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She couldn’t keep up. She couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening, not even with the mantra of the next thing, and then the next that had gotten her as far as this without succumbing to panic, claustrophobia, or despair. Not in the face of the broken promise of pancakes, the empty house, the hateful words, Peter’s bloodied leg. Each breath he took brought more blood, and Hannah’s gorge rose each time she caught herself staring at the red drops falling from the mangled flesh, like she and Kelli taking little jumps off the low cliffside at Jeb’s swimming hole in the summer.
Things kept happening and she couldn’t keep up, and now there was a terrible, unbridgeable gap between her mental picture of them mushing into Timmins — or toward any house with lights on and people and warmth inside — and the reality of this bloodied boy on the bloodied snow, and her bloodied hands, which she could barely feel because she’d had her gloves off for so long.
In desperation, she kept cleaning Peter’s leg, sponging as neatly and gently as she could. The disinfectant itself did not hurt, but the flesh had not been cut cleanly, and it was ragged, with little pieces of skin that flopped over when she sponged them. Twice she had to stop herself from retching. Her crying was almost a good thing, as it kept her eyes a bit bleary so she couldn’t see the wound clearly.
Eventually her tears began to dwindle, and as they did, Hannah noticed a little kernel of thought inside her mind. It had a weird feeling to it; she kept running over it like running a tongue over a new tooth, or fingers over a new scarf that was so soft it clung to your fingers a bit like little soft hooks. Again and again, Hannah went through what had happened to Peter (the fight and his anger, the wound, the blood and cold), then the terrible gap between that and what she hoped for and had imagined so clearly, which was the town, and people, someone to help her, someone to help her mother. Each time, that gap made it impossible for her to connect things up; she couldn’t visualize a way to move from the first thing to the second the way she could other things, like coming to Jonny Swede’s in the first place or jumping higher in ballet. But each time she failed, she took a sidelong look at the little kernel, which felt like it was … waiting.
It was sort of like the times she’d gone ice fishing on the lake with her family, before she’d grown too old to like such things. They would all sit in the little hut or, if it was a sunny day, outside in a circle on the ice, and although there was a sense of cold and dislocation — sitting motionless outside in the winter, for fun? — there was also a sense of ease, of knowledge that waiting was the correct thing to do. That was what the kernel felt like, and when she tried, she found she could sort of move the kernel, so she placed it right in the gap, between the events of the morning and the lights of the town. And it fit. It slipped between the two things so
that she could imagine going from the cold, bloody fight all the way to the town, and it somehow fit, even if it didn’t make sense. And now her drying eyes could once again make out the sled and the four dogs, waiting. Waiting for her.
She looked toward them. “All right. I have my job, you have yours. Line out!” she called, and they uncurled themselves and stood and stretched, tails wagging slowly. She’d finished bandaging Peter’s wound, and now she propped him up so that he was sitting. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She went over to the pack, dug out one of the remaining emergency blankets, and unfolded it before returning to help Peter remove his ruined snowshoe.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, thrusting his wounded leg under him and trying to stand. He got halfway up, but once he put weight on the injured leg, he pitched forward into the snow, yelling in pain. “Come on, come on!” he gasped. At the centre of the wound, where the cut was the deepest, Hannah saw a fleck of blood seeping through the gauze and bandages. If he moved too much, he would just bleed through them, and she didn’t have enough bandages to change the dressing more than once.
“Hang on,” she said. She trooped back to the sled and rearranged it so that one pack lay across the bed instead of lengthwise, tied it down tightly with the pack line, then laid out the unfolded emergency blanket on the basket of the sled.
The sled was still snubbed to a tree; she took the snub line off and attached it to the carabiner at the back of the gangline, so that the dogs were now tied to the tree and the sled was free. She grabbed the bridle and pulled and heaved the sled over the unbroken snow to where Peter was, then she pulled and heaved some more to turn it around so it was facing the dogs. She took off Peter’s other snowshoe and tied it to the back of the sled. Together they eased him into the basket in the middle of the blanket and pulled the sides up over him. His teeth were chattering.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
She went back to the tree and untied the snub line, led the dogs through the now-broken snow, and hooked them up, pointing back toward the trail they had come in on. Then she checked each dog over. Peter was holding his leg and trying to get comfortable. The emergency blanket made crinkly sounds as he shifted on the wooden slats. Finally, he settled half lying down, half sitting, with his right leg propped out straight over the packs and his good leg bent, the knee pointing up.
“We’re going back, right?”
“No, we’re going to Timmins. It’s closer.”
“I knew we’d just end up doing what you wanted,” he said. He shook his head and crossed his arms tightly. “I’m going to die out here and it’ll be your fault.”
Hannah was working salve into Rudy’s foot. If you don’t want me to treat you like a stupid jerk, stop acting like one, she thought. But she wouldn’t say it out loud, because then she’d be exactly what he said she was: a mouthy cidiot. She realized that she did owe him an explanation so that he wasn’t in the dark about why they were doing this.
“I think … I think the most important thing to do is to get you to a hospital.”
“Jeb can fix this,” he protested. “She did stuff like this in the field.” His face was set in a scowl, but she couldn’t tell if it was from pain, fear, or anger — maybe it was all three.
“That thing was rusted, Peter. The plow.”
“So?”
“Have you ever had a tetanus shot?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She finished up with Rudy’s paw. “You can get really, really sick from tetanus.”
“You’re just saying that. You just want to get to Timmins.”
She moved on to Nook. Nook turned her head and Hannah tried to scritch it the way her father did, the way Nook liked. She was rewarded by Nook leaning in to her hands.
Getting help for her mother was still important. But something else was there now: a deep dissatisfaction with almost everything she had done about it. Maybe she was just stubborn, maybe she did just want everyone to do what she wanted. Maybe. Now that she had found a way to change things as they were to how she wanted them to be, she felt a weird sense of gratitude. Now she had a chance to earn the skills and experience of this trip — to earn them with her team, and with Peter.
“The truth is,” she said, “our dads are probably already on their way back by now. Someone will probably be able to help my mom before we even get to Timmins. Or maybe Jeb will go check on her. Maybe the power will come back on. I don’t know. But what I know for sure is you need help right away.”
“I thought you said she was dying.”
