Snowhook by Jo Storm

“That’s what the radio guy was talking about. We have to beat that, Peter.”

He looked from the storm to her face. His glasses sat crookedly on his nose, and she realized they no longer fit because his face had lost some of its padding, making the glasses slide farther down. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “This is bullshit.”

“I know. I’m scared, too.”

She called up the dogs and they lined out. She walked to the head of the gangline and started breaking trail for the team. The wind died down, and for a while it was just the thick, heavy snow falling and the jagged rent of the approaching storm in the sky above the empty tree trunks, but it started up again as they approached a section where the trees thinned. She could see the storm had swung around so they were facing it full-on now. It crept across the sky, dark enough that it covered the whole section of sky in front of them like it was night. Around the edges of the massive system, a sickly green light leaked, changed on its course from the sun by the suffocating storm clouds.

They came out of the trees head-on into a wind that almost blew Hannah off her feet. The snow sang past her ears, keening and slicing, stinging her eyes. She swore that she would never again go outside without a pair of goggles in her pocket. The darkness was falling fast, and she could barely see three feet in front of her through the snow and lapsing light, but there was a large open area — another lake? — in front of them. For a moment, the snow arced away in the wind and fell against their backs instead of their faces, and she saw the snow in front of her being driven far past her feet and then down, straight down, a good ten feet …

Hannah yelled and windmilled her arms, almost falling back onto Nook’s head. The darkness of the storm ebbed, and for a moment the scene ahead of them was suddenly lit with a weak, greenish wash of sunlight.

They were at the lip of a pit. Down and down it went, cascading in layered tiers ten feet apart to a wide-bottomed pit ten times that depth. They had missed the snowmobile trail turning to the left to run parallel with the edge and had almost fallen into the pit.

Hannah grabbed Nook’s collar, even though the husky had not moved. The wind shifted, and like a million frozen hornets, the snow tore at her face again. She brought her scarf up over her nose and turned, leading Nook carefully away from the edge and back to where the trail curved along the side.

Once she had relocated the trail, she struggled back to where Peter lay huddled under the emergency blanket. The wind whipped the foil, cracking and ripping it and making it sound like a broken wind chime.

“What’s wrong?” he shouted over the howling of the storm. The snow was driving so hard that it was piling up on the front of the blanket, sliding off in clumps each time he moved.

It was no longer a storm, she realized. It was a blizzard.

“There’s a pit or something,” she shouted back.

He sat up straighter and looked to his right into the dark-grey air where the snow disappeared from sight.

“The quarry?”

“I don’t know, maybe. It’s huge.”

“Yeah, it’s the quarry. That’s good, we’re almost there! It’s just the quarry, then the lake, then Timmins! We can make it!”

The wind was making her eyes tear up, and it felt like the temperature was still dropping. She could feel her eyelashes gluing together at the outside edges as her tears froze almost immediately.

There was no way they could stop now; the top of the lip was like a ski ramp for the wind; it whistled up the side of the quarry and blasted past them, almost lifting her off her feet. Then, from behind them, blizzard gales would swipe, full-grown grizzly bear swipes, lashing and buffeting them. At any moment, they could get caught leaning the wrong way and go tumbling off the side.

“Get under the blanket, including your head, and try not to move!” She had to shout so loudly that her voice was getting hoarse. Peter nodded and slid down until his head and wounded leg were the only things not lying flat. He pulled the emergency blanket right over his head and left only a small opening for his mouth.

Hannah groped her way to the black packsack and rummaged blindly in it until she felt a piece of rope. All the dogs were standing with their backs hunched against the wind, tails tucked and heads close to the ground. She struggled to the front of the sled again, tied the rope to Nook’s collar, and started off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

One foot, then the other. Keeping the pit and the blizzard winds on her right, Hannah followed the trail around the rim of the quarry, rocked by the competing winds coming in from underneath and from the side and hemmed in by the thick undergrowth on the left.

She glanced back now and then to make sure everyone was okay. What she had thought of as darkness was, she saw now, just the sheer size of the storm. The dogs squinted against the wind so hard their eyes were almost shut, and they walked in a drunken zigzag, trying to keep up with the heaving of the sled as it rocked back and forth, buffeted by the wind.

The gusts were so strong now that the younger trees were almost completely bowed over. The trail they were following got thinner and thinner, until finally they were standing in front of a wind-bent wall of bush. Hannah cast her eyes around, lifting her scarf as high as it would go and shading her forehead with her mitt, trying to see through the snow.

The trail must go somewhere. It can’t just stop.

She swept her eyes al

ong the bush, looking for where the trail cut into it, but there was nothing but trees and shrubs and the occasional rock. She looked back down at her feet, then behind them a few metres, and she saw the tiniest of ridges on the edge of the lip, disappearing fast under the driving snow. She went back and looked more closely.

It was a trail that led down — down into the pit, the tiny edge following the pit wall on an angle.

The trail would have been tricky enough in broad daylight, with fresh dogs who knew what they were doing; but with an injured passenger in a blizzard on the edge of night, with her and the dogs dead tired and inexperienced, it was impossible.

She would have to lead the dogs down to make sure they didn’t miss the trail or capsize the sled. But someone needed to ride the brake as they descended, or the sled would run them all over.