Snowhook by Jo Storm

She could see the dogsled and the dogs from where they were. Nook, Rudy, and Bogey were lying down, but Sencha was standing. Over the makeshift coat, her blue sled harness stood out from the monochrome of winter. When Hannah’s gaze drifted to her, Sencha’s tail wagged and she sat, watching.

Waiting.

Ready.

“Peter,” she said. He was still punching the snowmobile. “Peter!”

“What!” he snarled.

“We’ll keep going, okay? We’ll keep going to Timmins.” She could look past his stubbornness. And it was better to have two people together than two people alone. Anyway, she doubted they could break through those shutters.

“Hannah, we are not … going … to Timmins.”

“Why not? We’re almost there, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not. But we’re not going there. We’re going back.”

“Back? We can’t go back. Jeb —”

“We’re going back!” he said, pushing himself out of the seat and climbing off the snowmobile.

They couldn’t go back. It was two days out, and they were only one day from Timmins, she was sure of it. “Peter, we can’t! If we don’t go to Timmins, my mom could die!”

“Jeb has bullets!” he shouted back. “She’s sick, and she’s alone. Do you know what she could do to herself? She gets so scared, she once thought some snowmen at the park were the enemy … she wanted a gun so she could shoot at them! And nobody cares, nobody’s there to help her because my dad is too chickenshit to deal and the Army abandoned her. It’s just me and her. No. We’re going back. You can use the satellite phone. Or not, I don’t care.” He groped around for his discarded snowshoes.

He sounded so sure. As though he had already decided. As though it was always going to be this way, even if Jonny Swede had been there to help them. She remembered how reluctant he’d been to take the shirt and the gloves from her. It was because he had been planning to do this, to thwart her plans and do exactly as he wanted.

She looked at him accusingly. “All this time, you were planning to just go back. You lied.”

“Yeah, well so did you.”

“You knew I needed to get to Timmins!”

“You tried to act like you’d just let Jonny decide what was best, but the whole time you were planning to wheedle and nag him into doing what you wanted, weren’t you? Because you knew he’d side with me, with family.”

Hannah felt hot shame rush to her face. Peter was right; she had been planning to do just that. “My mom needs help! And he’s not your real family.”

“He is family,” snapped Peter. “Just because he’s not blood-related doesn’t mean he’s not family. He helps us because he wants to, not because he can get something out of it. He’s not like your goddamn family. He would have taken my side and you know it, so you were planning all along to screw me over and get what you wanted. You lied to me.”

Peter’s face was swathed in frost as he shouted, little pieces of it sticking to his scraggly facial hair and fogging his glasses. Off to their right, chickadees chirped in the bush, flitting around an empty bird feeder.

“Yeah?” she shouted back. “Well, I don’t need you, and I didn’t need this stupid machine, either,” she said, pushing ineffectually at the handlebar of the snowmobile, which she was still leaning on. “I’ll get there on my own, and you can freeze and die walking back because you’ll probably get lost since you’re too stupid to even know where you are!”

“I’m tired of you bossing me around and giving me free stuff like I’m some charity. Screw you, Hannah. My mom could die, Peter,” he mimicked. “Yeah, right. You wouldn’t know hard times if they slapped you in the face.” He threw the tarp haphazardly over the snowmobile and put his snowshoes back on.

She stood back, her fists clenched and her mood ugly. “You don’t have to slag off my mom just because you don’t have one!”

He’d finished putting his snowshoes on, and he stood up and looked at her. His eyes were dark and his lips white, his face twisted. “You’re just a snotty little city girl. Go to hell,” he said, starting back toward the sled, lifting his snowshoes high to cl

ear the snow.

She stared after him, so numb with shock and disappointment — they had worked so hard, and it had seemed so natural that they’d do what she thought best. Wasn’t she the leader? — that she could only watch as each of his snowshoes lifted, dripping snow, canted, then hit the snow again as he drove it angrily through the snowpack.

Eight, nine, ten steps, and then his right foot came up, dripped, canted, came down — but it did not hit flat. Instead, it bulged in the middle as the snowshoe hit something hard and solid, and Peter yelled, then leaned sideways, losing his balance. He fell on his side in the snow and grabbed his right leg with both hands.

Hannah fumbled with her snowshoes and stumbled over to where he lay. He had taken a glove off and was rocking back and forth, holding his leg. Beside him, the long spiky handle of an old hand plow stuck out of the snow, the shearing pin sticking up at an angle. His snowshoe dangled from his foot, and there was a jagged rip in the side of his pants, from his ankle to his knee. She could see that his foot had gone right through the sinew and lashing of the snowshoe, and the shearing pin had acted as a knife along one side of it and up Peter’s leg. The smell of fuel lingered, and she realized that, although they had cleaned the shoes as best they could, the spilled fuel had eaten through the webbing of his snowshoes. The resistant force of the plow coupled with his angry stomping had broken the webbing. His snowshoes were useless now.

“You idiot,” she said.