He attacked the snow and ice with a fury. He chopped, stabbed, and broke chunks of the snow. He scooped, pushed, and kicked the frozen debris behind him.

“Slow down!” Mimo called thirty minutes into the ordeal. “We can’t keep up.”

Pino paused, gasping like he’d run a long race, and glanced at the candle, now barely a stub and sputtering against drips of water falling every so often from the ceiling of the tunnel.

He reached up and moved the candle over, set it on a ledge he cut with the ax. Then he set to chopping again, at a slower rhythm than before and with more strategy. He looked for the cracks in the surface and tried to cut into them. Pieces began to peel off in triangular and odder-shaped slabs ten or twelve centimeters thick.

The snow’s different, he thought, running the granules through his hand. It was breakable, and the crystals were almost all faceted like his mother’s finest jewelry. He sat there, thinking that this kind of snow could cave in from above. As they were chopping their way through that solid block of snow and ice, he’d never considered that the ceiling could collapse. Now, it was all he could think about, and it froze him.

“What’s the problem?” Mimo called as he crawled up the tunnel behind him.

Before Pino could reply, the candle’s flame sputtered and died, sending him back into total darkness. He buried his face in his hands, finally overwhelmed by the feeling that he, like the candle, was about to die and go black. Waves of emotion—fear, abandonment, and disbelief—crashed over him.

“Why?” he whispered. “What did we—?”

“Pino!” Mimo shouted. “Pino, look up!”

Pino raised his head and saw that the tunnel had not gone pitch dark. A dull, silvery glow showed through the tunnel ceiling, and his tears of despair turned to joy.

They were almost to the surface, but as Pino had feared, the hoary snow broke apart and caved in on him twice, forcing him to back up and dig out before at last he pushed the ax forward and felt it break the final resistance.

When he pulled the ax back, bright sunshine blazed in.

“I’m through,” he shouted. “I’m through!”

Mrs. Napolitano, Mrs. D’Angelo, and the children were cheering when he forced his head and then his shoulders up out of the snow crust. The storm had long passed, leaving cold mountain air that smelled delicious and tasted better. The sky was clear and cobalt blue. The sun had only just come over a ridgeline to the east. Fifteen new centimeters of powder snow lay over the rubble field, which he figured was nearly fifty meters wide and fifteen hundred meters long. High above him on the Groppera’s crag, he could see a jagged fracture line in the snow.

In places, the slide had stripped the mountain almost bare. Rock and dirt and small trees were mixed into the new snow. Seeing the destruction and getting a sense of the sheer power of the avalanche, he believed it was a miracle that they’d survived.

Mrs. D’Angelo thought so, too, as did her husband, who followed his children out. Mimo exited behind Mrs. Napolitano. Pino went back in, grabbed the skis and packs, and pushed them up the passage.

When he emerged from the tunnel for the last time, he felt spent and filled with gratitude. It is a miracle we got out. How else can you explain it?

“What’s that?” Anthony asked, gesturing down the valley.

“That, my friend, is Val di Lei,” Pino said. “And those mountains over there? That’s Pizzo Emet and Pizzo Palù. Way down below those peaks, in those trees there, Italy becomes Switzerland.”

“It looks far,” Judith said.

“About five kilometers?” Pino said.

“We can do it,” Mr. D’Angelo said. “Everybody helps everybody.”

“I can’t,” Mrs. Napolitano said.

Pino turned to find the pregnant violinist sitting on a snow boulder, one hand on her belly and the other holding her instrument case. Her clothes were coated in frost.

“Sure you can,” Pino said.

She shook her head, started to cry. “All this. It’s too much. I’m spotting blood.”

Pino didn’t understand until Mrs. D’Angelo said, “The baby, Pino.”

His gut fell. She was going to lose the baby? Out here?

Oh God. No. Please no.

“You can’t move?” Mimo asked.

“I shouldn’t move at all,” Mrs. Napolitano said.

“But you can’t stay here,” Mimo said. “You’ll die.”

“And if I move, my child might die.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I can feel my body telling me so.”

“But if you stay, you’ll both die here,” Mimo insisted.

“It’s better,” the violinist said. “I could not live if my baby were to die. So go!”

“No,” Pino said. “We are getting you to Switzerland like we promised Father Re.”

“I won’t take a step!” Mrs. Napolitano shouted hysterically.

Pino decided to stay with her and send on the others with Mimo, but then he looked around, thought a moment, and said, “Maybe you don’t have to take a step.”

He dropped his pack and put on his long wooden skis with leather and steel cable bear trap bindings. He played with them until they were tight around his boots.

“Ready?” he said to Mrs. Napolitano.

“Ready for what?”

“Get up on my back,” Pino said. “I’m taking you piggyback.”

“On skis?” she said, terrified. “I’ve never been on skis in my entire life.”

“You never were buried in an avalanche before, either,” Pino said. “And you won’t be on skis. I will.”

She stared at him doubtfully. “What if we fall?”

“I won’t let that happen,” he said with all the confidence of a seventeen-year-old who’d been skiing almost as long as he’d been walking.

She didn’t move.

“I’m giving you a chance to save your baby and be free,” Pino said, pulling the violin case from his pack.

“What are you doing with my Stradivarius?” she asked.

“Staying balanced,” Pino said, holding out the case in front of him as if it were the wheel of a car. “Like an orchestra, your violin will lead us.”

There was a moment’s pause where Mrs. Napolitano looked to the sky and then stood up out of the snow, shaking with fear.

“Hold my shoulders, not my neck,” Pino said, turning his back to her again. “And wrap your legs tight around my waist.”

Mrs. Napolitano grabbed his shoulders. He squatted, got his arms behind her knees, and helped her up onto the small of his back. She got her legs around him, and he let go of them. She didn’t feel that much heavier than his pack.

“Think like a jockey on a horse,” Pino said, bringing the violin up in front of him and holding it lengthwise. “And don’t let go.”

“Letting go? No, never. Absolutely the farthest thing from my mind.”