“He’ll be a lot better if Steve gets here. You sure you’re not spoofing me about that?”
Bunny shook her head slowly. “I don’t do that kind of trick, Diego. None of us would.”
She left then. Diego watched her drive off in the snocle, wondering how a girl got the chance to drive one of the few decent vehicles on this iceberg. Maybe when Steve got here … He wouldn’t let himself count on that. Not that he still thought Bunny would lie to him: Why should she? Why would she? But maybe it wouldn’t be as easy as she thought. Maybe Giancarlo wouldn’t let Fiske send for Steve. He liked Bunny, but she hadn’t been around company crews like he had-she couldn’t know how untrustworthy people could be, how unreasonable. She sure was a funny girl. And she really seemed to like this place.
Chapter 8
A scratch on the door heralded Sinead’s arrival at some O-dark-hundred hour. Yana was on her feet instantly and opened the door, dancing about on tiptoe as the cold of the floor ate through her bedsocks.
“I’ll stir the stove,” Sinead said, loosening her outer garments. “You’ll need something warm in your belly today. Sometimes I think it’s colder just before spring than it is midwinter. Good day to check the traplines though.”
As she busied herself, pouring water from the thermos into a pot to heat, shaking down the ash from the embers, Yana inserted herself into the layers she felt she would need on this expedition.
“Wha … arrrre … we trapping?” she asked, her teeth chattering. She wondered that everyone in Kilcoole seemed to have whole teeth. She was certain one morning her front ones would crack off.
“Whatever’s willing,” Sinead said with a droll grin.
“Which leaves me no wiser.”
“It’s a good time to see what’s available,” Sinead repeated. “The time of year when some are more happy to die than live.”
“How can you tell which is which?”
“You’ll see. Here, drink this!”
Yana was quite willing to, cradling the cup in her hands and occasionally, carefully, holding it close to her cheeks to warm her cold face. As carefully as she wrapped her quilts about her prior to falling asleep, her face insisted on being out in the open, and was always cold in the morning.
Sinead had made a single serving of porridge, as well. “Aisling fed me,” she said with a grin. “Can’t get out of the house in the morning without being stuffed.”
Yana grinned back, for a moment envious of Sinead, who had a caring partner who saw to her comfort. Then, warmed by the hearty meal, she was ready to go. Sinead had damped down the energetic blaze so that there would be coal to start up again when Yana returned. Clodagh’s cat went out with them and whisked away on some business of its own.
“D’you have one like that?” Yana asked Sinead as she settled in the sled.
Sinead gave a snort. “No one has Clodagh’s cats. They have you.”
Yana agreed heartily and pulled the fur up to her face just as Sinead shouted to her lead dog, a big shaggy brindled female she had named Alice B.
There was no one else about as the dogs pulled the sled quickly down the main track of Kilcoole, though some houses showed lights. They were soon out into the forest, and Sinead urged her team to the left, down a long slope and then onto a wide expanse of white. Here and there Yana saw what looked to be the tops of square fence posts jutting up from their winter blanket and wondered if this was where the village grew its crops in the short summer season.
When she saw the leaders suddenly drop off into nothing, she just had time to take a firmer hold on the driving bow before the sled abruptly nose-dived down the steep slope.
They crashed past more of the spired vegetation she had seen on her first ride on Petaybee; then the surface became smooth again. Another one of Petaybee’s many rivers? As they then traveled up a slope on the other side, she decided her notion was correct. Frozen bushes shortly gave way to trees, growing thicker as they progressed along the trail Sinead was following. The track led slightly uphill and then dipped downward again, across another clearing and into more forest, with Sinead pulling ever left, toward the slowly brightening eastern sky.