I'm riding behind Nash again, gripping his waist as we drop into the transition zone between the mountains and the frozen wetlands, all hidden ravines and willow thickets whipping past my knees.
"Hold on!" Nash yells over the engine.
"Where are we going?" I shout back, my face pressed against his back to shield it from the wind.
"Riverbed!" he yells. "Open ice! We can make better time, put distance between us and the pack!"
The river will be a highway. Assuming, of course, that it's frozen solid.
We burst out of the trees onto the river ice, and Nash guns the throttle.
For ten minutes, we fly. I keep looking back for gray shapes loping in our wake and find only swirling snow and shadows.
Then I feel it.
A sudden, sickening lurch. The back of the snowmobile drops, the engine screaming as the track loses purchase, and then,crunch.
Nash slams on the brakes, but momentum is against us. The machine skids sideways, tilting dangerously. The sled behind us, the one carrying the heavy Pelican cases, the generator, and the satellite equipment, swings around like a pendulum.
It hits a patch of overflow, water that has seeped up through cracks and frozen into a slushy, treacherous soup, and breaks through the crust.
Before the secondary sled tips fully into the slush, Nash lunges across the lashings, rips the green ammo crate and the small orange emergency tool kit free of the cargo netting, and shoves them onto the firm ice behind us. The crate skids. The kit bounces. Both clear the hole with maybe a foot to spare.
The sled goes down. The hitch groans, metal screaming against metal.
"Off!" Nash roars. "Get off! Now!"
I scramble off the back, my boots slipping on the ice. Nash jumps clear just as the sinking sled drags the back of the snowmobile toward the dark, slushy hole.
"The hitch!" I scream. "It's pulling the machine in!"
Nash is already moving. He dives for the rear bumper of the snowmobile, grabbing it with both hands and digging his boots into the ice, trying to hold a thousand pounds of machine and gear against the relentless pull of gravity and water.
"Uncouple it!" he grunts, his face turning red with effort. "Aris! The pin! Pull the pin!"
I scramble toward the hitch. The sled is half-submerged in the thick, black water. The heavy cases are already underwater. If that sled goes, my research goes. The generator goes. So does our heat source.
But if I don't uncouple it, the snowmobile goes too. And then we're walking. In wolf country, at night.
I grab the hitch, but there's too much tension. The weight of the sled is pulling the coupling tight against the pin. I yank on it, but it won't budge.
"It's jammed!" I yell, panic rising in my throat.
"Kick it!" Nash shouts. He's slipping. The snowmobile is inching backward, dragging him with it toward the hole. "Aris, you have to cut it loose or we lose the machine!"
My mind races. Physics. It's just physics. Tension, torque, leverage.
If I kick the pin, it won't move. The drag coefficient is too high. I need leverage.
I look around frantically. Nothing but ice and … the shovel. It's strapped to the side of the sinking sled, the handle sticking up just above the surface.
I lunge for it, my hand plunging into the freezing muck. I grab the handle and rip it free.
"Aris!" Nash's voice is strained, desperate.
"Hold on!"
I jam the blade of the shovel between the snowmobile bumper and the sled tongue. I use the bumper as a pivot, throwing my entire body weight onto the handle to pry the weight off the pin.
