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Never mind that she had never ridden on a chute before, and definitely pictured it having safety rails.
She nodded to him with a confidence she didn’t feel, and watched as he threw his hook higher than she would have thought possible, and ensured it held firmly, before he began to pull his body up, arm over arm.
The bare muscles of his arms and torso rippled with the exertion, and she found it hard to look away. But there was a nearly impossible task at hand, and no time like the present to attack it.
“Okay,” she said briskly to the deer, hoping it would fall in line if she showed a little confidence. “Let’s get onto that chute platform.”
Grabbing the harness, she started marching off and nearly fell over when the deer didn’t move.
“Come on, let’s go,” she told it.
It only blinked at her with its large, beautiful eyes.
“Whistle to it,” Jhon shouted from what seemed like a dizzying height above.
She gave a little whistle, and the deer immediately began to move in the direction of the chute.
Their first attempt was mostly a failure. The deer followed along obediently enough, but they wound up with the right half of the sleigh and deer on the platform and the left half off.
“You didn’t think about your own legs?” she asked the deer.
It blinked at her, then gave a loud snuffle that almost made her jump out of her shoes.
It did not seem to want to go backwards, so she had to lead it off the platform and then in a large circle to approach the target again.
This time was better than the first, but still not good enough. They were about six inches off the platform.
“One more time,” she told the deer enthusiastically. “We’ve got this.”
It was actually kind of fun learning how to work with the animal and the sleigh. They had just about reached the far outer loop of the circle when she heard thunder.
“Wow, I could practically feel that,” she told the deer.
But it had frozen in its tracks, those lovely, limpid eyes so wide with fear that she could see the whites.
Then it hit her.
The tundra was dry, like a desert. There were no thunderstorms here.
Her heart began to pound, and she could hear Jhon screaming to her from above, but she couldn’t make out the words.
“We need to move,” she decided. “Come on.”
But the terrified lichen-deer wouldn’t budge.
She felt the ground reverberating now, sending a ticklish sensation through her calves.
Think.
The deer was afraid of the sound. So what could she do?
She placed her hands over its ears, and it blinked at her, clearly feeling better.
But she couldn’t get it onto the platform with her hands over its ears.
Thinking quickly, she opened her cloak and plucked Bo out of the sling that held him close to her chest.
She shrugged the cloak off and placed it on the ground with the baby on top.
