Snowhook by Jo Storm

She looked up the length of his woollen pants and saw that his leg was bleeding; the blood was darkening the blue wool to black in a slow stain near his knee that curled over itself like a hook.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Peter rocked back and forth, still trying to hold his leg, but every time he touched it, he winced and moved his hand away. He was swearing, his face contorted in pain.

Hannah looked up. They were about twenty feet from the dogs. She took off her gloves and knelt down. “Let me see,” she said. He tried to clasp his leg again. She pushed his hand away and peeled back the torn fabric.

For a moment she fought the urge to gag. A long, shallow gash had opened the back of Peter’s leg, right below his knee, from his ankle up. The flap of skin hanging off it was twice as long as Hannah’s hand, and the wound was partially hidden by his socks, now soaked in blood.

She turned away and walked to the side of the shuttered house, gasping. It was suddenly hard to see as the sun came out, reflecting off the snow crystals and making her eyes water. Once again, she cursed herself for forgetting her goggles. She stared at the dark, stout poplar trunks until her eyes adjusted and she’d stopped crying, and by then she had a plan.

She couldn’t close the skin with a needle and thread because Peter had used the last of the thread fixing her glove — and she had no idea how to do that, anyway. Instead, she could use strips of clothing and whatever was in the first-aid kit to bind the wound until they could get help. She went back to Peter.

“What is it? Is it bad?” Peter said. He stopped his rocking motion, but his voice betrayed the agony he was in. He was still on his side with one arm underneath him, and the deep snow prevented him from twisting to see his leg.

“It’s going to be okay,” Hannah said.

There was a lot of blood. The smell was like blackflies in her nose, sharp and biting. She tried not to worry too much about how much blood he was losing, though it was probably more than was good for him. She pulled the torn flaps of his blood-soaked pants wide and used snow to clear off what she could. Peter clenched his teeth and hissed and swore.

“Stay here, and don’t touch it,” she said. He continued rocking as she went to the sled, pulled out the emergency kit and, from it, the first-aid box.

When she returned to his side, he’d propped himself up, one hand packing down the snow beneath him. He was staring at his leg in disbelief.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Hey, lie down.” She put the first-aid kit down next to him.

“Jesus, look at it,” he said, his voice tight. His movements had brought a fresh gush of blood out of the wound, and it dripped down onto the snow under his leg.

“Stop moving, okay? I need to wrap it.”

She stood up, removed her coat, and laid it open on the snow. She placed the first-aid kit on its still-warm surface. She would need freedom of movement to bandage the wound.

“Rest, ice, compression, elevate,” Hannah recited. She had learned this in gym class. She said it out loud to calm herself and to let Peter know what was happening. Had she been in his place, she’d have felt better if the person helping her spoke as though they knew exactly what to do.

Peter nodded, and Hannah felt a small measure of relief. She went back to studying the ragged gash on his leg while taking out gauze, ointment, and sterile pads.

The wound could not be elevated, and she didn’t think that ice was the best idea since they were outdoors, but she could apply compression. The first problem was what to do about his clothing: should she keep it on against the cold, or remove it? Pulling back the flaps of the cut pants as wide as they would go, she considered. She could remove his pants — but she rejected that idea almost immediately. He had no spare pants, and it would be too much exposure of skin in the winter. She decided that the blood-speckled pants, even wet, would be warmer than nothing. She went back to the sled, grabbed some spare clothing, and used it to pad around the wound so that any blood would soak into the clothing, not his pants.

His boot was another thing: there was nothing to do but try to get it off.

“Go back, we have to go back. We have to go back, Hannah,” he said, and she could hear sheer panic in his voice; it sounded just like hers had after they’d run from Jeb. His body was reacting to the fear with the urge to do something.

“Just lie still,” she said.

He lay down, his teeth chattering, his glasses pushing across his nose from the awkward position. She took them off his face.

“Put these in your pocket, okay? You won’t need them for a bit.”

“Just hurry up so we can goddamn well get back.”

“Stop swearing,” she said. “It’s not helping us, and it’s just using up energy.”

He grunted, clenched his arms around himself in a bear hug, and started rocking again. Every now and then he would lift his head to try to see what she was doing.

Hannah grabbed a gauze pad and the disinfectant and started cleaning the wound, in her mind trying to figure out how to say the obvious to him: there was no way to turn around now, what with the empty trail, the flooded shortcut, and the storm behind them. She also had no idea how much farther it was to Timmins, but she figured it was at least another day, especially if Peter had to ride in the sled, with the dogs breaking trail. She also had no idea how bad Peter’s injury was, but it looked really bad. And they had only enough food for that day.

The panic pushed through her arm and she accidentally pushed Peter’s wound hard with the gauze. Peter groaned and twitched his leg away. Frustration and fear spread through Hannah’s body, and she began to cry. Thinking of the wastefulness of her tears — now she’d have to drink more, which meant getting a stomach ache from the barely unfrozen water — made her feel even worse, and the tears just kept coming.