“I’m willing,” Yana said firmly. “And thanks, Clodagh. I really appreciate all your help.”
“Pshaw! You’ll do the same in your own turn. Ippies stick together, cocking a snoot at the company for all they’re so superior!”
With that she swung her ample bulk about with unexpected grace and was out the door before Yana could say more.
Chapter 6
The wind roared down the pass from the mountains, through the foothills, and across the snowy plain that hid treacherous muskeg, rattling the snocle with bullying gusts. Bunny sat inside in full outdoor dress, watching the big shots prowl around and point as if they knew what they were doing.
They didn’t. Even after they hauled Siggy’s team back out here, way before the team had had a chance to recover from their ordeal, they knew no more than they had before. Of course, being stupid ips, Siggy and the others had no idea what the technical readings actually said, but this was where the storm swept down upon them, losing both ips and company men in a whiteout. Bunny had been in whiteout conditions herself several times along the river with the snocle and going back and forth between Scan’s place and Kilcoole. White snowy ground underfoot, white sky overhead, and white haze and snowfall obscuring any other features of the surroundings, whiteout was disorienting and dangerous. It was a little like she’d heard space described, only white instead of black.
You could either keep driving, if you knew your trail, and hope you’d come out on the other side or find a landmark, or you just stopped and waited it out. The sensible thing to do, this far from any villages, would have been to bed the dogs down and wait it out, but the geologists had brought a lot of equipment and only allowed space for as much food as they felt they would need on the strict timetable they had set for themselves.
Lavelle told the company men, “We said, ‘You better stop here until we can see something’ but they said, ‘Aw, no, we’ll just be usin’ our instruments.’ Only problem was, their instruments broke ‘cause of the cold.”
The company men insisted that the instruments had been made for this climate and that it was impossible that they would break, and Lavelle had just shrugged. Thereafter she didn’t know much except that the sleds had gotten separated, and the other three had been lost, drivers, dogs, geologists, equipment, food, and all. She had been driving the sled with the boy in it, so she had had room for a few more supplies. Brit had been driving the sled with the father, with Siggy running between them to keep them connected, as he had tried to do with the other sleds before they got lost back up to Moose Lake. Maybe they hit a thin patch of ice. Then, as they were coming down a pretty steep slope, the sleds overturned and both passengers were thrown out of the sleds, to roll down the hill and vanish.
“Didn’t you think it was a little strange, them just vanishing like that?”
“No. What I thought was strange was that they couldn’t find us. We were hollering like everything and the dogs were barking. Brit wanted to start searching, thinking maybe they were knocked unconscious, and we did look around where they should have logically been. But when we didn’t find any holes or anything, Siggy said the safest thing to do for everybody was stay put, light a fire, keep warm, and make noises all the time while the whiteout lasted.”
‘Trying to save your own skins, huh?” asked Colonel Giancarlo, the one who had sent Charlie away.
“No, no,” said a younger captain with a handsome weather-beaten face and a much pleasanter manner. “Very understandable,” he said soothingly to Lavelle, who had started to bristle. “What happened then?”
Lavelle looked straight at the colonel and said, “Then the weather cleared a little and Dinah kept whimpering, so I unhitched her. She run off and pretty soon we heard her howling; then she came trotting back with the boy. He said she dug through a drift to get him but his father was hurt and could we come and help him pull his father out. He got trapped in sort of a little avalanche, but fortunately, there was a cave in the side of the hill where he was trapped. They made it to the cave, but the snow blew back against the entrance again and it was real dark. The boy said he knew we wouldn’t find them there but it was shelter and he’d been afraid to leave for help for fear he wouldn’t find him again. He’d called out but we didn’t hear each other for the wind.”