I’ll show Bart, too.
She filled her lungs again and exhaled slowly and promised she would. She laid her hands across her chest and smiled for, if worst came to worst, she could always give it up and go home.
A LITTLE BEFORE first light, Carrie followed Whitey as he carried her bulging duffle bag across the runway and nestled it in the sled that looked like a large toboggan to Carrie. Six huskies—all, Bart had said, rejects from the camp’s kennels—were already harnessed to the sled and were curled in the snow to protect their faces and feet. As Carrie approached, one raised its head to look at her, its pale blue eyes squinting to protect them from the swirling snow.
“You’re good to go, Miss Ritter,” Whitey said. “McFee and I stocked the camp well this summer. You’ll need to collect some meat along the way, but you should be fine until the spring.”
Bart smiled. “Another walk in the park.”
Whitey laughed. “Another winter, McFee. Another cold, dark winter. You take care.”
The two men embraced and slapped each other on the backs of their large down parkas. Whitey turned to Carrie who forced a smile and shifted her weight from one boot to the other and crossed her arms against her chest to keep warm. “You okay?” he asked.
“It’s freezing,” she said.
“A little below,” Bart said.
She felt a slight twinge of panic. “If it’s this cold now and it’s only October, what’s the weather like in January?”
“It gets down into the twenties and thirties,” Bart said.
“But it’s that now,” Carrie said.
“Twenty or thirty below zero,” Bart said.
Whitey chuckled as he fumbled for his cigarettes. “It was almost that cold yesterday up at Chandalar Lake.” He looked at Carrie, her face clouding over at the thought of thirty-below-zero temperatures, and turned to Bart. “I could fly you in the Beaver, if that would work better for you.”
“We’ll be fine,” Bart said.
Whitey nodded toward Carrie. “You’re sure?”
Carrie wanted to hear more about flying into camp, but Bart interrupted her thought. “I’m sure,” he said. “Winter is the essence of life in the wilderness and I want Carrie to experience it all.”
Whitey took a long drag on his cigarette. “She’ll do that,” he said. “That’s for damn sure,” and put out his hand to her.
Carrie shook his hand. “This is it?” she asked. She wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of the goodbyes, for such a sudden start to her adventure.
“It’s all she wrote,” Whitey said. “Enjoy the Riviera.”
Oh, my God! It gets to be thirty below zero and it’s dark all day long and they joke about it? She slumped in the narrow sled, zipped her parka under her chin and arranged a pile of caribou skins over and around her to protect her from the wind that lifted snow in small, icy clouds around her.
“Ready?” Bart asked.
Again she thought she had something to prove and, again thought she could always come home. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Ready.”
Bart walked the line of sleeping dogs and prodded each with the toe of his boot and clucked, “Up you gup. Up you gup.” All six stood and shook the snow from their thick fur. The two closest to the sled reared on their hindquarters and snarled at each other before settling down. Bart adjusted the headlamp he’d strapped over his wool cap, stepped on the sled’s foot boards, gripped the handle bar with both hands and yelled, “Hike up!”
The dogs barked wildly and strained against the towline. Slowly the sled picked up speed. The swirling snow blinded Carrie, her sinuses bruised by the cold, and she realized that all those things that she imagined only happened in books or on TV or in the movies—whiteouts and avalanches and gangrene and people freezing to death—could happen to her. She slipped on her dark glasses and settled deeper in the sled and knotted her scarf across her nose and mouth and tried to curl up, the way the huskies did, to keep warm. Two days of this? she thought. I’ll never make it. Six months of this? What have I gotten myself into?
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