Excerpted from The Third Man Factor by John Geiger, to be published tomorrow by Penguin Canada
The early morning was perfectly still and silent. James Sevigny, a 28-year-old university student originally from Hanover, N.H., and his friend Richard Whitmire set out to climb Deltaform, a mountain in the Canadian Rockies near Lake Louise, Alta.
They ascended a couloir, an ice gully, in bright late-winter light on April 1, 1983, roped together and using ice screws in their climb. Whitmire, a 33-year-old from Bellingham, Wash., was in the lead and at one point cut some ice loose.
The ice catapulted safely past Sevigny, but was suddenly followed by the collapse of a snowfield above the couloir. A tremendous roar broke the silence, and an avalanche swept the two men more than 600 metres down Deltaform.
Sevigny regained consciousness, he guessed, an hour later. He was severely injured. His back was broken in two places. One arm was fractured, the other had severed nerves from a broken scapula and was hanging limply at his side. He had cracked ribs, torn ligaments on both knees, suffered internal bleeding, and his face - broken nose, broken teeth, and open wounds - was a mess.
Whitmire lay nearby, and from his misshapen body, it was clear he was dead. Sevigny lay down beside him, certain he would soon follow.
He then felt a sudden, strange sensation of an invisible being very close at hand. The presence communicated mentally, and its message was clear: "You can't give up, you have to try."
It urged Sevigny to get up, stood behind his right shoulder, and implored him to continue even when the struggle to survive seemed untenable.
Because of its enormous empathy, he thought of the presence as a woman. She accompanied Sevigny across the Valley of the Ten Peaks, to the camp he and Whitmire had started from. Such were his injuries that it took all day to make the crossing of about 1.5 kilometres, and his companion was with him every step of the way.
When he reached the camp, Sevigny could not crawl into his sleeping bag because his injuries were too severe, and he could not eat because his teeth were broken and his face was swollen. He could not even light the stove. He sat down and realized it was late afternoon. He believed that in a couple of hours he would be dead.
Then he thought he heard some other voices, and called out for help. There was no response. It was at that moment that he felt the presence leave. "What I thought then was I'm hallucinating, the presence knows I'm dead, and it has just given up on me. But as it turns out, those were people. In fact, the presence had left because it knew I was safe."
Allan Derbyshire, who was with two other cross-country skiers, heard a faint cry: "Help! I've been in an avalanche." Had he not, Sevigny would have almost certainly died, as there were no other skiers or climbers in the area.
James Sevigny's encounter at the foot of Deltaform may sound like a curiosity, but over the years, the experience has occurred again and again: to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, and divers, as well as polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts - people who confront life at its extremes.
This radical notion - that an unseen presence has played a role in the success or survival of people who have reached the limits of human endurance - even has a name: It's called the Third Man Factor.
For five years I contacted survivors, read through old handwritten journals, combed through published exploration narratives and survival stories. The stories only grew more astonishing, and I began to realize that I had a kind of natural history of adventure in the making, a record of all the disasters that can befall man on ice, mountain, sea, land, air, and space.
In compiling these stories, one thing, at least, became clear to me. The Third Man represents a real and potent force for survival, and the ability to access this power is a factor, perhaps the most important factor, in determining who will succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds, and who will not.
"To state it plainly, rarely does one person survive under extreme conditions when another dies simply because the survivor has greater will to live," wrote Claude Piantadosi in his study The Biology of Human Survival.
And yet, in situations where success appears to be impossible, or death imminent, something happens. There, amid the anxiety, fear, blood, sadness, exhaustion, torment, isolation, and fatigue, is an outstretched hand - another existence, proffering a "transfusion of energy, encouragement and instinctual wisdom from a seemingly external source."
A presence appears, a Third Man who, in the words of legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner, "leads you out of the impossible."
John Geiger is editorial page editor of The Globe and Mail. This article is adapted from his new book, The Third Man Factor, to be published Tuesday by Penguin Canada. For more stories, visit www.thirdmanfactor.com.