Snowhook

by Jo Storm

  “Hello, Earth to Hannah? Here,” said Peter. He was holding out a spoon. In his other gloved hand, he held the steaming pot.

  She realized she’d been standing there staring at him like an idiot while she was thinking about the dogs. She grabbed the spoon and they both squatted back down. Peter placed the pot in the snow and stirred, and they watched it melt a hole in the packed-down snow until it was half-buried. The cold from the snow quickly cooled the contents of the pot, and they ate right out of it, spooning the brown liquid — stew, Hannah guessed — into their mouths, dribbling juice down their chins. Peter used the back of his sleeve to wipe away his dribbles.

  “What time is it?” he asked her again.

  She was already tired of looking at her watch every time he asked, but some part of her did want things to be part of a routine or a schedule, like back home; maybe he felt that way, too. In the city, clocks were an essential part of life. Get up at 6:00, ballet until 7:30, change for school, breakfast, class at 8:30. She liked the orderliness of it, how she could go from day to day in a groove like a sled track on a crisp day. Just like her running dream before it went bad. That was what she liked: the freedom of routine. It allowed her to do different things in her head, like work out the hard math problems, or wonder whether Billy had been talking about her — and if he had, what he’d said — or worry what the more popular girls’ clique was saying about her. But the bush was not like that. She had slept until 11:00 and the day didn’t care; it just went on.

  She had to get that sense of order going again. “Time to figure out what we’re going to do,” she said. She dropped her spoon into the stew pot and walked back to the tent to get her water bottle. She would start by remembering to stay hydrated. Her legs felt as weak as runny eggs, and her head was like a mouse nest, inside and out — her hair was plastered to one side of her face and her thoughts were sluggish.

  She came back and crouched near Peter. She stared at the fire as Peter fed the water pot with more snow.

  “How far is it to Timmins?”

  “Too far, Hannah.”

  “Well, how far is that?”

  Peter shrugged. “Why don’t we go back to your place?” he asked.

  “There’s no power at our place.”

  “We could use your car. How sick is your mom? I can drive.”

  “There’s no way. It’s buried under the snow, and the road isn’t even plowed. Haven’t you been listening to the radio?”

  “No,” he said. In his tone, and the way his face pulled down, he made it seem like people who listened to the radio were somehow inferior. “Dad’ll call when he gets back, though.”

  “How come you guys have power?” asked Hannah.

  “We have the generator,” said Peter. That must have been the source of the humming she had heard when she approached the cabin.

  “This is so stupid,” she said.

  “If you hadn’t brought those goddamn dogs, if you hadn’t yelled and banged on the door, then everything would have been okay,” said Peter. “That’s what does it — when things surprise her or mess up her routine. She was already stressed out by the storm.”

  Hannah thought about it. Whenever her dad wanted to see Jeb, he phoned ahead, and it was almost always when Scott was present. She hadn’t really noticed before — although she was piecing it together now — how careful everyone was about what they spoke about and how they said things in front of Jeb. The only time Hannah’s mom had gone over, she and Jeb had argued over putting a penny in the vase of tulips she’d brought (supposedly to protect the flowers from bacteria). Jeb had suddenly started to shout, and surprisingly, Hannah’s mom had quickly acquiesced. With anyone but her husband, when the shouting began, her mom was just getting started.

  They sat and watched the water in the pot begin to bubble. Peter took it off the fire and placed it in the snow.

  “We could go to Jonny Swede’s,” he said. “He’s nearby.”

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. He looked around and squinted up the trail. “We’re about halfway, I guess.”

  “So a full day on the sled?”

  “Maybe less. I don’t know. I’m not a dogsled expert like you are. Most people go on snowmobiles.”

  “How far is Timmins from his place?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again, “I’ve never gone to Timmins from his place. Maybe an hour?”

  “By car?”

  “Yeah,” he said, in a tone that said obviously, idiot. “We won’t need to go to Timmins, Hannah,” he added.

  “Peter, I need to get insulin for my mom!” Hannah was rapidly calculating in her head. Most of the driving out here was on back roads or secondary highways. An hour by car was probably about nine hours by dogsled. That was two more nights.

  “Maybe Jonny Swede has some,” said Peter.

  “Insulin? Only diabetics use insulin.” She tried to use her own obviously, idiot tone.

  Peter shrugged and Hannah glared at him, raging at his careless nonchalance. He didn’t even seem to care how sick her mom could get without insulin.

  “Does he have a satellite phone?” she asked.

  Peter laughed. “He doesn’t even have a fridge. He keeps all his stuff in a cold cellar. He dragged this old bus up there to make an outhouse, too. This great big long yellow bus with a shitter in the driver’s seat.”

  “Wow. Gross.”

  Peter shrugged again. Sometimes it felt like he wrapped himself around this northern place like a blanket, protecting it. Even if he thought it was gross that Jonny Swede didn’t have a fridge and used a bus for a toilet, he would never say.

  “Then why would we go there?”

  “He has a snowmobile. He knows my dad.”

  “Your dad is in Quebec.”

  “He’ll come back when they figure out what’s happening here. Plus Jeb probably called in to her case worker.”

  “Case worker?”

  “Yeah, the guy from the Forces who talks to her when she’s like this. She always thinks he’s her superior officer when she’s gone like that,” he said, putting a finger to his temple. He poured some of the boiled water into the stew pot, swirled it around, then dumped it out on the trail.

  “Who cares who Jeb calls?” said Hannah, annoyed at Peter for making it all about him. As usual.

  “Well, if she calls her case worker, he usually calls my other aunt in Temagami, and then she’ll come out herself or get in touch with townspeople here and have one of them come out to check on Jeb. Friends of my dad, sometimes. Sometimes a guy from the Legion.”

  “No one can get to her. The roads are all closed.” Peter scowled at her. “You go to Jonny Swede’s, then,” she continued. “I’m going to Timmins.” She looked over at Sencha, who had emerged from the tent and was stretching.

  “Well, you can’t use the snowmobile, ’cause I am. I’m taking Jonny back to Jeb’s. He knows how to take care of her.”

  “But I need to get to Timmins. We can stop by Jeb’s on the way back, after my place.”

  “We’ll see what Jonny says,” said Peter.

  “Okay.”

  Peter nodded as though he had expected her to agree — or he didn’t care. He covered the fire, put the camping things back into the packsack, and placed it in the sled basket while Hannah broke the tent down. They both folded up the ground sheet that the tent had sat on.

  “Do they call him Jonny Swede because he’s Swedish?” she asked, packing the ground sheet in the supply bag while Peter poured water from the pot into both of their water bottles.

  “No, because he’s from Norway,” said Peter, rolling his eyes. He handed her a full bottle. “Here. Drink.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After they’d each finished their bottle of water, Peter refilled them again. He packed away the cooking things while Hannah looked over the dogs and hooked up Sencha’s harness.

  The sky hovered over the tops of the trees like it was somehow closer than usu
al, and that feeling was made even worse by the snow that fell and fell and fell. Hannah made an effort to take her mind off the falling snow, lest its constant downward motion creep into her brain, bringing her down, too. Instead, she tried to see it as a good thing: without the snow, the day would have been very dark.

  The dogs were a mess. She let Bogey off the gangline to relieve himself. He immediately raced to a nearby tree and watered it for a long time, then busied himself sniffing out the best toilet. Both Nook and Rudy had been trained to relieve themselves while still on the gangline; if they were running, they simply pooped as they ran, and they’d wait for a stop to move off the trail as much as the gangline would allow before urinating where they stood.

  But the house dogs were not like that. Bogey, especially, was very picky about his toilet business. No one could watch, and he couldn’t do it near anyone else, either. But she could let Bogey off without having to worry about him running away — something she couldn’t do with the sled dogs. They had never learned sit, heel, or come, because they had never needed to. Just like Sencha had never had to learn gee and haw, the right and left of dogsledding.

  Hannah picked up Rudy’s paw to inspect the tear that she and her father had looked at earlier. It seemed like a year ago that the two of them had crouched, bellies full of lunch, to inspect the doghouses. Rudy’s feet were thickly furred; she combed through the fur to see that the cut was still sealed and his feet looked okay. His toenails were shortened from scratching the packed-down area around his kennel; this helped on the trail, as the short nails did not push up against his toes and cause sores to develop.

  Hannah snuck a few looks at Peter as she moved on to Nook. He had removed his coat so as to better move his arms. She could make out muscles even through his thick wool sweater, and his torso was wide and thick, but stocky. He was wearing a utility sweater, like hers, but his had a layer of smooth material sewn onto the tops of the shoulders to prevent the wool there from wearing off too quickly.

  He was wrapping up everything in quick, economical motions — the pots inside each other, the utensils in the pots, then the pots in a bag tied up neatly. He was doing a good job, but she didn’t want to say as much in case he took it the wrong way, like she was confirming that she wasn’t as experienced as he was. It was nice to have someone along who had camped before and who knew all kinds of little things from years of experience: where to set up a fire, how to pack for hiking, which socks to wear. She did feel cold and miserable and was barely able to stand, but it could have been much, much worse. If Peter hadn’t been there to bully her into drinking water, she didn’t know how long it would have taken for her to remember herself.

  She went back to attending to the dogs. Nook’s feet were clean and problem-free, too, but she did have a heat sore under her left front leg from where her harness swept down her chest and up her back. The area was rubbed raw because, Hannah realized, she had put the wrong harness on Nook. The two sled dogs’ harnesses were the same colour, but each was tailored to the individual dog. On the chest piece of Rudy’s was the letter R then ND in marker, faded but still legible. The R was for Rudy, and the ND meant that he was one of Nook’s puppies.

  “Hey, Peter, I need to change their harnesses,” she said. “Can you hold Nook while I get Rudy?”

  Peter was zipping up the supply bag and putting it in the basket. “No.”

  “They’re not going to do anything to you.”

  “No,” he said again. “I’ll take down the tent.”

  “Don’t be such a wuss, Peter.”

  He ignored her, going to the tent and pulling the vestibule back. He righted her bag of clothing and roughly stuffed anything that had spilled out of it back in. She had wanted to change her clothes, but he was packing up already and she had her hands full of dogs, so she let it go and promised herself she’d change when they stopped next. Hopefully, it would be somewhere warmer.

  Hannah got some salve and the tie-out line out from the black pack and rubbed it on Nook’s heat sore. Then, with the tie-out line, she staked Nook to a tree and removed the harness. Nook shook herself and sat, looking up the trail.

  Hannah did the same with Rudy, untying him from the gangline and tying him off to a tree to remove his harness and check for sores. Finally, she switched harnesses so that each dog was wearing the right one. As she worked, Sencha and Bogey watched curiously. Hannah thought about the four of them. Sencha had incredible stamina; they had gotten her from a farm that specialized in making old-fashioned carriages, and all the Dalmatians on the farm ran with horses in parades or in competitions. Bogey’s thick body was very powerful — he had once dragged a small tree trunk to Kelli when she couldn’t find a suitable stick to throw. But all their lives, the house dogs had depended on the Williamses as their source for everything: food, fun, and rules.

  Nook looked at her in a different way than Sencha and Bogey, even than Rudy. Sencha was like Kelli in some ways — a pest and a nuisance, but someone who made life a bit more interesting when she was around. Bogey was omnipresent, trying to be everyone’s best friend. Nook, meanwhile, did not want to be her friend at all. But Nook did want to work, and if they could work together — if Nook could run — then she would do it, and they would get along. It was a pact one made with Nook, one whose weight Hannah could feel. Rudy was similar, but for him, everything went through Nook. He looked at Nook before lifting a paw for Hannah’s inspection or before eating. Whatever Nook did, Rudy would do, too, because Nook usually got to run, and that was what Rudy lived for.

  With the two sled dogs sorted out and back on the gangline, Hannah turned her attention to the house dogs. Bogey had finished his ablutions, so Hannah started checking him over. As she did so, she thought about her plan of action.

  Her ballet teacher was always telling her that she could jump higher if she wanted to. When Hannah disagreed, her teacher said, “That’s because you aren’t practising it in your head. If you see yourself jumping higher in your head, you’ll jump higher here” — and the teacher tapped Hannah’s legs.

  So that was what she would do. She visualized getting to Jonny Swede’s house and his snowmobile and his car, and she visualized him taking her to Timmins. She was visualizing so astutely that only Bogey licking her hand reminded her of where she was.

  “Healthy as a horse,” she said, slapping his furry flanks. Bogey wagged his tail and licked her hands and tried to get at her face while she hooked him back to the line.

  Sencha also came more willingly than usual. As Hannah put the harness on, she ran her hands over the Dal’s flanks. Her belly was raw in some areas, so salve went onto those spots. More troubling was that her nose was dry and warm.

  Hannah paused and looked over to where Peter was packing the tent down. He had collapsed it, but the tent poles were giving him some trouble. “Need help?” she asked.

  “I got it,” he snapped.

  “Hey, how much do you weigh?”

  He stopped wrestling the poles and looked up. “What?”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “Why?”

  She waved at the sled. “They can only pull so much weight.”

  “Hundred and forty,” he said.

  “Pounds?”

  “No, feathers. Of course pounds, doofus.”

  She glared at him across their impromptu campsite. “What are you, five years old? No one says doofus.”

  “Oh, sorry. Witch,” said Peter, and he picked up the poles again.

  Hannah looked at the snow on the ground. She fought the urge to start yelling again. Peter was very good at needling her. The snow whispered around her as it fell. The world seemed very small, and that smallness made her feel helpless.

  He’s just as scared as I am, she thought. She dropped the line in her hand and went over to him. “They have bungee cords in them,” she said. “Like this.” She took a pole from his hand and pulled it out so that the bungee cord was stretched, then she folded it neatly in half, and then again
.

  “I’ve never seen poles like that before,” he said.

  “Yeah, my dad lives at the sports store when they have sales.”

  “How does it hold the weight? Like a pulley, right?”

  This time it was Hannah’s turn to shrug. She was more worried about the dogs. “So that’s almost three hundred pounds, then. Three hundred pounds that they have to drag,” she said.

  He watched her as she continued folding the tent pole. “That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can they do it?”

  “Yeah, but it’ll be tough. Nook and Rudy are okay, but Bogey and Sencha, they don’t really do this much —”

  “Work?” said Peter. He laughed. “City dogs.”

  She bent and thrust the neatly folded pole into the tent bag. “Why are you such a jerk about the city? Have you even been to one?”

  Peter ducked his head and grabbed another pole. “I’m never going to the city. Too many people, too many cars. Too many immigrants. Not like you,” he added, flicking his eyes at her, “but like real immigrants who can’t speak English and don’t get jobs.”

  “That’s racist!” said Hannah. She had never said the word out loud before, even though they had studied the subject in social sciences at school, and it sounded like it didn’t really belong where they were. It was a word that didn’t feel relevant to the snow on the maple boughs and the small depression where their fire had been. But at the same time, it felt true.

  Peter was stuffing his pole into the bag. “I said not like you. Your mom is fine. Kelli’s weird, though.”

  Hannah launched herself at him. His bent-over head and rounded shoulders received the brunt of her shove, and he landed with a whomp in the soft snow of the trailside. He had been standing in front of a small gully; now he slid back until he was several feet from the trail.

  “She’s not weird, she’s nine!” Hannah stood over him, clenching her fists and her teeth.

  “Jesus, Hannah!” Peter looked up at her and put his hands to his face. “I’d better not lose these glasses, or you’re dead.”