As he spoke he reached out and caught hold of my waist, tugging me gently towards him. He was careful, almost tender, in the way he spun me round so that I was facing out from the slope when I came to a stop beside him. He clipped me into a second ice screw that he had placed beside the one on which he was hanging, and directed my uninjured leg to a foothold that he had hacked from the ice. I realised then that he had been fully aware of the pain he had been putting me through, and this concern was a quiet way of saying, it's all right. I wasn't being a bastard. It just had to be done.
