The Unexpected Find

by Toby Ibbotson

  Judy bit her lip. Of course: a three-ton vehicle on an uphill gradient with practically no friction between wheels and road would be entirely dependent on forward momentum. Increasing the engine revolutions would only make things worse – that was no way to apply the work of the engine to the road. Basically, once they stopped, they’d never get started again.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she said.

  “Good, you do far too much of that anyway,” came the reply.

  And that’s how they carried on: not too slow, but not too fast either. At least when they were going downhill. Every time Mr Balderson touched the brakes they could feel the rear end of the camper twitch and waggle, ready to put them into a full skid and slew them helplessly sideways across the road. When, inevitably, that did happen, it wasn’t really Mr Balderson’s fault. They were going carefully downhill when the snowbank at the roadside ahead seemed to erupt and a huge shape broke free and leapt out in front of them. They had time to see the heavy dark brown body perched on top of absurdly long legs, and the long mournful face with a wisp of beard under its chin turn towards them, momentarily transfixed by the headlights. But a full-frontal collision with a five-hundred-kilo elk, whose massive body is at the level of the windscreen, would have meant death for everybody, not just the elk, so Mr Balderson had to brake. The rear wheels whipped round and spun the camper like a fairground ride, making them hit the snowbank side-on with a crunching thud while the near-side wheels slid over the invisible edge of the ditch and the elk loped off with a gangly rubbery stride and disappeared on the other side.

  Judy could hardly breathe, and not just from the shock: William was on top of her and Mr Balderson was on top of William. Slowly the camper leaned over and came to a peaceful rest, nestling deep into the loose snow.

  It was very quiet. They struggled to untangle themselves.

  “Where are we?” asked William

  “In the ditch,” replied Mr Balderson.

  “Can we drive out again?”

  “On the whole I would say no, but I’ll see if he’ll start.”

  This wasn’t easy with the camper listing like a ship on a reef. The engine turned over a couple of times, coughed and cleared its throat, but there was nothing more than that.

  “We are going to need some help,” said Mr Balderson. “Everybody needs help sometimes.”

  “But who’s going to help us?” said Judy. “We haven’t seen anyone for hours.”

  Mr Balderson looked past the edge of the ditch. “True. But the road is ploughed, so it is in use. We shall stick it out, sing songs, tell stories, and dream of things past and things to come. Could you see if the gas heater still works, Judy?”

  It was dark in the camper as Judy scrambled back through the mess. Cupboard doors had sprung open, books and jars of jam and bits of clothing and tools were everywhere. She tried to start the heater, but nothing happened.

  “Temperamental at the best of times,” said Mr Balderson. “There’s probably snow packed in there.”

  Something in his voice sounded different. It was only a little different – a tiny bit less full of the joys and excitement of just being alive – but Judy noticed it. William shivered. He was starting to feel cold.

  “Right,” said Mr Balderson, “let’s get organized. Get into your sleeping bags and lie close together.”

  “Why?” asked William.

  “Because it is going to get cold,” Mr Balderson replied.

  “It’s cold now.”

  Mr Balderson sighed. “You won’t think this is cold in an hour or two, I can assure you.”

  It was a bothersome fussy business, in the darkness of the crazily leaning camper, to fumble around finding seat cushions and blankets and work out how to make some kind of bed. In the end, Judy and William didn’t so much lie down on the couch as roll into it, with William on the inside.

  “Help, Judy’s squashing me, I’m squashed!”

  “Good,” said Mr Balderson. “The squasheder the better.”

  They had burrowed down as far as possible under quilts and blankets – and the clothes Mr Balderson had heaped on top of them – and Judy had made William get into her sleeping bag. Now he struggled a bit and stuck out his head.

  “If someone comes past, how will we stop them?” he asked Mr Balderson.

  “They’ll stop. They know what’s at stake here.”

  “And what is at stake?” asked Judy, though she knew really.

  “Keep your head covered, Judy, and stop asking questions.”

  Mr Balderson was clambering around, stepping over them from time to time, rooting about and humming to himself. Quite suddenly a pale light flooded the camper. The moon had broken free from the treetops and rode low in the sky.

  “Ah … as I feared, it’s cleared up,” said Mr Balderson. He had assembled a very mixed collection of garments for himself. To Judy, peering out from the cocoon she had made, he seemed to be about twice his normal size, as though someone had inflated him with a bike pump. He was wearing his woolly hat, but on top of it was a tea towel that he had tied under his chin. He must have been wearing at least three jumpers as well as a moth-eaten windcheater. He could hardly move his arms. Under two voluminous skirts was a pair of dirty jeans that Judy had seen stuffed into one of the bench lockers to stop a bunch of spanners from rattling about, and on his hands were at least two pairs of woollen socks.

  “We should have brought some proper clothing, but there wasn’t really time for that,” he remarked.

  “Now, in view of the weather I think I shall just walk back up the road for a bit. I’m sure we passed a farm a little way back…” He clambered awkwardly towards the door and managed with difficulty to get it open. He tumbled out.

  “Time to snuggle, people. Snuggling’s what does it.” Then he let the door slam shut, and he was gone.

  Neither William nor Judy were the kind of people who snuggled if they could possibly help it – which just goes to show what a bit of extremely cold weather can do, because now they snuggled as though their lives depended on it. Which in fact, although neither of them mentioned it, they did.

  Within half an hour the final vestiges of warmth had been sucked inexorably out of the camper as the cold seeped in. Outside, the last wisps of cloud scattered before the dying wind, and the moon rose higher in a perfectly clear sky. The temperature had dropped like a stone and there was absolute silence, the silence that only a deep midwinter night can bring: no rustlings on the forest floor, no soft twittering from birds in the branches, no fox’s bark, no squirrel hastily scrabbling up a tree trunk. And so the cold – the vicious, stealthy, merciless, cracking cold – had made its dramatic entrance, stalking forest and field, poking into every crack and cranny and root and hollow tree, searching with icy fingers for small fluttering hearts to pull the life from.

  In the camper, Judy had rolled herself up in the quilt and left only a little hole for her nose and mouth. The warm air that she exhaled had formed a ring of ice crystals round its edge. She looked at the condensation that had frozen instantly into a pattern on the windows of the camper, a filigree of frost.

  William’s muffled voice from somewhere almost underneath her said,

  “My feet are cold.”

  “Waggle them.”

  “I can’t, you’re lying on them.”

  Judy moved a bit.

  “Can you waggle them now?”

  “Sort of.”

  Judy remembered playing outdoors once, in some kind of courtyard. It was one of those memories that’s from so long ago that it seems like a dream. She must have been very small. But she remembered harsh sunlight, and complaining that it was too hot, and asking why it didn’t get cooler.

  “I shall never complain about the heat again,” she said out loud.

  9

  The big tiled stove in the living room was almost too hot to touch. Stefan checked to see that the fire had died down properly and then reached up to close the damper. Now the heat would last all night
, but he would have to get up early anyway, to light the kitchen stove and fill the wood box. He started to get ready for bed. His little room was tucked in behind the kitchen, with the chimney making part of one wall, so he was cosy enough. As he slid down under his duvet he smiled contentedly. If it was under minus thirty in the morning, he wouldn’t have to go to school – and it looked like being a lot colder than that. That was the rule for pupils who came in from the outlying villages. So he could spend tomorrow with his little Ferguson, which meant he had a decision to make: renovate the DC generator and keep to his plan of restoring the whole tractor to mint condition, or weld new brackets, mount an AC generator and stop the battery losing power on him all the time. In the company of happy thoughts of condensers and distributors, Stefan fell asleep.

  In the camper, William’s teeth chattered.

  “I can’t feel my feet at all. I waggled them but it didn’t help.”

  Judy knew that he was shivering badly.

  “We’ll have to change places,” she said. “We need to be like penguins, William. They stand in a huddle and the ones on the outside move into the middle to get warm.” Judy managed to pull and push and roll William over her so that he lay on her other side. She quickly realized why he had felt so frozen. The side of the camper was icy cold.

  “W-w-what if nobody comes?” William wanted to know.

  “Oh, we’ll be all right,” Judy said breezily.

  To her relief, William seemed satisfied with this. It was the kind of thing an air hostess would say if the engines conked out at thirty thousand feet, she thought grimly. On the other hand, what else was there to say? The outlook seemed fairly poor to her, but there wasn’t any point discussing it with William. In fact, she guessed there was a clear possibility of them actually dying, not just being frozen and uncomfortable and miserable. For a brief moment, she tried out of sheer habit to calculate the probability of survival, but she just didn’t have enough information about this kind of thing to even make a decent stab at it. Forty per cent? Fifty? One and a half? She felt drowsy. But, no, she mustn’t go to sleep. She knew that much.

  “Do you think Mr Balderson will be back soon?” William wondered.

  “Yes, he won’t be long.”

  She didn’t know how long Mr Balderson could last outside, even if he kept moving. She had a feeling that it wasn’t very long. Twenty minutes? Half an hour? But this was all just guesswork, and she didn’t like guesswork.

  “We could make a great big bonfire and get really warm,” said William’s voice in her ear. “There are about a million trees, would anybody mind?”

  “I don’t think they’d mind much, but I don’t think we could actually do it. Four feet of snow, no proper clothing, one little axe. It’s pretty hard to make a fire even when it’s not cold and snowy. I’m not much good at camp fires at the best of times.”

  “And I’ve never done it before.”

  “Well there you are then. We’d be all at sea.”

  William’s head emerged from his sleeping bag.

  “If it was the sea then this would be a boat, but it’s not. And we would be shipwrecked, not crashed, and send up a flare.”

  “That’s a good thought, William, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have any flares.”

  Suddenly Judy’s head had pictures in it that started turning into an idea. If it didn’t work, they would definitely be done for…

  “But it should work,” she said to herself. Think, Judy. How many things could go wrong? She got to eight things that definitely could go wrong, and gave up counting.

  Judy emerged from her nest, and tucked her quilt and blankets around William.

  “W-where are you going?”

  “You gave me an idea, William. You’re a genius.”

  “Am I?”

  “Well no, but at least it was an idea.”

  Judy climbed forward, took the keys out of the ignition and pushed open the door on the driver’s side. She half scrambled, half rolled out into the moonlit road, brushing snow that was as dry as desert sand from her clothes. Every drop of moisture was frozen out of the world. She had thought that inside the camper was as cold as it could possibly be, but she was wrong. Out here, she couldn’t breathe through her nose; her nostrils stuck together when she inhaled. She breathed carefully through half-open lips. She had a small key to open the hatch that was set into the side of the camper, but her hands were horribly fumbly and the two pairs of woollen socks on her hands weren’t helping much. In about five minutes her hands wouldn’t work at all. If it had been a game at a children’s party, or one of those idiotic TV programmes where the contestants make fools of themselves, then it would have been funny. It wasn’t funny now.

  She lifted each of her feet in turn, up and down, up and down, as she tried to delay the moment they would turn into blocks of ice. Finally she got the key into the keyhole, but it wouldn’t turn. The lock was frozen.

  Now at last she felt real fear. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to be back in England, where being cold meant an extra jumper and a cup of tea; not here, where the cold was a force of nature as deadly as a tidal wave or a hurricane or an erupting volcano. She was an alien here, a living creature, a bag made of skin and filled with blood and muscle and bone, flowing and bubbling and burping and digesting and totally at odds with the dry, lifeless, crystalline beautiful desert that is a winter landscape at under minus forty degrees. Tears of sheer frustration froze into little pearls on Judy’s eyelashes, and her eyelids started sticking together. She blinked and rubbed at them.

  Heat it, said a clear calm voice, right in the middle of her head. Heat the key.

  Judy groped in her pocket with her socked hand and took out the lighter.

  She clicked it. Nothing. But the second time it lit, and Judy held the key over the weak yellow flame and saw it blacken. She pushed it into the lock and forced herself to count to five. It was enough. The key turned and she opened the hatch. Inside were two propane cylinders. She rolled them out into the road.

  “Minimum fifty metres. But that’s another guess,” she mumbled.

  Still in the desperate hurry that the body, with no help from the mind, seems to generate all by itself in such a cold, she dragged the cylinders down the road. The chill of the metal handles made it feel like they were slicing through the socks on her hands like a scalpel. Propping them up beside each other in the snow at the roadside, one slightly higher than the other, she opened the valve of the lower one, directing it on to its neighbour. At once the propane hissed out. Not too much at first, she said to herself. Judy clicked the lighter, and kept on clicking and clicking. At last it worked, and she lit the gas before opening the valve completely so that the blue flame could roar straight on to the other cylinder. There was no time to watch. With a slow turn, Judy half-jogged back to the camper; if she moved any faster then the slight wind her speed created was unbearable. Scrambling back into the camper she buried herself, shaking and shivering, in the pile of cushions and blankets and sleeping bags and old clothes that had William in it somewhere.

  How long could it last, the propane flame, going full blast? Would it heat the other cylinder enough? And if it did work, were they far enough away? How hot could it get, when the heat was constantly sucked out of it by the freezing air? She should have covered the cylinders with something – a blanket, anything – but they couldn’t spare them and there hadn’t been time. Maybe a bag would have done it? Her holdall. But there hadn’t been time; she would have frozen to death. Judy felt frozen now. Going outside had pushed her to the point where she felt she would never be warm again. She had brought the cold in with her – in her hands and feet and blood.

  “William. William?”

  She started worrying at William like a puppy with a favourite toy. “Don’t go to sleep, rub your hands together, wiggle your toes.”

  William didn’t answer.

  She felt for his body in the pile, drew him towards her and wrapped her arms around him. Then she wa
ited.

  A sudden flash, like lightning, illuminated the camper, to be followed a millisecond later by a deafening explosion that sounded horribly close. Something bounced off the roof.

  Stefan sat up in bed. Something had woken him up. He listened but there was nothing. Sometimes when the cold came suddenly the trunk of a birch tree split open with a crack like a pistol shot, when the last sap of autumn froze and swelled. But not now, surely? And anyway, it wouldn’t have woken him up like that. His bedroom door opened slowly, and in the moonlight he saw his grandmother with a shawl over her shoulders.

  “Stefan, did you hear? Something’s happened, down the road a way. A big bang.”

  “Yes. It woke me up.”

  “It’s not right. You must go and see what it is.”

  “Nobody’s out tonight. I’ll go in the morning and look then if you like.”

  “Please go now. It was a boom, like the war. Perhaps an invasion has started.”

  “I don’t think the Russians will come tonight.”

  Stefan’s grandmother was mostly perfectly sensible and calm. But what happens to a young child is there for ever, and she was only six years old when the Russians invaded Finland, the country of her birth.

  “Stefan…”

  He was already out of bed and pulling his trousers on. “I’m on my way.”

  He went out into the hall and continued dressing. Thick woollen socks, woollen jumper, winter overall, a parka with a fur-lined hood, heavy lined boots and his mittens. It should be enough to keep out the cold. He opened the inner front door, and closed it behind him as he opened the outer door before walking across the yard to the shed where the tractor stood ready. Stefan climbed up into the cab and started the engine, lifting the snow-blade attached to the rear. He turned the heater on full, leaving the fan for a bit to give it time to warm up. It was a cold night.

  As he drove out of the shed and down the track towards the road, he looked around. The night was as beautiful as a winter night can be. The birches cast a tangled calligraphy of moon-shadows across the white meadows, each branch a pen-stroke precisely marked. Every half-buried fence post wore a hat of snow, like a line of chefs at a royal banquet. With the moon almost full, only the strongest stars were visible, and a planet or two. He could have driven without headlights and still seen perfectly clearly.