by Jo Storm
The wolf swung its muzzle up, catching their scents and exposing its throat. Rudy exploded, screaming and howling, his inhales hooked with hate and the instinct to kill or be killed. Only Nook was silent, her body mirroring the wolf’s in an easy, half-relaxed stance. Interested. Deciding. The wolf dropped its head and took a few steps toward them. With that, Nook changed, bringing her body down into a slight crouch like Sencha, and baring her teeth like Bogey.
The wolf’s gaze flickered over to Hannah. It doesn’t look like it’s scared, she thought as the wolf stared at her, unblinking. It looks like … like it’s measuring the odds.
Beside Nook, Rudy was throwing himself into his harness, trying to get at the wolf. Each jump forward caused the sled to lurch and thrust the brake up painfully into Hannah’s foot. She was already at the limit of her strength; if all the dogs threw their weight into their harnesses like that, she wouldn’t be able to hold it back.
Hannah took one arm off the bow of the sled and began shouting hoarsely, the cold air and her dry mouth causing her voice to crack. She waved her arm like a maniac, trying to look threatening, but was completely ignored for her troubles.
The wolf flicked its eyes over her again, and over the sled and the shiny blanket that encased Peter, and then it went back to staring at the four dogs. It kept its head the same height, extended at the shoulders, for a few seconds more. Then it turned off the trail, taking one last, measured look at them before bounding away across the wind-whipped snow, only occasionally breaking through. For all its mass, it weighed less than any of her dogs, Hannah realized. No one fed this wolf specially prepared meat and vegetables after a hard day of hunting. She suddenly had the disturbing thought that, to the wolf, she was just a warm hunk of meat moving around, and only the size of her pack had dissuaded the wolf from making a different decision. She was not a threat; only the dogs were. She felt light-headed.
The whole episode had lasted less than a minute, although her drumming heart and the fatigue creeping through her already exhausted body told her that what the encounter had lacked in length was made up for in intensity.
Peter had not even spoken, but as the wolf disappeared, she heard him let out his breath in a whoosh. “Holy crap,” he said.
Hannah shook her head. “That was a wolf, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” he confirmed. “Way too big to be a coyote. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
Mentally, she tried to stick the word beautiful between calculating and killing machine.
“It was something,” she said. “God, and I thought the moose was scary.”
“Yeah. A pack of those wolves, they would have pulled that moose down no problem. Right now they have the advantage.”
Hannah thought of the wolf running on top of the snow, and then the moose, labouring through the drifts, and shuddered.
“I wonder why it was on the trail, though,” he continued, shifting to look around. “Those grey ghosts don’t normally go anywhere near people.”
“Probably the same reason as us,” said Hannah. “It’s easier. I mean, if a moose wants to use it, why not other animals?”
He nodded. “I guess, yeah.” She watched him scan the side of the bush where the wolf had gone.
“What are you looking for?”
He craned his neck to look behind them. “More.”
Hannah turned her head so fast she saw spots dancing on the snow in the empty trail behind them. “Shit!” she said.
“Yeah, they don’t work alone, especially in the winter,” he said. “And sometimes they’ll send out a decoy and sneak around behind you.”
“Are they all that big? It was so big.” Hannah could hear the disbelief in her own voice.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen that many — maybe four in my whole life. It sure looked big.”
“Maybe it was the leader.”
“Maybe. All I know is, where there’s one, there’s usually more. Let’s get out of here.”
Hannah called up the dogs, and they started off again, slowly, hesitantly, still looking around. But they ran. When the trail began to angle down, Hannah rode the drag mat.
The trail then turned leisurely again, and there were more downhill sections as they left the wide-cut blaze. The trees thickened again as they descended, but Hannah could see all the way down the hill to where the trail came out on a large open area again.
“The lake!” shouted Peter, sitting up.
The sled rode easily down the hill, and the lake beckoned.
In no time, they were past the treeline and rushing across the ice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The lake was a silent field of ripples scoured clean by the blizzard’s winds. Hannah saw where the ice had ground up against itself, creating ledges that the sled lurched over, causing Peter to wince and swear.
The dogs pulled strongly, and Hannah handled the sled without even thinking now, leaning hard on the runners to turn it, talking the dogs through the leaning of the sled. And the dogs talked to her through it, responding to her commands. It was as though she were running with them. Bogey grew surer of himself the farther they went, and the team followed. The wolf’s low killing stance faded from their memory, and they saw only snow and ice, the white layers piled on top of each other.
But suddenly, just ahead, the ice dipped and its rutted surface ended, replaced by a smooth, clear concave area, the water underneath visible and looming in a dark amorphous circle. Hannah felt the sled tilt a tiny extra bit to the left, saw Nook swing her head up and let her line go slack, and heard a muted crack at the same time. The hairs on Hannah’s neck rose, and the kernel was suddenly there, not with a memory or an idea, like the other times, but linking her directly to the shrouded winter world itself — to the snowpack and the wind and the poplar trees, to the chickadees and the wolf trotting away, to the fish on the far side of the lake in the cold depths of coves, safe and silent and sluggish. Her world expanded to an impossible degree, and she flew through it, through the bindings and pins on the sled and through the gangline and the bodies of the dogs and then up, up, up, to look down and see the fault line that ran over the lake, through the weather-softened ice beneath them.
The kernel held her there for only the briefest moment, enveloping her in calm and distance and clarity; then she fell back to earth, to her body, to the next thing, and her arm flexed and her hand was grabbing the snowhook and she threw it into the firm, still-thick ice at her feet, stepping on it hard as the ice changed from a thick, opaque white to a muddy, see-through brown. She drove it deep into the winter mantle of the lake and then jumped off the runners and landed roughly on her knees on the ice, yelling as the sled continued forward, propelled by the speed of four dogs who loved pulling and running and who were finally on packed ground, not wading through snowdrifts.
Fast.
The snowhook line unravelled quickly and was three feet away from stopping them safely when Bogey fell through.
His powerful shoulders did most of the work when he pulled, and now they thrust his sharp nails into the rotten ice below, acting like picks, piercing the skin of it and sending him crashing through in an explosion of ice shards and water and his sudden panicked screaming.
A second later, the snowhook line snapped taut. The sled, the team, and Peter lurched forward, then snapped back as the hook held. The ice around them cracked; she could see a large white rent snapping along underneath the sled. It was like watching lightning skitter across the ground; it moved so fast that she couldn’t tell where it started or ended, hidden beneath cloudy swirls of snow. The snowhook held fast, keeping the sled crosswise to the widening gap.
“Get out get out get out!” she screamed, a sloppy terror overflowing her heart as she ran toward them. “Peter, GET OUT!”
The ice cracked again, ripping up in watery spouts of ice at other spots farther in toward the centre of the lake. The crack under the sled was not the crack that Bogey had fallen through. He had merely weighed too much and been in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Around him, the ice thickened considerably, but he didn’t know how different kinds of ice smelled, how thin ice was dangerous, how thick ice was safe. Now he was in the middle of the hole, paddling frantically through the floating chunks and churning up the water, panicking.
If it had been Sencha, Hannah knew, there would have been no hope. But the big brown Labrador lived to swim, and his thick double coat and otter tail were made to do exactly this: survive in frigid waters.
But suddenly Bogey went under, and the gangline pulled everyone and everything toward the open water.
“BOGEY!” she screamed. Hannah was still ten feet from them, and the rough ice tore at her boots, making her fall again. It felt like a dream, the stumbling and the pain in her legs, the terror in her heart. Sencha and Rudy and Nook had all begun to bark, pulling back from the open water. All of a sudden, Bogey’s head resurfaced, half-smothered in the lines of the dogsled and his own harness.
The next thing, Hannah thought: Get in the water, get the harness off.
She quickly pulled off her toque and scarf and gloves, dropping them as she went. She would get Peter to pull on the gangline, she would support Bogey, and they would get out. She took hold of her zipper to take her parka off.
A long, flat rope sailed right at her head and she ducked, instinctively catching it with her left hand. She turned and saw that Peter had gotten out of the sled, his jacket and sweater were shucked off, and his torn pant leg was flapping behind him as he half ran, half hopped over to the open water. The other end of the rope was tied around his chest, just under his armpits. He was pulling his hand from his pocket and Hannah saw him flick open his pocket knife, holding it low and ready in his fist. He turned to her and yelled one word before throwing himself onto his good side, sliding toward the open water as though he were sliding into home base. “Pull!” he yelled.
Then he was in the water. The panicked Lab made right for him, trying to climb on top of him to get out. Peter yelled and knocked him away, and Bogey turned weakly, now trying to make for the other side of the hole to climb out. With his back to Peter, the lines were easy to get at; the knife flashed, cutting through the ropes. The other three dogs fell back when the tension was released; they scrambled to one side of the hole and onto the thick white paste of ice that would easily bear their weight, pulling the sled to the side but unable to move forward because of the snowhook. They were pointed at the shore now. Sencha’s tail was curled right under her body, and she shivered in terror, trying to back away even farther from the frigid water.
Hannah was five feet away now. She threw her jacket down and stopped running, pitching herself down onto all fours to keep her weight distributed over more of the ice.
“Bogey, Bogey, come,” she called, and the Lab turned to her, his eyes wide with panic and pain.
He swam to her and she grabbed his collar, pulling as Peter pushed up from behind with one arm, the other holding on to the ice.
“Hurry,” said Peter. “I’m going numb.”
He was eighty pounds of wet, terrified, panicking dog, and he did not listen well; he yelped and snarled and tried at all costs to keep his head above the water and his back feet down, but he was too heavy for Hannah to pull him out head first. She felt around until she had a hold of his harness. She pulled on it hard, listing him parallel to the water. Slowly, the heavy Lab came up sideways, his head dunking under the water momentarily as Peter pushed his rear end up first, the lighter end.
The flailing, scrabbling dog dunked almost as much water on Hannah as if she’d gone in herself, but finally he scrambled out, heaving up onto solid ice and bolting over to the other dogs, still crying. Hannah lay spread-eagled, her cheek on the ice, and tried to will warmth back into her limbs.
The cold crept all around them, wetting down the edges of the ice and making her ungloved hands freeze to the surface, ripping off chunks of skin when she lifted them to grab Peter’s arm. He slipped out of her grasp again and again, kicking weakly with his good leg. Her arms were heavier than lead; they no longer felt attached to her, just frozen chunks with fingers that couldn’t bend. Her teeth were chattering and the wet sides of her hair fell forward, already icy and sharp.
“Stop, stop,” gasped Peter as she pulled futilely on the rope under his arms. He clung to the side of the ice with his hands, no longer able to pull himself up, his head barely above water. She couldn’t pull over 140 pounds straight up, with no help. In the distance, the snowhook rested, humped up against a crack in the lake, holding the sled fast. She lifted her head off the ice, more skin ripping off, this time from her cheek.
She stumbled, her legs screaming in frozen agony, but she ignored them, she ignored everything but the glinting snowhook and the next thing. She lurched along the ice, moving across the thickest ridge, pulled the hook up, and raced back, calling the dogs as she ran.
“Nook, Rudy, Sencha — get up! Get up!” she hollered. The three dogs stood, alarmed and confused; she was calling them to go one way, but running the opposite. Nook pointed her head toward the shore, then back to Hannah.
“Nook!” yelled Hannah. “Nook, get up now! Get up! Sencha, go! Get up, go go go!” She threw herself back down at the mouth of the water and passed the line of the snowhook through the end of the rope, tying it off in a slipknot, still yelling at the dogs to start.
Nook, still in her place as wheel dog, shook herself off quickly and started forward, but the other dogs did not understand and did not pull, and soon she stopped.
Hannah grabbed Peter’s arm; he had almost no grip left, and his lips had a bluish tinge to them. He looked sleepy, lolling in the water like it was the height of summer. Hypothermia was setting in.
“Get up, guys, let’s go let’s go!” yelled Hannah. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brown blob move forward: Bogey, padding out to stand a little in front of the gangline, his cut traces dangling down, useless.
But he could still lead. All the other dogs need is someone to follow. A leader.
“Bogey!” she yelled. She put all her remaining strength into her voice. “Bogey, good boy, that’s right, Boge, get up, get up, let’s go, get up!”
And he moved. A few steps, then some more, then he broke into a trot, aiming for the treeline and the distant trail. Nook followed immediately, and Sencha, happy to be moving away from the water, and finally Rudy, pulling hard because that was his job.
The gangline tightened and the sled began to move. Hannah wedged her arm over the edge and into the water, putting her other arm around Peter and holding on, trying to act as a buffer against the hard sides of the ice. She set her knees and pulled and twisted, and the sled moved and so did Peter. He woke up and began to pull himself weakly, using her back as support.
His bad leg came up last, scraping over the edge of the hole, and then they were out and on the thick, safe ice near the shore. She pulled the knot on the rope free with numb fingers and set the snowhook, cramming it into a small crack and calling the dogs to halt.
Hannah and Peter lay on their backs, wheezing and coughing. The sun shone down with a freezing grin, but at least there was no wind. Her lips were raw, her hands felt like and looked like hamburger, and her arm was badly scraped now from Peter’s body dragging it across the fissured ice as he was hauled up.
Peter turned and lay face down, breathing heavily. Finally, he coughed again and spat up some phlegm.
“Hannah,” he said.
“What?”
“That. Sucked.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hannah lay on her back, staring up into the sky. “Get up,” she said, willing herself as much as Peter to follow the instruction.
“Just gimme a minute,” he said.
“Peter, we have to get up. We need to get warm.”
“I just need to rest a minute.” His voice was still slurred, and his blue lips barely moved when he spoke.
“Get up,” she repeated.
With agonizing difficulty, Ha
nnah sat up. Neither of them had their coat on, and both of them were soaking wet and about to freeze to death.
No amount of common ground is going to get us out of this one, Mrs. Dowling, she thought.
But in a flash, she heard Mrs. Dowling’s I always know the answer voice: “With the right kind of encouragement, a good leader and their team can overcome any obstacle.”
Hannah almost laughed out loud. What kind of encouragement could possibly help right now?
“Peter, come on, get up!”
“Shut up,” he slurred. “Ashhole.”
Encouragement, my ass, thought Hannah. Wanna see some leadership, Mrs. Dowling? Watch this.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey!” She shouted it this time, her voice roughened by the cold. She poked Peter’s wet, prone body.
“Whaaaat.”
“Pansy-ass!” she said.
“What?”
“I said you’re a pansy-ass. Get up!”
He opened a bleary eye. “What?”
“Quit screwing around and get off the ice, you stupid hick!”
“What is your problem? I just saved your stupid dog.” He turned on his side. His expression was confused.
“Oh, come on, you only went in the water because you were too dumb to use the snowhook, like I did.”
“Are you kidding me?” Peter’s face pinched as he squinted at her, and she realized he had lost his glasses —
and his knife, probably — somewhere in the lake. That made her feel terrible.
She glared at him. “Kidding that you’re too stupid to figure stuff out? No. You can’t even work the stove properly.”
He pushed himself up to a sitting position. “What in the hell is your problem?”