Snowhook

by Jo Storm

  They rounded a slight corner where the trail skirted one of the many marshes in the area, and the first flakes began to hit her face, thick and splattering. The dogs puffed, but their breath did not make clouds because it had suddenly gotten so warm. Hannah was sweating heavily under all her layers, and she kept her toque off even after they started running again, letting the cool air hit her hair and face unimpeded. It felt good.

  The snow started to come down more heavily, in the space of a few seconds going from nothing to making it nearly impossible to see. She squinted and realized she had forgotten to bring her goggles — a modified pair of ski goggles that covered her face and allowed her to keep her eyes open in driving wind and snow. Thankfully, she was not going far.

  The eerie silence deepened as the snow crowded close together, blocking out sound. Hannah did not know the trail very well, but she did know that where it split into many small tracks, she needed to take the far right-hand one and follow that. It was a long, slow uphill climb that she knew led to the back of Jeb’s house.

  The trail became wider and more packed down as they headed up the hill, and the dogs spread out a little. Even Sencha pulled — though it was more because everyone else slowed down than because she wanted to work.

  They pulled into the area around the back of Jeb’s house that was maybe twice the size of their own yard — half an acre that in the summer they played badminton and soccer on. In Jeb’s yard there were old cars and a leaning, dilapidated shed. An ice hut stood on steel runners, ready to be pulled out onto the lake that skirted the left side of the cabin.

  This was Jeb’s house, but while she’d been away with the Army, Peter and his father had lived here. Hannah could see the broken and rusted frame of the old dirt bike she and Peter had used when she was ten years old now half-buried in the snow. That was the summer that Jeb had returned and taken her house back, and after that they hadn’t visited as often. Hannah’s dad had said that Jeb needed time alone to get back to herself, because she’d had a tough time while she was deployed. Sometimes he would go into the cabin to talk to her and tell Peter and Hannah to stay outside.

  Hannah stopped the sled between the shed and the house, about halfway across the yard. There was a low hum coming from the front of the house, like a large mosquito buzzing. The track she followed swept around in a large arc to join back up with itself; snowmobiles did not turn very tightly. She unmoored the snowhook and set it firmly, stepping on the back plate to drive it securely into the snow. For a minute she debated letting Sencha and Bogey off to run around, but there would be time for that later. Right now, Hannah wanted to make her phone call to the pharmacy and make sure she would be able to get a ride back to the cabin before dark. She walked up the steps and knocked on the splintered wood of the back door.

  That’s it, she thought, the adventure is over. The excitement of it was leaving her body, and she felt her headache ebb away as the snow fell with more and more vehemence, until she could barely see the dogs and the sled. She heard movement inside the cabin, but no one came to the door. Hannah knocked again, louder, and the sounds stilled.

  “Hi,” she called. “It’s me, Hannah Williams.”

  Still no one came to the door, and suddenly Hannah was sick of it all, tired and getting cold, and her stomach ache was back. Probably Peter was ignoring her for a joke, but it wasn’t freaking funny. She pounded at the door with her gloved fist as loudly as she could and yelled, “Hey! I need help. My mom is sick. Open up!”

  Then Sencha began to bark furiously at something and Hannah turned to see Peter coming around the side of the house in his snowshoes, his arms full of wood, woodchips all over his thick wool sweater because he hadn’t done his coat up.

  Behind her the door opened, and things got very bad very quickly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Hannah turned to see who had finally opened the door and immediately felt a hot, stinging sensation in her chest. Then she was lying on her back in the snow, unable to breathe.

  She had never had the breath knocked out of her before, but a small piece of her understood that was what had happened. She struggled, instinctively placing her hands against her chest as if to help expand her lungs. Her eyesight dimmed as though she were looking through a playground tunnel. Her breath tasted like rust, and the snow pelted down into her open mouth as she gasped for air.

  Slowly, agonizingly, her breath came more easily. With it came her hearing, and finally her eyes began to see more than just the darkened circle of her own chest and the snow in which she lay.

  Above her on the small porch stood Jeb. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun, and in her right hand she held a rifle with a brown wooden stock.

  She was pointing the rifle at Hannah, squinting into the whirling snow.

  “Get down! Get down! Get down!” screamed Jeb. Hannah flipped over onto her stomach and pressed her face into the snow, breathing in the smell of snow and woodchips and trying not to suffocate on the terror that clogged her throat.

  All the dogs were barking by now, and as Hannah turned her head ever so slightly, she could see Sencha lunging against her collar and gangline, trying to get to her.

  “Jeb!” she heard a voice yell. “It’s Hannah, Jeb. It’s Hannah … George’s daughter! It’s okay.” It was Peter.

  “This isn’t backup, this isn’t scheduled,” Jeb said to Peter. Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw Peter carefully place an armful of wood on the ground.

  “You’re at home, Jeb, home in Canada. It’s Hannah. She’s here. That’s her.” He pointed at Hannah.

  Jeb’s voice was hard and angry. “I don’t know this individual. I don’t know you, either. You’d better take cover from this sandstorm, son.”

  “Jeb, you’re home,” Peter said. Through her terror Hannah heard the calmness in Peter’s voice; he sounded like a principal announcing a fire drill or a gym teacher instructing students to climb the ropes for the yearly fitness test.

  Hannah knew that during Jeb’s time in the Army she had spent a long time away from Canada, deployed in Afghanistan. Whenever Hannah had asked where, her father had merely said, “She’s in the desert, and it’s not pretty.” That was all he would say. Jeb had been home now for almost two years, but from what Hannah could make out, she rarely left her house.

  Hannah lay there, hardly breathing. The cuffs of her coat were soaking up the snow, and it was melting into her gloves. She felt it trickling down the backs of her hands, but she was too scared to move. Except in the movies, she had never before seen someone point a gun at another human — let alone at her — and this was not like the movies. She had seen her father and Scott fire guns when they hunted in the fall, had seen them kill partridges — the flurry of the bird’s takeoff cut off by the sharp crack of the rifle, then the bird suddenly falling like it had forgotten everything it knew about flying. Lying face down in the snow, unable to breathe, the dogs barking and lunging in the background, and Peter’s weirdly calm voice — this wasn’t like the movies at all.

  “Jeb, you don’t need a gun,” she heard him say.

  “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am, Jeb. It’s your nephew, Peter.”

  “I … I don’t think I do. No, I do know you — Peter. Peter. What are you doing?”

  “I was getting some wood.”

  “Where is this sandstorm coming from? I’m getting close to black on water, here.”

  “It’s snow, Aunt Jenny. You’re home now. It’s snow.”

  Jeb said nothing back, but Hannah could hear her shifting on the small porch, her boots knocking against the beat-up wood and scraping against the snow that dotted it.

  “I can get you water, Jeb,” said Peter in the same it’s all okay voice. “I’ll get us water from the well, okay?”

  There were a few moments of silence. Hannah couldn’t see anything and didn’t dare turn her head. The hairs on the back of her neck felt like barbed wire, stiff and unyielding.

  Then came the soun
d of Peter moving toward the cabin. The dogs were still barking.

  “Hannah, the stupid dogs,” said Peter in the same voice, all flat and equal stresses on each sound he was making, “Ha-nah-the-stu-pid-dogs,” as casual as if he were talking about the weather.

  Hannah slowly raised her head. “Sencha,” she said, “enough.” She tried to say it like her mother, in that tone that brooked no argument. The Dal gave two or three more barks, then fell silent.

  “I don’t see your kit, soldier,” Jeb said to Peter. Her voice had gone back to one that Hannah didn’t recognize, hard and adult with no comprehension of the person in front of her. It was as though she were pushing what was inside her head outward into the world, to make the world inside her head the real one.

  “I don’t see your kit,” she repeated. “Where’s your sidearm?”

  “It’s in the cabin, Jeb,” said Peter. “Maybe … maybe you could go get it for me?”

  “I’m going to call this in, soldier, that’s what I’m doing. I don’t know the regs on this, and my CO isn’t around. I’ll call this in, you watch the squirter,” she said, and Hannah saw Peter look over like Jeb had pointed at her.

  “Okay,” he said.

  There was the sound of boots on the porch, and then the door slammed shut.

  Hannah’s mouth was open. She realized she was panting. She was panting, and so, when she felt an arm under hers, jerking it upward, she slammed her mouth closed and bit her tongue, hard.

  “Get up,” said Peter in an angry whisper. “Get up and get going!”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Shut up and go,” he hissed, pushing Hannah forward roughly, “before she comes back and decides to shoot you or one of those bloody dogs.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Going to die, Hannah thought, going to die, going to die. The whole world was silent under their stumbling feet, the snow stinging and blinding. It was like being buried alive, but in whiteness, and claustrophobia gripped at Hannah, making her want to scream.

  But if she screamed, it might bring Jeb back out — Jeb with the gun, Jeb who could shoot the gun, shoot her or shoot the dogs or shoot Peter. So she didn’t scream. Instead, a whimpering sound came out with each short breath, ummh ummh ummh, as she followed Peter’s snowshoe tracks and his flailing arms. He was already almost out of sight, as his snowshoes kept him from sinking into the snow. He had run right past the dogs, ignoring them, and she started to follow, but then her feet stopped like they weren’t her own and she was turning, grabbing Nook, thanking everything in the world in that moment that she had not let Sencha or Bogey off, that they were all still ganged. She bent low over Nook’s head and hissed, “Get up, Nook, get up, GO!” and pushed the husky past her, around the wide snowmobile track that looped back to the main trail. The dogs picked up her fear and pulled hard, their bodies bunching up into an upside-down U and then pushing forward powerfully — but the snowhook held the sled fast and they couldn’t go anywhere, straining and barking. Hannah stumbled to the back of the sled, grabbed the snowhook, and pulled it up, nearly falling as the pulling dogs suddenly gained traction and the sled shot forward.

  The snowhook ripped out of her hand, falling to the ground and trailing after them, and she grabbed wildly for the handlebars, twisting her wrist and fighting for a grip on the ash wood. One foot, then two on the runners — the sled creaked and groaned under the torque, but even that was muffled under the constant onslaught of snow.

  She reached Peter and flew by him. His jacket was still open and he had his head down now, running awkwardly through the snowstorm. The team rounded the first corner into a more open area; the trees were several feet away on either side. The snow began to smack hard into her face, driven into her eyes by her speed and by the wind. They spun round the corner, back onto the track they had come in on, then shot down the hill to the main trail, Nook turning the team so quickly that the sled almost slid off the track.

  Hannah fought the urge to keep going. It was in the dogs, she could feel it. It was in her: panic and anger. Everything in her body screamed run!, but she wouldn’t run — she couldn’t leave Peter. The snowhook, not in its usual holder, bounced up and hit the back of her leg, point first, ripping a hole in her thick pants and making her wince. She tried to reach down and grab it, step on the brake, and keep the sled upright all at the same time.

  “Whoa whoa whooooaaaaa,” she cried.

  The sled slowed, and she pressed the brake harder, still wrestling with the urge to let up, to go until they were far away from all this mess, back at her family’s cabin, in front of the fire, listening to Kelli talk about mushrooms and wood elves while her mom showed her how to mend holes in socks. But she couldn’t go back, and the cold wash of concern about her mom stiffened Hannah’s leg, and the sled came to a stop.

  Tentatively, she got off the runners and checked the back of her leg, which was stinging and throbbing. It looked like the snowhook had not gone through anything besides her clothing. Still, she would need to close that hole soon. She could already feel the winter air seeping in, and it was only barely cold enough to make her breath fog.

  She looked up as Peter came huffing up, his coat still open and his face closed and grim. He slowed as he neared the sled, stopping well away from it, then bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping.

  “Is she going to come here?” asked Hannah, straining to look behind him through the snow.

  “No,” said Peter between gasps. “She stays at the house.”

  Hannah hardly thought that the dingy, smoke-infused one-room cabin qualified as a “house.” The wood stove there leaked, unlike the one Hannah’s family had. Every year the Williamses cleared the creosote and nesting birds out of the chimney and re-lined the glass door with special thick rope so that it didn’t suck in air from the front. Jeb’s stove was old and had no glass door, and the handle was homemade, thick metal welded directly onto the metal door. It got so hot that you had to put on oven mitts to open it, and all the oven mitts in Jeb’s house had long, streaky burn marks where they stayed in contact with burning logs or the side of the stove. The top two feet of the cabin were coated in a black, sooty ring, and it stank of cigarette smoke and green kindling.

  Peter stood up and came a bit nearer, taking off his mitts and wiping his face of sweat and snow. Even the sound of his breathing was muted as the snow continued to fall. Suddenly, the press of all that precipitation began to weigh on Hannah. The silence was like an accusing stare; the sweat trickling down her back reminded her of the sensation of snow melting down the backs of her hands as she’d lain face down in the snow like a coward. Was that what Peter was thinking as he stared at her, still standing away from her? Why did the satellite phone have to be in Jeb’s cabin? It was all so stupid and unfair. And what was wrong with Jeb? Hannah could not understand what had happened. She had never seen an adult act that way, not even the homeless people by the Beer Store at the end of their street in Toronto. Jeb had taken all the rules and thrown them out, and now Hannah didn’t know what to do.

  “She won’t follow us,” repeated Peter. “She’ll stay in the cabin and try to call people to report us. The guys on the radio, they know what to do when she’s like this.”

  “She’s freaking me out!” yelled Hannah, not meaning to shout.

  “Shut up!” Peter shouted back. He took a quick step toward her and shoved her, his palm pushing against the centre of her chest, and she fell back into the snow again. The fall didn’t knock the breath out of her as the butt of the rifle had, but it was in the same spot and it hurt, it hurt a lot. Hannah sagged back to the ground, curled on her side with the snow pattering down. Then she was crying, and she cursed the crying, but she couldn’t stop. The tears were useless — just wasted water, wasted time.

  Peter stood above her for a few moments, then moved a few feet over to the side of the trail and looked back toward the house. Blurrily, Hannah could see him clenching his hands into fists and uncle
nching them. He stared up the hill a long time doing that, then finally threw them up in the air in a strange angry gesture and swore loudly.

  It was not a word that Hannah had ever heard him use before, and it shocked her so much she stopped crying. Peter was sixteen, and he was on the local hockey team, so she imagined he swore all the time; the boys on the hockey team at her school swore even more than the football guys. Some of the girls on her volleyball team swore when they were rotated out too soon or they missed a block or they didn’t play at the start of a game. But they seemed like kids trying things on compared to Peter just now. When Peter swore, it meant something.

  As soon as she stopped crying, Hannah felt stupid about it. She turned her face away from Peter even though he wasn’t looking at her and wiped the tears away with her gloved hand. The dogs whined, but they all seemed okay. Nook and Sencha were standing, and Rudy, too, but Bogey sat. Sencha, when she saw Hannah look at her, began wagging her tail rapidly.

  Peter turned and looked at her. “Look … I.” He paused. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then get up. I know where we can go.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Hannah.

  Peter dipped his head back toward Jeb’s cabin. “When she’s like this, it’s better that I go away for a bit. It’ll be okay. It’s the storm and stuff; the storm makes her like this. She can’t see with the snow and she thinks she’s back … there.”

  “Back in the war?”

  “Yeah. It happens.”

  “She had a gun!”

  Peter started off down the trail. “Don’t be an idiot. There weren’t any bullets.”

  He said it with such duh in his voice that Hannah couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Then a word appeared, and she grabbed hold of it and yelled it at his retreating back for all she was worth.