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“Thatis alake?”she asked.
“Sure,” he told her. “A big one. And right now, while the day is at its warmest, some of the ice is cracking and shifting.”
She shivered at the thought.
“So where are we headed?” she asked, trying not to think too much about all that ice.
“The plan was to get to the edge of the lake and then go back up onto the tundra,” Kian said, frowning.
“Was?”she asked.
“There’s a herd of mammoth up there now,” he told her. “Not just the possibility of bandits.”
“What does that mean for us?” she asked.
“We’ll have to choose between those things and going out on the ice,” he said, as if it were the simplest, most practical thing in the world.
She supposed it was, at its core.
But it was also terrifying to feel they were choosing between two very bad options.
“The ice is cracking,” she pointed out, as if maybe he’d forgotten in the last ten seconds.
“Yes,” he said. “Parts of it. But by the time we get there, the temperature will be dropping again.”
She nodded and gazed down at her daughter.
I will be brave for you, my darling.
They rode on in silence, the going getting slower and slower.
“Time to walk,” the sheriff called out after a while.
She glanced at Kian and he nodded once, looking furious.
He hopped out and then helped her, taking the baby from her to wrap the sling around his own chest.
The baby looked so tiny in her father’s arms that it nearly broke Kinsley’s heart.
But then they were hiking through thick mud, and just keeping her boots on her feet took up all her energy.
They marched for all they were worth, but the sun was sinking too quickly, painting the horizon in fiery colors as the mud began to stiffen.
“Oh,” Kinsley said suddenly, watching the mud freeze up around her boot right in front of her eyes.
“Move,”Kian growled.
“We’re freezing up,” the deputy called out.
Kinsley looked at the ice up ahead. It was so close. They were nearly there. And the tundra above would be reachable soon, too. But both places might as well have been a hundred miles away with the sleds freezing in place.
This time she was already out of the sled though, so when Kian told her to stay put while he ran to help the sheriff, she moved to the back of the sled and pushed as best she could to make the dogs’ job a little easier.
The bear was whining as he ran with Lyslee to help the sheriff.
Kinsley wasn’t sure if it was his hurt shoulder, or the mud trying to trap his big paws, but the creature was unhappy. She hoped Lyslee was holding on tightly.
She and the dogs caught up just as the others managed to rock the sheriff’s sled out of the frozen mud.
