Pino tried to shine the miner’s lamp into the tube, but he couldn’t see much. He held his hand across the hole, feeling for a breeze, some sign that air was getting through. Nothing. Fighting panic, he got one of his bamboo ski poles and used his knife to cut the leather and metal basket off the bottom, leaving him with the exposed steel spike.

Pino pushed the ski pole up the chimney hole. It stopped when half the pole had vanished. He jabbed at the blockage. Snow dropped out and to the floor. He started jabbing and turning and probing with the ski pole, causing a steady stream of snow to fall from the tube. Five minutes. Ten minutes. He could push the ski pole and his arm up the chimney, and it still felt blocked.

“How long can we last in here without air?” Mimo asked.

“I have no idea,” Pino said, and pulled the pole down and out again.

He took a second ski pole and cut the leather pieces from the pole baskets into narrower strips. With the strips and his belt, he managed to attach the two poles end to end, spike to handle. It was a wobbly connection at best, and Pino could no longer stab as hard as he could with the single pole.

How long can we survive without air? Four, five hours? Less?

Mimo, Mr. D’Angelo, and Pino took turns chipping at the snow in the chimney, while Mrs. Napolitano, Mrs. D’Angelo, and the children huddled in the corner, watching. All their exertions and exhalations had turned the interior of the hut warm, almost hot. The sweat poured off Pino’s head as he kept teasing the ski poles upward, chopping out snow bit by bit.

Two hours after he started, when the handle of the lower ski pole was almost to the ceiling, he hit something that felt unmovable. He kept chipping at it, but all he was getting was slivers of ice. There had to be a block of it above.

“It’s not going,” Mimo said, frustrated.

“You keep at it,” Pino said, stepping aside.

It was now stifling hot in the hut. Pino stripped off his shirt and felt himself struggling for breath. Is this it? Will it hurt, not having air? He flashed on a fish he’d seen dying on the beach at Rapallo once, how its mouth and gills had sought water, each movement smaller than the last until there was none. Is that how we’ll die? Like fish?

Pino did his best to control the panic swirling in his stomach while his brother and then Mr. D’Angelo kept chipping at the obstruction. Please God, he prayed. Please don’t let us all die here like this. Mimo and I were trying to help these people. We don’t deserve to die like this. We deserve to get out and keep helping people escape the—

Something came clanking down the chimney and smashed into Mimo’s hands.

“Ahhhh,” he yelled in pain. “Damn, that hurt. What was that?”

Pino aimed the miner’s lamp on the ground. A chunk of ice the size of two fists lay in the dirt. Then he noticed shadows wavering on the walls and the dirt around the ice chunk. He went to the chimney stub, put his hand to it, and felt a small but steady chill draft.

“We’ve got air!” he said, hugging his brother.

Mr. D’Angelo said, “And now we dig out?”

“And now we dig out,” Pino said.

“You think you can?” Mrs. Napolitano said.

“No other choice,” Pino said, looking up the chimney tube, seeing pale light, and remembering how high the chimney stuck out of the roof. Then he looked at the open door and the wall of white debris that clogged the entrance. The top of the door frame was low—one and a half meters? He imagined a tunnel angling upward. But how long?

Mimo must have been thinking along the same lines because he said, “We’ve got at least three meters of digging.”

“More,” Pino said. “We can’t dig a shaft straight up. We’re going to have to go at an angle to the door so we can crawl up it.”

They used the ice axes, the hatchet, and the small metal shovel that came with the woodstove to attack the avalanche rubble. They dug at a seventy-degree angle to the door frame, trying to bore out a passage big enough to crawl through. The first part of a meter was relatively easy. The snow was looser. Small blocks and gravel-sized streams of ice and debris came free with each strike of the ax.

“We’ll be out before dark,” Mimo said, shoveling the snow back into the deepest part of the hut.

Pino’s carbide lamp died, leaving them all in pitch-blackness.

“Shit,” Mimo said.

“Mommy,” Anthony whined.

Mrs. Napolitano said, “How will we see to dig?”

Pino lit a match, dug in his pack, and came out with two devotional candles. He had three. So did Mimo. He lit them and placed them above and beside the doorway. They no longer had the strong glow of the headlamp to rely on, but their eyes soon adjusted to the flickering light, and they set at the avalanche debris again, chopping and picking at what now felt like a monolithic block of snow and ice. Superheated by the friction created in the avalanche, the debris had become as solid as cement in places.

Progress ground to a crawl. But every chunk removed was a cause for celebration, and slowly the tunnel began to form, wider than Pino’s shoulders, first a meter, then almost two meters long. They took turns, the man up front chipping at the ice and snow, and the other two moving the snow out into the hut, where the D’Angelo family and Mrs. Napolitano were crowded into a corner, watching the snow mound grow.

“Will we have enough room for all the snow?” the pregnant violinist asked.

“If we have to, we’ll start up the stove and melt some of it,” Pino said.

By eight o’clock that evening, they were, by Pino’s estimate, four meters out from the door when he had to call it quits. He couldn’t swing the axes anymore. He had to eat and to sleep. They all had to eat and to sleep.

He divided the remaining provisions in the packs while Mimo and Mr. D’Angelo reassembled the stove. He apportioned one half of the provisions into six shares, and they ate dried meat, dried fruit, nuts, and cheese. They drank more tea and huddled together before Pino lit the stove and blew out the third-to-last candle.

Twice during the night, he dreamed of being buried alive in a casket, and he awoke with a start, listening to the others breathing and the tic-tic-tic of the stove cooling. Snow had melted into the dirt floor, and he knew he’d soon be lying in chill mud. But he was so tired, and his muscles so sore and cramped, he didn’t care, and slept a third time.

Mimo budged him hours later. He had the second-to-last candle lit.

“It’s six a.m.,” his brother said. “Time to get out of here.”

It was cold again. Pino’s bones ached. Every joint was sore. But he set about dividing up the last of the food and the water he’d melted on the stove the night before.

Mr. D’Angelo went into the tunnel first. He lasted twenty minutes. Mimo lasted thirty and slid out of the tunnel, soaked from sweat and melting ice.

“I left the ax and the candle up there,” he said. “You’ll have to relight it.”

Pino crawled back up the tunnel, now five meters long by his estimate. When he hit the wall, he rolled over and lit one of his last four matches. The candle was dwindling.