They started up along the beach towards the sea ice. She could feel the body warmth of her captor ahead of her, his broad back giving her at least some protection from the wind.
Swivelling her head about, she tried desperately to get a bearing on the Safety roadhouse as it disappeared into the spindrift but it was hard to keep her balance with her hands tied behind her back and the sky was a formless white and the selvedge where the land pressed up into it almost invisible. Behind her, she could see Sammy and Derek, with their legs clamped to the snowbies, struggling to stay seated as the vehicles bumped along. If either of them fell, she knew the men would leave them there and she sensed that Sammy and Derek knew this too.
As their captors picked their way through the pressure ridge where the shore-fast ice met the pack ice out onto the smooth pan of the middle of Norton Sound, the thought suddenly occurred to Edie that all three of them were going to be taken out into the middle of the Sound and left to die. She felt herself liquefying, a rush of terrorizing adrenaline course around her veins. She bit down hard on her lip, willing herself to keep her head. If she did not, how could she expect Sammy or Derek to keep theirs?
The men picked up speed now, racing south and west into the swirling drift. With no outerwear, each gust of wind felt like a new assault, the cold slamming into the face, tearing at the ears, forcing the eyes to close. She wanted to turn her body in, to protect herself with her shoulders, but with her arms tied behind her back she could not. She began to shiver uncontrollably, the spasms coming like the waves on a stony beach. She took a deep breath then, and forced herself to take her mind on a trip around her body, tightening and releasing the muscles. This she did over and over until the heat had stopped the shivering, then she jammed her head around. Behind her, Derek was still bouncing in the saddle, his body hunched and rigid, eyes shut tight against the formidable cold. The ropes held him without providing any support. Off to one side, she could just about see Sammy through the spindrift. It was probably –28 on the sea ice, –35 if you included wind-chill. Unprotected from the wind, and without outerwear, they would soon begin lapsing into a disorientated state of hypothermia.
Whatever their destination, Edie was in no doubt now that this was a one-way trip.
She began to lose control of the muscles in her limbs. However much she tried, she could no longer waylay the agitation of her body. She was shaking violently, her fingers, nose and ears throbbed with frostnip and though she kept her eyes closed, she could feel her tear ducts forming little boulders of ice. Soon, she knew, she would stop feeling the pain. Then her mind would begin to wander and she would hallucinate. Finally, an overwhelming urge to sleep would come over her and then it would all be over.
She had no idea how much later it was when she began to feel the snowmobile slowing, then sliding gradually to a halt. She tried to open her eyes but the lashes were firmly frozen together now. The driver got down from the snowmobile and she felt herself being heaved off the saddle. Then she fell and landed on her side in wind-dry snow. She still could not open her eyes but she knew she was lying close to the vehicle from the loud roar of the engine and the stench of exhaust fumes. Something was thrown off the vehicle onto the snow, and she felt a knife sawing at the ties on her wrists. Her two captors shouted to one another, there was the sound of the snowmobiles accelerating, then a swoosh in the snow as the vehicle beside her turned. The snowmobile roared off, kicking snow in her face. She listened to the sound of the engines. Then there was only the shriek of the wind and they were alone.
Suddenly, she realized that her body was no longer shaking.
Forcing herself to sit, she shouted out and, with a bolt of relief, heard Derek and Sammy respond.
She screamed, ‘Don’t move, I can walk. I’m coming for you.’ Her eyes were still held fast with ice. Though it felt as though the sockets were full of sand, she began to screw them up hard, then release, until she thought she would faint from pain, but she could feel the tips of the eyelashes gradually begin to soften, then she began to force the lids apart, feeling the tearing as, one by one, the lashes popped out at the root. She looked about. They were out on the sea ice in very low visibility. The wind was coming in from the east-north-east now, whipping snow into her ears, her mouth, her nostrils. In the distance she thought she could see a slight darkening on the ice and hoped it was Sammy or Derek. She knew she had to get to them fast and willing her legs to move she tried to lift herself from the ice but nothing happened. She tried again, harder this time, but still her legs did not move. Yet in spite of this, a kind of calm had come over her. These were the conditions she had been born into, this is what she knew.
No longer able to feel her fingers, she used her elbows to rub her legs until a fierce pain came back into them, and then she stood, wobbly at first, but gradually gaining her balance against the scooping action of the wind which threatened at any moment to lay her back down on the ice. Though her eyes felt as though they were being scoured, she could see a few feet ahead. Step by step she made her way through the whipping drift towards the dark patch on the ice some way away. It was Derek. He was lying on his side in the snow. She put her arm on him. His eyes were partly open but he could not see. The telltale hard white waxiness of frostbite had settled on his face. The ties around his hands had been cut. He was moaning softly. She stood up and looked about but could see nothing except driving snow. Derek made a coughing sound. She looked down and saw that he was trying to point with his finger but his fingers had frozen together and what he was holding out looked like a stump of a hand, its edges already swelling with frostbite.
She knelt down and shouted into his ear, ‘Are you trying to tell me where Sammy is?’
He nodded.
She shouted Sammy’s name and heard a faint sound. Using all her strength to pull Derek up by the shoulders into a sitting position, she began to rub his body with her elbows. ‘Keep on rubbing your skin till I come back. Think about lemmings,’ she said. ‘All the different types of lemmings and all the research you still need to do on them.’
Derek give a little nod and what would have passed for a smile if his lips weren’t iced together.
She found Sammy nearby, doubled over on the ice, his arms tucked between his chest and knees. He was shaking violently. His eyebrows and nose were white with frost but he looked up as Edie approached and blinked an acknowledgement. She bent down and rubbed him hard. His skin had frozen but the flesh was still soft below. He had frostbite, but it wasn’t yet deep. Hunter’s response, that mysterious opening of capillaries in the hands and feet, the adaptive flushing of warm blood unique to those who worked constantly in frigid conditions, had protected both Sammy and his ex. Derek, who had fewer clothes on, was past all that.
‘Can you stand?’
He nodded. A look of deep concentration came over his face. She reached out a hand to help him, but he pushed it aside. He wanted to feel the limits of his own capabilities. He rose slowly, first elevating his knees, then pushed off first with the left foot, then with the right. At the top, he caught Edie’s arm briefly to steady himself and they began to walk like that, arm in arm, towards the spot where Derek was sitting.
For a moment they huddled together, each enjoying the warmth of the others’ breath on their frozen eyes, on the frozen hairs inside their nostrils.
‘We went over a pressure ridge not far back. I felt it.’
Sammy grunted an affirmation. He’d felt it too. In a world where she could no longer be sure where the lines between reality and her own confused state lay, this was good, this suggested that she was right, that there was a pressure ridge and that they might reach it. She didn’t have to explain that the wind would have piled snow there and they might be able to make a shelter. They would all know that was the only hope they had.
Derek groaned again. She could feel the force of him, trying to move his legs, but it came out as nothing more than a momentary tightening.
Edie said, ‘That’s OK, Police,
we’ll pull you.’
She and Sammy helped each other up, then, looping their arms under Derek’s shoulders, Sammy and Edie began to drag the policeman like a sled behind them. It was slow going, he was heavy and they were weak and had to be careful not to bring on a sweat that could make their hypothermia worse. All the same, step by step they retraced their path, following the snowmobile tracks that were growing ever fainter as the wind frisbeed snow across the ice. Then, after who knew how long, Sammy pointed out the band of grey marking the place where the ridge began. They came to where the two ice floes had raised up at their edges. Right here the ridge was small, too small to act as a wall for a shelter, and it was at the wrong angle for either side to be in the lee of the storm, but it would make a suitable foundation.
Sammy was by now becoming unsteady on his feet. Edie left the two men huddled together and set off along the line of the ridge to find deeper snow, making sure to move downwind from them so she could hear Sammy’s voice. Her footprints might be sufficient, but every couple of minutes Sammy would shout to keep her orientated. She’d come back for them when she’d found a drift.
It didn’t take long. A little way further, the ridge grew taller where the floes had been forced up high against one another and the wind had already driven loose piles against the pressure ridge. What snow lay in drift was dry and the wind had not yet had a chance to compact the layers. It would be too frail for a snow house. She made her way back to them. Where her footprints had been rubbed out, she waited for the sound of Sammy’s voice to come to her over the roar of the wind. The fear that had terrorized her earlier had gone. Her only feeling now was the absolute focused determination that, whatever happened to her, Sammy and Derek would get through this. She could feel herself weakening now, her hands hardening already, but she would not allow them to die here. Quickly, scoping about, she decided that the three of them working together might be able to mound up the snowdrift into a temporary snow cave in which they could at least take some shelter from the blizzard.
She found them where she had left them, Sammy keeping Derek warm with his body.
She said, ‘We need to drag him a little further. Can you do it?’
Sammy flashed her a look of absolute conviction. She gave him a wink back. The old team.
All three found the walk to the pressure ridge exhausting, but they had no time to acknowledge their throbbing arms, their stiffening skin, their increasingly muddled thinking. And yet they all knew, could see from one another’s faces, that they were all suffering, all becoming too weak to think about anything but conserving their resources for the job of survival.
They left Derek sitting on top of the pressure ridge, clambered down and kicked up the snow around, pressing down with numbed feet to pack it a little so that it would not collapse when they started scooping out the hole. When they had a good-sized mound, they fetched Derek, dragging him down the slope and installed him on one side of the mound. While they built it up around the sides, Derek went to it with his elbows, hollowing out a shallow shelter in the snow. The effort of concentration seemed to perk their spirits and get their adrenaline circulating. Sammy began to sing, old songs, songs about spirits and hunters, and though they could hardly hear one another above the yelling of the wind, just knowing they were singing together gave them a renewed sense of hope.
They clambered into their newly fashioned shelter, and pulled in snow around the entrance. They were bunched together, knees up against their chins, their arms around one another to hold in the heat. None was shivering now, none could feel their extremities and yet they were full of the greatest affection for one another. If they went like this, in one another’s arms, then each would know there were many worse ways to die.
For hours they sat singing in the dark of the snow cave, the strength of their voices gradually ebbing with their life force until a violent, katabatic gust, twisting its way towards the pressure ridge, spun off the makeshift entrance to the shelter, allowing the driving snow to cover them. Without hesitation, Sammy made his way forward on his knees to the broken entrance.
‘I’m going to make some repairs,’ he said.
Derek and Edie looked at one another, weak and nearing death. They both understood what Sammy had just volunteered to do and it humbled them.
Outside the blizzard sang its own raucous, anarchic tune. Moments passed and they heard Sammy’s shouts. Shuffling to the entrance of the snow cave, Edie peered out. The sunset wasn’t far off and the snow was now deep grey. She squinted. In front of her she thought she could make out something blue. Sammy’s clothing? No, she remembered. Sammy never wore blue. It was a kind of cloth though, or perhaps a sheet. The wind was pressing it into whatever was behind it. She slid from the cave, stumbled in the wind towards it then saw that it was pressing into the contours of a human body. Sammy. She went towards it now, walking bent, in a hunter’s attitude, against the worst of the wind.
Sammy was trying to handle a blue tarpaulin, which was flapping crazily in the blizzard and threatened to take off in the wind. She went towards him and, using her arms, because her own hands were by now quite useless, helped to manhandle the tarp into a twist they could then carry through the snow and back to the cave. They did not speak – the roar of the wind was too loud for them to make themselves heard – but immediately got down to what needed to be done, the collecting and heaping of snow around the tarp to make an entrance. Finally, they rolled back inside, and tamped up the entrance with more snow.
Sammy shouted, ‘It’s the one from my sled. Must have torn off in the wind. I found it flapping from an ice boulder just along the pressure ridge.’ The skin on his lips peeled open and began to bleed and he put a hand up to it. The flesh beneath wasn’t frozen yet. Another sign of hope.
The tarpaulin flapped and billowed in the wind but it remained firm.
‘I guess the team didn’t make it,’ Sammy said.
Edie reached out and squeezed his arm. ‘But we will,’ she said. Snow began to accumulate at the base of the tarp. They could hear the tap tapping then nothing, as the layers piled higher. The snow cave began to warm from their body heat. They started to feel sleepy, but knew they must not sleep. There were three things Inuit did in these circumstances. They sang the old songs, they played the old games and they told the old stories.
About halfway through the night, when they had told the stories and sung the songs and as sure as they could be that they would make it at least to the next day, Sammy said,
‘Maybe one or other of you can tell me what this is all about?’
And so there, in the snow cave surrounded by a howling blizzard and not knowing how they were going to get out of it, with frostbite already creeping like a shadow across their limbs and faces, Derek and Edie took it in turns to tell him the story, from the moment Edie found the body of Lucas Littlefish to their last, disastrous, trip to the Safety roadhouse in the hope of finding their friend.
45
Edie did not hear the snowmobiles but she felt the sound as a vibration coming up from the ice beneath her feet. The heft of the air gave her the sense that a great deal of new snow had piled around the snow cave and that they were under it. It was impossible to know for sure who might be heading towards them. But there were only two people who knew where they were. And she was pretty sure she didn’t want to see them again.
Sammy felt it next, then Derek.
Derek said, ‘Holy walrus.’
Sammy looked up. His face had swollen so badly in the night that it looked like some kind of red tuber. It alternately hurt and itched, he said, and he would have had a hard time not scratching it were it not for the fact that he’d grown up knowing that this was the worst thing you could possibly do for frostbite. Besides, he had nothing to scratch it with since his hands were in the same condition.
‘It’s not like there will be any footprints. It’s not like we’re visible. It’s not like they can even hear us.’
Sammy said, ‘So what we’ll do i
s…?’
‘Hope and pray they’re gonna ride right by us,’ Edie said. She was whispering now, though she only realized this when she heard her voice.
‘Pray,’ said Derek, with what his lips could manage of a scoff. ‘Late in the day for that, isn’t it?’ Of the three of them, he had suffered most on the journey. On the snowmobile, Sammy had managed at least to stick his hands down his trousers, which had probably saved his fingers, though it had led to an agonizing patch of frostbite on his lower back. No such luck for Derek. He had been wearing less than the other two and nothing at all on his hands, which were still frozen, the skin billowing off them like sails in a stiff breeze. Underneath the skin, the flesh was already blackening. His sight had partly returned, or at least he imagined it had. It was too dark in the snow cave to know for sure. Maybe the strange swirls in front of him were the effects of the frostbite. Maybe, he said, they were just what blind people always saw.
The trembling grew stronger and was accompanied now by the burr of engines, the sound coming up from the ice. Edie put her ear to the ice beneath them.
‘Definitely two,’ she said. ‘Not far away now.’
They sat bundled together, barely daring to breathe. Then the sound seemed to dim.
With her ear to the ice again, Edie said, ‘They’ve passed us.’ A moment later she said, ‘They’ve stopped.’
Gradually, the sound grew louder once more, then died.
Whoever it was had pulled up right beside them.
All of a sudden, they heard something else. Edie felt herself take a deep breath. A methodical thump started up, coming from somewhere above them. She tipped an ear to the ceiling of their tiny shelter. The sound was at shoulder height.
Someone was using an ice axe.
She wasn’t afraid to die, she realized then. She was only afraid of the pain that would come before.
Little particles of ice, fragments of snow which had melted with their breath and crystallized, began to crumble off the section of snow wall nearest to the sound.
The Boy in the Snow Page 29