It’s 1865 in Kurtal, a former farming village that is now a resort in the Swiss Alps, and Rudi Matt is 16. He is smaller and slimmer than the other boys his age and has very light-colored skin, hair, and eyes. Rudi tries to tan his face to make him seem rugged, like the mountain climbers in his village. He works at the Beau Site Hotel as a dishwasher. He slips out of work—which doesn’t bother the cook, Old Teo Zurbriggen—and walks to the edge of town, through wildflower meadows, and toward the mountains. In nature, Rudi’s limbs and lungs are doing “what they had been born to do” (13). Rudi stops at a small box, nailed to a tree in the highest meadow, which contains a cross and a chipped image of the Virgin Mary. “Josef Matt,” the name of Rudi’s father, who died when he was a baby, is carved on the lid. Rudi climbs with his staff, thinking of his father; he’s solemn for a bit, but he can’t stay upset when he’s climbing.

Over the past decade, Kurtal began attracting an abundance of tourists. This is how the “sport, the craft, the adventure of mountaineering had been born” (17).