Snowhook

by Jo Storm

  She pointed at him. “You’re an immigrant. Everyone is an immigrant.”

  “I’ve been here longer than you!” He struggled to get up, but without snowshoes, his feet sank into the soft snow almost to his waist.

  “My dad doesn’t even like your dad,” said Hannah. “He just hangs out with him because he feels sorry for him.”

  Peter had forded his way back to the trail, and he stood with his hands on his knees, catching his breath. He muttered something low that sounded like, “My dad’s an asshole.”

  “What?” asked Hannah, shocked.

  “Nothing,” said Peter. “I’m sorry I said you were immigrants.”

  “We are immigrants.”

  “Well, whatever, I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s just go,” said Hannah.

  “Fine.”

  “And stay away from my dogs!” she spat out as she headed back to the line. The sled dogs were lying down snoozing, as though it were an everyday thing to have fights in the middle of the woods in the winter.

  Hannah gathered up Sencha and put her harness and collar on, but only attached the tugline. She decided not to use the neckline — the short line that attached the collar to the gangline. That way, Sencha could roam a bit and get used to the team dynamics, instead of being yanked back in line every time she strayed an inch. The bigger dogs could take the rougher handling, but the Dal, though built for stamina, was not built for cold. Hannah would hook up her neckline again after a while.

  With all the bags back in the sled and Peter in the basket, they started out. This start was smoother than her first and less panicked than the flight from Jeb’s, but still, it was awkward, with half the team pulling and the other half learning. The new snow was deep enough that the sled runners moved almost silently over it, though not so deep as to make it hard for the dogs to reach the ice pack underneath.

  Eventually, the running smoothed out and slowed down. During their wild flight the day before, Hannah had stood, crouched tensely on the runners, the whole time — but that was hard on the dogs. Now, she poled, periodically lowering her foot into the snowpack the dogs churned up and pushing, thereby taking her weight off the sled for a moment. This was especially helpful going up hills, while on the downhills, she placed her foot lightly on the wide rubber mat that sat below the sharply pointed brake, using the drag mat to keep the sled at a steady pace, preventing it from speeding up and banging into the backs of Rudy’s and Bogey’s legs.

  The weather and the landscape were grey, and Hannah’s thoughts were just like her legs: heavy and irritated. It was cold, but only in the way that cold had become her new constant. Her thick gloves had dried out near the fire that morning, and so had her toque. The hot meal had pushed warmth back into her bones, and poling with her feet every few steps got her warm in a hurry.

  The sled rode over the snowpack with a steady shushing. The whole world was a dim white ribbon of trail faintly marked with old snowmobile tracks only visible in the dense coniferous forest. Then the sky lit up with sunlight, casting tall shadows across the lengths of the maples. This area of maple bush went on and on; she had never seen anything like it. At home, there were maple trees in the planters outside their school, and there were some carefully manicured maples in the park they went to occasionally, but they were nothing like this. Out here, she was the one who felt contained. The trees were just themselves, without any help or hindrance from her.

  Each year, the drive up to Timmins was the most boring part of their trip to the cabin, but now memories of it flitted through Hannah’s mind as she watched the trees, sentinels in the snow, sweeping by in slow succession. Past the last big town, the road stretched out ahead in a patchwork of sun-faded grey asphalt, a yellow line, and the green sea of tall grass on either side, where the trees were pushed back. But still they were there, the trees. For hundreds of kilometres, there were no towns unless you turned off the highway and drove down a smaller road, and those smaller towns lived among the trees, not separate from them. At one school they passed, the playground was merely some of the same forest with a fence around it.

  The green of the trees, which she dismissed so easily when she was riding in the car, came back to her now. After so many hours outside in the snow, she longed for colour. She thought of the waxy green of poplar leaves, the sharp blue-green of spruce trees free of snow cover, the tarnished, dusty green of jack pines that had turned partially red from car exhaust. After a while, even that red disappeared, as the cars travelling the highway became fewer and fewer, and the trees crept closer to the highway’s edge.

  The memories came and wormed their way in, not chastising or judging her, but rather, venturing in like a curious puppy. She hadn’t ever thought memories could be curious, but that was what it felt like — a handshake, or a dog’s tongue across the back of a hand. In her memory, summer felt like an impossible blessing.

  Out of the corner of her eye, a streak of white shot across the white expanse, under the maples. It was a startling motion, almost alien in the stillness of the winter. Hannah tracked the blur — it suddenly got wider as it made a large circle and started back toward them, with two long ears and black eyes: it was a huge rabbit.

  She saw it at the same time that Sencha did. Untethered by a neckline, Sencha bunched up into a brown and white piston and launched herself after the rabbit.

  The rabbit changed direction in a way that seemed to defy gravity, going pell-mell one way, suddenly leaping straight up and to its left a good ten feet, landing and reversing direction so quickly that Sencha’s straining neck and haunches were still pointed in the wrong direction even as her eyes tried to track it.

  It was now behind them, and Sencha was determined to follow it. She jackknifed the gangline, pulling the entire team in a sharp turn to the right as she reached the end of the tugline. The weight of three dogs all going one way against only her going the other way pulled her backward toward them like a slingshot, but she was up again in a second and hustling after the rabbit, which had bounded to the other side of the sled now in a wide arc and was hopping along leisurely parallel to the trail. The rabbit’s actions seemed weird to Hannah. It slowed down right in front of all those dogs?

  Sencha swivelled her head and caught sight of the rabbit on the other side. Once again she lunged after it, this time leaping right over the gangline and pulling the team to the left now. Hannah shouted, and Peter shouted, too, but the Dal ignored them. She wasn’t barking or making any other kind of noise, but her whole body said there is prey. Nothing in the universe was going to stop her instinct to get to that rabbit.

  The entire team was in chaos after that. Rudy and Bogey tried to continue running the trail for a few moments, but Sencha’s actions confused them and the yelling scared them. Eventually they just took the path of least resistance, which was to follow Sencha. Sencha, meanwhile, strained and headed down another of the hollows that littered the sides of the trail. This one was fairly steep. The windward side wasn’t as deeply snowed in, and the Dal tugged and pulled down it, with the rest of the dogs now haphazardly following, chest-deep in the drift and tugging against each other. The sled jerked sharply and tilted on the edge of the drop.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” shouted Hannah. She stepped on the brake and dug in its points, but the sled was rising out of the snow on one side, and the brake was useless. She grabbed the snowhook out of its holder, jumped off the sled, and wildly threw it into the snow behind her, hoping it would catch and dig in — but it didn’t. It landed on its side and dragged along, bumping over clumps of snow, and she had to leap out of its way as it sped toward her, points first, then disappeared over the lip of the depression.

  The sled tilted completely on its side and Peter leapt out, cursing. The bags bulged against their tie-downs and then slid out, not lashed tightly enough to the frame of the sled. The bags and Peter landed hard in the side of another depression, and the sled flipped over completely, landing so close to Bogey that it brushed his tail. The Lab
leapt sideways, straight into Rudy, then turned his head to snap at the husky for the unexpected contact. Rudy stumbled and then turned, his lips pulled back to expose long white teeth. He plowed straight into Bogey, going for his throat.

  Hannah had seen dogs fight before, but this time there were no adults around, no one else to pull them apart. She stood at the top of the hillock, paralyzed by the noise and by the fear that one of them was going to get seriously hurt down there, at the bottom of the bowl.

  Rudy was on top of Bogey for a long time, growling and screaming, tearing at Bogey’s face and ears, trying to roll him over. Bogey crouched, digging his paws into the ground and using his powerful legs to keep him upright, protecting his throat and trying to bite at whatever part of Rudy came near. In a flash, the two dogs sprang into the air and arced like fish jumping out of water, snow spraying up with them. And then Bogey was on top, his wide brown muzzle squared off and showing only teeth, the ridge of his back sticking straight up.

  Hannah didn’t think it was possible for her heart to beat even faster, but she was wrong. Fear came off her in waves. Through the din and the mess and the fear, she saw that Sencha and Nook, still attached to the gangline, were being tugged toward the two roiling dogs. Sencha’s back hair was also sticking straight up, and she struggled wildly to get away without success, sprawled halfway up the bowl and very close to Peter’s feet. Nook had dug her feet in, but she was still being pulled in as well, and as she got closer, her stance got lower and her lips, too, began to curl back in preparation for entering the fight.

  The snarling and barking was so loud that Hannah didn’t realize Peter was shouting until she glimpsed him on the other side of the dogs, trapped, with the fight between them. He was holding his hands up in an X against his chest and face and trying to back out of the bowl, but the sides were too steep. With each step back, he slid closer and closer to dozens of sharp teeth, and his shouts soon turned to screams.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hannah slid down the hill feet first. As she slipped, her hand closed on something hard, and she took it with her. She had seen her father break up dog fights before, and once, at a dogsled race, she had seen a whole team fighting another team. It had taken so many people to calm the dogs down that another fight broke out between teams that had been left unattended, and in the end one of the dogs died, getting the gangline wrapped around his neck and choking as he fought.

  It was hard to tell, but Hannah thought Rudy and Bogey were getting tired. At first the fight had been all noise and flashes of teeth and ugly stances of muscle, smashing into each other, but as she slid toward them, there was a tiny break in the battle, a growl-less moment before they threw themselves back at each other.

  Rudy had gained the upper hand again and was back to trying to roll Bogey, slamming into the Lab’s side and biting his shoulder. The teeth of both dogs were red with blood.

  Rudy stood atop Bogey and again there was a small, narrow silence for the exhausted heaving of flanks — and Hannah acted. She hefted the hard thing in her hand — the snowhook, she saw — and stumbled and fell toward the two dogs just as they began another round.

  “Get off, get off, that’s it!” she screamed, hitting Rudy’s flank with the flat back of the snowhook. The dogs ignored her, so she hooked the prongs of the snowhook under Rudy’s collar and heaved backward, pulling him sideways and off the Lab. Hannah saw Peter turn and, with the help of his hands, scramble up the side of the bowl and out of her view.

  In a split second, Bogey was up. His whole mouth dripped blood and phlegm and spit, and his ears were flat against his head, with the crest of his skull puffed up to twice its normal size. Hannah continued yelling and struggling with Rudy, who was rigid under her hands. She didn’t know what else to do – he was fighting so hard, and he wasn’t even acknowledging her, despite her shouts. Hannah had to get through to him somehow, so she punched him, punched him as hard as she could, in the neck and in the back, screaming, “That’s it, that’s it!” over and over. At the first punch, Rudy turned and started to snap — at the last second, Hannah saw his eyes register who she was. He turned back to his main antagonist, but she felt a little rigidity go out of him.

  Bogey turned his body so that it was parallel to Rudy. He was still growling and showing teeth, his posture imposing, all the hair on his body puffed up. However, Hannah knew that when a dog stood sideways, it was saying, I don’t want to fight anymore, and she realized in a split second that this was her moment to fix what was happening. Before she even completed the thought, she was standing between the two dogs, kicking backward into Bogey’s flanks while still facing Rudy.

  “That’s enough, that’s it!” she said. She grabbed Rudy’s muzzle, as she’d seen other mushers do. In her other hand, she held the snowhook over her head, in case he lunged at her. She had seen mushers who in moments like this beat their dogs, and as her fear began to seep away, Hannah lowered the hand that held the snowhook. She did not think that was the right way to do things.

  Her fear was seeping away, but in its place rose a terrible anger at what had happened, at how the dogs were not listening to her, Peter was not listening to her, no one listened to her.

  She leaned her face right into Rudy’s, pushing down with the hand that held his muzzle. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said. She held his muzzle down and pushed with everything she could. Her deadened legs screamed, but still she pushed, until the sled dog was pushed down onto his elbows, with her nearly on top of him. Behind her, she could hear Bogey moving, and she kicked out backward again, barking, “Go!” at the Lab over her shoulder. Then she returned her face to just above Rudy’s.

  “Never, never, never!” she snarled. Then she waited. She could feel the anger in both her and the dog, like they were having their own silent battle now. Whoever won would be the leader, and she knew that no matter what, it had to be her. Rudy had already been thrown off by Sencha, and Bogey, not Rudy, had started the fight in fear. But Hannah could not let fear run this team — not the kind of fear that paralyzed or the kind of fear that made them fight. She had to lead them.

  Slowly, deliberately, she drained the fear and the anger out of her body until it was gone. She had no idea how long it took, maybe a minute, maybe an hour, but each breath she took became slower. And as her breathing slowed, so did Rudy’s. The sled dog tried to take a few looks at Nook, but each time, Hannah pulled him back until he was looking only at her. His muzzle began to drop of its own accord, until in a rush, his body relaxed and she nearly pushed his muzzle through the snowpack, she was still pushing down so hard.

  When she took her hand away, her glove was smeared with blood from Rudy’s teeth.

  Hannah stood up. Behind her, Bogey shook himself, long and hard, then came toward her with his head down. He was panting and wagging his tail, and he shied his head away immediately when Rudy looked at him; he did not want another fight, it was clear. Hannah watched, but Rudy didn’t look at Nook again; he looked at her. She had won.

  She surveyed the scene of carnage. The silence of the forest was eerie after the explosion of noise from the dog fight. The drifting snow was already covering the trampled-down area. The two blood-covered dogs, Sencha, and Nook were all hopelessly tangled in their lines at the bottom of the depression. The overturned sled teetered on a jutting branch, and the whole area was strewn with bits and pieces of gear: the supply bag, Peter’s sleeping bag, the dog food, ropes. Sencha tried to get to a nearby food packet, but her tangled line prevented it, so she sat down instead to scratch her flank, exposing her pink, salve-covered tummy. Hannah saw Peter at the top of the bowl, standing behind a tree.

  “You okay?” she called.

  He didn’t answer, but he sat down in the snow, pulling his hood up so that it covered his eyes and leaning against the tree.

  All of this over a rabbit, thought Hannah. Although the truth was, all this had happened because she hadn’t been paying attention. No, it went even further back than that: it w
as because she hadn’t used Sencha’s neckline. A reckless gamble that they had all paid for. And why had Sencha bolted? Because Hannah hadn’t been paying attention, she had been thinking. She had blamed it on the dogs and on Peter and the weather and the trees, but she was the one who hadn’t been listening.

  Once, when she was about eight, she had been at a dog race when a certain sled caught her eye. All the dogs were quiet, pointed in the same direction, not wacky with joy or excitement. The sled was older, the square kind used for heavy loads or long overland trips. A squarish carabiner attached the gangline to two bridles; all the other sleds had only one bridle.

  This team was run by two sisters, twins so alike that people could only tell them apart by their different-coloured hats. Hannah drifted toward them, and their dogs watched with mild eyes.

  “Why do you have two bridles?” she asked.

  The sister in the green hat laughed, and the one in the red hat said, “Because you can’t afford to make a mistake in the winter.” Then she, too, laughed, and Hannah had wandered off, thinking they were very strange. Why would anyone laugh about making a mistake?

  Now she thought she knew why: the sisters had made mistakes but come through them; they were laughing as they thought back to how lucky they had been. Just like Hannah. There were precious few second chances in the winter, and Hannah had just gotten one.

  Thinking was for nighttime, she told herself. Think after dinner. Think when you first wake up; plan and think. But in the daylight, when the dogs were under her command, when the trail was the only thing between them and getting her mom help, there was no time for thinking. There was seeing and there was doing: seeing what was happening, and doing the next thing that needed doing. That was it. That was all.

  The next thing that needed doing was to get everything back together.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hannah scrambled across to Nook and checked her over. Besides the raw spot from wearing the wrong harness, she was fine. Sencha was also fine, twisting away from Hannah to continue rooting through the snow for the interesting scents she had caught.