CHAPTER NINE

Trapped in an Icy Tomb

When Sandy awoke, it was still pitch-dark inside the lean-to. He was about to roll over and go back to sleep, but he decided to see what time it was first. He pulled down the zipper of his sleeping bag, fumbled for the flashlight and flicked the switch.

The sudden burst of light woke up Jerry. “Whazza matter?” he mumbled.

“Go back to sleep,” Sandy told him. “It’s still the middle of the night.” He turned the spot on his wrist watch. “What the—” he exclaimed, and sat up, startled. He squinted at the dial again, but there was no mistake. It said 7:30. “That’s impossible! It must have stopped!” But he held it up to his ear and heard the steady, rhythmic ticking.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jerry, fully awake now, propped himself up on one elbow.

Suddenly, Sandy began to laugh. “Oh, I get it. We’re snowed in.” He explained to Jerry. “My watch said it was half past seven, but I couldn’t believe it because it was so dark in here. It’s the snow; it’s blocking out the daylight.”

“It’s really morning?” Jerry said doubtfully. “Well, let’s go out and find out.” He unzippered his sleeping bag.

Propping the torch up in the snow, Sandy tried to push his head and shoulders through the drift that blocked the entrance. It was like running into a stone wall. “Ouch!” he cried. He dug at the snow with his fingers, but his mittens slid futilely off a surface that was as smooth as a skating rink.

“Well, come on,” Jerry said impatiently. “Let’s go.”

“Door’s frozen up,” Sandy told him. He sat down and tried to kick through the ice with his feet, but couldn’t dent it. He turned to Jerry. “Try your end. This one is plugged up solid.”

“So is this end,” Jerry reported, after pounding away with his hands and feet for several minutes. “So, we’ll go out the side.” He grabbed one corner of the robe and tugged it loose from where it was anchored under the snow, while Sandy worked on the other corner. Then they pulled it aside, exposing a smooth, glittering expanse of ice behind it.

Sandy tested it with his fist and whistled. “Like iron.”

There was a tremor in Jerry’s voice. “What goes on around here? Maybe I wasn’t kidding last night when I called this thing a tomb.”

“Take it easy,” Sandy soothed. “It’s only snow.”

“Yeah, ice,” Jerry repeated. “You ever see them drive trucks across the ice on frozen lakes? I’ve seen it in newsreels. That ice is pretty rugged stuff.”

“You got a knife?” Sandy asked. “I left mine in the sled.”

“So did I. Say, let’s try to move the sled,” Jerry suggested.

They both shoved and pulled at the sled for a long time, but it seemed welded to the spot. At last, Jerry sank down exhausted. “I don’t get it. What happened?”

Sandy played the light over the walls of the lean-to. “I can guess. Remember how cozy and warm it got in here last night? Between that stove and the heat from our bodies, I bet the temperature in here was a good fifty degrees higher than it was outside. The heat radiates through the snow, causing it to melt partially. Then it freezes up. That’s how the Eskimos harden the walls of their snow houses. They build big bonfires in them.”

“Only they don’t forget to make doors in ’em,” Jerry said grimly. “Another thousand years from now, I can see a couple of geologists like your dad and the professor digging us out. Preserved in a block of ice like that baby mammoth.”

“It’s no joking matter,” Sandy said. “We’ve got to think of a way to break out of here. One thing, though: they’re bound to send out search parties and sooner or later they’ll find the sled.”

“What makes you think so?” Jerry demanded. “The sled is probably covered with snow by now and this must look like any other part of the landscape. And you don’t think those dogs are going to hang around here forever, do you? They’ve probably run off looking for food already.”

Sandy felt his heart begin to race madly. “I never thought of that,” he admitted. “Well, it’s up to us then. What have we got that we can use as a chipping tool?”

“Only thing I can think of that’s metal is the Coleman stove.”

“That’s no good. No sharp edges.”

They were silent for a moment, then Sandy snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it! The gun!” He took the bulky .45 out of his pocket and held it up in the light. “We’ll blast our way out.”

Jerry looked worried. “You know what they say about shooting fish in a rain barrel? Well, if one of those slugs ever ricochets inside here, we’ll be dead fish.”

“It’s our only chance,” Sandy said. He loaded the gun, cocked the hammer and nudged off the safety with his thumb. Holding the gun at arm’s length away from him, he pointed the muzzle at the end where the entrance had been. “Better make sure your hood is pulled tight over your ears,” he advised Jerry.

“I’m all set. Let ’er go.”

Sandy shut his eyes and tightened his finger on the trigger. The explosion reverberated like a bomb in the small lean-to. Sandy felt the shock wave slam into his face, and the recoil almost tore the gun out of his hand. He sat there stunned for a while.

Jerry’s voice screaming in his ear brought him out of it. “Sandy, it worked!”

He opened his eyes to the most wonderful sight he had ever seen. A beam of sunlight was pouring through an opening in the ice wall. The potent, snub-nosed .45 slug had blasted a hole almost four inches in diameter. In the light of the flashlight, he also observed that the ice around the hole was shattered and veined from the shock wave.

Dropping the gun back into his pocket, Sandy got on his knees and began to work on the opening with his hands. Snow and ice crumbled easily, and before long he had enlarged the hole so that he was able to squirm through. Jerry was right behind him. Painfully, they stood up.

“Oh,” Jerry groaned. “I feel like a dog on its hind legs.” Looking up at the clear blue sky, he threw kisses into the air with both hands. “Mr. Sun, I never figured we’d ever see you again.”

It was a perfect, cloudless day without even a breeze. Looking around him, Sandy realized that the high winds of the night before had exaggerated the intensity of the blizzard. Except where it had drifted around the sled and lean-to, no more than twelve inches of new snow had fallen. He discovered, too, that they had been traveling along the ridge of a low hill and had stopped on the most exposed spot in all the surrounding terrain. On either side, the ground sloped away gently into protected valleys thick with fir trees.

After spending hours shut up in the gloom of the lean-to, the boys found the sunlight on the snow blinding. They dug their smoked glasses out of their packs and put them on. The dogs crowded around them, yelping and wagging their tails.

“I guess they’re hungry,” Sandy said. “Is there any meat left?”

“A little,” Jerry said. He went to get the can of food from the front of the sled. As he threw the last chunks of raw horse meat to the huskies, he eyed it forlornly. “I’m so hungry I could eat it myself.”

Sandy grinned. “Even some of that _muk-tuk_ would look good to me now.”

“Are the sandwiches all gone?”

“We finished them last night.”

They had just finished feeding the dogs when a faint “Ha-lo-oo-oo...” floated through the still air. On a distant ridge the figure of a man and a dog were silhouetted against the sky.

“It’s Charley and Titan!” the boys yelled in unison. They began to leap up and down, waving their arms and screaming, “Charley! Over here!”

Less than a quarter of an hour later, the Indian came plowing up the hill with Black Titan floundering behind him. They hugged him joyfully and pounded his back, and even Charley was grinning from ear to ear. He listened solemnly while they related their harrowing experiences with the wolves and how they had been trapped in the lean-to.

Charley had had a pretty bad time of it himself. He admitted that, for the first time in his life, he had lost his way when he went back to look for the boys, and had somehow mistaken east for west. Confused and blinded by the shifting gale winds and whipping snow, he had wandered off to an adjacent ridge. After walking around for hours, he had become exhausted—he had been tired out by running twenty-five miles behind the sled to start with—and erected a lean-to in a clump of thick pine trees in the sheltered valley. He had built a big fire and had fallen asleep beside it almost immediately. The next thing he knew, Black Titan was licking his face and the first streaks of dawn were filtering through the pine branches overhead. He had been searching for the boys when he heard the gunshot.

Using the snowshoes as shovels, the three of them dug the sled out of the snow bank. The intense heat of the sun softened the hard upper crust and melted the ice that had formed around the runners. Then Charley hitched up the dogs and headed for the nearest check point, which was only a few miles away.

Their arrival created quite a bit of excitement. “Only one other sled has come through here,” a worried official told them. “The Mounties have planes and search parties out looking for the others.”

“We saw one of the planes,” Sandy said. “He dipped his wings and we waved to him. So he knew we were all right.”

“Actually, though,” the official went on, “the storm looked worse last night than it was. Those winds were gale force. I don’t imagine anyone was really in serious trouble. They’re all experienced woodsmen, accustomed to roughing it on the trail.”

Jerry hooked his thumbs inside his belt and puffed out his chest. “Sure, it was a breeze.”

Tagish Charley was more interested in the sled that had passed through the check point that morning. The official said the other driver had about one hour’s start on them.

“We catch ’im,” Charley said. “Let’s go.”

“Hey!” Jerry complained. “What about breakfast? I’m so ravenous, I’m liable to take a bite out of one of the dogs.”

“No time to eat,” the Indian said. “We have to win race.”

“We’ll give you some sandwiches and hot coffee to take along,” the official promised. “You can eat on the run.”

Jerry stared wistfully at the platters of flapjacks, juicy Canadian bacon and hot biscuits on the stove. “If we come out of this alive, I’ll never look at a cold sandwich again,” he vowed.

A short time later, they were racing down the trail. It was a good day, and by nightfall they had covered another forty-five miles and overtaken the sled ahead of them. Its driver turned out to be a young uranium prospector. For five years he and his brother had been competing in the big race. Two years before, they had come in first and they were hoping to repeat this year. They were pleasant young men and spent the night with Charley and the boys at the last check point on the route.

That night, after a hearty supper, they sat around the fire talking to Sandy and Jerry. Tagish Charley went to bed as soon as he had the team fed and settled in the barn. About nine o’clock, another sled arrived at the check point, and the driver reported that still another team was camped at the side of the trail about an hour’s ride away.

“This is really going to be a photo finish,” one of the brothers said. He got to his feet and knocked the ash out of his pipe into the fireplace. “We better sack in, men. There’s going to be a mad scramble to get away first in the morning.”

Sandy and Jerry followed them to the big dormitory bedroom, where a dozen army cots were set up around a potbellied stove that glowed a dull cherry-red in the darkness. Charley was already snoring loudly as they slipped into their bedrolls.

“Now how are we supposed to get to sleep with that big lug sawing wood?” Jerry grumbled. “We may as well sit and ... and ... talk ... around ... the ... fire....” His voice trailed off into a pretty good imitation of a buzz saw of its own.