and Ernie turned his attention to making sure his baby wasn’t going to end up a forty-ton chrome and steel toboggan, heading for Silver the short way, straight down the cliff.
The heater was being a bitch. They’d been in the cab with the doors shut now for at least ten minutes, and Ernie could still see his breath. If this carried on he’d have to stop in Silver when he let his passenger out, get the thing fixed himself, or stop over until he could find someone who could.
He shifted down a gear, as he felt a slight give under the front wheels.
‘Are there many Indians in Silver?’
Ernie didn’t enjoy the last exchange about Indians. He wished he’d never brought the subject up. ‘Yeah. One or two.’
‘Assiniboine, Kinchuinick or Blackfoot?’
‘Kinchuinick mostly, I think. Hey, I don’t know, buddy. Do I look like Professor of Native North American Studies at Princeton?’
The road, which hadn’t seen a snowplough for hours, was having one last go at slowing up Ernie Legat and his seafood, boasting a drift of at least three feet across the last serious bend before the run out to town. Ernie could see the lights of Silver just starting to poke through the blizzard, and decided to ram the sucker. Without touching the brakes, he slammed the eighteen-wheeler into the snow bank and hoped it was only this high for a few feet.
Somewhere in one of the back axles, a set of wheels complained enough to shove the rig alarmingly to the left, but the truck held on and ten feet later they were clear. Silver twinkled ahead. Ernie knew his was the last thing on wheels that would get through that for a while. The ploughs wouldn’t even look at this until the storm calmed down and nothing he could see was hinting at that. He would drop his passenger and head for the truck stop at Maidston Creek, five miles down the valley. It looked like he’d have to sit out this tempest for a day or two.
‘Well, that weren’t too tidy, but we made it okay. Where d’you want off?’
‘Town boundary’ll do fine.’
They crawled up to the edge of town and the hydraulic brakes started hissing and puffing as soon as Ernie caught sight of the aluminium sign that read through a thin sheath of snow Welcome to Silver. Ski a bit of history!
‘Sure this is it?’ asked Ernie as the truck stopped by the sign.
‘Yeah. This is where I need to be. Thanks Ernie.’
He put the cushion he had held for the last few miles on the seat beside him, opened the door and hopped out, still holding the clutch-handle.
‘And don’t drive too long that you need Amy’s cushion now, hear?’ He shut the door and moved off into the darkness.
Ernie smiled at that. He picked up the cushion to put it back on the dash. He dropped it quickly back onto the seat. It was frozen into a solid, kidney-shaped block of ice.
A blast of hot air from the heater hit Ernie in the face. Seemed it was working again in a big way, and the sudden rush of heat gave him goosebumps, then something approaching a flush.
Suddenly Ernie Legat’s heart started to beat a little too fast. How did that guy know Amy made that cushion? How did he even know her name? He hadn’t said anything about it at all. Couldn’t explain that one from an I.D. in the cab.
And there was something else, something at the very back of Ernie’s mind that had bothered him all the way down the pass, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What the hell was it?
He threw the truck into gear and started to move off, grateful, though he couldn’t say why, that the stranger had been swallowed up by the dark and the blizzard.
It was three miles out of Silver that Ernie had it. Even though the cab had been colder than a whore’s heart, it was only Ernie’s breath that clouded. He didn’t like to think about that. So he didn’t.
It was twenty minutes after two in the morning that Staff Sergeant Craig McGee stood at the edge of the Trans-Canada highway, looking at the single set of truck tracks already filled with snow, and realized that his sergeant, Joe Reader, was in big trouble.
Joe had been due back around ten, after a routine call to Stoke, on the other side of Wolf Pass. The guys at the store in Stoke who’d called him said he’d left around nine, and since there was a radio in the pick-up, he’d have called for help if he’d gotten stuck in the snow.
Craig didn’t like this. Joe was a radio junkie. He’d call up his boss just to say he’d seen an elk in the road, and if he was out there in a drift, Craig would have had an irritating call every two minutes plotting the exact minute-by-minute progress of his entrapment. Of course the radio could be down, which meant that Joe had a cold night ahead, but the truck tracks were evidence that something had got through the pass in the last two hours. If that were so, why hadn’t Joe clambered from some trucker’s cab hours ago and shambled into the office with a sheepish grin? A trucker wasn’t going to ignore a stranded pick-up, especially not one with the RCMP logo painted on the doors and blue and red lights on its roof.
The blizzard was approaching nightmare force, and Craig McGee could hardly stand against the might of the wind and the stinging bullets of snow. He ran back to the Cherokee, sitting off-road with its engine still running, and climbed back into the driving seat. There was no way a chopper could fly in this and it would be crap in the dark anyway, even with the spots on. Nothing for it but to wait for dawn and hope that Joe’s wife Estelle didn’t go hysterical on him in the meantime.
Craig turned the patrol vehicle round and headed back into town.
The Indians called the gash in the rock that ran from the top of Wolf Pass down to the Silver Creek, Makwiochpeekin, the Wolf’s Tooth. Fifty feet from the bottom of the gully what was left of Joe Reader’s pick-up lay wedged in the fissure of rock like a broken filling in that tooth. Joe’s head was almost severed from its torso but a stubborn sinew kept it hanging there, banging against the bare metal of the cab where it dangled upside-down. The snow eddied round the remains of Sergeant Reader in tiny cyclones as the ragged, gaping holes in the vehicle allowed it access to the carnage.
Two crows perched on a tiny ledge on the cliff watched the meat hanging from its metal larder, swinging gently with the wind. Perhaps when they were sure it was safe, they would fly over there and explore.
But for now only the snow and the wind explored Joe and his vehicle, and from the look in his eyes, which were two frozen balls in his battered head, Joe Reader didn’t mind a bit.
When Katie Hunt’s phone rang, she jumped. She hoped it was Sam, and it was. Only two days back at work after his blackout and the ski company had sent him to Stoke for fencing in one of the worst blizzards she could remember. That seemed to Katie to be a slice of a raw deal, but the Hunt family had long since learned to lock away resentment at raw deals in a mental box marked Leave It.
Right now, she was just glad he was safe.
‘So where you going to spend the night, honey?’
Sam sounded tired. ‘Well it’s either the Stoke Hilton or I can bed down in the ticket office. I’m gonna go for the ticket office. Room service is quicker. Seems like I’m the only homeless one round here, so I get the place to myself. It sure beats the hell out of sleeping in the ski truck in a twelve-foot drift. You okay?’
‘Sure. You okay? No headaches?’
Katie heard Sam smile through his voice. ‘No. No headaches. No drooling down my chin like a lunatic. No writhing on the floor in a fit.’
Katie ignored his mockery of her concern. ‘When do you think you’ll make it home?’
‘If the blizzard lets up I guess the pass’ll be open by about noon tomorrow. You can wear my wool shirt if you get cold in bed without me.’