The Shot List

About

At 4:20 every winter morning, Mara Venn writes the shot list for Ardent Ridge. One signature sends her patrol into avalanche terrain; another closes Calder Road, the valley's only route to a hospital, a school and six hundred resort jobs. This winter a layer of depth hoar has survived every storm, every test and every reassuring result laid on top of it. Calder has 1,806 residents and one large employer. A full resort day grosses $438,000; a closure takes $186 from a room attendant who cannot replace it. The resort is owned by a municipal retirement fund whose members are bus drivers and nurses four hundred kilometres away. Its operations director needs an 11.5 per cent return because other working people were promised one. Around Mara, a mountain manager trusts thirty-one winters of feel, a young forecaster has better data and no authority, a volunteer rescue leader also drives the school bus, and a heli-ski guide works slopes outside Mara's boundary that still drain through her fences. On 12 January an avalanche crosses the black line on the 1998 hazard map and buries lift electrician Eli Vale beside a road Mara had closed, reopened and closed again. The decision that put him there belongs to a shot list, a work order, a radio dead zone, a breached flight protocol and a persistent weak layer waiting since November. Every account is true. None is enough. Three months later a coroner's inquest must find facts without assigning legal blame. A new hazard map moves the line through fourteen houses, a daycare annex and the resort maintenance yard. Mara can keep her job only by endorsing a statement she half believes. Across three acts, thirteen state-changing choices and five endings decide not what caused the burial, but which line the valley agrees to live behind.

Content notice

• avalanche burial and death
• recovery and attempted resuscitation
• grief and survivor guilt
• public blame and workplace pressure
• economic precarity and threatened homes
• professional explosive avalanche control discussed non-instructionally
• alcohol use
• sexual intimacy implied; cuts away

Cast

• M Mara Venn protagonist; Ardent Ridge snow safety programme director no portrait yet
• I Ivo Saye mountain manager; thirty-one winters at Ardent Ridge no portrait yet
• N Noor Amini junior avalanche forecaster no portrait yet
• C Celia Rook operations director for resort owner North Arc Municipal Retirement Fund no portrait yet
• T Tom Arnett Calder Volunteer Rescue leader and school bus driver no portrait yet
• R Rae Quist owner-guide of Quist Alpine Aviation no portrait yet
• E Elias "Eli" Vale Ardent Ridge lift electrician no portrait yet
• S Sima Holt presiding coroner no portrait yet