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Then there was a short, sharp sound that was muffled but had enough force to tear through the empty air between the snow and prick against their eardrums. A gunshot.
All the dogs were spooked — Nook and Rudy shivered in place, Bogey sat upright, suddenly tense, and Sencha, unused to loud noises, skittered sideways, whining — and they all looked back at Hannah.
“She must have found the bullets,” said Peter. For the first time, his wide grey eyes looked scared. Not angry or annoyed, but scared. The nakedness of his reaction shocked Hannah. “We hid them,” he continued, still looking back up the trail toward the cabin. “We hid them … but she must have found them.”
The two teenagers stood there, unable to move in the teeming snow — their footprints were already disappearing under it.
Hannah stood locked in place, a small part of her brain still trying to figure out how the sound of the gunshot had travelled through all the snow. Kelli would have appreciated working that out, she thought. Another part of her recognized that she was in shock.
“We have to go, we have to go,” said Peter finally.
“Okay, all right,” Hannah said. “Get in.” She motioned to the basket. It would be tight, but he could lie on top of the bags, and it would only be until they reached … wherever it was that Peter was aiming them toward.
“No,” he said. He took a step back.
Behind them, the shouts grew louder, sliding through the snowflakes more urgently. Jeb had found their trail despite the heavy snow. The hair on Hannah’s neck stood up again. She waited for the tinny sound of the gun, wondered if getting shot felt very painful, wondered how long it would take to die.
“Let me drive,” Peter said.
Hannah thought about how Peter stayed well away from the sled and never looked directly at any of the dogs, and she suddenly realized something: he was afraid of dogs.
“They don’t listen to people who are afraid of dogs,” she snapped, angry that he hadn’t just admitted to it. “Get in the basket, Peter. Just get in.”
The shouting behind them became more distinct; they could make out words in Jeb’s not-there tone of voice. Hannah shivered. Nook whined and began to line out.
“Get in the basket or I’m leaving without you!”
Peter got in the basket with an awkward lurch, his snowshoes hanging off one side. Hannah didn’t care. She called to the dogs — the words were barely out of her mouth when they all began to pull. She had grasped the handlebars, anticipating having to push the sled to start because of the extra weight, but the four dogs were powerful; even Sencha was straining against the gangline. The sled shot forward. Hannah took a few stumbling steps, then ran almost at full tilt to catch up. When she jumped on the runners the sled didn’t even creak, despite her lopsided balancing act. The dogs pulled strongly and smoothly. The force of the lurching sled bowed Peter’s legs, which were trailing his heavy snowshoes, and he struggled to get them off his feet as they raced away.
The sled was much more weighted down now, so Hannah could feel every creak and groan of the frame. Under her feet, every clump of hardened snow, every chunk of broken ice snatched at the underside of the frame or lurched it sideways or upward, making the hide webbing stretch and groan.
The dogs ran and ran. The trail, hidden under a heavy canopy of trees, did not have nearly as much debris on it as Hannah’s driveway or the road to the cabin had. These trees had not been weakened by years of wind or pollution, so they stood tall and strong. What fallen trees there were, the dogs skirted around.
Peter finally got his snowshoes off and leaned ov
er the side, looking back. This caused the sled to skid on one runner, making it harder to pull. Hannah yelled at him to sit in the middle of the basket, and Peter slumped back down.
At first, Hannah was so tense that she didn’t even dare look behind them, but eventually the stiff feeling in her neck ebbed away, and she started to see the trail in front of her as more than just an escape route. Nook slowed without prompting to a pace a little faster than a jog, and the four dogs loped along, their legs scissoring in economical motions that cut through the snowy cloth of the trail. They were entering a part of the forest where there were more deciduous trees than coniferous ones — maple and cherry and poplar, the thin poplar trunks looking like impossibly tall stalks of grey grass in the distance. To the left and right, the ground was smooth and ran into little hollows and hillocks, free of the big marshmallow bumps of boulders that jutted out around her family’s cabin.
They topped a small hill, and below them, she could see more of the same kind of landscape. She noticed bits of yellow plastic at the bottoms of many of the maple trees: plastic-covered tin buckets hanging from spigots driven into the trees. They had entered a sugar bush, where the owner was collecting tree sap, which would be boiled down into maple syrup.
“Stop!” said Peter.
“What? Are we here?” Hannah looked around but saw nothing, just the trail stretching out, the green arms of far-off conifers and the thinner fingers of the birch and maple and poplar trees skinned in ice.
“Just stop!”
Finally, they did. Rudy and Nook immediately lay down, their tongues lolling. Bogey also lay down, but with his hind feet splayed out behind him like a frog as he tried to get as much of his belly as possible onto the cool snow. Sencha remained standing, small whines escaping her mouth more from habit than anything, Hannah thought.
Peter had scrambled out of the basket as soon as they halted, not looking at her, and he moved off the path again. The snow was changing fast, no longer small, light flakes, but thick, heavy blobs with a cold, stinging wetness to them. It pelted them, the trees, the dogs. Peter was staring off into the trees again — looking at what, Hannah had no idea.
“I think it’s going to storm again,” she said. “Are we close?”
“No,” said Peter. He kept on staring around at the trees. Bogey began to whine, a surprisingly tinny sound coming from such a big, husky-looking dog.
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” she snapped.
“I don’t know!” shouted Peter. He bent his head and turned away from her even more. His shoulders twitched under his big heavy parka and Hannah thought, Now he’s crying, too!
