by Jo Storm
The rest of the afternoon was spent doing more chores. Hannah dug out their SUV while her dad cleared the long, thin driveway that led back to the long, thin dirt road that led to the long, thin paved road that took them to Timmins. It was an hour to town by car in the middle of summer, an hour and a half in the winter.
After a while, Kelli came out with Bogey. She threw a pink tennis ball into the snow and the big brown Lab plowed after it, breaking a trail for her.
Hannah and her dad untied Nook and Rudy and tied them to the bumper of the SUV so they could work on the doghouses. They nailed a piece of tarpaper over the hole in the roof of Rudy’s doghouse and poured cold tar on it — which didn’t really pour so much as glop and glump onto the wet shingles.
Nook’s doghouse was in worse shape. “Held together with spit and duct tape,” said her dad. He looked at the two doghouses. The sides of Nook’s kennel were scratched and splintered from her chain rubbing against it and from animals nesting in it during the spring, before they arrived for their summer vacation. “I guess we have our summer cut out for us, kiddo. Time for some new doghouses.” He knelt in the snow and began testing the other parts of the structure.
Now was her chance. Hannah took a deep breath. “Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“I want to go to camp this year.”
He looked confused. “We’re at camp.”
Hannah shook her head. “No, like a real camp. Like, with other kids.” She had thought about this for three months. She took another deep breath. “There’s one called Tabigon, in Temagami. They have leadership courses,” she offered, hoping it sounded adult and mature.
Temagami was pretty close to Timmins, only a couple of hours away. It took fourteen hours to get from their house in Toronto to the cabin in Timmins, so compared to that, it was very close. This was the sneaky part of the plan. Hannah’s best friend, Lindsay, went to a sports camp, but it was many hours south, in Muskoka. They had their own lake and sailboats and jet skis and three tennis courts, including an inside one. They had boys and horses. They went rock climbing and kayaking. They had everything. Everything.
If she could just get them to let her go to any camp, she and Lindsay figured they could get her parents to agree to Lindsay’s camp later. First they just had to get them to agree to let her go at all.
“What kind of camp is it?” asked her father.
Hannah tried not to yell with happiness that he hadn’t just said no right away. “It’s a sports camp. It’s good for you,” she said. She knew those were magic words. Good for you was always better than fun. “I looked it up. You get up early and go swimming in the lake and learn to rescue people in canoes.” This part would particularly interest her father. He had wanted to show them how to do that himself, but their pond was far too small and shallow. “They teach you how to survive in the bush, too.”
“You already know that,” he replied quickly.
“But it’s different, Dad. It’s with other kids. I could … I could maybe help, too.”
“Hunh.”
“And it’s pretty close. I could come here on weekends and stuff. It’s only for two weeks. It’s good for me. Please?”
“Sounds expensive.”
“Dad, I’ll give up my allowance forever if you let me go. I promise. I’ll never ask for anything, and I’ll help Kelli with her homework and walk the dogs every day.”
Her dad frowned. “Sweetie, you’re selling it a bit hard.”
She stopped talking and held her breath.
Her dad pushed his toque back and rubbed his forehead. “It’s not for a while, so let’s keep our minds on the task at hand. Go grab Nook and Rudy.” He paused and looked over at the two huskies. They saw him looking and began jumping and barking. “Poor guys. They think we’re going out. They just want to work. You know what? Let’s take them tomorrow instead of driving to Jeb’s. Make a day of it. I’ll ski and you can drive the sled. Tomorrow, guys!” he hollered as Hannah trudged over.
The dogs were pretty excited, now that her dad had talked to them. They also knew that whenever they were tied to anything other than their kennels, it meant they were about to run. They jumped and whined, and Hannah knew she’d have to take them over one at a time.
She decided to take Nook first. Nook was a true northern sled dog, with dense, thick fur that stood out all around her face like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Rudy was one of her pups and looked just like her, except his ruff was brown. When Hannah’s mom and dad had come back to Canada and decided to move to Toronto, her dad’s friend Pierre had offered to keep Nook for them. Pierre had thirty dogs — thirty! — and he competed in races all over North America, so Nook and Rudy stayed with him all year, except when the Williamses were at their camp.
“There’s my girl!” said Hannah’s dad as they approached. “Get up, Nook, there you go. Tomorrow, I promise.” After he’d clipped her collar to the kennel chain again, he ran his hands over her fur and lifted each foot to look closely at the pads. “Still got it after all these years, eh?” he said, and he scritched his fingers through her age-whitened ruff the way she liked.
Nook was a veteran, a dog who had run big races and traplines both. She had trained other dogs to be leaders and rebellious puppies to run in a team. She had once, Hannah’s dad said, gone after a black bear that got too friendly with his camping supplies. But she looked just like one of the house dogs as she sat on her haunches and thumped a foot on the ground in happy time to the scratching.
“Check Rudy’s front left foot, will you?” Hannah’s dad said.
Hannah started to object, then remembered her vow from only a few minutes ago. She went to Rudy and lifted his paw. She studied the heart-shaped pads carefully. One toe had a wide pink crevice running through it. Over that crevice was a sort of clear coating — the special glue that Pierre gave them to seal wounds on the feet to let them heal. Bandages would never work; they always fell off or got torn off by the dogs themselves, then the wounds would get wet and then become infected.
“It looks okay,” she said.
“Any pus?”
“No.”
If my friends heard this, they’d laugh until they peed themselves, thought Hannah.
George grabbed Rudy’s head ruff and playfully wrestled him from side to side. “Stop trying to dig holes, idiot. The ground is frozen!”
Rudy licked his face.
CHAPTER TWO
After the doghouses were patched and an adequate area shovelled clear around them, Hannah and her father went inside to get a cup of hot chocolate. The cabin was empty; Hannah’s mom was teaching Kelli how to cross-country ski outside on the deserted road.
“Dogsleds next,” said her dad after they had finished their drinks.
They got their coats and boots and hats and mitts back on, took the shovels, and went around the cabin to the back porch, which was really a lean-to with sides, although someone had added a shallow front wall, like stables have. There were many pegs here, and different-size hooks, and they all held dogsledding equipment. Four large pegs held a heavy touring sled that needed many dogs to pull, and a smaller sled sat underneath it on a shelf.
“We’ll use the cross backs tomorrow,” said her father, after they had pulled out all the dog harnesses and inspected them for tears. The cross back harnesses were for racing and formed a big X across the dog’s back. The other harnesses were square and had more padding on them; they were for pulling heavy loads.
Hannah and her dad checked the rigging: the long ganglines that the dogs were attached to, the short necklines, the thick tie-out line, and the tough, webbed snowhook line. The snowhook was used to anchor the sled. It was a heavy claw with two sharp prongs that were curved so that the more the sled moved, the more they dug in. The backs of the prongs were attached by a flat bar, so the driver could step on it and drive it into the snow quickly to stop the sled.
Then they set out a gangline for four dogs — Nook would lead, with Sencha beside her and Bogey an
d Rudy behind as the wheel dogs.
Hannah listened half-heartedly as her father rambled on and planned their short trip. Jeb had been in the Army proper, but both her father and Scott Purcell were Reservists. They both loved planning things “the Army way,” which, as far as Hannah could tell, meant making a list and then adding or subtracting things a hundred times an hour. What to take, how to pack, what to eat, when to leave — endless tasking just to go to a neighbour’s house.
The only thing that kept Hannah from freaking out was the fact that her dad hadn’t said no to the summer camp idea. So, she dutifully laid out the rigging and helped tighten the loose screws on the frame of the dogsled, and oiled the wood on the handle and put wax on the bottom of the runners so they wouldn’t stick to the snow. They also put new black hockey tape on the handle and replaced the bungee cord that held the drag mat and the attached metal brake off the snow. And it was all very boring and she felt herself floating away a little, worrying about what Lindsay was doing, and what she was missing, not being in Toronto.
Nothing ever happened up here; it was just endless days of fixing things and watching her sister get boringly excited about the forest. And more and more often, Hannah would go home and find out she’d missed something — a new person added to or an old one subtracted from their group at school, or a new routine in ballet that she hadn’t been there to learn — and she would struggle to keep up, trying to learn everything in secret while making it look like she’d known it all along.
“Grab some ointment and booties, too, Hannah,” said her father, so she packed into a bag the ointment and the fleece booties that protected the dogs’ paw pads from the cold and the abrasive ice, as well as preventing snow from getting caught between their toes.
When they were done, it was almost dark. They stomped back to the front porch and once again shook off all the snow, then went inside and undressed. It seemed to Hannah that most of winter was about putting on clothing and then taking it off, and being wet in between. At school plays and meetings, when her parents talked to other parents, Hannah heard them say things like, “We like the simplicity of it.” But it wasn’t simple. There were more stupid things to do up here in one day than in a week in Toronto.
Her mom and sister had returned from their skiing, and as Hannah and her father undressed, the phone rang. Hannah snatched up the receiver. It was a ridiculous phone, a squat square of dull beige plastic, ugly and heavy. It even had a curly cord that attached the handset to the dialing part! And the dialing part was round, like one of those Fisher Price toy phones for babies. You had to stick your finger in and twirl it instead of punching buttons. The cord was ancient and duct-taped in several places, and so stretched out that only small lengths of it still retained their original spring-like shape.
“Hello?”
“This is Lieutenant Wagner. I need to speak to Mr. Williams.”
“Just a moment, please,” said Hannah.
She held up the receiver. “Dad,” she said, then placed it on the counter. “It’s the Army.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Yes, sir … Yes, sir … No, sir, I’m at my family’s camp in Timmins … Yes, sir.”
Hannah stopped listening closely. She knew there were only two reasons for her father to talk like that: he was being called up, or he was getting a promotion. Either way, it meant he was leaving.
“Okay. Do we have an estimation of time? Yes, sir … No, sir, I’ll leave the car for my wife and catch a ride with Corporal Purcell. What are the chances of mobilizing? … No, sir, just getting my family kitted out in case, since we’re all up here … Yes, sir. I’ll see you at the rendezvous … Thank you, sir.”
He put the phone down and immediately picked it up again, speaking as he dialed. “We’ve been called up. Big storm in Quebec. They thought I was still in Toronto. I guess that damn answering machine isn’t working again.”
“Are you going?” asked Mina.
Hannah’s dad held up a finger and spoke into the phone. “Hey. You get the call? … What? … Well, you could have called me, Homer … Okay. I’ll see you in an hour.” He hung up.
Mina’s eyebrows rose. “You’re going tonight?”
“Yep.”
“I thought it wasn’t that serious.”
“It isn’t,” said George, “but he’s going in now, and he’s my ride.”
“Is it a big storm?” Kelli asked.
“Very big,” he answered, going into the bedroom. “There are power outages, and it’s not just snow, but ice and freezing rain, too.”
“An ice storm!” said Kelli. “I bet it’ll be pretty. Like a forest that shines back at you. Pretty! Can I come?” she asked, coming to stand in the doorway to the bedroom.
“No, honey, you can’t come. You stay here with Mom and Hannah and have fun, okay? I’ll be back.”
Hannah watched her mom in the kitchen, where she was wrapping up sandwiches. She stopped wrapping for a moment, and then when she started again, she was a bit slower, like she had to concentrate harder. “How long?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Not long, Mina.”
“But what about the sledding?” said Kelli.
“You’re big now, you don’t need to have everyone around when we do things,” he said.
Kelli said nothing.
It wasn’t long before the lights of Scott Purcell’s truck winked through the trees down the driveway. Nook and Rudy ignored the vehicle, but the house dogs went wild, barking. When Hannah opened the door, Bogey went bounding out to the truck at full speed, jumping on Scott to lick his face and pressing and twirling against his legs, almost knocking him over. Scott laughed and thumped the Lab’s sides, and both dog and human looked very pleased.
You’re not that special, thought Hannah from the doorway. Bogey does that to everyone.
Before Scott had arrived, Hannah’s parents had gone into the bedroom and closed the door. Even without seeing their faces, Hannah knew they were arguing. Her father hated to argue in front of people, hated yelling. He wanted everything calm and talked about reasonably. Hannah had met her mom’s family only twice, but each time she had been shocked at the volume of their conversations. They spoke and laughed and cried at the same volume: deafening. Around them, Hannah saw her mom become a different person, argumentative and teasing, and much louder. Normally, she never raised her voice.
Scott came in stamping his feet, but didn’t remove his boots, standing on the living room mat and dropping snow all around him. Kelli retreated to the folding stepladder again and stared at him from there, glaring at his feet.
“Hey, Hannah,” he said, then, “Let’s go, Williams, time’s a-wastin’!” He nodded to Hannah’s mom. “Hello, Mrs. Williams.”
“Hello, Mr. Purcell.”
“I’ve come to take your boy away,” he said. He did not look sorry. And when Hannah snuck a look at her father as he came out of the bedroom carrying his duffel bag and coat, neither did he.
It was a quiet night after Hannah’s dad left, driving off into the dark. Hannah’s mom took her insulin injection and then they ate supper. Afterward, Hannah and Kelli cleaned up while their mother read a book about accounting. She was taking a course at the community college near their house in Toronto. She was tired of her job as a gym teacher at a private school.
The darkness outside was thick, as though it were pressing down on them. Kelli complained that her head hurt.
“It’s just the low pressure,” said her mom. She said it would be gone by morning.
The next morning Hannah’s mom divvied up the chores that their dad usually did. Afterward, Sencha and Bogey came out to play with Kelli, who had strapped on snowshoes and wandered past the yard at the back of the cabin, tromping down the path she had made that went into the Moss Garden. This was a large open space under the tamarack and poplar and birch. In the summer, a thick, spongy moss grew on it, as well as harder, stiff, white crumbly stuff her dad identified as lichen.
Later, they came ba
ck inside and played a dice game.
“When’s dad coming back?” asked Kelli, whirling the plastic cup that held the dice and dumping it upside down onto the table. “Ooh, a full house, one roll!”
“No one knows yet,” replied her mom. “Don’t worry, he’ll let me know.” She turned to Hannah. “Hannah, get the radio out, please.”
“Why?”
“Just get it.”
Hannah went to the kitchen and fished the radio out from under the counter. Like everything else in the cabin, it was old and ugly, with green metal casing on the sides and broken white plastic on the front. There was one dial to tune the radio — not even digital — and a single speaker. The back had a big space for batteries.
“Turn it on, please,” said her mother.
Hannah shrugged, putting the radio on the counter between the phone and the small brown box that held her mom’s insulin ampoules — small glass cartridges that fit into a special needle. Her mom had been prepping her lunchtime dose.
The radio crackled as Hannah turned the knob that doubled as both the on/off switch and the volume dial. As the speaker warmed up, the voice of the announcer became clear.
“This is a CBC Radio One Special Report for northeastern Ontario: Environment Canada reports that a massive storm system continues to develop in eastern Quebec and is growing larger, dumping extreme amounts of precipitation.”
“Are we northeastern Ontario?” asked Kelli.
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“Pre-cip-i-tation, pre-cip-i-tation,” chanted Kelli.
It snowed a little again after lunchtime. The first fat flakes drifted down like friends, landing on their upturned faces as they stood in the front yard.
“I hope we get lots,” said Kelli. Hannah said nothing, but she was hoping the opposite.
“Well, let’s not let the work you did yesterday go to waste,” said their mother to Hannah. “Let’s go out for a sled ride.”
They took the small kicksled out to the end of the driveway with Rudy and Nook and took turns racing up and down the empty road. The snow came and came and came, each piece part of a large wave of white.