Snowhook by Jo Storm

Impossible.

But it can’t be impossible, can it? she thought. Because we’re going to do it. She thought of ways to make it work. She could cut a gee pole — a long pole lashed to the sled so she could walk in front of it, steering and acting as a brake. That wouldn’t work, though; the sled was too heavy and would be on an angle. She could unhook the dogs and pull the empty sled down, then go back and get Peter, but the snow and the wind made it impossible to see anything. She was scared that if she left something or someone alone, they’d get lost. No, it was better to keep everyone together. After a few more minutes of brainstorming, Hannah had a plan.

The path down was not straight, but canted, so if she didn’t steer or brake the sled, it would begin to slide downhill sideways, eventually capsizing, or worse, falling off the ledge. She went back and untied Peter’s remaining snowshoe from the back of the sled, then wedged it between the basket and the brushbow, with the curved end pointed toward the dogs.

“Use it on this side,” she said to Peter, pointing to his left-hand side. “Push down.” She still had to shout to be heard over the wind.

Peter nodded, understanding what she wanted: an additional brake that dug into the hill, keeping them from tipping over. He moved the snowshoe to the far left of the space and grabbed on with two hands, using his good leg for leverage against the brushbow.

Hannah went to the front of the sled and bent over Nook’s head.

“Easy, Nook, easy and slow,” she said, rubbing the husky’s flanks.

Back behind the sled, she took off her snowshoes and slung them over her back, got the brake ready, and shouted, “Huphup, eeeeeasy now!”

The sled moved forward over the lip of the quarry and down the steep slope to the next tier. Peter dug his snowshoe into the side of the bank, using it like a rudder to keep them more or less straight, and down they went. Hannah kept one foot on the drag mat and the other on the brake, using the drag mat to steer and the brake to slow them down.

The sled tilted and slid, and the dogs hustled to the uphill side of the trail to compensate, straining almost perpendicular to the trail. The wind rushed in again and blew them all toward the wall of the pit, and Hannah’s foot slipped off the brake for a moment. The sled shot forward. The gangline slackened suddenly and the dogs stumbled. The sled slid hard toward the side of the ledge.

“Hurry, huphup!” shouted Hannah, getting back on the brake. The dogs responded, pulling hard, and with their force, Hannah’s drag mat steering, and Peter’s leverage, they evened the sled out onto the trail.

It was only a hundred feet, but it felt like a hundred miles. The ledge loomed whenever the sled skidded too far, and Hannah’s heart slammed in her throat. If they went over it, they were all done. She could see Peter’s shoulder straining to keep the snowshoe brake in place against the incline, and the dogs scrambled and heaved and panted, digging through the snowbanks that the blizzard was piling up.

Finally, they were down to the next ledge and the trail flattened out again. Hannah couldn’t tell where they were in the quarry, but the ledge afforded them some relief from the wind.

She reached out a hand to her right, the pit side of the shelf. Her mitt was caught immediately by the up-rushing wind, which lifted her entire arm over her head, and she drew it back, her heart thudding. It was like they were in a bubble, and outside the bubble, the wind and the cold and the snow — winter — wanted to end them.

She stopped the team, grabbed the snowhook, and stumbled off the runners. There was nowhere to tie off to, just the smooth, endless expanse of the shelf running away from them. She set the snowhook as close to the pit wall as she could; if the sled somehow got caught in the wind and was dragged over the side, the snowhook would stop it from falling all the way to the bottom.

She hoped.

Peter sat up, rubbing his right shoulder with his left hand.

“What are we doing?” he shouted. They didn’t have to scream anymore, as they had at the top of the quarry, but he did still have to raise his voice to be heard, and if she went more than four feet away from him, she would lose sight of him in the swirling, stinging snow.

“We have to stop,” she yelled back. “We almost fell off the edge, I can’t see anything, and the dogs are exhausted.”

“We’re so close!”

“I know.”

“We could keep going,” he said. He sounded angry. “I don’t want to stop!”

He half rose from his seat, grimacing and starting to sound off some more, when the wind suddenly shifted. It was like Hannah had touched one of those static electricity generators they had at science fairs; beneath all the layers of clothing, she felt the hair on her arms lift as the space around them turned into a momentary vacuum, sucking everything upward, and then the blizzard was upon them, knocking Hannah off her feet, the dogs sideways against the quarry wall, and Peter back against the basket.

She struggled upright, hanging on to the bucking sled’s sides. The dogs were pressed in a single line against the side of the shelf. Sencha was keening, trying to get behind Nook, and Bogey’s eyes were wide with terror. Rudy and Nook pressed as close to the wall as possible, their paws splayed, their heads bowed as they metaphorically gritted their teeth.

“We’re stopping!” she yelled. Peter, gasping and holding his leg, agreed.

“Don’t get out,” she continued, “I need you to hold down the sled, okay? I need the weight. Don’t move.”

He nodded, and she crawled forward to get out the tent.

Setting it up was almost impossible. Four times, she put the poles in place and tried to spring them up to form the tent roof, and each time, the wind ripped one section or another from its mooring, or it pulled up the tent pegs, or it blinded her with snow. Each time, the tent ended up flapping in the wind like a handkerchief hung out the window of a car going at high speed.

Finally, the wind shifted. Again, it felt as though someone had turned on a vacuum over top of them, sucking up all the air. She had better luck then and eventually got the tent up and the fly over it. She pulled the two packsacks out and stuffed them into the vestibule, packing them up against the tent wall to keep out the wind and anchor the tent, however weakly.

Hannah could no longer feel her fingers, and her nose alternated between stinging and numb. The wind pushed and pulled at her clothing like teeth, snapping on the flapping hood that kept getting blown off her head. Her legs felt like lead again, lead bars that she had to lift and drag around. Her neck was sore from the constant shifting to keep it straight in the conflicting winds, and her arms burned from setting the poles upright over and over while she’d tried and failed to get the tent up.