Snowhook by Jo Storm

There was the sound of boots on the porch, and then the door slammed shut.

Hannah’s mouth was open. She realized she was panting. She was panting, and so, when she felt an arm under hers, jerking it upward, she slammed her mouth closed and bit her tongue, hard.

“Get up,” said Peter in an angry whisper. “Get up and get going!”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”

“Shut up and go,” he hissed, pushing Hannah forward roughly, “before she comes back and decides to shoot you or one of those bloody dogs.”

CHAPTER TEN

Going to die, Hannah thought, going to die, going to die. The whole world was silent under their stumbling feet, the snow stinging and blinding. It was like being buried alive, but in whiteness, and claustrophobia gripped at Hannah, making her want to scream.

But if she screamed, it might bring Jeb back out — Jeb with the gun, Jeb who could shoot the gun, shoot her or shoot the dogs or shoot Peter. So she didn’t scream. Instead, a whimpering sound came out with each short breath, ummh ummh ummh, as she followed Peter’s snowshoe tracks and his flailing arms. He was already almost out of sight, as his snowshoes kept him from sinking into the snow. He had run right past the dogs, ignoring them, and she started to follow, but then her feet stopped like they weren’t her own and she was turning, grabbing Nook, thanking everything in the world in that moment that she had not let Sencha or Bogey off, that they were all still ganged. She bent low over Nook’s head and hissed, “Get up, Nook, get up, GO!” and pushed the husky past her, around the wide snowmobile track that looped back to the main trail. The dogs picked up her fear and pulled hard, their bodies bunching up into an upside-down U and then pushing forward powerfully — but the snowhook held the sled fast and they couldn’t go anywhere, straining and barking. Hannah stumbled to the back of the sled, grabbed the snowhook, and pulled it up, nearly falling as the pulling dogs suddenly gained traction and the sled shot forward.

The snowhook ripped out of her hand, falling to the ground and trailing after them, and she grabbed wildly for the handlebars, twisting her wrist and fighting for a grip on the ash wood. One foot, then two on the runners — the sled creaked and groaned under the torque, but even that was muffled under the constant onslaught of snow.

She reached Peter and flew by him. His jacket was still open and he had his head down now, running awkwardly through the snowstorm. The team rounded the first corner into a more open area; the trees were several feet away on either side. The snow began to smack hard into her face, driven into her eyes by her speed and by the wind. They spun round the corner, back onto the track they had come in on, then shot down the hill to the main trail, Nook turning the team so quickly that the sled almost slid off the track.

Hannah fought the urge to keep going. It was in the dogs, she could feel it. It was in her: panic and anger. Everything in her body screamed run!, but she wouldn’t run — she couldn’t leave Peter. The snowhook, not in its usual holder, bounced up and hit the back of her leg, point first, ripping a hole in her thick pants and making her wince. She tried to reach down and grab it, step on the brake, and keep the sled upright all at the same time.

“Whoa whoa whooooaaaaa,” she cried.

The sled slowed, and she pressed the brake harder, still wrestling with the urge to let up, to go until they were far away from all this mess, back at her family’s cabin, in front of the fire, listening to Kelli talk about mushrooms and wood elves while her mom showed her how to mend holes in socks. But she couldn’t go back, and the cold wash of concern about her mom stiffened Hannah’s leg, and the sled came to a stop.

Tentatively, she got off the runners and checked the back of her leg, which was stinging and throbbing. It looked like the snowhook had not gone through anything besides her clothing. Still, she would need to close that hole soon. She could already feel the winter air seeping in, and it was only barely cold enough to make her breath fog.

She looked up as Peter came huffing up, his coat still open and his face closed and grim. He slowed as he neared the sled, stopping well away from it, then bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping.

“Is she going to come here?” asked Hannah, straining to look behind him through the snow.

“No,” said Peter between gasps. “She stays at the house.”

Hannah hardly thought that the dingy, smoke-infused one-room cabin qualified as a “house.” The wood stove there leaked, unlike the one Hannah’s family had. Every year the Williamses cleared the creosote and nesting birds out of the chimney and re-lined the glass door with special thick rope so that it didn’t suck in air from the front. Jeb’s stove was old and had no glass door, and the handle was homemade, thick metal welded directly onto the metal door. It got so hot that you had to put on oven mitts to open it, and all the oven mitts in Jeb’s house had long, streaky burn marks where they stayed in contact with burning logs or the side of the stove. The top two feet of the cabin were coated in a black, sooty ring, and it stank of cigarette smoke and green kindling.

Peter stood up and came a bit nearer, taking off his mitts and wiping his face of sweat and snow. Even the sound of his breathing was muted as the snow continued to fall. Suddenly, the press of all that precipitation began to weigh on Hannah. The silence was like an accusing stare; the sweat trickling down her back reminded her of the sensation of snow melting down the backs of her hands as she’d lain face down in the snow like a coward. Was that what Peter was thinking as he stared at her, still standing away from her? Why did the satellite phone have to be in Jeb’s cabin? It was all so stupid and unfair. And what was wrong with Jeb? Hannah could not understand what had happened. She had never seen an adult act that way, not even the homeless people by the Beer Store at the end of their street in Toronto. Jeb had taken all the rules and thrown them out, and now Hannah didn’t know what to do.

“She won’t follow us,” repeated Peter. “She’ll stay in the cabin and try to call people to report us. The guys on the radio, they know what to do when she’s like this.”

“She’s freaking me out!” yelled Hannah, not meaning to shout.

“Shut up!” Peter shouted back. He took a quick step toward her and shoved her, his palm pushing against the centre of her chest, and she fell back into the snow again. The fall didn’t knock the breath out of her as the butt of the rifle had, but it was in the same spot and it hurt, it hurt a lot. Hannah sagged back to the ground, curled on her side with the snow pattering down. Then she was crying, and she cursed the crying, but she couldn’t stop. The tears were useless — just wasted water, wasted time.

Peter stood above her for a few moments, then moved a few feet over to the side of the trail and looked back toward the house. Blurrily, Hannah could see him clenching his hands into fists and uncle

nching them. He stared up the hill a long time doing that, then finally threw them up in the air in a strange angry gesture and swore loudly.

It was not a word that Hannah had ever heard him use before, and it shocked her so much she stopped crying. Peter was sixteen, and he was on the local hockey team, so she imagined he swore all the time; the boys on the hockey team at her school swore even more than the football guys. Some of the girls on her volleyball team swore when they were rotated out too soon or they missed a block or they didn’t play at the start of a game. But they seemed like kids trying things on compared to Peter just now. When Peter swore, it meant something.

As soon as she stopped crying, Hannah felt stupid about it. She turned her face away from Peter even though he wasn’t looking at her and wiped the tears away with her gloved hand. The dogs whined, but they all seemed okay. Nook and Sencha were standing, and Rudy, too, but Bogey sat. Sencha, when she saw Hannah look at her, began wagging her tail rapidly.

Peter turned and looked at her. “Look … I.” He paused. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Then get up. I know where we can go.”

“What do you mean?” asked Hannah.