Snowhook by Jo Storm

She placed the bags in the cavity inside the sled, a small three-by-three-foot space with slats at the bottom instead of a solid seat so it would weigh less. Finally, she put in a camp stove and canisters of fuel, placing them in their own small canvas bag at the top of the emergency bag. She covered the sled with burlap and then stood in front of it, looking for any suspicious bumps that might give away her plan — but there were none. She slapped her hands together the way her mom did after a hard day’s work. She was ready to go and had everything she needed. She would be back and a hero before anyone even knew it. There was no way she could get into trouble.

Dinner was silent and quick. While Kelli and their mom were doing the dishes, Hannah grabbed the back-roads map and wrote the number of the pharmacy in Timmins on it. Everyone went to bed early.

Hannah waited in the dark that night after dinner until the cabin grew quiet with the sound of sleep and snow. She had volunteered to take the dogs out last thing and check on Nook and Rudy in the kennels. It gave her a chance to put collars on everyone, pull the sled off its hooks, and do a last check of the two big packsacks — the blue clothing bag and the black supply bag. The snow was falling thick and fast. On any other night she might have stopped to enjoy it, but tonight it was merely something she had to see through.

As she lay in the bed waiting for everyone to fall asleep, she went through a mental list of her equipment: the dogsled gear, her clothing, the first-aid kit, the knife, the camp stove and its fuel. She had everything she could possibly need.

Leaving the cabin was the easiest part. She crept to the door with her boots in hand, mitts and hat tucked in them already. Sencha, always curious, followed her, and Hannah opened the door and scooted the Dalmatian out, hoping she wouldn’t start whining before Hannah was outside, too. Bogey quietly followed her, his Labrador instinct to stick with the group kicking in. Hannah tucked her long underwear into her boots and slipped a folded note on the counter right beside the radio, where one of them was sure to see it. It said simply, “Back with a snowmobile soon.” She wanted it to be mysterious, although only Jeb’s place was close enough to get to in a short amount of time, so they’d be able to guess where she’d gone.

The only problem would be noise: as soon as the sled dogs saw a sled, they’d get tremendously excited, barking and jumping. Heart in throat, Hannah approached Nook and laid her hand across the old dog’s muzzle. “Quiet, now,” she commanded, then led Nook to the perimeter of the clearing, tying her off to a tree near the buried car. Then she went back and did the same with Rudy. Leaving the two dogs tied and the other two roaming, she crept to the back of the cabin and grabbed the sled, looping the gangline across her shoulders and pulling it as silently as she could across the clearing to where Nook and Rudy waited. The thick snow, still falling like a heavy sweater over everything, muffled most of the noise.

Hannah was surprised to find that neither Nook nor Rudy began barking when they saw the sled. Perhaps they were thrown by the odd sequence of events, as they were in the dark and not wearing their harnesses.

This part she had planned carefully while lying in bed. She did not put on the harnesses, but merely transferred the sled dogs’ leashes to the gangline so they would not run away. Then they all started out toward the road, Hannah balancing being pulled by the dogs with pulling the sled in a slow, measured way.

The driveway was buried in new snow up to her knees, and when they reached the road, Hannah was shocked at how the shape of it had almost totally disappeared; only a thin, treeless ribbon of white stretching out gave any indication that people travelled here. It looked like no one had been there in years, though it had only been a day.

At the end of the driveway, she stopped and set the brake by pressing it firmly into the packed snow and jumping up and down on it to make sure it would hold tight. As she sorted through the equipment, she ran through the sequence in her head. Nook and Rudy were her lead dogs; they would stand at the front of the line, before the wheel dogs, Sencha and Bogey. All four would be connected to the gangline, which ran straight from the middle of the front of the sled to the lead dogs. Each dog would be connected to the gangline by a tugline that ran from their harness to a clip on the main line. While Sencha and Bogey would also sport a neckline that attached each of their collars to the gangline, the lead dogs were attached to one another by a neckline that ran between the two dogs.

Hannah took a deep breath and laid out the gangline, put the harnesses on Nook and Rudy, and hooked them on. They stood still, used to it, but Bogey and Sencha were another matter. She got Bogey’s harness on, but it took a little while, as he didn’t know as well as the other dogs what to do. Finally, he was on the gangline. Then Hannah approached Sencha. The Dal slipped sideways, sensing the excitement that Hannah had been trying to keep down inside herself. The other dogs caught it as well, and Rudy began pacing — two steps left, whine, two steps right — tugging the gangline and the other dogs.

Hannah refused to be thwarted this close to the beginning of the trip, so she abandoned her effort to get Sencha into the harness, tossed it into the basket, and moved to the head of the sled. Sencha dodged in and out of the line, trying to get Bogey to play with her until Hannah’s go away motions made her scamper off to a snowbank.

“Line out!” Hannah whispered, and Nook and Rudy pulled to the end of the gangline, lifting it out of the snow so that it was taut, the sled and the dogs held by the brake digging into the snow. Bogey was pulled haphazardly into place by their movements. He and Sencha had pulled the sled several times before, but this was the first time they’d gotten out to the cabin this winter, and he wasn’t sure. He stood and half turned toward Hannah, his thick tongue hanging out of his mouth the way it did when he was thinking. Hannah pulled the snowhook out from the snow, stored it back on the sled, and then they started out, pulling slowly across the snow in the wan moonlight. Sencha’s spots were a bobbing beacon in front of them as she raced ahead down the road, queen of their rebellion.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hannah guessed that she would get to Jeb’s cabin by midmorning, lunch at the latest. She followed the thin ribbon of the empty back road until just past a tiny crooked bridge that was bookended by big, bulky shelves of snow with no trees. The rocky mantle of the Canadian Shield lay under everything like shin guards under socks; once the thin layer of soil had been scraped off, it shone hard and unyielding, no matter what the light was. The bush on either side had been trimmed back by surveyors who had come recently to see if there was any reason to mine the land, but still Hannah and the dogs had to skirt around downed trees across the road, thick with ice and leaving ugly, jagged stumps like broken fingernails at the forest edge.

Hannah stopped the team where the path was intersected by another, even thinner trail across the road — the bush trail for snowmobiles and ATVs. All the trails this far from Timmins had been made by locals, trappers and teenage boys who used them as a way to get into Timmins to get to work or the grocery store o

r the bar.

It was still dark. Hannah looked at her watch: 4:30 a.m. It would be several hours yet until her mother and sister found her note. She was tired, unused to being awake at this hour. It made her body feel odd, like it was floating. The snow fell on everything, so thick and heavy that it obscured the trail only a little past where the brush had been trimmed back. Hannah stood at the end of the bridge for a minute, allowing the last pieces of nervousness to wiggle around in her mind before gathering up Sencha’s harness from the basket.

“Sennnnncha!” she called.

The Dal approached, head down and tail wagging furiously. Sencha was always torn between being in the centre of things with the other dogs and doing her own thing. Hannah started putting her harness on, getting her front paws through easily, but having difficulty stretching the long X down the length of her spine, as Sencha was a serious wiggler. Finally, she got it on. The Dalmatian pulled away and twirled, trying to see what was weighted on her back, then sat in the snow to see if she could pull or scratch it off with her hind foot.

Hannah knew that of all the dogs, Sencha would be the most trouble. She had the least experience as she had only been on a gangline once, last year, and though she loved running, she had only run while pulling once.

Hannah rearranged her team, leaving Nook at the front and putting Sencha beside her, then placing Rudy behind Sencha as the wheel dog, with Bogey’s rough brown flanks and lolling tongue beside him. Rudy was like a larger version of Nook. He looked lean and lanky, but his chest was very long and tucked up sharply into a tapered belly and waist. His rounded breastbone reminded Hannah of an ice cream scoop.

Rudy lived for one thing: running. He would run all day, lie down, and get up and do it again, every day of the year. He and Nook still worked part-time on Pierre’s sled. Pierre was a trapper, and he used the sled to get to places that a snowmobile couldn’t — or to get there without a lot of noise — in Temagami. Her dad called Rudy and Nook “soft southern dogs,” as a joke, because Temagami was south of Timmins, even though it was still far to the north of Toronto.

Rudy and Bogey would pull most of the weight, and Nook and Sencha would ensure the sled kept moving at the right pace, making the wheel dogs’ job easier. Hannah was pretty sure that Nook would quickly show Sencha the ropes, but for now, Sencha would not be hooked to the gangline. She would run along beside with her harness on, learning; this was what the old mushers did with puppies or new dogs to get them used to one new thing at a time.

Hannah walked back and stepped onto the back of sled, on the long wooden runners that had a plastic strip screwed to them to give her boots something to grip. She called out the quiet “Hup!” that signalled the dogs to get ready. She had not run a dogsled by herself for a while. The last time had been a short race for kids when she was nine, five kilometres around a big snowbank, down a hill, and across a snowy beach to the finish line.

Nook and Rudy faced the trail, tails and heads low: a work pose. Bogey was looking back at her and Sencha was off on the other side of the road, sniffing at clumps of snow.

“Get up!” Hannah called, and Nook and Rudy pulled. Bogey, caught in the traces, stumbled and began to run, still looking over his shoulder at Hannah.

“Let’s go, Bogey, good boy, let’s go!” she called. But Bogey continued to look over his shoulder at her, and the line began to slacken on one side. Nook slowed down without looking back — waiting for whichever dog is being bad to figure it out, Hannah thought — but that made Bogey slow down even more.

“Come on, you stupid dog, get up!” Hannah half shouted, half whispered. But Bogey slowed down even more, convinced he was doing something wrong, since no one ever yelled unless he had done something wrong. The sled creaked to a stop.

“Stupid dogs!” Hannah hissed under her breath. It made her even angrier not being able to yell in case they heard it back at the cabin. But Bogey had never pulled a sled for long, and he did not take well to new things. In his mind, she imagined, he had just pulled for a long time and now he was done: perfectly acceptable behaviour.