Christmas Under the Stars

by Karen Swan

  But it wasn’t proving so convenient now. By her own recollection, there wasn’t much more than some store-cupboard basics – tins of tomatoes, tuna and peaches, some pasta and rice noodles, half a stale loaf, eggs.

  ‘Well, it’s only been two days. I think we’ll survive,’ she smiled, trying to tease him out of his sulk.

  ‘No. This is forecast for another three days, Meg.’ His arm had swept across the room and was pointing towards the window and the unremitting whiteness beyond.

  It was her turn to frown as she watched the wind whip up the snow, scarifying the deep ground cover. Three more days?

  She smiled brightly and gave a lackadaisical shrug, determined not to be beaten. ‘OK, so then this will be the week when we finally open those tins of peaches and butter beans that we put in the larder all those years ago. I’m sure I can find some recipe for putting them together that won’t be toxic or inedible.’

  Mitch didn’t appear to find this prospect funny. ‘We can’t just sit here for days on end, waiting for it to pass till we can go out again, Meg.’

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ she contradicted with an arched eyebrow. ‘That’s exactly what we can do.’ Her tone was light but she saw the thunder in his face and wondered again if it was just the weather giving him this cabin fever. Was it pre-wedding jitters? Or something more? Her stomach clenched at the thought – was he doubting them? Her?

  ‘Look, let me just get the snowmobile fixed and then I’ll race into town—’

  ‘What is it with you needing to race all the time, Mitch?’ she asked with a forced little laugh, feeling exasperated, worried it was her he was trying to get away from. ‘Why can’t you just sit still for once? You spent all weekend in the edit studio with Tuck. Wasn’t that enough? When do I get to have you? Isn’t the whole point of having a cabin in the woods to be snowed in?’ She arched an eyebrow suggestively but Mitch’s return stare was brooding in all the wrong ways.

  ‘You’ve been watching too many Doris Day films. You won’t think it’s so romantic if we run out of food.’

  ‘Oh, I give up,’ she sighed, turning away from him, his rejection stinging. ‘You’re determined to be grumpy. Fine then, go and pick on someone else. Badger and I are enjoying the peace.’

  There was a tense silence and she knew Mitch was glaring at her – irked by her refusal to argue – before he irritably unzipped his coat and tossed it onto the back of the chair, where it promptly slid to the ground.

  Badger gave a small whine as the zip clattered on the wooden floor.

  ‘Fine. I’ll speak to someone who actually wants to talk to me then.’

  ‘Fine!’ she called after him as he turned and walked towards the tiny spare bedroom that was only just big enough for a single bed, a desk and a wardrobe. ‘Why spend time with me when you can spend time with them? Because they understand you, right?’ she scoffed as the door slammed shut behind him. She stared at it, knowing that any second now she’d hear the familiar whine and crackle start up as he hit the frequencies of his beloved ham radio and chatted to these faceless, faraway friends that he would never meet. People that he seemingly felt more connected with than her, sitting in the next room.

  She slumped back into the chair and looked out of the window again. The sky – having never achieved brightness anyway today – was already sinking into an indigo slumber, the drifts on the sills rapidly approaching the halfway mark. Hidden in the trees, muffled by rising snow, it felt as though their cabin was becoming smaller, as though the wilderness was swallowing them whole.

  Friday 24 March 2017

  ‘We have to move,’ Meg snapped.

  Mitch looked over at her standing by the window. Badger was lying on his feet in his customary place at the end of the bed, a much-needed heat blanket on these freezing nights. The embers in the small bedroom stove opposite were as faint as a sleeping dragon’s heartbeat, the flames having long since died in the middle of the night.

  ‘I mean, you agree this is ridiculous, right?’ Meg asked, clutching her jumper closer to her body and motioning to the wall of white on the other side of the glass. Light speckled the surface, bending and refracting through microscopic air holes, the flakes which were pressed against the pane as prickly as cacti. ‘It’s the twenty-first century. We aren’t even thirty. What are we doing living in the middle of nowhere like goddam hermits, unable to send an email or a text, completely cut off from civilization?’

  ‘Not cut off. The snowmobile gets us into town in twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘When it’s working,’ she muttered, padding across the floor in her thick hand-knitted socks, opening the stove door and throwing in some kindling sticks. ‘Which it never is.’

  Mitch smiled sleepily and shifted position to get a better view of her bending over. ‘“Never” is a bit harsh,’ he murmured, graciously choosing not to state that it was her fault it hadn’t yet been fixed. ‘This is only the second time we’ve had trouble with it.’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty damned useless if it’s broken down right when we’re stuck in the worst polar storm anyone’s seen for the last forty years.’ She arranged some dried logs in a pyramid fashion, then closed the stove door and opened up the draught, watching as the heat swelled and ignited again. She straightened up. ‘We’ve been stranded for three days now and if your forecast’s right, it’ll be another two before we can get into town,’ she said despondently, looking out of the window again at the unremitting whiteness.

  An unseasonal thaw a few weeks earlier meant that the fresh snowpack – all four metres of it – was now effectively gripping on to a glass surface and with all that new weight, it could go at any time. The avalanche risk was off the scale, unprecedented; and combined with the relentless blizzards and white-outs, the entire town was in lockdown. No one was allowed to leave their hotels or their homes.

  Meg had lived here for eleven years, her family relocating to Canada for her father’s work as a mathematician at the Banff International Research Station. As a result, Meg – a brown-haired choir girl with hazel-green eyes, from the Garden of England – had seen out the last years of her childhood in the snow and she knew just how playful and beautiful, capricious, belligerent and unpredictable it could be; she’d spent every winter weekend skiing and snowboarding, and it was how she’d met Mitch properly – sharing a chairlift with him one day, even though they’d been in the same English class for a year.

  But she’d never seen anything like this before; at least, not on this scale. Overnight curfews, sure. But to be so many days holed up – trapped – in their cabin and the town quarantined, was another phenomenon entirely.

  ‘Well, there’s a brief hiatus tomorrow, supposedly,’ Mitch said, clasping his hands behind his head and clearly liking the way the firelight glowed on her skin. ‘Tuck says there’s gonna be a few hours’ respite before it closes in again.’ Tuck’s father had been mayor when they were growing up and the family, originally mountain pioneers, had lived in Banff for eight generations. There wasn’t anything about Banff that Tuck didn’t know and that included the state of the sky above it.

  ‘So we could try to get down to town then?’ Meg asked hopefully.

  ‘In theory we could make a break for it, I guess.’

  ‘In theory,’ she repeated, ruffling Badger’s velvety head and dropping down to plant a kiss between his eyes.

  ‘Well, I’m kind of liking the idea of being holed up here with you.’

  She glanced across at him, saw the smile playing on his lips, the dance in his eyes. ‘You didn’t yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday I was a fool. An idiot. I knew nothing.’ A look she couldn’t pin down came into his eyes. ‘I don’t deserve you.’

  ‘No. You don’t.’ She grinned, sticking her chin in the air but feeling reassured by his attentions again. Yesterday had been a blip. Cabin fever. He’d had it then; she had it now.

  He grinned back. ‘And yet somehow, I do still have you.’

  ‘Only because I can’t escape.
I’m trapped here.’

  ‘Damn straight. You know we could never live anywhere but here.’

  He was right. This was their home and for a moment, she saw its smallness and intimacy from an outsider’s perspective – the caramel-coloured pine floor that had fallen out of favour in interiors circles but always felt so cosy to her; the vanilla-coloured walls that were bland to her eye (as a former art student, she lived for pattern and colour) but which Mitch had insisted on in case they ever did decide to go back to Plan A and rent the cabin out; the reindeer hides on the floor almost bald from wear; the blue-and-green knitted bedspread made by his mother, ragged from where Badger’s nails kept catching it; the framed needlepoint of a heart on the wall which she had made in domestic-science class after they had got together and she knew he was the One.

  ‘The neighbours wouldn’t be tolerant of you pegging out the washing in the nude, for one thing. And I wouldn’t be tolerant of them if they were.’

  She bit her lip, knowing exactly where they were heading.

  ‘Come back to bed.’ He held his hand out to her, that sexy smile on his face. She still found him every bit as attractive as she had when they’d first got together, seventeen and ready to take on the world. She didn’t mind that his nose was broken or that his eyebrows were effectively one. He still had the kindest eyes she’d ever seen and the sexiest bum. He suited his light brown hair both when it was long and shaggy – his winter look when he went into a sort of hibernating sympathy with the wildlife – and in its summer buzz cuts that felt furred in her palm. She liked it when he logged in his jeans and a shirt; she loved it when he closed the door on the world and wandered the cabin in just his hockey shirt and socks.

  The little bedroom was bathed in an almost ethereal light thanks to the bright diffusion coming from the snowed-up window, the crackle of logs burning again in the stove, and she walked towards him, pulling her jumper over her head. Mitch fondly nudged Badger off the end of the bed and the dog slunk out of the room to curl up on the rug in front of the main fire.

  It was a small life, she knew that.

  But a big love.

  Chapter Four

  Saturday 25 March 2017, 6.15 p.m.

  Creamed chicken and flageolet bean bake.

  OK, so it wasn’t a culinary masterpiece given that most of it was made from tins lurking under cobwebs in the furthest reaches of the larder, but she deserved points for sheer inventiveness, and over the last hour – as night had fallen and the wind blew itself inside out, howling around the cabin with ever-increasing ferocity – their little home had filled with a tempting aroma of sage (dried) and mushrooms (freeze-dried). She’d found some peas in the freezer and managed to make a creamy mash topping with a tin of condensed milk and a couple of clod-crusted potatoes, tubers shooting out at all angles, from a sack that had been kicked to the back of the larder and long forgotten.

  ‘Mitch!’ she called, her hands and arms swamped in the oven gloves patterned with red gingerbread men as she lifted the steaming dish from the oven and set it down carefully on the iron trivet. ‘Dinner’s ready!’

  Pulling off the gloves, she turned to the hob, the saucepan lid rattling as the water roiled and steam billowed in plumes underneath. She grabbed it and poured away the boiling water, blanching the peas immediately and setting down the pan again.

  Was he still on the phone? It had rung earlier when she’d been finishing the potatoes and she’d heard the murmur of his voice through the closed door – it was Tuck, no doubt, wanting to know why they hadn’t made the dash into town during the storm’s brief respite this afternoon, like they’d said they would. Little did he know they’d only just got out of bed. Storm? What storm? Baby, it’s cold outside . . .

  ‘Mitch! Hurry up! I’m serving!’

  She bent down and pulled the dinner plates from the warming tray beneath the oven, wincing as she momentarily forgot about the silver rims around the edges and having to run her finger under the cold tap for a moment. She stood by the sink, looking out into the night, trying to see past this storm that seemed personally targeted, like a wolf trying to blow the house down; but the blackness was unremitting and all she saw was her own image reflected back at her in the small square panes.

  Badger – knowing that if ever food was going to be dropped on the floor, it was now – was sitting in his usual spot by the bin, watching her intently, his head moving in time with her darting dashes from the oven to the sink and back to the hob again, like a spectator at a tennis match.

  ‘Mitch?’ she tried again.

  No reply.

  Meg cast Badger a look. ‘Honestly, what’s he doing? Go and get him, there’s a good boy.’

  Badger knitted his ginger eyebrows together in his black face, as though he couldn’t imagine what was keeping Mitch either, and pattered across the kitchen.

  Meg reached for the wine glasses in the cupboard and retrieved the pinot noir she’d left to warm and breathe by the stove, having found it frozen almost solid that morning by the door in the shed. She hoped it would be passable.

  She placed it on the small pine table which she’d decided to cover with a tablecloth for once and a small jug of holly branches dotted with berries snipped from the tree outside their bedroom window. Her view was that if they couldn’t eat well, they should at least dine in style and that meant dressing the table and using proper glasses. Their day in bed together had left her feeling more connected to her fiancé than she had in weeks, his recent agitations soothed away, and she was now feeling strangely sad that the storm would soon, inevitably, break and their little mountainside bubble would burst.

  She heard the front door slam, the wind propelling it with extra force so that the entire cabin seemed to shake for a moment and the curtains lifted in the draught like skirts. Running back to the open-plan kitchen area – at sixty square metres the cabin really was too small for unnecessary walls – she heaped the peas onto the warm plates and was spooning out the bake when Mitch appeared in the doorway, Badger jumping up and down excitedly the way he always did when he knew he was going out too.

  Mitch didn’t notice the dressed table or the steaming meal on plates in her hands. He was looking straight at her – apologetically, ruefully, but his brown eyes already had that brightness in them that always came when he was going out on one of his sorties.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she gasped, dropping the plate clumsily on the worktop so that a few peas rolled like marbles over the side and down the front of the unit. But even Badger didn’t notice. His entire focus was on his master, recognizing the helmet in his hand and the harness already on over his waterproof trousers and parka, the small backpack on his shoulders, the length of rope coiled around his waist, his boots clipped shut and his skis no doubt already positioned outside the door with their skins on. He knew what it meant as well as she did. ‘Mitch, no. You’re not going—’

  ‘Meg, that was Tuck. They’ve got two guests missing – a father and his twelve-year-old son. They went on a hike this afternoon, heading for Wilson’s Gully.’ His speech was low but hurried, urgency bubbling through.

  ‘What?’ she half-gasped, half-shrieked. ‘Are they mad? Who would go out in these conditions? Don’t they know there’s a freaking lockdown?’

  ‘I know. But apparently they set out thinking that the break in the weather this afternoon would hold.’

  ‘How could anyone with half a brain think that? Haven’t they heard of the eye of a storm? Didn’t they see the forecasts?’

  As if to prove the point, the wind gusted strongly again, making the timbers groan. Meg almost felt the wind was trying to wrap itself around the cabin and lift it straight off the ground.

  Mitch shook his head. ‘I don’t know – they’re tourists. Who knows what the hell they were thinking? But I do know that I have to do something. These people have been officially missing now for four hours already. The wife says they were due back at two p.m. and in these conditions, in the dark, Search and Rescue won’t loo
k now until first light. Their last known position is too far on foot from town and it’s too treacherous to send out a team.’ He sighed, looking directly down at her. ‘They won’t survive the night, Meg.’

  ‘But it can’t be down to you to save them!’ Meg cried, watching in mounting panic as he put on his helmet and fastened the straps beneath his chin. He checked the head-torch, a beam of dazzling, almost intergalactic white light dissecting the room in half. Satisfied, he turned it off again.

  ‘Look, it’s different setting out from here – I know the area better than anyone. The wife had a map of their route and where they were when she last spoke to them and it was Wilson’s. If they’re still there, then they’re just over the ridge from here. Even in these conditions, I can be with them in the hour.’

  ‘But what if they’re not? What if they’ve moved on?’ she demanded.

  He glanced at her. Mitch didn’t deal in what-ifs.

  ‘Do Search and Rescue know you’re going up there?’ she asked, but his silence was all the reply she needed. They both knew perfectly well they’d forbid him to go out. ‘So you’re just going out on your own? With no backup?’

  ‘I’ll have Badger with me. He’s better than anyone.’ Badger’s ears lifted at the sound of his own name, his head cocked enquiringly to the side, his paw held out in front of him like an invitation to dance.

  ‘No!’ Rushing past him into the hall, Meg pressed herself against the back of the door. ‘You’re not doing it. I won’t let you.’

  ‘Meg.’

  ‘I said no! No.’ She spread her arms wide so that they touched the walls.

  Mitch walked up to her, his boots clunky on the floor, his technical, waterproof, windproof, thermally insulated clothes rustling as he moved. ‘Meg, there’s a twelve-year-old boy out there.’ His voice was softer now. ‘I can’t just leave him out there all night. He’ll be dead before dawn – him and his father. There’s no other way – I’m their only hope.’