Snowhook by Jo Storm

“I need something to cover Sencha,” she said. She held the shivering Dal around the barrel of her torso, hoping to warm her up.

“Well, I don’t have anything,” he said.

She gritted her teeth. “In the blue bag, get a sweater or something,” she said.

“Get it yourself,” he replied. “I’m making a fire.” He turned and headed for the copse and began to gather twigs from the thin branches that had broken under the weight of ice or feeding deer.

“We don’t need a fire, idiot!” she shouted after him. “We need to get the tent up, and we need to get Sencha warm!”

Peter ignored her, his pockets full of twigs as he moved under the larger maples and started to dig up the snow, searching for branches. There was a downed maple, a huge dead tree with the branches of one side sticking up out of the snow like liquorice — they were black from the rain and from weathering. Peter pulled off a few of the underside branches that were still dry and walked back. He crouched down in the snow. “You always make a fire,” he said, as if he were standing in front of a classroom. He took out a steel lighter from his inside pocket and made a hollow in the snow between the sled and where Hannah was bent over Sencha. “That’s the first thing. You always make a fire.”

Hannah gave up and went to the sled. The darkness was dropping rapidly now, and when she lifted the heavy tarp that was lashed over everything in the basket, she could barely distinguish between the blue bag of clothes and the black bag that held the food, the tent, and her sleeping bag. She opened the blue bag and grabbed the first thing that looked big enough — a wool sweater her father’s sister had knitted her — and untied some more rope. She returned to the miserable Dal and wrapped the sweater around her, securing it with the rope.

Hannah stood and surveyed her surroundings. She knew that the best place to pitch a tent was close to a rock to keep off the wind, but the closest rocks she had seen on the way there were now lost in the darkness and could not easily be reached.

She realized now that many of the skills she knew — how to collect water, how to signal a plane, how to light a fire without matches — were not helpful for their situation. They’re summer skills, she thought, and she laughed to herself, thinking how much easier everything would have been if it had been summer, and then she laughed at how ridiculous that thought was. It was pretty funny, for sure, to wish you had been chased by a gun-wielding woman and then gotten stuck out in the forest in the summer instead of in the winter.

Summer skills, she thought — all that moving around freely without thinking twice about it. The ground was a friend, the sun was a friend. She thought with sudden intensity about how long the sun was out during the summer. It felt like winter hated the sun, only tolerating it for little bits of time. Winter hated the ground, too; everything took five times as long to do as it did in the summer. Her shoulders and arms were burning from hanging on to the sled and she was starving.

She looked one way down the trail, then the other. They had come gently downhill and were at the bottom of what looked like a shallow depression. Up the trail, the land rose just as gently and disappeared into night and trees.

She decided to set up

the tent right there on the edge of the trail, close enough that if a snowmobile did happen to come by, it would see them, but not so close that it would run them over. She shoved the faint hope of rescue aside.

Before setting up the tent, though, she had to feed the dogs. She grabbed a container of food. It was slightly thawed from the higher temperature the rain had brought, though mostly still frozen. This time, she didn’t try to warm the food, but just threw some at each dog. There were no complaints. The dogs pounced and grabbed, then settled down to ripping and tearing the pieces of food.

After she’d made sure there wouldn’t be any fighting between Bogey and Rudy, the two males — although if anything did happen, she knew Nook would sort it out — she hauled out the tent.

Ten pounds of poles, fabric, and bungee cords. After tamping down the snow to make a flatter, drier surface, she set out the thick waterproof pad that the tent sat on, protected from the snow. Then she pulled out the tent itself — by then she could no longer see it in the darkness, so she had to stop and dig through the supply bag to get the tiny lantern that could throw some light on the area where she was working.

Throughout this, Peter sat on his haunches, trying to start a fire. The smoke sometimes drifted over to her, but more often it just hunkered in place under the control of the rain until the entire area stank.

Hannah rubbed her eyes to try to get the smoke’s sting out of them and unrolled the tent and laid out the poles. The tent sat on the pad, and she slid the supple bungee-corded poles through the two long loops on the tent, secured them into eyehooks on one side, then went over to the other side and pulled the tent up to secure the other two hooks. She threw the fly over that. Its thicker material slid easily over the already wet poles. She secured the fly to the tent bottom.

Thankfully, the tent had a large vestibule, like a tiny room before the zippered inner door. This meant they could keep all the gear in one place and nearby if they needed it in the night. It was truly dark now, the clouds still low and threatening. The rain was letting up, at least, but the temperature was dropping very quickly. From where she was stationed at the tree, Sencha whined softly.

Hannah dragged out her sleeping bag and threw it into the tent. Peter, now nursing a small smoking fire that was really more like a badly lit candle, dragged his sleeping bag over and tossed it into the tent, too.

“There’s a stove,” said Hannah. “It’s in the black bag. There’s food in there, too.”

Peter walked to the sled and, keeping as far away from the dogs as possible, leaned in to look through the bags. He took out the bag that held the stove and fuel and food.

“I don’t see the stove.”

“That’s it, in your hand,” she replied.

Peter opened the small black bag in his hands and tipped the contents out over the snow. “Be careful!” Hannah snapped. “It’s not a toy.”

“How is this a stove?” he asked.

Hannah looked at him. She had assumed he would know what to do with it. But she remembered now that when her family and Peter’s had gone camping together when they were both younger, Peter’s father had always cooked on a fire and laughed at her dad, who used a camp stove.

“There’s some energy bars in the other bag,” she said. “Get those instead.”

Peter shoved the stove and all its elements back into the bag before standing up. “Where’s the water?” he asked, and she gritted her teeth at how, again, he said it as though he didn’t expect she would have an answer.

“There’s a bottle with the bars and one on the sled.”