by Jo Storm
It was a good fire. She had underestimated the importance of the light, for as she was getting changed, twilight had fallen around them in its quick wintry way. The heat drew her in. Is this what moths feel like? she wondered. The way she was feeling, she could have cheerfully jumped right into the fire. She settled for leaning in close, feeling the heat coating her face as she studied the stove by firelight.
The tines were bent, but otherwise the stove seemed okay. Peter had gotten another fuel canister out, so she carefully threaded it onto the stove, primed it, and started it up. Peter watched carefully. The stove sputtered from the air in the line, flickered, caught, then held steady. They grinned at each other over the blue, hissing flames.
“I’ll get another pot, you grab some dinner,” he said. Hannah went to the pack and got out two packages of spaghetti and meatballs. Her hand knocked into something square as she was searching the pack. It was the emergency radio.
She took the backcountry rations and the radio back to the fire and lifted the red plastic radio.
“We can hear the weather,” she said.
Peter took the grey food packets from her, grunting. “I have to get more wood before it gets too dark.” He opened both and dumped them into a big pot, set it on the camp stove, and adjusted the heat.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll watch dinner.”
He put his snowshoes on. In the middle of buckling them, he paused. “It was a hare, by the way,” he said.
Hannah looked up from stirring. “Huh?”
“You said it was a rabbit. That the dog was chasing. It wasn’t — it was a hare.”
“What’s the difference?”
He stood up, shucking snow off the shoes and putting his mitts back on. “Rabbits don’t change colour. And they don’t hang out in big open spaces like the sugar bush. They like scrub, small trees, and stuff where they blend in.”
“It did look kind of big for a rabbit,” she said. She remembered how huge a leap it had taken and the sheer impossibility of it leaping sideways ten feet, then turning on a dime.
“So, they’re not the same species?” she asked.
“Not really. Lots of people get them mixed up,” he added. He had picked up a short piece of rope and was slinging it around his body to help hold firewood. “Rabbits, they have lots of babies, more than once. Hares have fewer, and they nurse them, too. Rabbits kick out the kits once they’ve weaned.”
Hannah was feeling light-headed; she didn’t know if it was the tiredness, or the smell of warming spaghetti, but laughter was bubbling up in her chest. “Well, I guess that answers one question.”
He looked at her. “Eh?”
“Why there’s no expression about breeding like hares.”
Peter rolled his eyes, but in a teasing way. “Duhhh.”
She stuck the spoon in her mouth. “Hurry up or I’ll eat everything.”
Peter adjusted his glasses and started off. “You’d better not.”
After he’d moved out of the circle of light and slowly disappeared into the gloom, Hannah turned her attention to the radio. It had a solar panel and also a battery. Since it had been sitting in the dark pack for two days, she would need the battery. She popped the back open, connected the leads to the nine-volt battery cell, and turned the radio on.
The radio, though small, had many functions. Besides the solar panel on top, it had a flashlight on the side and a small speaker on the bottom. It even had a hand crank in case the battery died and there was no sunlight.
There were three settings: AM, FM, and WB. It was already set to WB, the weather band. There were no stations on the weather band, just a constant repetition of the weather in English and then in French for the entire region, from North Bay to Kapuskasing. She turned up the volume until she could clearly hear the forecast. It was odd to hear another human being, even one who sounded slightly robotic, like the broadcast was snippets of different people talking cut together, instead of a live person.
“Today, for Timmins and surrounding area, snow and ice pellets. High minus one, low minus fourteen, with one hundred percent chance of precipitation. Fifteen to twenty centimetres of snow. Visibility zero. Overnight, temperature dropping to minus twenty degrees. For tomorrow, clear in the morning —”
She switched from the weather band to FM and pushed the tuner buttons, trying to find a station.
“So let’s make sure we’ve got what we need with the cold snap moving in. Bundle up, people, I know there’s lots of you without power or a generator. Get to a neighbour or, if you’re okay, go check on your neighbour, all right? They’ve got help on the way, but still, it’s no time to be alone. Remember, the community centre is open, and so is the gym at —”
She switched off the radio and put it back in the bag, carefully wiping off the snow before she did so. She went back to the fire to stir the spaghetti and her stomach growled. The snow in the pot on the edge of the fire had melted, and she added more to fill it up again. It took a lot of snow to fill the pot with water.
So, the cold was coming and the power was still out. She knew they had been lucky so far, even with the heavy snow.
The other emergency radio was at the cabin, maybe being hand-cranked by her mom right now. Hannah tried not to let her gnawing worries get the better of her. She hoped that her mom was not too worried, that she would understand that Hannah was going for help, so she could stop rationing. She imagined her mom and Kelli going through the daily chores, getting the wood and making the food, doing the shovelling and tidying up. She tried hard to imagine her mom injecting her insulin before dinner, as she usually did. If it can work with ballet, maybe it can work with other things, too.
From her spot near the tent, Nook raised her head and looked off into the darkness. Hannah turned to see Peter coming out from the dark with his arms wrapped around a big bundle of wood. He laid the wood beside the fire, careful not to get snow on it, and put a few more sticks on the flames before taking his snowshoes off.
She wrinkled her nose. “Man, those snowshoes stink.”
“Yeah, I guess we didn’t clean the fuel off them very well.” He looked at the webbing of each one, pulling the sinew and gut, and checking the bindings. “The snow will clean the rest off.”
She turned off the stove and placed the pot in the snow, and they squatted as they had that morning, stirring the pot to cool its contents and leaning toward the fire for warmth.
Peter removed his gloves and held his hands to the fire for a bit. He studied his pile of branches and selected a smooth one, then broke it into smaller pieces on his knee. Moving between the fire and the rock, he propped his gloves up carefully by the fire, using the sticks to keep them upright. Just as when he’d been packing up, his movements were economical, but she sensed that he was working out the problem as he went: which stick to use, where to place the gloves so they would dry the best.
When the gloves were arranged to his satisfaction, he sat back on his heels and picked up two more short pieces of branch.
“Want me to do yours, too?”
Hannah took her gloves off and handed them over. He looked at the torn palm on the one before propping them up.
“Is there a sewing kit?” he asked.
“Yeah, in the supply pack.”
“You should fix that glove.”
She looked back at the pot and shrugged. “I have another pair.”
“Those ones are fine, they just need to be stitched up. They’re good gloves,” he said.
It sounds like he’d like to have them, Hannah thought, and she looked at his mitts drying by the fire. They were thick wool, the kind where the tops flipped back to reveal finger gloves. The leather palms were scarred in some places.
“I don’t know how.” She tasted a spoonful of food. “It’s ready, anyhow.”
“I can fix it,” he said, coming around to the pot. She handed him a spoon and they began to eat.
“You kinda remind me of my sister,” Hannah said, her mouth full. Th
e spaghetti was still too hot, but they ate it anyway, shovelling it in and then huffing through their open mouths, trying to cool it down. She burned her tongue and the back of her throat, but she didn’t care. It was warm, and it was food. In fact, it was all she could do not to snatch the pot away and eat it all. And judging by the way Peter was spooning up gobs, red sauce dripping off his chin, he felt the same way.
He sat up taller, holding his spoon upright. “Huh?”
“She would have known that stuff about hares and rabbits,” she said.
“Yeah, but she learned it from a book.”
“So?”
“So, it’s different.”
“Oh, your way is better?” she said bitterly. Same old Peter.
“No, just …” He stopped and made a circular motion with his spoon. Then he took another mouthful.
They ate in silence for a while. The snow began to taper off. The dogs, just within the light of the fire, moved now and then to reposition themselves, but no more than a few inches. Bogey was the closest, and Hannah saw his head slipping off his paws. He began to snore.
“What did the radio say?” asked Peter, spaghetti showing between his teeth as he talked with his mouth full. He wiped his chin with his parka sleeve.
“More snow tonight,” she said. Her mouth was full, too. It was funny how talking with their mouths full wasn’t a big deal to them, no more than their tacit agreement to wait when one of them stopped and turned off the trail a little to pee. It made things very simple, and Hannah found that despite the cold and the nausea and the pangs of anxiety about her mom, she was relaxing into this routine and familiarity.
“After the snow, it’s going to get cold,” she continued.
“How cold?”
She dragged her spoon around the mostly empty pot, scraping up the last bits. She felt like she could eat for weeks, but there were only five packets of food left. She carefully licked the spoon clean.
“Cold,” she said.
“My sleeping bag is really warm. I’m not worried. It can get to minus thirty and I’ll be okay.”
“It’s not us I’m worried about.”
“The sled dogs will be fine,” said Peter. “That’s why dogs have fur. You worry too much.”
“Bogey and Sencha don’t live outside.”
Peter looked at the dogs, three snow-covered lumps near the sled. “Where’s the other one?”
“She’s in the tent. Exactly where she was last night.” He looked back at her, quick and angry. “Do you want her to freeze?” Hannah snapped.
“She’s a dog,” he insisted. “They stay warm.”
“She has to sleep inside or she’ll die, Peter.”
He grunted and went to check on their drying gloves. There was nothing she could do about his fear of dogs, but she had to make sure the dogs were properly taken care of without putting too much pressure on him.
Hannah scoured the spaghetti pot with snow and refilled their water bottles from the other. Then she dragged out the emergency kit. The contents had gotten jumbled up from being thrown off the sled, carried through the blaze trail, sat on, and rummaged through. If she’d had any strength at all, she would have gone through it to check that everything was intact, but the warmth of the fire and the spaghetti had turned her will to mush. She just wanted to sit in front of the fire and watch the light, so bright and compelling after two days of greyness and dark.
She located the sewing kit next to a small silver bundle tied with elastics. Emergency blankets. She mentally slapped herself on the forehead. She took out two of the four blankets, along with the sewing kit, and went back to the fire. “Look what I found!”
Peter was putting more wood across the centre of the fire, making the flames leap and sparks fly up to fight the thinning snow momentarily before winking out. He didn’t have his glasses on, and when he looked up, squinting to see her, she saw dark circles beneath his eyes. She handed him the sewing kit and one of the folded-up blankets. It was very small, as small as her cellphone, but once unfolded it was big enough to wrap right around a person, covering them from head to toe. The thin plastic layer didn’t look like much, but Hannah had used these before in ice fishing huts, and she knew that they worked almost as well as sitting near a fire because they were airtight and waterproof and reflected back almost all of your body heat, trapping it inside the blanket and keeping you warm.
“Nice!” said Peter. They unwrapped the blankets, tossing the wrappers into the fire.
Hannah watched as Peter awkwardly threaded a needle, his blunt fingers too cold to be dexterous. Then he took her ripped glove off its warming pedestal and began to sew neat stitches along the tear.
“You’re left-handed.”
“Yeah,” he said, not looking up. “Sucks.”
“I am, too,” she said. It was the first thing they had in common since both being afraid of Jeb. The leadership teacher at Hannah’s school, Mrs. Dowling, had said that the more people had in common with you, the easier it was to lead them. “It doesn’t suck. It means we’re smart.”
“Maybe. But it makes everything hard. Like this,” he said, holding up the glove.
“Why?”
“Because Jeb taught me how to sew, and she’s right-
handed.”
“Oh.”
Hannah watched the small needle dip into the thick fabric and out again. Their blankets caught all the heat from the fire, and the rock behind them reflected heat onto the backs of their heads. She took her toque off, running her fingers through her dirty hair. “My mom’s left-handed, too.”
“Yeah.” He said it like he didn’t care, but Hannah saw his brow furrow. “I mean, no one is in my family,” he continued, still sewing. “No … my uncle is. I don’t know, maybe my mom was, too. Probably.”
Peter’s mom was dead. Now it was Hannah’s turn to say “yeah” in an uncomfortable way. They didn’t have much in common, really.
The fire snapped and more sparks flew skyward, climbing higher into the snowless air. She could feel the dropping temperature on the edges of her cheeks and on her bare hands, which held her emergency blanket loosely around her. Beads of sweat appeared on Peter’s forehead.
“Whew,” he said, pushing the silver foil down to his waist. “I’m sweating up a storm. These blankets are awesome.” Hannah’s classmates used the word awesome with irony whenever they were instructed to do something they didn’t want to, like write on the board or pick up gym equipment. But Peter said it like it was something important. The word was a perfect summation of the blanket. “I won’t need it tonight,” he continued. “If you want, well … maybe you can use it for the dog … the Dalmatian … or whatever.”
Hannah picked up the poker — the long, fire-blackened stick Peter had selected to control the size and shape of the fire — and stabbed at it. Another line of sparks flew skyward, a red gangline headed to the stars. She could say many things right now, talk and talk, but it didn’t fit here. It didn’t fit the cold, because talking was wasting energy. It didn’t fit the fire, which kept them warm in its simple way. It didn’t fit winter. Talking was another summer skill. “Thanks,” she said simply. And she meant it.
Peter nodded, pulled his last stitch tight, and bit through the thread to snap it. Then he slid his hand in and opened and closed it to test the mend. He handed her back the glove. She didn’t say thanks again, and he didn’t seem to mind. He put the needle away and threw the remaining short end of thread into the fire.
They sat watching the fire for a while. Hannah was full, her belly and body full of warmth and her head full of thoughts. In school, she remembered writing down a list of leadership qualities like they were parts of a game. Out here, only a few parts of all of that were important. Maybe Peter was right, about the difference between learning from books and learning from experience. But that didn’t seem quite right; without her course on leadership — learning from books — she wouldn’t have understood why she had to take the lead, or how. Then she th
ought of her father patiently teaching her to identify birch from maple when she was young. It seemed to her that both were important. You learned some stuff in stillness, and some stuff by doing.
Peter wiped more sweat off his forehead and took off his sweater. The armpits of his long-sleeved shirt were wet, and seeing that, Hannah had another idea. She pushed herself up and went to the tent. In the vestibule she could barely see Sencha, because there was little light away from the fire, and because the Dal had burrowed her entire body except for her nose into the bag. She opened her eyes briefly as Hannah gingerly felt around her, but she didn’t move, not even when Hannah had to pull something out from under her. She made sure Sencha was well covered again and walked back to the fire.
“Here,” she said, holding out a pair of socks and a long undershirt.
“They won’t fit me.”
“Take them. They’re clean, and you need them.”
“No thanks.”
“Come on,” she said. “I’m giving them to you, for free, okay? You can have the gloves, too.” She wagged her hands, which were clad in her second pair. “These ones fit me better.”
“They won’t fit,” he repeated, reaching out nonetheless to take the items. He fingered the expensive wicking fabric of the undershirt. It was dark blue and made from merino wool, lighter than regular wool and warmer, too.
“The socks are tube socks, so they’ll be okay. And the shirt is my dad’s.”
Peter looked unhappy with his hands full of gifts. He put his glasses in his pants pocket and took off his old undershirt, then put the new one on and smoothed it down. He looked less unhappy. “Why do you have one of your dad’s shirts?”