by Henry, Sue
Murray still could not feel her feet, which worried Jessie considerably, though the pain that could have resulted from such a ride without the numbness would not have been at all pleasant. Jessie hoped that moving the injured musher onto the sled and dragging her downhill was not further damaging a spinal injury she had no way of identifying. That there was little alternative was small comfort to her fears. All she could do was hope the lack of sensation was due to cold, for the loss of a toe or two, even a foot, to frostbite would be any active person’s choice over paralysis. At least the rest of Gail was sheltered, even a little warmer, thanks to her canine companions, and her verbal responses more alert and coherent.
They had reached a point where Jessie could begin to make out the tree line, when she thought she saw something moving on the hillside below. A few minutes later she was sure. Another musher was headed up the hill in her direction, working as hard on the steep slope as she had not so long before. They had practically met each other in the obscuring storm, however, before she could make out the identity of the team and driver, catching a glimpse of Lynn Ehlers’s friendly, weathered face and dark beard, though it was now as white as it would be when he was eighty, blown full of snow.
Their teams met and she pulled her sled just past his so they were even and stopped.
“Jessie. What the hell happened?” he asked in concern, assessing the situation and quickly making the obvious assumption of misadventure. Only mushers in trouble needed to be transported. “Who is it?”
“Gail Murray. Her sled fell over on her. She’s got a broken leg and…who knows what else. She can’t feel her feet—she’s also hypothermic from lying in the snow for the better part of an hour up there on a switchback.”
“Jesus! How’d it ha—Oh, hell, it doesn’t matter how. We’ve got to get her down, fast—back to Forty Mile, I’d guess. Right?”
Jessie almost wept in her relief and appreciation of his immediate assumption that it was we and not you.
Mushers, she thought—and not for the first time—were some of the best and most caring people on earth. It simply would not have occurred to him—like most who ran the wilderness trails with all their perilous possibilities for disaster—to consider anything short of providing an injured musher with all the help he could muster.
Stepping off his sled runners, he was about to see what could be done when he took another look at Jessie’s face and saw that the tears in her eyes were not only the result of the wind.
“Hey,” he said, with a grin that accentuated the weathered creases around his eyes, and laid a heavily mittened hand on her arm. “It’ll be okay, you know, Jess.”
She smiled ruefully back at him and shrugged her shoulders in slight embarrassment and distraction. Jess? No one but Alex Jensen called her Jess.
“Yeah. Thanks, Lynn. You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”
“Well, good. Then I’m glad I’m here. Let’s see how we can work this out. How about if I turn around and run behind you until we get out of the worst of this bastard storm. Then we could trade off the lead and make an endurance run.”
She drove ahead to give him room to swing his team around without their having to struggle any farther up the hill. As she waited and was impressed with how expertly he handled his dogs, she thought again of the mission that she had interrupted and the choice she had made in turning back down the mountain. Could this be a window of opportunity to complete her mission? Probably not. It wouldn’t be fair to leave him alone to finish the rescue she had already begun, but…He knew nothing about it. How could she explain?
Stepping off the sled, she walked back to check on Gail Murray. Sensing that an abatement of the elements was close ahead, the dogs pulling the second sled were still on their feet, ready to go. They gave her curious looks as she passed them. Hey, they seemed to say, let’s get going and out of this awful weather.
Murray was awake and alert, hypothermia on the retreat.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why’d we stop?”
“We’ve got company,” Jessie told her encouragingly. “Lynn Ehlers just showed up and he’s going to help me get you back to Forty Mile.”
“Great. Listen. I’m not complaining, but I’ve got a little feeling back in this bad leg. It’s not real comfortable, but I can handle it for now. I can’t swear about later, though, if it keeps coming to life. You got anything for pain in your kit? We left mine up on the hill.”
“Yeah, I sure do. Never travel without it—you just never know. I’ll get some for you.”
When Jessie came back, Lynn had introduced himself to Gail and was telling her that it would be no big deal getting her back down the Forty Mile River to the Yukon.
“It’ll take a while, but you’ll be just fine.”
“Thanks.” She smiled a little in response to his optimistic good cheer. “How’s my team doing, Jessie?”
“Just great. Here, swallow these.” She handed Murray a couple of capsules and opened the thermos of tea.
She was glad that some sensation had returned to Murray’s leg, though she thought it might be more painful than Gail was admitting and might cause her some real discomfort on the uneven parts of the trail. It relieved some of Jessie’s own worries about spinal injury, but there was still the possibility of frostbite to consider. If Gail’s feet were frozen, it would hurt like hell when they began to come to life.
“Let’s get going,” Ehlers suggested. “We’re burning daylight.”
Closing Murray back into her close shelter, they went back to their sleds and continued down the hill and into the trees, which at first were thinly scattered on the slope, but quickly became a forest that broke most of the force of the wind. The snow, however, continued to fall and drift in the intermittent gusts.
As soon as they came to a spot that was more sheltered and level, they stopped to rearrange themselves, build a fire, and feed and water both the teams Jessie had brought off the mountain. Lynn decided to snack his, having fed them before starting uphill.
“They’ll get a good feeding next time we stop,” he decided.
Sensing a break, all the dogs ate and drank well, then lay down and curled up in heat-conserving circles for a snooze.
“We’ll have to give them short rests,” Ehlers commented, when they had finished the chores and were satisfying their own appetites close to the fire. “We ought to get going as quickly as we can. Long runs and shorter-than-ordinary rests should be okay.”
“They’ve certainly earned more,” Jessie told him. “I’m really proud of my guys, but you’re right. This has to be a speedy run.”
“You’ve got a good-looking team. All veterans?”
“Yes, this year they are. Even Pete, who’s getting up there. He’s run six years for me. Five Iditarods in a row.”
Within the sled in which she lay now motionless, Murray had eaten a little soup, then almost immediately had drifted off to sleep. Jessie thought that this would be all right, now that she was no longer so cold she could hardly talk. She was going to need all the rest she could get on the trip to the big river, especially if it turned out she was in any real pain.
Staring into the fire, Jessie was once again torn between the two commitments she had made, though neither had anything to do with the race. She was the one who had promised to get Gail Murray back to Forty Mile, not Lynn Ehlers. She was also the one who had agreed to be responsible for getting the ransom money to the top of American Summit, or wherever the kidnappers decided to contact her. Once again it had come to a choice.
Could she explain some of the problem to Ehlers without telling him all of it? In these circumstances it wouldn’t be fair to ask him for something so important without telling him the reasons for the request. Could she ask him at all? Would he think she was copping out on—
“Jess? What’s on your mind?” he asked in a quiet voice, and she looked up to find him watching her with a concerned and questioning expression. “You’ve got a frown that says som
ething’s bothering you—a lot. Given the situation, I think we’re pretty well set here. What’s worrying you so much?”
She hesitated, surprised out of her own reverie.
He waited.
“It’s not so easy, Lynn. There’s more to this than you know.”
“Better tell me—have it all out, before we go ahead with this.”
“Well…that’s just it. I’m not…Oh, hell. I need to go back up there, soon.”
“Why?”
“You already know that Debbie Todd’s missing and they haven’t found her. What you don’t know is…”
Jessie gave in and once again told an outsider everything, including what they knew about the disappearance and B. J. Lowery’s murder, Jake’s and the Yukon Quest’s money-gathering and concern for secrecy, even her own contact with Delafosse, and why she needed to be where the kidnappers could find her to collect the ransom she carried.
When she finished, he sat for a minute, staring at her in astonishment, with the odd hint of a grin twitching the corners of his mouth.
“Good God, woman. I heard in Forty Mile about you pulling John Noble out of that hole in the ice. Is there anything that could go wrong with this race that you haven’t got caught up in—or anything you can’t do?”
Shaken from the anxious consideration of her alternatives by his view of what had happened to her over the last few days, Jessie could suddenly see a sort of twisted humor in all she’d been through. Once she did, she couldn’t stop the release of tension that started as a chortle and ended up a belly laugh that bent her double as she rolled back on the sled on which she was perched. Her laughter set his going, and it was several minutes before either one was again capable of coherent speech.
“Oh, wow. I needed that,” she told him, gasping for air.
“Guess so. Me, too. Now…what do you want to do?”
She stopped, startled by his question.
Most men simply assumed that they should take charge of a situation, went ahead and did so. Actually, it was more the way they thought—in terms of action rather than consideration. Solving problems was something to do. It had always irritated her to be so easily and without question cut out of a determination by this assumption. It had made her stubbornly insist on her right to make decisions, and she realized that she had been instinctively ready to do so again. But Ehlers had not reacted as she had almost subconsciously expected he would. He had not short-circuited the procedure, but was waiting for her to be part of the process.
What do you want to do? Such a simple question—such an enormous relief to feel she didn’t have to fight for her interests.
“What do I want to do? I want to help you take Gail down. I want to go back up that hill. I want to be twins, is what I want, Lynn. Dammit.”
“That I can’t help with. But it seems to me you’d better get going back up there. Look at it from a practical point of view, Jessie. You are the only one who can carry that money—the one they designated and will expect, right? I can take Gail back to Forty Mile, but I can’t carry the ransom. Doesn’t that make the decision for us?”
It clearly did.
What seemed a very long time later, in the deepening dark, the light from Jessie’s headlamp illuminated a snow-covered heap that was the equipment she had removed from Gail Murray’s sled bag on the downside of the second switchback of American Summit.
Through the fading light, she and her team had once again made the nightmare uphill climb through the blizzard, which continued its remorseless, unmerciful assault on them. Knowing what to expect had made no difference in the difficulty of the seemingly perpetual ascent. If anything, it was worse, as tired muscles were required to repeat what had already strained them to a point of depletion.
The only relief came in the last mile or two, when the snow gradually stopped falling and the wind hushed its howling to a mere moan. Jessie had looked up to see a couple of stars hesitantly peeking through a break in the overcast. Slowly the break had widened, and through it she could also see a hint of moonlight along the edge of the clouds.
Stopping the team just above the switchback, she now thrashed her way through the drifts and started to dig the snow away from the pile of gear, to locate the food Murray had carried for her dogs.
Before leaving Lynn Ehlers to make the run back to Forty Mile alone, Jessie had given him most of her own dog food, knowing she could pick up Murray’s on her way to the summit. Though mushers seldom feed their dogs exactly the same things, whatever formula it turned out to be would be edible, and hungry dogs wouldn’t care. It seemed the best way to ensure that all were fed enough to make safe passage.
Now, as she brushed at the snow, she was confused to find the pile covered with less than she had expected. Only a thin layer covered most of it, and the pile was scattered as though it had been dug through—searched.
Someone’s been here, she realized, and worried suddenly that the food she needed would be gone. But it was there and nothing seemed to be missing—not that it mattered much, except for the food, though it was unsettling. No one had passed them on their way down the hill, or after they had met Ehlers. To search through this pile, someone would have to have come from above.
It was not hard to make the mental leap to assuming who it might have been. When she hadn’t showed up as anticipated, someone waiting for her might have come down, found this location, and searched the equipment to see if it was hers—and if, by chance, the ransom had been left along with the rest. It made perfect sense. Who else would be traveling back along the trail? Not a sled driver, certainly.
Well, whoever it had been, they had not found what they were looking for, obviously, because she still carried the scarlet-taped package of money in her own sled.
Loading Murray’s dog food into her sled bag, along with the other musher’s first-aid kit to replace her own, also gone with Murray and Ehlers, Jessie started the team on up the slope, which soon was not quite so steep. The wind dropped even more, and as the country leveled slightly, she could see that the hill undulated away ahead of them. Though the storm had obliterated the trail, there was a marker or two in the depressions between drifts, and the faint suggestion of a track beside them. Another, deeper suggestion was visible off to one side.
Stopping the sled, Jessie waded across to it, curious, and carefully brushed and blew away some of the light unpacked snow. Only a little way beneath the surface was the unmistakable track of a snowmachine, compressed by the weight of the vehicle that had made it. It overlapped another—someone had come and gone back over the same trail, confirming her earlier assessment of the equipment search. If she was reading this correctly, somewhere up ahead was someone not connected with the race—someone waiting for her to appear with the ransom she had been instructed to carry.
Feeling the pocket of her parka to assure herself the handgun was still there, she went back to the team and got them started again, heading west, watching carefully for any sign of company on the crest.
21
“The snow spread away, level as the great harvest plains, and here and there about us mighty mountains shoved their white heads among the stars. And midway on that strange plain which should have been a valley, the earth and the snow fell away, straight down toward the heart of the world…. We stood on the dizzy edge that we might see a way to get down. And on one side, and one side only, the wall had fallen away till it was like the slope of the decks in a topsail breeze…‘It is the mouth of hell,’ he said; ‘let us go down.’ And we went down.”
—Jack London, “An Odyssey of the North”
JESSIE HEARD THE ENGINE OF THE SNOWMACHINE BEFORE SHE saw it coming toward her through the veil of snow propelled by the wind across the summit. What came first into view was not the machine, but only the form of the driver, for the machine itself was hidden below it in the fog of flying white.
Stopping the team, she waited, watching, as the whining apparition approached and gradually became clearly visible—a dark rid
er on an even darker conveyance. Bypassing the string of dogs, the figure pulled up beside her, did not turn off the engine, but set it to idle and sat for a minute looking at her without speaking. She directed the light from her headlamp at him and stared back, in suspense, aware that her breathing had quickened and her heart rate increased.
He wore a heavily insulated black coverall, boots, and gloves made for snowmachine travel in extreme weather. A black helmet with a darkly tinted faceplate hid his features and made him as anonymous as he was ominous and threatening. There was absolutely nothing that might aid her in identifying him, now or later.
Swinging a leg over the saddle of the snowmachine, he came up to her and stopped. As she watched, he removed one glove. Under it, he wore another glove, thinner, less insulated. Deliberately, he took a handgun from one pocket and, pointing it in her direction, spoke for the first time.
“The package,” he demanded, in a voice slightly muffled by the helmet and the wind. “And don’t do anything dumb.”
“Where’s Debbie Todd?”
“Not here. You’ll find out later, after we get the money. But if we don’t get it, you’ll never know.”
Jessie gave in. She hadn’t really expected Debbie to be there anyway.
“Right. It’s in the sled.”
She stepped from the runners of her sled and walked around the opposite side to open the sled bag.
He followed, either in anticipation of what he was about to be given, or because he wanted to stay close, not trusting her.
Opening the bag, she took out the red-taped package of money and, without a word, held it out.
“Put it on the Ski-doo.”
Imperious son of a bitch, she thought, as she moved back around her sled and crossed to the idling snowmachine. Probably doesn’t want to have to hold anything but that gun.
He opened a compartment under the saddle and gestured to it.
She dropped in the package and stepped back from the machine.
“Now, put your gun in there with it.”