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“Hey,” she said. “Hey!” She shouted it this time, her voice roughened by the cold. She poked Peter’s wet, prone body.
“Whaaaat.”
“Pansy-ass!” she said.
“What?”
“I said you’re a pansy-ass. Get up!”
He opened a bleary eye. “What?”
“Quit screwing around and get off the ice, you stupid hick!”
“What is your problem? I just saved your stupid dog.” He turned on his side. His expression was confused.
“Oh, come on, you only went in the water because you were too dumb to use the snowhook, like I did.”
“Are you kidding me?” Peter’s face pinched as he squinted at her, and she realized he had lost his glasses —
and his knife, probably — somewhere in the lake. That made her feel terrible.
She glared at him. “Kidding that you’re too stupid to figure stuff out? No. You can’t even work the stove properly.”
He pushed himself up to a sitting position. “What in the hell is your problem?”
“You are! Now get up and get your stupid coat!”
“I can barely walk, for God’s sake.”
Hannah waved her hand in a whatever motion. “I just saw you sprint fifty feet. You can walk just fine. You’re just lazy.” She hauled herself to her feet and casually set off in search of her own discarded gear, trying to keep her teeth from chattering too loudly. “And by the way, could you get any fatter? It was like hauling a whale out of the lake.”
“I’m going to kick your ass, you know that?” he shouted as she walked away.
“Whatever.” She grabbed her coat. It took all her willpower not to wrap it around herself immediately. If she did, the water from her wet sweater would soak right into it, making it useless. She bent and picked up her toque and put that on right away, along with her scarf and gloves.
When she turned back, Peter was getting to his feet, hauling himself up with the strength of pure rage. He took a few hobbling steps and grabbed his own coat, hat, and gloves. “You get back here, you little —” He stopped midsentence and stared at the things in his hands. “Did you just make me mad on purpose?”
“Well, yeah.”
He glowered at her. “I was going to get up, you know.”
“No, you weren’t.”
He stared at her, shaking his head. “Unbelievable. You are such a shithead, you know that?”
She grabbed the snowhook and began coiling the line to put it away. “Whatever you say, chicken.”
Their biggest obstacle now was building a fire, and the fact that they had no extra clothes. Hannah’s pants were mostly dry, but her sweater and undershirt were soaked. All of Peter’s clothing was starting to stiffen into chunks of ice. When he’d thrown himself out of the sled, the emergency blanket had been torn to pieces, skipping away in the light wind that blew across the lake. She went to the first-aid kit, took out the last emergency blanket, and gave it to him.
Peter stripped down to his underwear, put his dry coat on, and sat in the sled basket wrapped in the emergency blanket. Hannah took out the makeshift coat she had fashioned for Sencha — which was just a dirty undershirt, anyway — and put it on. Then she put her scarf and jacket on. She pulled Bogey’s frozen harness off, and the other dogs’, too. She got four portions of dog food from the sled and fed them, roughing up the fur of each dog as she did. They ate so fast that she was pretty sure none of them even chewed. Then all four dogs settled down immediately and fell asleep, Sencha wedging herself in between Bogey and Rudy. The Labrador was already dry, due to the fact that his oily coat shed water like a duck.
Hannah slapped her arms on her sides to warm herself and placed all the wet, frozen clothing in a pile near where she was going to start the fire.
“Okay. So how do I make a fire?” she asked.
“What?”
“You know, what do I do? I need birch bark, I remember that …”
