Part 6
She understood it faster than he did, or maybe she’d been doing the math already while she worked on the bear. “Five people,” she said. “And her.”
“And her.”
“Then you go. Take him.” She pointed at the wounded man. “He needs a hospital more than any of us. I’ll stay with her and the others.”
“Four hours there and back, if nothing goes wrong. That fire’ll be ash in three.” He shook his head. “And you can’t drive a machine in the dark on river ice. You go off the trail and break through, nobody finds you till April.”
“Your boys won’t wait that long,” Rusk said thickly from the snow. “You think we came out here with just three? There’s more of us at the forks. You run, they’ll catch you on the river. You sit, they’ll be here before light.”
It might have been true. Probably it wasn’t. Amos couldn’t afford to bet either way.
“We all go,” he said. “Together. Now. River’s flat and the snow’s wind-packed. It’ll pull if we go slow.”
It took an hour to rig. The freight sled went behind the snowmachine with the three prisoners in it, lashed down, the wounded man in the middle where it was warmest, a pair of insulated bibs from Rusk’s cargo box spread over his legs. Behind that they dragged the bear on a tarp from the same cargo box, rolled her onto it by inches, both of them heaving, and tied the tarp to the freight sled’s tail with a length of rope doubled four times. Nora tucked her red parka around the bear’s chest and belly and tied it on with vet wrap. Then she stood there in her fleece with her arms wrapped around herself, and Amos took off his torn parka and put it over her shoulders without a word, and she let him.
He put her behind him on the seat. He wedged June’s bucket between his knees.
When he opened the throttle, the machine bogged and whined and the track spun, flinging snow back over the prisoners, and for a long moment nothing moved. Then something gave. The sled broke free of the snow it had settled into, and the tarp behind it slid, and they crept down the trail to the river at the speed of a man walking.
The river was worse than he’d hoped. The wind was coming straight down the valley now with nothing to stop it, and it cut through his wool shirt and long johns as though he were wearing nothing at all. He kept his face down. The headlight showed a cone of moving snow and, beyond it, nothing.
He knew this river. He knew that a few miles down, below the big bend, springs came up under the ice and pushed water out on top of it, under the snow, where you couldn’t see it. Overflow. In a cold snap like this one it froze from the top down, a thin crust of snow and slush over six inches of water sitting on solid ice. In daylight you could sometimes spot it by the color of the snow. At night there was no way to tell.
He swung wide toward the far bank where it usually ran shallower. It didn’t matter. A mile past the bend the machine lurched and the nose dropped and water sprayed up gray in the headlight, and the track churned and bit and sank, and the whole rig settled into slush to its running boards and stopped.
Amos was off the seat at once, knee-deep in water so cold it felt like being struck. He grabbed the handlebars and heaved. Nothing.
“Get off,” he told Nora. “Get to the snow, there. Higher. Don’t stand in the wet.”
He waded back to the freight sled. The slush was already starting to set around the runners. In twenty minutes it would freeze them solid to the ice, and the machine too, and then they would sit here until they all died.
He cut the lashings off the prisoners’ legs. He left their hands tied in front.
“Out,” he said. “Both of you that can walk.”
“Like hell,” Rusk said.
Amos put the muzzle of Rusk’s own rifle against his chest. “Get out and push, or freeze sitting there. Either one’s fine with me, Dale. I’ve had a long night.”
Rusk got out. Cody got out after him.
The wounded man struggled up onto one elbow in the sled. His face was gray. “Give me the tow rope,” he said. “I can’t push. I can keep her tarp from swinging into the wet.”
Amos looked at him for a second, then put the rope in his tied hands.
Then they pushed. Amos at the handlebars, gunning the engine. Rusk and Cody at the back of the sled, leaning their shoulders into the stanchions with their bound hands braced on the wood. Nora on the far side of the tarp, hauling with the wounded man, the two of them keeping the bear up out of the slush. They shoved and the machine rocked and the track threw a rooster tail of slush over all of them, and it didn’t move. They rested and shoved again. It slid a foot. Another. Amos swore at it, and Rusk swore at it, and they kept going, five of them together, enemies and strangers and one wrecked old man, grunting and slipping in the black water while the headlight swung back and forth across the snow.
The track found purchase on something hard. The machine leaped forward and up out of the slush, and the sled came after it with a sucking noise, and the tarp after that, and then they were on dry snow again with the overflow steaming behind them.
Amos’s legs were soaked to the knee and already stiffening. He knew what wet wool did at thirty below. He sat on the snow and pulled off his boots and wrung out his liners while Nora dug in her torn pack and came up with a pair of dry wool socks, rolled tight in a plastic bag. “For me,” she said, “if I fell in a creek.” He put them on. His toes had already gone past hurting into something wooden, and he didn’t like that, but there was nothing to be done about it here.
Wet clothes would kill the rest of them within the hour if they sat. Amos made Rusk and Cody walk beside the sled, holding on to it, to keep their blood moving. Nobody argued.
Nora walked beside the tarp. After a mile she stumbled. After another mile she stopped answering when he called back to her.
He killed the engine and went back. She was standing still beside the bear with her hand on the parka over its chest. Her face was blank. Her eyelashes were white. She was swaying.
“Nora.” He took her shoulders. “Nora. Look at me.”
“I’m fine,” she said, slurring. “I’m just going to sit down for a minute.”
“No, you’re not.” He pulled his mittens off and put his bare hands on her face. Her skin was like stone. “Talk to me. Tell me about the bear. Tell me what she needs.”
“She needs…” Her eyes wandered. “Surgery. Plates. Two plates. And somebody needs to check her temp…” She swayed again.
“Then you have to stay on your feet to check it.” He pulled her along by the wrist to the snowmachine and set her on the seat, pressed against the warm engine housing under the cowling, and made her put her hands on it. He wedged June’s bucket into her lap so she’d have something to hold. “You stay awake. You keep talking. You hear me?”
“Bossy,” she muttered. But her eyes came back a little.
He drove with one hand and kept the other behind him on her knee, squeezing it every few minutes until she swore at him. The sky to the southeast began, very faintly, to go from black to charcoal. Not dawn. Dawn wouldn’t come until nearly ten. But the first gray promise of it.
Then he heard the other sound. It came from the south, low and heavy and rhythmic, under the snowmachine’s whine. He let off the throttle and the machine coasted to a stop. A light swung across the sky above the trees, low and coming fast, straight up the river toward them. In the sled, Rusk lifted his head and started to laugh…
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