BY THE LAST WEEK IN OCTOBER, I was beginning to feel a small sense of control over my fate. The group had decided to mount an escape attempt, and as we prepared in earnest, our spirits rose. No one else had died since our eighth day on the mountain, when I'd lost Susy. Fito and his steady, levelheaded cousins, fellow team supporters Eduardo Strauch and Daniel Fernández, had devised an efficient system of cutting and drying the meat, and all of us were

After the avalanche, eight were dead. And the Fairchild was covered with snow. How much lay above us? Two feet? Twenty? Were we buried alive?

eating enough now to at least hold starvation at bay. Out of respect for me, the others had promised not to touch the bodies of my mother and Susy, but even so, there was enough meat to last for weeks if we rationed carefully. Many of us were comforted by these thoughts as we filed into the fuselage on the evening of October 29.

As always it was pitch black. I dozed for perhaps half an hour and then woke, frightened and disoriented, as a huge and heavy force thumped against my chest. I felt an icy wetness pressing against my face, and a crushing weight bore down on me so hard that it forced the air from my lungs.

After a minute of confusion, I realized what had happened—an avalanche had rolled down the mountain and filled the fuselage with snow. There was silence, then I heard a slow, wet creak as the loose snow settled under its own weight. It felt as if my body were encased in concrete; I managed a few shallow breaths, but then snow packed into my mouth and nostrils and I began to suffocate. Oddly, my thoughts grew calm and lucid. This is my death, I told myself. Now I will see what lies on the other side.

Then a hand clawed the snow from my face and I was yanked back into the world of the living. I spat the snow from my mouth and gulped cold air.

I heard Carlitos's voice. "Who is it?" he shouted.

"Me," I sputtered. "It's Nando."

Then he left me. I heard chaos above me, voices shouting and sobbing.

"Dig for the faces!" someone yelled. "Give them air!"

"Help me here!"

"Has anyone seen Marcelo?"

"How many do we have? Who is missing?"

"Someone count!"

A few moments later they dug me out, and I was able to lift myself up from the snow. The dark fuselage was lit eerily by the flames of a cigarette lighter. I saw some of my friends lying motionless. Others were rising like zombies.

Our losses were heavy. Marcelo was dead. So were Enrique and six others. The Fairchild was completely covered. How much snow lay above us? I wondered. Two feet? Twenty? Were we buried alive?

It's hard to describe the despair that fell upon us in the grim days following the avalanche. With an aluminum cargo pole, we were able to poke a breathing hole through what turned out to be several feet of snow, but we labored for hours to burrow a passage out of the snow-choked plane, only to discover a blizzard raging outside. Trapped by the weather, we could not sleep, warm ourselves, or dry our soaking clothes. The snow inside the fuselage was so deep that we couldn't stand, and we had to sit with our chins against our chests. Fito's water-making machines were outside, useless to us, and we had to gnaw chunks of the filthy snow on which we were crawling and sleeping. With no access to the bodies outside, we rapidly began to weaken.

We were all well aware that the eight avalanche victims lay within easy reach, but we were slow to face the prospect of cutting them. Until now, a small crew of three or four had cut the meat outside the fuselage, and the rest of us never knew from whose body the flesh had been taken. How could we eat flesh cut from these newly dead bodies right before our eyes?

Silently, we agreed we'd rather starve. But by October 31, the third day of the storm, we couldn't hold out any longer. Someone found a piece of glass, swept the snow from one of the bodies, and began to cut. It was a horror, watching him slice into a friend, listening to the soft sounds of the glass ripping at the skin and muscle below. When a piece was handed to me, I was revolted. It was soft and greasy, streaked with blood and bits of wet gristle. I gagged hard when I placed it in my mouth.

There was something sordid and rank in our suffering now, a sense of corruption that soured my heart. As I shivered in the clammy snow, racked with despair, it was hard to believe in anything before the crash.