The Devil's Dozen

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Have you ever seen an ant trapped in a sand pit? The pit is built by a ant lion, an insect that sits on the rim of the pit and watches his victim struggle futilely to crawl out. But the pit is constructed with slopes at just the right angle, so that the sand particles lose their cohesion, break, and send the ant tumbling back to the bottom. The ant lion waits until his prey is overcome with exhaustion; then he kills.

I knew what the ant felt like.

I was rolling, then flattened out on my stomach, trying to find a handhold with my fingers. But volcanic ash is worse than sand. There is no cohesion. Your fingers slide through as if the ash were water.

The .44 Magnum clapped again, the slugs digging deep into ash. One bullet sent a geyser of dust into my eyes, blinding me. I choked, sucking more ash into my lungs. At 17,000 feet I was having enough trouble breathing as it was. But all my troubles seemed to be coming to an end.

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