“And long guns,” Katie said.
“Uncle of mine was a buffalo hunter,” Ellie told them. “Trained animals, some of the time. Used to go after those big white bears up north.”
“Polar bears.” Ryan nodded. “Seen some of them. Swift and evil bastards.”
“Big, huh? Uncle Jack used to trek north, way up past the Canada line. Spent most of his life there. Died up there. Damnedest thing.”
“How?” Ryan asked.
“Let’s crack open a bottle of vino pinko I been saving, and I’ll tell you.”
“Better keep a lookout behind,” J.B. warned. “Least from here we can see miles south. No sign yet of anyone driving out after us.”
Nell was picking at a loose thread of pretty silk on the hilt of one of her knives. “I reckon that they had too many chilled to be eager to come running after us.”
Ryan disagreed. “Not sure about that. I’ve known a posse of fifty men chase for five hundred miles over a misunderstanding about a woman’s honor. There were a lot of corpses to be buried back in the ville.”
They sat in a circle, and Ellie passed the bottle around. The wine was the most delicate shade of pink, much closer to being clear than to red, with a subtle taste of sunlight on a summer meadow.
“Your Uncle Jack?” J.B. prompted. “Said he died strange up north.”
She wiped her mouth, licking her full lips and smiling directly at Ryan, “Yeah. Unlucky, you could say.”
JACK KISSOON HAD BEEN hunting with a partner, which was where the first part of the story came from. They’d been after a big white bear, a loner with an old shoulder wound that gave him distinctive tracks as well as a vile temper. The animal had taken refuge from the two men in the ruins of an old copper mine, up in the Canadian tundra, in the middle of winter.
Jack had been ill. Some kind of fever that was making him sweat, his body literally steaming in the biting cold of fifty below, the kind of cold where the line between living and dying was thinner than in most places. Illness wasn’t that uncommon up there. There were plenty of triple-red hot spots from a radar defense line before skydark.
The two men had agreed to split up while tracking the bear, which was where the rest of the tale turned into supposition and deduction.
“Frank Tunstall, Uncle Jack’s partner, skirted around the edge of the old workings, trying to head the animal off before he went clean on through and vanished into the badlands beyond. It started to snow and turned into a full whiteout in less than five minutes. Frank and Jack were both old hands and knew that you didn’t last long at that sort of temperature in the middle of a blizzard. There was no time to light a fire.”
Frank had found shelter in a hut that had once stored dynamite. Thick walls and a stout roof and a solid door. No windows to let the chill factor in.
He’d curled up to wait out the storm.
It had taken the rest of the day and the whole night and right through past noon the following day.
“Frank finally opened the door. Not easy with a lot of snow piled against it. No sign of the bear, and no sign of Uncle Jack, either. So he started to scout around. Plenty of places that his hunting partner might have tucked up against the blizzard. It took nearly three hours before he found him. He was dead.”
Frank found that Jack had crawled into a narrow drainage pipe with a constricted opening. It was just large enough to contain his body if he stretched out, but it kept off the murderous wind and the heavy fall of snow.
What Jack hadn’t reckoned on was what would happen when his sweat began to condense on the cold plastic of the pipe’s ulterior. It formed a layer of ice, which grew thicker as the storm raged on when Jack had most likely fallen asleep.
His breath and his perspiration made the pipe grow ever tighter and tighter as the sheathing of clear ice became thicker and thicker.