by Jo Storm
The rain was coming down harder, and Hannah turned back to the sled. “Do what you want,” she said. “I’m making lunch.”
“You could at least help,” said Peter.
“Help what?”
“Help me get the sleeping bag.”
“I thought you were just going back,” she taunted.
“Forget it,” he said. He walked to the sled and pulled out his snowshoes.
“I’ll wait here,” she said.
“Whatever.” Peter stepped into the bindings. He used the same tone Hannah did with her little sister.
She pulled the snowhook out and set it. She unhooked Sencha, but left Bogey on the gangline with the sled dogs. Unlike Sencha, Bogey was easygoing and adapted pretty quickly, as long as there were other dogs or humans around.
Peter had almost disappeared through the trees by the time Hannah had detached Sencha from the neckline and the gangline and taken off the harness. She left the harness lying across the packs on the sled. Leaving it on would have allowed large packs of snow to get lodged under Sencha’s chest and armpits and chafe her. Hannah was pretty proud of herself for remembering that.
It was a small comfort, though. Beyond the rain trickling down her face, her sodden gloves, and the heaviness of the snow sticking to the bottom of her snowshoes as she followed Peter’s trail was a feeling of frustration that she couldn’t shake. She had planned so carefully and now Peter had ruined it all with his stubbornness and making her feel like she didn’t know what to do. She did know what to do; she just hadn’t been anticipating Jeb, or the rain, or going the wrong way.
She glanced up. The iron-filings clouds had moved away, and the sky above them now was dark, like a big hand pushing down on her. She could not see much of it through the trees, but it looked as though it had lightened a bit in one direction. She hoped it was a break in the weather, and that it was heading their way.
She thought about how far they had come from Jeb’s house as Peter’s form came trudging back a half hour or so later, hugging a sleeping bag. The dogs had run for a long time, but she had forgotten to check her watch, and she now realized that the trail had grown indistinct as the day grew darker. It was 3:30 p.m. The freezing rain was still coming down, and with it, the darkness of a winter night.
Outside.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Knowing they would be sleeping outside sent a jolt of fear and energy through Hannah. The rain was starting to feel even colder, and the air was rank with the rotten, heavy smell of sodden bark and ice. Darkness would be upon them in half an hour or less; they had to set up their camp. There was lots of work to do before Hannah could get herself dry, but she knew she could do it. She was going to be a hero, despite the weather and despite Peter. Wasn’t that what heroes did — succeed in spite of their obstacles?
Peter trudged to the sled. Trying to greet him, Bogey began to pull toward him, ducking under the gangline and tangling it. Hannah yelled at him and he doubled back, tangling it even more. Finally, she just unclipped his lines. The big brown Lab went bounding over to Peter, who was crouching, adjusting his snowshoes. Seeing the dog coming toward him, Peter stood quickly and turned away, crossing his arms over himself and showing his back to the dog.
“Get him away!” he shouted. Sencha, noticing the action, trotted over to investigate. Peter turned and twisted awkwardly on his snowshoes, trying to keep the dogs at his back. They thought it was a grand game, as they kept trying to get in front of him to see what he was hiding. They gambolled and tripped over his snowshoes, and soon it was a frothy, snowy mess.
“Hannah, get them off me!” he shouted.
He sounded so frightened that Hannah felt disgusted. They’re just dogs, she thought.
Sencha — clearly enjoying this game of what have you got? — rounded on Peter with determination, wagging her tail furiously and thrusting her nose into his clasped hands.
Peter shouted and kicked at her, striking her chest with the blunt tip of his snowshoe, sending the Dal yelping and sprawling.
“Hey, watch it!” shouted Hannah. She ran over to where Peter was and pushed Bogey away. He went over to the sled dogs and hovered around them, eventually lying down. Hannah grabbed Sencha, hauled her to a tree, and tied her off to it with one of the pieces of rope that had been tying down the packs. Sencha was shivering, she noticed; Dalmatians lacked an undercoat, unlike Labs and huskies. Her fine white hairs were plastered to her body, and her tummy, which had almost no hair at all, was pink from the cold and rain.
Hannah cursed herself. At the cabin there were coats for Sencha that protected her belly and kept her warm, but she hadn’t thought to bring any.
“Keep them away from me,” Peter said. He was looking off the trail at a small copse of young trees that were barely higher than he was.
“I need something to cover Sencha,” she said. She held the shivering Dal around the barrel of her torso, hoping to warm her up.
“Well, I don’t have anything,” he said.
She gritted her teeth. “In the blue bag, get a sweater or something,” she said.
“Get it yourself,” he replied. “I’m making a fire.” He turned and headed for the copse and began to gather twigs from the thin branches that had broken under the weight of ice or feeding deer.
“We don’t need a fire, idiot!” she shouted after him. “We need to get the tent up, and we need to get Sencha warm!”
Peter ignored her, his pockets full of twigs as he moved under the larger maples and started to dig up the snow, searching for branches. There was a downed maple, a huge dead tree with the branches of one side sticking up out of the snow like liquorice — they were black from the rain and from weathering. Peter pulled off a few of the underside branches that were still dry and walked back. He crouched down in the snow. “You always make a fire,” he said, as if he were standing in front of a classroom. He took out a steel lighter from his inside pocket and made a hollow in the snow between the sled and where Hannah was bent over Sencha. “That’s the first thing. You always make a fire.”
Hannah gave up and went to the sled. The darkness was dropping rapidly now, and when she lifted the heavy tarp that was lashed over everything in the basket, she could barely distinguish between the blue bag of clothes and the black bag that held the food, the tent, and her sleeping bag. She opened the blue bag and grabbed the first thing that looked big enough — a wool sweater her father’s sister had knitted her — and untied some more rope. She returned to the miserable Dal and wrapped the sweater around her, securing it with the rope.
Hannah stood and surveyed her surroundings. She knew that the best place to pitch a tent was close to a rock to keep off the wind, but the closest rocks she had seen on the way there were now lost in the darkness and could not easily be reached.
She realized now that many of the skills she knew — how to collect water, how to signal a plane, how to light a fire without matches — were not helpful for their situation. They’re summer skills, she thought, and she laughed to herself, thinking how much easier everything would have been if it had been summer, and then she laughed at how ridiculous that thought was. It was pretty funny, for sure, to wish you had been chased by a gun-wielding woman and then gotten stuck out in the forest in the summer instead of in the winter.
Summer skills, she thought — all that moving around freely without thinking twice about it. The ground was a friend, the sun was a friend. She thought with sudden intensity about how long the sun was out during the summer. It felt like winter hated the sun, only tolerating it for little bits of time. Winter hated the ground, too; everything took five times as long to do as it did in the summer. Her shoulders and arms were burning from hanging on to the sled and she was starving.
She looked one way down the trail, then the other. They had come gently downhill and were at the bottom of what looked like a shallow depression. Up the trail, the land rose just as gently and disappeared into night and trees.
She decided to set up
the tent right there on the edge of the trail, close enough that if a snowmobile did happen to come by, it would see them, but not so close that it would run them over. She shoved the faint hope of rescue aside.
Before setting up the tent, though, she had to feed the dogs. She grabbed a container of food. It was slightly thawed from the higher temperature the rain had brought, though mostly still frozen. This time, she didn’t try to warm the food, but just threw some at each dog. There were no complaints. The dogs pounced and grabbed, then settled down to ripping and tearing the pieces of food.
After she’d made sure there wouldn’t be any fighting between Bogey and Rudy, the two males — although if anything did happen, she knew Nook would sort it out — she hauled out the tent.
Ten pounds of poles, fabric, and bungee cords. After tamping down the snow to make a flatter, drier surface, she set out the thick waterproof pad that the tent sat on, protected from the snow. Then she pulled out the tent itself — by then she could no longer see it in the darkness, so she had to stop and dig through the supply bag to get the tiny lantern that could throw some light on the area where she was working.
Throughout this, Peter sat on his haunches, trying to start a fire. The smoke sometimes drifted over to her, but more often it just hunkered in place under the control of the rain until the entire area stank.
Hannah rubbed her eyes to try to get the smoke’s sting out of them and unrolled the tent and laid out the poles. The tent sat on the pad, and she slid the supple bungee-corded poles through the two long loops on the tent, secured them into eyehooks on one side, then went over to the other side and pulled the tent up to secure the other two hooks. She threw the fly over that. Its thicker material slid easily over the already wet poles. She secured the fly to the tent bottom.
Thankfully, the tent had a large vestibule, like a tiny room before the zippered inner door. This meant they could keep all the gear in one place and nearby if they needed it in the night. It was truly dark now, the clouds still low and threatening. The rain was letting up, at least, but the temperature was dropping very quickly. From where she was stationed at the tree, Sencha whined softly.
Hannah dragged out her sleeping bag and threw it into the tent. Peter, now nursing a small smoking fire that was really more like a badly lit candle, dragged his sleeping bag over and tossed it into the tent, too.
“There’s a stove,” said Hannah. “It’s in the black bag. There’s food in there, too.”
Peter walked to the sled and, keeping as far away from the dogs as possible, leaned in to look through the bags. He took out the bag that held the stove and fuel and food.
“I don’t see the stove.”
“That’s it, in your hand,” she replied.
Peter opened the small black bag in his hands and tipped the contents out over the snow. “Be careful!” Hannah snapped. “It’s not a toy.”
“How is this a stove?” he asked.
Hannah looked at him. She had assumed he would know what to do with it. But she remembered now that when her family and Peter’s had gone camping together when they were both younger, Peter’s father had always cooked on a fire and laughed at her dad, who used a camp stove.
“There’s some energy bars in the other bag,” she said. “Get those instead.”
Peter shoved the stove and all its elements back into the bag before standing up. “Where’s the water?” he asked, and she gritted her teeth at how, again, he said it as though he didn’t expect she would have an answer.
“There’s a bottle with the bars and one on the sled.”
She turned back to the sled, grabbed the tarp, and unhooked it from the sides. Then she placed it, wet side down, over the snow in the vestibule of the tent. With Peter’s help, she dragged the two bags off the sled and into the vestibule. She packed them against the side of the fly to stop the wind, then she untied Sencha and led her into the vestibule. Peter, already inside the tent, stopped unrolling his sleeping bag.
“What are you doing?”
“She has to stay in here or she’ll freeze,” said Hannah.
“She can’t come into the tent.” He was unwrapping one of the energy bars and the idea of food caused Hannah’s stomach to clench, hard, into her spine almost. She closed her hands into fists until the spasm passed. She hadn’t brought any extra blankets, and she’d also forgotten a headlamp. There was a flashlight in the emergency kit, but it was impossible to hold things and do things at the same time.
How would she keep Sencha warm? She groped through the darkness to find her clothing bag, thinking to wrap the Dalmatian in more of her clothes, but then she had an idea: she unzipped the bag and turned it sideways so that Sencha could burrow into it just like she did in Hannah’s parents’ big bed at home. She coaxed Sencha into the bag of clothes and laid the big woollen sweater over her. It was wet, but not all the way through, and still, it was warm.
Hannah was too tired to eat. She could barely keep her eyes open. The last thing she remembered was struggling to get out of her boots and into her sleeping bag, scrunching her hat down over her head so that it covered her ears, and noticing that there was no difference between the darkness inside her sleeping bag and the darkness of the night.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hannah dreamt she was running, running like the sled dogs, long and easy and full of light, effortless wind. They ran across the greenness of a meadow, and each smell was a tug on her senses: the sharp tang of grass and pine needles, the small, anxious mice and moles hidden at her feet. Then it changed, and the ground became uneven under her feet; instead of springy turf, there were rocks, and she realized she was barefoot, running through raspberry bushes in shorts, and the sharp, spiny bushes scratched and poked her legs until they felt like they were on fire.
She awoke with her legs in agony. Peter was shaking her shoulder.
“Hannah, Hannah. Are you okay?”
“My legs,” she gasped, and moaned again, drawing her legs up to her torso and wrapping her arms around them. The grey light of day filtered through the tent. The bush was silent — so silent, Hannah thought through the pain, that it must be snowing again.
Peter looked around the tent and grabbed the water bottle Hannah had put near her head. He shook it, and the water inside sloshed only a little.
“It’s full,” he said.
“So?” she groaned.
“You need to drink water, Hannah,” he replied, uncapping the bottle. “I didn’t see you drink anything yesterday. Here.”
She took the bottle, put it to her lips, and drank. Immediately, her belly started to rebel; she barely held back from barfing up all the water onto Peter’s blue wool pants. She waited for the nausea to pass, then drank a bit more. Her stomach was on fire as well as her legs, and her headache had come back sometime in the night. She lay in her sleeping bag, exhausted, floating in and out, with Peter haranguing her to drink until she fell asleep again with a belly more or less full of water.
“Cidiot,” she heard him mutter as she drifted off.
When she awoke, the first thing she saw was Sencha’s anxious face. The flap of the vestibule was pulled back, and looking past the Dalmatian’s brown and white face, Hannah could see it was snowing. Her cheeks were cold and her whole body ached, but her mind was a little clearer. She was loath to move, as her thick winter sleeping bag filled with goose down had a hood that flipped over her head. That was good, because sometime during the night her toque had slipped off.
Seeing Hannah’s eyes open, Sencha begin to whine. Hannah heard crunching sounds, then Peter’s body blocked the vestibule opening as he crouched down.
“What time is it?” he asked. No good morning or greeting of any kind. He had his hood pulled up over his toque, and there was a layer of snow on it. One side of his glasses was fogged.
Hannah dragged her hand out of its nice warm spot by her belly and looked at her watch. Her heart jumped.
“Eleven o’clock.”
“Are you up yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s go.”
He stood and crunched back out of sight. Hannah struggled with the zipper of her sleeping bag, then wormed her way out. She tugged on her boots and jacket, shivering in the steep temperature difference. Sencha pushed past her and burrowed right into the vacant sleeping bag. Hannah reached over and touched the dog’s nose. It was cold, which was good; it meant Sencha did not have a fever. Still, the Dal was taking any opportunity she could to be warm, so before leaving the tent, Hannah pulled the top of the sleeping bag over Sencha so that only her brown nose poked out.
Peter was in the same position he’d been in last night while she was erecting the tent, but now he squatted before a small, cheerful fire. On one side of the fire was one of the brand-new cooking pots from the supply packsack. The orange enamel was already soot-blackened, and there was something bubbling in it. Hannah’s stomach lurched. She was still exhausted and working through her dehydration, so she couldn’t tell whether the stomach lurch was good or bad. On the other side of the fire was a pot full of snow he was melting to make water.
The dogs were miserable. Although Bogey’s tail wagged, he did not get up from his spot, where he was curled up under the brushbow of the sled with his butt almost touching Rudy’s. There was a dusting of snow on all the dogs, and when Nook lifted her head in Hannah’s direction, small shards of ice came off her ruff and landed at her feet. Still, her eyes and face were calm.
“Did you feed them?” she asked Peter.
“No.” He was stirring the stew pot. He had pulled the supply bag right out of the vestibule and dragged it close to him — and farther from the dogs, she guessed. It was still open and snow was drifting into it, but she was too tired to say anything.
She considered feeding the dogs — the day before had been long and rough — but then she thought about Bogey’s unfortunate start yesterday and decided she’d give them two meals at the end of the day, wherever they ended up.