Way of the Wolf (14 page)

‘I suppose.’ Tikaani laughed suddenly, his dark mood lifting. ‘I wonder who was the first guy to eat reindeer moss? Who first looked at a dead deer and thought,
Mm-mm, never mind the meat, I bet what’s in its stomach is really tasty
?’

Beck laughed with him. ‘Maybe it was the same guy who was stuck in the middle of Africa and thought,
Dang, I’ve run out of wood, what can I burn for a fire? I know – elephant dung!
’

Tikaani hooted. ‘Elephant . . .
dung
?’

‘Yup. And it smells worse than you could possibly imagine.’

‘No,’ Tikaani said earnestly, ‘it probably doesn’t.’

The wind was picking up behind them. It was a freezing blast that would have been very unpleasant to walk into, but it was at their backs, blowing them on their way. Beck thought of the old Celtic blessing: ‘May the road rise up to greet you, may the wind be always at your back.’ This road was indeed rising up to greet them – they were still heading slightly uphill – and he reckoned that having the wind at your back was the nicest thing you could wish anyone.

‘Could you get the map out, Tikaani?’ he asked. He felt Tikaani tug at his rucksack and a moment later the map was passed to him. He unfolded it to show the pass and peered at it. He had to hold it quite close to see. If he was reading it right, then they should at least be out of the pass by sunset. There was still daylight left.

At least, there should be. He checked his watch. Yes, still some hours until sunset. But it was quite hard to even read the map in the gloom. As if something was blocking out the sun . . .

A reluctant instinct made him look across at the clouds. The fierce wind cut into his face and his heart sank. He knew immediately that they weren’t going to get out of the pass that day. In fact, if he didn’t do something right now, they weren’t going to get out of the pass at all.

The storm had got here much faster than he had expected. It had been creeping up on them as they talked and laughed. The clouds were dark and swollen with a million tons of snow. The land below them was obliterated by snow and shadow. Standing on top of the mountain, Beck was at the same height as the storm. He wasn’t looking up, he was looking straight at it. It was like staring into the eyes of a wild animal.

A wild animal that was charging at them, ready to wipe out anything in its path.

Tikaani followed Beck’s gaze. ‘Oops. We’re going to get snowed on?’

‘If we’re not careful we’re going to get dead,’ Beck said bluntly, ‘Feel like some digging?’

But he was already trudging up the side of the valley as fast as his snowshoes would let him, before Tikaani could answer. He didn’t go far – just until there was a good slope, about thirty degrees from horizontal. He thrust his stick into the snow and leaned all his weight on it. It went in as far as the very end, and even then it didn’t hit anything. Excellent, Beck thought. There was probably a couple of metres of snow between them and the rock. That would do.

Tikaani had caught up. ‘Digging?’ he asked.

Beck knelt down and punched his fists into the snow. There was a very thin crust of ice on the top, called névé, where the snow had thawed then refrozen. Below that, the snow was fresh and powdery. Ideal.

‘We’re going to make a snow shelter,’ he said. ‘Start digging.’

Tikaani crouched down beside him and did as he was told, scrabbling away like a human terrier. Their mittened hands made excellent shovels. ‘We just burrow down into the snow?’

‘Exactly!’ Beck agreed. He grinned without humour, and explained as their hole got deeper. ‘Snow insulates. It keeps cold out and warmth in—’

‘Excuse me,’ Tikaani interrupted, though he kept digging. ‘What kind of residence are Inuit famous for?’

‘Huh?’ Beck frowned for a moment, then his face cleared. ‘Oh, yes. Right!’

Tikaani was thinking of igloos, which were built on exactly the same principle. Snow, packed solid, was a good construction material and an excellent insulator. Beck probably couldn’t tell Tikaani anything he didn’t already know about snow.

‘Have you ever been in a snow shelter?’ he asked.

Tikaani shook his head. ‘No. They’re generally used by hunters and I’ve never been hunting. Or by people stuck out in storms . . .’ He smiled at Beck. ‘And I’d never done that either, until today. My dad was always very careful, making sure we didn’t get caught in a whiteout.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Unlike Tikaani, Beck had experienced a whiteout – deliberately. With a rope around his waist, so that he could be dragged to safety, the Sami had sent him out into a snowstorm just to see what it was like. He hadn’t been able to see a thing – not even which way was up or down. His sense of direction had vanished in about thirty seconds. Everywhere he looked, any way at all, there was just that whirling, ravenous white. If you got caught in a whiteout, the only answer was to stop moving and make a shelter. If you kept going, then you wouldn’t just get lost. You might not be able to tell if something was ground or just air full of snow, so you could fall and not even realize until you hit bottom.

By now there was a sizeable pile of freshly dug snow around them. Beck scooped some up into a block and squeezed it together. The loose powder compressed into a solid mass with only a little pressure.

‘So we’ve still got time to have a snowball fight?’ Tikaani asked sceptically.

‘Not really.’ Beck plonked the block down next to the hole and scooped up some more. ‘This hole is going to be our entrance, and so we need to block out the wind. This will be a little wall.’

Tikaani looked at the hole they were digging, realizing something for the first time. ‘This is facing right into the wind. It’s just going to fill up with snow again. Shouldn’t we dig on another slope, away from the wind?’

Beck shook his head. ‘The snow can just blow down a slope like that and bury everything there. If we’re on the windward slope, we know the snow will always blow past us, keeping the entrance free. So we use this wall to keep the wind out of our hole. Keep digging – I’ll give you a hand in a minute.’

It only took a couple of minutes for Beck to build his wall. It didn’t need to be high and it didn’t need to be perfect. The blocks were crude and misshapen, but they stuck together. Even that reduced the wind speed significantly, and the boys felt the difference. It was as if warmth was a flower inside them, and suddenly it could put out a tiny little bud that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

After about fifteen minutes the hole was deep enough for the two boys to crouch in, side by side. They were below the level of the snow and they could keep digging while the wind raged above them. It was already much stronger than it had been when the first snow was falling. It whipped past them – above them – in whirling clusters that stung the face whenever one of them peeked out. Inside the hole it was a couple of degrees warmer already.

‘We spend the night like this?’ Tikaani asked hopelessly.

Beck smiled. ‘Hey, we’ve only just begun!’

He took a final look outside, ducking as a particularly strong burst of snow came swirling towards him. A shape moved within it – a white shadow that glided with the wind.

Beck’s every muscle tensed and he strained his eyes at where it had been. Where he
thought
it had been. It might have been whirling snowflakes, his brain interpreting them as a particular shape. He had barely thought about it for ages now, but it had looked awfully like a wolf.

However, the coming storm was much more lethal than a wolf, and Beck knew a wolf on its own was unlikely to attack. It wouldn’t even want to share their cave. Wolves had their own fur coats.

‘Deep enough?’ Tikaani called behind him, snapping Beck back to the present. He would worry about wolves if he had to, later. Right now he wouldn’t worry Tikaani at all. He climbed back into the hole. It was a metre deep, warm and already pleasantly quiet. The snow insulated them from the sound of the storm as well as its strength. It was so tempting to curl up and go to sleep . . . but not yet.

‘It’s deep enough in this direction,’ he agreed, peering around. ‘Now we start digging up again . . .’

And so their digging angled upwards, beneath the surface of the snow, careful not to break out into fresh air again. It took another hour to dig out the cave to Beck’s liking, but the urgency was gone. Once they were safely inside, they could widen their excavation. When they finished they were covered in powdered snow, but that was easy to brush off and they could admire their handiwork.

The final chamber was almost three metres wide and one and a half high. The floor was a flat platform big enough for the two of them to sleep side by side. Because they had dug upwards beneath the snow, it was higher than the entrance. The wind was blocked out by Beck’s snow wall and their rucksacks, which provided an extra barrier between them and the outside (and would also keep out any wolves that came visiting, Beck thought). The air was warm and still. The sound of the storm was a distant echo, there if they listened out for it. It could have been on the other side of some good double glazing.

‘Cold air sinks,’ Beck said, pointing back at the entrance. Even to his own ears his voice sounded muffled. The snow was absorbing vibrations. ‘Up here we’ll be good and warm. But help me smooth down the walls, or it’ll drip on us.’

They worked together silently for a while. Tikaani blew out of his mouth a couple of times. It swirled in front of him. ‘I can still see my breath,’ he said.

‘Good.’ Beck smoothed down the final patch of snow and looked around. ‘If it gets too warm, it’ll collapse. But it’ll be warm enough for us. It’ll never drop below zero inside here, anyway. You’d better put your wet clothes out, by the way. They’ll have frozen dry by the morning.’

‘Compared to out there it’s the tropics,’ Tikaani agreed, with a nod back at the entrance. He opened up his rucksack for his wet things. ‘Where do we put the jacuzzi?’

Beck chuckled as he laid out the tarpaulin where they were going to sleep. The floor was made of snow. They still needed insulation or the heat would be sucked out of their bodies. ‘We’ll do that tomorrow, right after we install the flat-screen TV and cable.’

‘Hey, excellent! I can catch up on some good TV.’

Beck took all the loose items from their rucksacks and laid them inside the tarpaulin; spare clothes – even the rope – would keep them off the snow. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out his water bottle. He shook it and heard the contents slosh around. As promised, the snow had melted.

‘And we have fresh water on demand,’ he pointed out. ‘Purer and cheaper than anything you could buy in a bottle back home.’

‘Hey, yeah.’ Tikaani took a long swig from his own bottle. ‘Maybe we should have dug a bathroom too. This lot will come out eventually.’

‘We have a bathroom.’ Beck pointed down at the entrance.

Tikaani looked unenthusiastic. ‘Yeah, I was hoping to avoid going outside again . . .’

Beck shook his head. ‘Not outside. It’s not worth losing the warmth. Just go down there. Let the snow absorb it.’ He looked at where Tikaani’s clothes were spread out. ‘Just try not to go on those.’

It was nearly dark outside now, and even darker in, with no torch or fire. And they were both tired. They lay down on the tarpaulin and Beck heard Tikaani stretch luxuriously.

‘I don’t care that we’re in a hole in some snow on the top of a mountain. This is better than any hotel.’

Beck smiled to himself in the darkness. It wasn’t how he had intended to end the second day of their journey, but it was better than it might have been.

‘They taught you this when you were in Finland?’ Tikaani asked.

‘This? No. This comes from a weekend in the Cairngorms.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Scotland. Closer to home.’

‘Oh.’ Then: ‘My ancestors really did know their stuff, didn’t they?’ Tikaani sounded more thoughtful, going back to their conversation earlier.

‘You know it too,’ Beck answered. ‘It just takes a while to come back.’

‘Yeah.’ Tikaani yawned. ‘Bit by bit,’ he mumbled . . .

And soon after that, it was obvious from his regular breathing that he was fast asleep. Beck lay and listened to the storm for a bit longer. He didn’t invite sleep because he knew it would come naturally.