“There is not enough luck in the world. That night I got somebody’s share.”

“There is not enough luck in the world. That night I got somebody’s share.” is Anatoli Boukreev’s retrospective description of a near-fatal accident during a night rescue on Manaslu. The line gives luck a sharply physical shape: a rope anchor, set only moments before, stopped Boukreev and two falling climbers after a slip turned a descent toward warm tents into a plunge over an ice wall.

The rescue and its sudden reversal

After receiving word that two climbers were missing, Boukreev and the young Kazakh climber Shafkat Gataullin turned back up the mountain without first warming themselves or taking a hot drink. They climbed through the night, rationing their headlamp batteries by switching the lamps on only when needed. After three hours they found the climbers down on the ice. One had lost a crampon and was too exhausted to fasten it back onto his boot. Boukreev tethered the pair to his harness, and he and Gataullin began leading them down through fog and near-bitter cold.

Above Camp III, two members of the Kazakh team came up to meet them, bringing hot tea. Seeing the illuminated tents below and reaching for warmth, the rescued climbers relaxed and drank eagerly. In that moment of relief, one lost his balance on the ice. As he tumbled, he pulled the other climber and Boukreev over a fifteen-meter ice wall and onto Manaslu’s face.

The anchor and the cost of survival

Boukreev had been belaying the pair with his ice axe when the fall tore him away from it. The three slid down the mountain for more than twenty meters before a rope fixed to an anchor stopped them. That anchor had been put in place only moments earlier, when they had paused for tea; a brief act of caution became the barrier between the fall and a worse outcome.

No one was seriously injured, but Boukreev lost his gloves in the fall. The short walk back to the tents at Camp III took fifteen minutes, enough for his hands to become frostbitten. Because his exposure was brief, he suffered no lasting damage. The rescue therefore ended not in uncomplicated relief but in a narrow escape that left a tangible injury, even as the two climbers reached safety.

What the expression means

Boukreev’s later remark does not describe luck as a dependable force or claim that the danger had passed. Its second sentence, “That night I got somebody’s share,” presents survival as a chance allocation: the anchor happened to be there, and the fall was stopped. Set against the rescue’s deliberate work—turning back, conserving light, tethering exhausted climbers, and placing the anchor—the expression holds preparation and contingency together. The rescuers could act carefully, but the outcome still hinged on a rope fixed just before the slip.