The books had been right. The fencing effectively guarded the pit from Wolf. Wolf tried to pull it out of place. But he was frustrated by the way Jeebee had anchored it, with large, metal, forge-made anchors, like spikes with their ends turned up. Plainly he did not like to walk or stand upon it. The books had been right in that. Also, they had been right in that he did not try to dig under the recommended three-foot skirt of it, that Jeebee had pegged down outward over the bare earth floor.
The storms tailed off. They became occasional. Sometimes a week or ten days would go without one. Jeebee had been unsure how successful Wolf’s hunting had been under these winter conditions. His conscience prodded him into sharing some of their stored meat with Wolf at intervals.
He had tried to do this always by taking the meat out of the pit when Wolf was away and thawing it in the inside room. Then, after Wolf had returned, Jeebee would carry it outside the front wall for some little distance and simply drop it in the snow. Wolf was never slow in collecting it for himself.
This worked well. But Jeebee could only guess whether he was merely supplementing Wolf’s diet or whether he literally needed to feed Wolf to keep him from starving. But in any case, Jeebee kept on doing it. The one natural and inevitable result was that they went through their stored supply of beef faster than Jeebee had expected. This forced him into taking more days to go on hunting trips.
He made a number of these during clear spots in the weather. Using the sledge to pull back the meat and sometimes the skin from more than one head of beef, however, turned out to be more than he could handle. The loaded sledge was a bastard—that was the only word for it—in the hills. He might have managed it with twice his usual load down on the flat surface of the plain. But going uphill, and over surfaces that frequently tipped sharply and unexpectedly to right or left, the double load was too much.
He had grown accustomed to the feeling that he should be able to make the trip down and back without trouble. Then came a trip on which, the second day out and having found no food animals, he was caught by a storm.
It came too swiftly for him to even think of getting back to the cave.
The first warning he had was a vague difference in the light. He looked up at the sky and saw, he thought, no clouds. But the blue overhead seemed more pale than usual, as if a layer of white gauze had been drawn over it. When he looked at the sun, its outline was unclear, as if a faint haze had developed, high up between him and it.
He took the glasses automatically to skim the horizon and found that the horizon was now indistinct. There was no line where sky and land should meet.
He had been out in the open for more than half a year now. There was nothing specific to fasten on, but an uneasy feeling grew in him as of something titanic and inimical looming over him. If he had been Wolf, Wolf would have been sniffing the still air tensely.
Where he might not have a year before, he now paid attention to that uneasiness. Stopping the sledge, he got out the tent and began setting it up alongside the sledge.
He had barely gotten it up with his blankets inside and one side staked down, when a thick mist seem to congeal around him all at once. The feeling of uneasiness grew. He drove the stakes on the other side of the tent and hammered its poles even tighter into the packed underlayers of hard snow. Taking the blankets out again, he scooped out snow inside to make up for the space he had taken away from the height of the tent.
He climbed within and fastened the ends of the tent as tightly as he could. He slid into his roll of blankets. The enclosed air space warmed quickly about him. Outside, the air remained still. But the uneasiness he felt was still with him. He kept on all his clothes and boots, and waited.
He did not have long to wait. Within minutes he heard the wind in the distance, like the sound of a hunting animal. Almost as soon as he heard it, it hit the tent, rising from a light push to a heavy fist blow of air that turned the tent’s interior icy cold, all at once. With it came the sudden rattling of ice particles against the tent fabric.
He pulled himself up partially out of the blankets so that his arms were free. He dug his mittened hands into the snow on the tent side away from the sledge and took hold of the stakes he had driven in there, putting his weight on them to help hold them down. The walls of the tent sucked inward, then billowed out again suddenly, with a crack. He could feel the pressure of the wind only inches from him, not touching him, but as if a great hand had taken hold of the tent with him inside.
He lay, the tent cracking and vibrating wildly around him, satisfied to just hold on if he could, until the gusts should pass.
But they did not pass. They came at slightly longer intervals for a while and then picked up again more fiercely than before. The foot end of the tent blew out suddenly and flapped wildly in the wind; its inner corners yanked by the force of the wind out from under the heels of his boots, with which he had been pressing them into the snow below.
There was nothing he could do but let it flap. He pushed down with one elbow on the flaps beyond his head, feeling the icy air reaching all around him. The storm was like some enormous living creature, trying to snatch the tent from him and tear it to shreds; to tear him, the sledge and everything else to shreds, leaving only the white sterile world of snow and snow-filled air.
He held on—he held on. But at last the outer side of the tent was snatched from the snow and a moment later the whole tent flew wild, flapping like a mad thing.
He grabbed and caught the inner edge, rolling on it to hold it down, rolling until he wrapped it all around him like an untidy cocoon.
He rolled backward until the low edge of the sledge stopped him.
Squirming around, bound by the rolled tent about him, he got his mittened hands free enough to dig into the snow under the runner.
Like a burrowing mole, he excavated until he could squirm in with the tent wrapped around him. He crawled until he was under the sledge, putting it between himself and the wind, cocked at an angle over his body.
He lay, gasping for breath.
The snow was blowing thickly now. It began to drift around him and around the sledge.
Soon they were completely enclosed; and the fierce tearing of the wind began to be muffled by its thickness. The wind sound grew more and more distant until he could barely hear it. In his heavy clothing, wrapped in the tent and the snow, he was almost warm.
“I mustn’t fall asleep,” he told himself, “I might suffocate.”
He lay there awake, accordingly, staring into an unchanging darkness. It was completely black around him now. It occurred to him that perhaps so much time had gone by that the sun was going down, the daylight leaving as the snow drifted deeper and ever deeper, over him. He could still hear the storm distantly, but now it had softened to a sound almost like a lullaby.
He woke with a start.
He had fallen asleep after all. But he was still breathing. Evidently the drift had not been packed so tightly by the wind that air could not reach him. Perhaps grains of hard snow, like those which had rattled against the tarpaulin tent when he had first been underneath it, would not pack like softer flakes.
He wriggled and pushed his way through the snow surrounding until he suddenly popped out into brilliant sunlight.
The sun was just rising in a bright blue sky. The air was so cold that his first breath of it seemed to shock his lungs. But—it was morning. Habit had woken him close to his usual time of rousing.
Nothing had ever looked so good to him as that sun, and the brilliant blue sky overhead. There were no clouds anywhere in the great blue bowl above the white land. About him, except for the drift that had enclosed and protected both himself and the sledge, the vast snow plain looked unchanged. Only a few small, dark nubs, the tops of frozen vegetation, still protruded through it at large distances from each other.