by Jo Storm
For a moment she fought the urge to gag. A long, shallow gash had opened the back of Peter’s leg, right below his knee, from his ankle up. The flap of skin hanging off it was twice as long as Hannah’s hand, and the wound was partially hidden by his socks, now soaked in blood.
She turned away and walked to the side of the shuttered house, gasping. It was suddenly hard to see as the sun came out, reflecting off the snow crystals and making her eyes water. Once again, she cursed herself for forgetting her goggles. She stared at the dark, stout poplar trunks until her eyes adjusted and she’d stopped crying, and by then she had a plan.
She couldn’t close the skin with a needle and thread because Peter had used the last of the thread fixing her glove — and she had no idea how to do that, anyway. Instead, she could use strips of clothing and whatever was in the first-aid kit to bind the wound until they could get help. She went back to Peter.
“What is it? Is it bad?” Peter said. He stopped his rocking motion, but his voice betrayed the agony he was in. He was still on his side with one arm underneath him, and the deep snow prevented him from twisting to see his leg.
“It’s going to be okay,” Hannah said.
There was a lot of blood. The smell was like blackflies in her nose, sharp and biting. She tried not to worry too much about how much blood he was losing, though it was probably more than was good for him. She pulled the torn flaps of his blood-soaked pants wide and used snow to clear off what she could. Peter clenched his teeth and hissed and swore.
“Stay here, and don’t touch it,” she said. He continued rocking as she went to the sled, pulled out the emergency kit and, from it, the first-aid box.
When she returned to his side, he’d propped himself up, one hand packing down the snow beneath him. He was staring at his leg in disbelief.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Hey, lie down.” She put the first-aid kit down next to him.
“Jesus, look at it,” he said, his voice tight. His movements had brought a fresh gush of blood out of the wound, and it dripped down onto the snow under his leg.
“Stop moving, okay? I need to wrap it.”
She stood up, removed her coat, and laid it open on the snow. She placed the first-aid kit on its still-warm surface. She would need freedom of movement to bandage the wound.
“Rest, ice, compression, elevate,” Hannah recited. She had learned this in gym class. She said it out loud to calm herself and to let Peter know what was happening. Had she been in his place, she’d have felt better if the person helping her spoke as though they knew exactly what to do.
Peter nodded, and Hannah felt a small measure of relief. She went back to studying the ragged gash on his leg while taking out gauze, ointment, and sterile pads.
The wound could not be elevated, and she didn’t think that ice was the best idea since they were outdoors, but she could apply compression. The first problem was what to do about his clothing: should she keep it on against the cold, or remove it? Pulling back the flaps of the cut pants as wide as they would go, she considered. She could remove his pants — but she rejected that idea almost immediately. He had no spare pants, and it would be too much exposure of skin in the winter. She decided that the blood-speckled pants, even wet, would be warmer than nothing. She went back to the sled, grabbed some spare clothing, and used it to pad around the wound so that any blood would soak into the clothing, not his pants.
His boot was another thing: there was nothing to do but try to get it off.
“Go back, we have to go back. We have to go back, Hannah,” he said, and she could hear sheer panic in his voice; it sounded just like hers had after they’d run from Jeb. His body was reacting to the fear with the urge to do something.
“Just lie still,” she said.
He lay down, his teeth chattering, his glasses pushing across his nose from the awkward position. She took them off his face.
“Put these in your pocket, okay? You won’t need them for a bit.”
“Just hurry up so we can goddamn well get back.”
“Stop swearing,” she said. “It’s not helping us, and it’s just using up energy.”
He grunted, clenched his arms around himself in a bear hug, and started rocking again. Every now and then he would lift his head to try to see what she was doing.
Hannah grabbed a gauze pad and the disinfectant and started cleaning the wound, in her mind trying to figure out how to say the obvious to him: there was no way to turn around now, what with the empty trail, the flooded shortcut, and the storm behind them. She also had no idea how much farther it was to Timmins, but she figured it was at least another day, especially if Peter had to ride in the sled, with the dogs breaking trail. She also had no idea how bad Peter’s injury was, but it looked really bad. And they had only enough food for that day.
The panic pushed through her arm and she accidentally pushed Peter’s wound hard with the gauze. Peter groaned and twitched his leg away. Frustration and fear spread through Hannah’s body, and she began to cry. Thinking of the wastefulness of her tears — now she’d have to drink more, which meant getting a stomach ache from the barely unfrozen water — made her feel even worse, and the tears just kept coming.
She couldn’t keep up. She couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening, not even with the mantra of the next thing, and then the next that had gotten her as far as this without succumbing to panic, claustrophobia, or despair. Not in the face of the broken promise of pancakes, the empty house, the hateful words, Peter’s bloodied leg. Each breath he took brought more blood, and Hannah’s gorge rose each time she caught herself staring at the red drops falling from the mangled flesh, like she and Kelli taking little jumps off the low cliffside at Jeb’s swimming hole in the summer.
Things kept happening and she couldn’t keep up, and now there was a terrible, unbridgeable gap between her mental picture of them mushing into Timmins — or toward any house with lights on and people and warmth inside — and the reality of this bloodied boy on the bloodied snow, and her bloodied hands, which she could barely feel because she’d had her gloves off for so long.
In desperation, she kept cleaning Peter’s leg, sponging as neatly and gently as she could. The disinfectant itself did not hurt, but the flesh had not been cut cleanly, and it was ragged, with little pieces of skin that flopped over when she sponged them. Twice she had to stop herself from retching. Her crying was almost a good thing, as it kept her eyes a bit bleary so she couldn’t see the wound clearly.
Eventually her tears began to dwindle, and as they did, Hannah noticed a little kernel of thought inside her mind. It had a weird feeling to it; she kept running over it like running a tongue over a new tooth, or fingers over a new scarf that was so soft it clung to your fingers a bit like little soft hooks. Again and again, Hannah went through what had happened to Peter (the fight and his anger, the wound, the blood and cold), then the terrible gap between that and what she hoped for and had imagined so clearly, which was the town, and people, someone to help her, someone to help her mother. Each time, that gap made it impossible for her to connect things up; she couldn’t visualize a way to move from the first thing to the second the way she could other things, like coming to Jonny Swede’s in the first place or jumping higher in ballet. But each time she failed, she took a sidelong look at the little kernel, which felt like it was … waiting.
It was sort of like the times she’d gone ice fishing on the lake with her family, before she’d grown too old to like such things. They would all sit in the little hut or, if it was a sunny day, outside in a circle on the ice, and although there was a sense of cold and dislocation — sitting motionless outside in the winter, for fun? — there was also a sense of ease, of knowledge that waiting was the correct thing to do. That was what the kernel felt like, and when she tried, she found she could sort of move the kernel, so she placed it right in the gap, between the events of the morning and the lights of the town. And it fit. It slipped between the two things so
that she could imagine going from the cold, bloody fight all the way to the town, and it somehow fit, even if it didn’t make sense. And now her drying eyes could once again make out the sled and the four dogs, waiting. Waiting for her.
She looked toward them. “All right. I have my job, you have yours. Line out!” she called, and they uncurled themselves and stood and stretched, tails wagging slowly. She’d finished bandaging Peter’s wound, and now she propped him up so that he was sitting. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She went over to the pack, dug out one of the remaining emergency blankets, and unfolded it before returning to help Peter remove his ruined snowshoe.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, thrusting his wounded leg under him and trying to stand. He got halfway up, but once he put weight on the injured leg, he pitched forward into the snow, yelling in pain. “Come on, come on!” he gasped. At the centre of the wound, where the cut was the deepest, Hannah saw a fleck of blood seeping through the gauze and bandages. If he moved too much, he would just bleed through them, and she didn’t have enough bandages to change the dressing more than once.
“Hang on,” she said. She trooped back to the sled and rearranged it so that one pack lay across the bed instead of lengthwise, tied it down tightly with the pack line, then laid out the unfolded emergency blanket on the basket of the sled.
The sled was still snubbed to a tree; she took the snub line off and attached it to the carabiner at the back of the gangline, so that the dogs were now tied to the tree and the sled was free. She grabbed the bridle and pulled and heaved the sled over the unbroken snow to where Peter was, then she pulled and heaved some more to turn it around so it was facing the dogs. She took off Peter’s other snowshoe and tied it to the back of the sled. Together they eased him into the basket in the middle of the blanket and pulled the sides up over him. His teeth were chattering.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
She went back to the tree and untied the snub line, led the dogs through the now-broken snow, and hooked them up, pointing back toward the trail they had come in on. Then she checked each dog over. Peter was holding his leg and trying to get comfortable. The emergency blanket made crinkly sounds as he shifted on the wooden slats. Finally, he settled half lying down, half sitting, with his right leg propped out straight over the packs and his good leg bent, the knee pointing up.
“We’re going back, right?”
“No, we’re going to Timmins. It’s closer.”
“I knew we’d just end up doing what you wanted,” he said. He shook his head and crossed his arms tightly. “I’m going to die out here and it’ll be your fault.”
Hannah was working salve into Rudy’s foot. If you don’t want me to treat you like a stupid jerk, stop acting like one, she thought. But she wouldn’t say it out loud, because then she’d be exactly what he said she was: a mouthy cidiot. She realized that she did owe him an explanation so that he wasn’t in the dark about why they were doing this.
“I think … I think the most important thing to do is to get you to a hospital.”
“Jeb can fix this,” he protested. “She did stuff like this in the field.” His face was set in a scowl, but she couldn’t tell if it was from pain, fear, or anger — maybe it was all three.
“That thing was rusted, Peter. The plow.”
“So?”
“Have you ever had a tetanus shot?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She finished up with Rudy’s paw. “You can get really, really sick from tetanus.”
“You’re just saying that. You just want to get to Timmins.”
She moved on to Nook. Nook turned her head and Hannah tried to scritch it the way her father did, the way Nook liked. She was rewarded by Nook leaning in to her hands.
Getting help for her mother was still important. But something else was there now: a deep dissatisfaction with almost everything she had done about it. Maybe she was just stubborn, maybe she did just want everyone to do what she wanted. Maybe. Now that she had found a way to change things as they were to how she wanted them to be, she felt a weird sense of gratitude. Now she had a chance to earn the skills and experience of this trip — to earn them with her team, and with Peter.
“The truth is,” she said, “our dads are probably already on their way back by now. Someone will probably be able to help my mom before we even get to Timmins. Or maybe Jeb will go check on her. Maybe the power will come back on. I don’t know. But what I know for sure is you need help right away.”
“I thought you said she was dying.”
“It’s not really like that. It’s a progressive disease.”
“I know what diabetes is. Your body can’t control the level of sugar in your blood. You can go blind or lose a limb. Your organs can fail. I know you can die from it. But I know it’s not likely.”
His words were so stark and simple that Hannah was taken aback, even though he didn’t say them cruelly. He was just listing things.
“It’s just …” Hannah mentally ran over the fixed gangline of her thoughts one more time. Later she could look back on all that she’d done and wonder or freak out about it, but for now, there was only the task ahead … and to do that task, she would need to be honest.
“I did it,” she said. “I was the one who broke her insulin vials. I broke them, and then I left her and Kelli trapped by the storm, because I wanted to be a hero.”
Peter waited quietly in the sled while she finished inspecting the dogs. She reapplied salve on Nook and Sencha’s heat sores. Nook’s was healing well, but Sencha’s was still red, as her belly constantly had churned-up snow plastered to it. Hannah decided to keep the Dal in her makeshift coat, as it covered her belly and would give the sore a chance to heal.
“I was going to get my tetanus shot,” Peter said suddenly. “For Air Cadets.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like the military but for teenagers. Only my dad said I couldn’t be in it this year. He doesn’t think it’s real enough — he hates the Cadets because they’re not really in the Armed Forces. Like he is,” Peter finished sarcastically.
“Isn’t he?”
“No, he’s not. He plays at the Army just like he says I do. The Reserves,” scoffed Peter. “Do you know what they do? They shovel sand into bags for floods and hand out water at marathons. They don’t even have guns.”
Hannah started on the rigging, making sure none of the lines was frayed and that each one was securely tied to the gangline, as well as checking that the gangline was strong and securely attached to the sled.
“As soon as I turn eighteen, I’m joining the real Army,” Peter blurted after a moment. “He can play soldier all he wants. But I’ll be the real deal, like Jeb. We’ll make a difference, not like the Reserves people. We’ll go places, save people. Not just be glorified sandbaggers.”
Hannah quickly stepped onto the runners at the back, hurrying because they needed to get going, but also to hide her shock from Peter; she had heard longing in his voice.
He wanted to be a hero, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Peter stopped talking after his outburst, burrowing into the emergency blanket and leaning his head back with his eyes closed.
Hannah got the dogs up, and they started back along the trail they’d come in on, but this time, they turned left instead of right. She looked longingly the way they had come — not because she wanted to go there, but because the trail was so much easier. Their two sets of snowshoes, four dogs, and a sled had packed the trail down nicely. Ahead of them now, the unbroken skein of snow was almost chest-high on Nook. As soon as they were on that thick powder, Hannah dropped off the runners and began walking. She wasn’t worried about the dogs getting ahead now. Nook would stop at her command, but it was unlikely Hannah would have to do that, as the snow and Peter’s added weight slowed the team down to her own walking pace.
She tried getting ahead of the dogs to break the t
rail for them, but the snow was too deep for her to walk over it with any speed; she only ended up making herself tired and the dogs confused.
She watched the trail and named the types of snow. They were in the deep bush now, among spruce and pine, with the odd maple or birch. On either side of the trail, the bush was unbroken, dense with the bowed heads of small trees and large bushes. Rabbit territory, she thought, not hare territory.
She halted the sled. Peter struggled to sit up, grimacing. She opened the supply bag, handed him a water bottle, and took out the radio before starting up the sled again.
“Well, Trapper Tom stopped by again this morning, and he says a huge storm is coming, because the last time it snowed, the snow was sticking to the fence posts. I kid you not, folks, this is what Trapper Tom is telling me. I go with what Environment Canada tells me. But hey, guess what? They’re saying the same thing, just without the fence posts.
“I know you folks in town are better off now, and thanks to Gerald for giving me a lift in to work on his snowmobile. They’re getting to things as soon as they can, but it’s a mess out there. Remember to keep the young ones inside and away from the roads. Having all these power lines down can be dangerous.”
Hannah turned the radio off again and passed it to Peter. The sun was still marking black shadows on the trees, but they were tiny slivers now, as the sun was almost directly above them, sitting on her left shoulder. She looked behind her. This morning, the storm had seemed imminent, but now she saw nothing but blue sky. The sun’s rays were much warmer, too. She took off her toque, letting fresh air get to her greasy, matted hair. A little while later, she undid her jacket, and finally she removed her gloves, because her hands were sweating. She wiggled her hot fingers as she walked. They felt funny without the extra encasing of the gloves, suddenly weightless and free.