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They had just gained the first hill leading them out of the maple bush when Hannah spied another trail off to their right, at the bottom of the rocky outcrop they had just topped. Beyond the tantalizing stick-straight section, she saw another layer of forest, and then an empty white space with curved edges. A lake.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing down toward the base of the rocks. “Is that the trail?”
She put her foot on the drag mat and slowed the team to a stop. It had stopped snowing. Now, without the snow’s hindrance, it felt like she was seeing every single leaf and branch and bird. She was starting to notice not the sameness of the forest, but all the differences: the snow load falling off a tree from its own weight, the red berries of a wintergreen bush by a low pond, the barred brown back of an owl ghosting so close to her head that the side of her hood ruffled, flying so silently that the dogs didn’t even notice it.
And so, her eye was caught by an impossibly straight line. Nothing in the bush was straight for too long; it must be something man-made.
Peter got out of the sled, and they stood staring down at it. All four dogs immediately lay down, Bogey and Rudy back to back like they hadn’t been trying to maul each other just a few hours earlier.
“The trail splits up ahead,” he said. “It splits three ways: to our place, Jonny’s, and way back to a trapline they run back there.” He looked at her and pointed down at the trail. “That’s the one that goes to Jonny’s.”
Hannah felt excitement for the first time since she’d eaten breakfast. “So we’re close?”
Peter squatted, peering at the trail. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “I think we have to go a ways before we switch back.”
“You said we were halfway this morning.”
“I don’t remember how far it is, Hannah. I’ve only been there maybe five times with my dad. Usually we take the highway.”
Hannah closed her eyes. She was tired. She had no idea what time it was because her watch had broken when the snowhook hit it on the way down to the bowl.
Every time she thought she couldn’t feel more tired, another part of her body decided to tell her how tired it was — her elbows, her neck, her hips. This is the worst kind of thinking, came a voice in her head. She couldn’t afford to give in to this kind of negative thinking at all.
“Do you think we could get down there?” she asked.
Peter looked up at her from where he was squatting. “What, to the other trail?”
“Yeah. Maybe not here,” she said, gesturing to the sharp rocks. There was no way they could get down those with the sled. “But farther up.”
“Maybe,” he said, standing. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
He got back on the sled, Hannah called the dogs up, and they started. There was no pushing or shoving from Sencha now. The Dal started when the team started, her neckline loose and the gangline taut, so Hannah knew that she was pulling, as well as keeping pace.
They descended the hill, Hannah riding the drag mat lightly, and then the trail flattened out to the usual rolls and wide turns designed for the more cumbersome width and turning radius of snowmobiles.
The sled swayed from side to side, and instead of just looking ahead to the next portion of the trail, Hannah began to clos
ely watch what Nook was doing. The veteran sled dog would often run very close to the side of the trail instead of in the middle, and as she swept past one such spot, Hannah saw that the middle of the trail, which outer dogs Sencha and Rudy ran over, was softer; the right-side runner slid slightly deeper into the snowpack. After they’d passed a section like that, Nook would swing back to the middle, and the sled, already shifting that way from the softer snow, followed easily.
If Nook ran all the dogs through the middle, it would be harder to pull, Hannah realized, so she was making them take turns at doing the hardest work. Sometimes Nook and Bogey, who was behind her, delved through the softer snow, and sometimes the other two did. Just like Canada geese taking turns dealing with the most turbulence at the front of the migration V until a different bird took the lead.
Okay, she thought, that’s enough. She had allowed herself that tiny thought, but now she yanked her attention back to the task at hand. She tried to see the different types of snow, the small bumps that signalled the presence of rocks or sometimes branches, the blue-coloured snow that hid water beneath it, the shallow depressions of old summer ATV ruts. She identified kinds of snow: the snow that lay like a skin on rocks and was hard to travel over, the fat snow that lay heavy on thinly populated parts of the wilderness that were probably marsh. The snow at the bottom of the bowl where Rudy and Bogey fought had been fat snow, waist-deep and clingy like a cold, deep leaf pile.
There was crisp snow on the sides of the trail that lay deep in the shade of the trees almost all the time, and then there was what she thought of as summer snow in the middle of the trail. It was usually the most packed-down and the easiest to travel over, but it also got the most kinds of weather, so it could be mushy from sun or rain or pitted from uneven freezing. She felt the awesome grandeur of snow: all of it was snow, but each kind was distinct, with its own life cycle.
She began to call out the types in her mind to see if she could anticipate where Nook would go when faced with skinny over-the-rocks snow, with fat snow on the windward side of the trail, with mushy, out-in-the-weather snow, or with a section of ice with a thin layer of snow over it. Hannah got better at it as she went along.
“There!” shouted Peter, pointing.
Hannah had already placed her foot on the drag mat before he’d even said anything, and she realized it was because she’d reacted to him lifting his hand to point. It felt good to be able to do something right. She had watched the dogs and the snow and their surroundings, and when something had changed, she hadn’t panicked, but merely acted cautiously.
I can learn this, I can learn, she thought.
The sled stopped. She set the snowhook firmly, and they walked back to where he had pointed. Once again, the dogs lay down immediately to sleep.
At first Hannah saw nothing, but then she noticed a tree that looked like it had been nicked by something — the bumper of a snowmobile or perhaps one of the sleds that they sometimes pulled. Maybe an ATV in the summer had stripped the bark off, although the nick was a little high to have been made by the bumper of a recreational vehicle.
“What?” she said. “That tree?”
