Dead of Winter (45 page)

‘Come on, Jack, let’s go and find her.’

Issie wasn’t sure any more quite where she was or in which direction she was walking. She remembered that she should be keeping the tops of wooden fence posts on her left for some reason but the snow was so deep that there would be minutes when she couldn’t spot them. Still she kept plodding through the driving snow, sometimes unable to see more than the immediate space in front of her.

She was slow now, each pace a step of fire from her hip down into her knee but she was determined and almost welcomed the pain as something to keep her focused. Although she wasn’t hungry Issie knew that she should eat and have some of her warm drink. Not that she was cold but she just knew it was what she was meant to do. The trouble was there was no shelter and if she stopped walking she feared she wouldn’t be able to start again, that her muscles would finally seize up.

Her back was aching from being bent over to protect her face from the cruelty of the wind. Sometimes it was so strong she could barely breathe. The good news was that her face no longer stung and her hands and feet seemed to have become accustomed to the cold because they didn’t hurt any more. Issie pushed herself through another drift, realising that she was wading rather than
walking most of the time. Her knees were numb and damp despite the bin liner wrappings.

It was much darker now. She knew that she should be concerned at the rapidly dwindling light. It meant that she had been walking for longer than she had thought but she wasn’t worried. Despite the hostile conditions and her isolation, Issie was managing to stay calm. If she thought about things philosophically, she actually had very little to worry about. All she needed to do was keep on; everything else would sort itself out.

She was unaware that each step was shorter than the last as every one was a mammoth effort. Issie yawned behind her scarf and realised that she was really tired.

A little bit further, we’re nearly there, girl
– her Pappy’s words from when she was little, trotting beside him three steps to his one, determined not to be carried the last part of the way. She could almost imagine him walking beside her.

‘I’m tired and a bit cold, Pappy.’

‘I know, girl, but it’s only a little way now and then you can have a nice mug of hot chocolate.’

‘With cream and a flake on top?’

‘Of course, only the best for my own special girl. Come on, just through the copse and we’re almost there.’

Pappy would ruffle her hair then and her legs always grew stronger.

The copse … Issie screwed up her eyes. Why was that important? She almost stopped with the effort to concentrate. A copse was … what was a copse? Was it a dead body? No, that was a corpse … so a copse was … a stream? No, but she knew the river would be coming up soon so she would have to be careful. A copse was …

‘TREES! A copse is trees!’ Issie yelped with excitement.

Soon there would be enough shelter to pause and eat something. She quickened her pace … or thought she did.

There was a shadow on her left. Issie tried to identify it but the snowfall was too heavy to make out its shape. Was that a tree? She
took another couple of steps and the shadow assumed the shape of a bent hawthorn, half drowned in snow on the windward side. A little further on was another, then a young ash and an alder sapling. This must be the copse! She turned and pushed through a deep drift towards them.

A scrappy cluster of brambles, hazel and more hawthorns had formed a hedge around larger stunted trees. The snow in the lee was light, barely a few inches deep, though it was piled hedge high on the windward side. Issie headed towards the shelter, relishing the bliss of being able to walk more freely at last. She used her boots to kick most of the snow away. On the cleared patch she put down a black bin liner and immediately weighted it with her pack. Crouching down with difficulty she ignored the shooting pains in her hip and breathed deeply in the relatively calm air. For the first time in what felt like hours she was out of the biting wind. She knelt down and forced herself to concentrate on what to do next but it was very difficult.

Issie opened her pack with difficulty as her right hand had no feeling and found a packet of chocolate biscuits, cursing that she hadn’t thought to open them before leaving the farm. She used her teeth to pull off her gloves. The shiny wrapper was impossible to open with numb hands so she had to use her teeth to rip it open. The top biscuits fell out so she scooped them up with her palms and crammed them into her mouth, chewing hungrily.

Feeling returned slowly to her left hand in excruciating shots of pins and needles. She relished the pain and shook her other hand, willing some blood into her bone-white fingers. Nothing happened but soon she was able to use her left hand to eat with. Three biscuits later she tried to open the thermos flask of sweet tea she had brought with her just in case, never expecting to drink it. The plastic cup came off easily enough, but try as she might, she could not twist open the stopper. She remembered fastening it tightly that morning to make sure it wouldn’t spill – too tightly, as it turned out, for her left hand to open now. She was thirsty, though, and the biscuits had made it worse. There was a small bottle of water in
her pack but that would be cold. Not good, she told herself, though she couldn’t remember why; but she was so thirsty and surely a few sips wouldn’t do any harm.

She managed to open the bottle and took a mouthful of water. She shuddered as the cold hit the back of her throat and shivered violently but she had another gulp anyway, too thirsty to care and forgetting to warm it in her mouth before swallowing.

‘Careful,’ she told herself, shivering, but half the bottle had already gone. Her teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

It was time to move on. Issie put everything back in her pack and stood up slowly, favouring her good side. Shouldering her burden with difficulty, she took a step towards the posts marking the footpath. The blast of the gale as she left the shelter of the trees almost knocked her over. How had she managed to walk through that? Surely it had got stronger. Maybe it would be sensible to sit out the worst of it by the hedge. She could use a couple of the bin liners to make a sort of shelter and wrap herself up in the foil and sleeping bag, with the other bin liners over it and her spare jumper as padding.

It was a good plan; she would be able to rest for a few minutes. Maybe then the pain in her back, hip and legs would ease off. One-handed it took Issie a long time to sort herself out. While emptying the backpack she found her Swedish fire steel and candle tin, which she had forgotten about, and wax matches. She had even put a couple of firelighters and small sticks of kindling in there, though she had also forgotten about them. She lit the candle in the perforated tin with difficulty, using all but three of the matches but it was so good to feel its heat that she didn’t care. For a full five minutes she squatted there, oblivious to everything but its warmth.

At last she looked up and around; noticed the blizzard conditions, the relative shelter in the copse, with the thick, insulating snow on the north and east sides. Issie stared at her dead-white right hand and took a deep breath. With the food, warmth and relative shelter she was starting to think straight again. If she couldn’t make a fire, she would probably die.

The fire steel was a new one, the last present Pappy had bought her. It still had paint on the fire starter but that would come off quickly enough with her penknife. If she could find some fallen wood she could keep a fire going long enough to warm herself. Issie shuffled around the copse and found twigs and small branches among the floor litter. There were sprays of last year’s leaves clinging to some of them. Of course, they were damp but she discarded the soaking ones and kept those underneath that seemed drier. With her precious firelighters, sticks of kindling and the steel it might just work. She would save the last matches just in case it didn’t.

Clearing the steel of paint took time as she had to wedge it between her knees and could only use one hand but it was done eventually. She used her feet to clear out a square for the fire and laid most of the kindling sticks and some of the smallest twigs in a shallow pyramid over a crumbled firelighter. She had torn shreds of paper wrapping from a stale bar of mint cake in her pocket and a packet of paper tissues ready to keep the blaze going. She took a long, slow breath and concentrated.

The first attempt with the steel failed. So did the second and the third.

‘So I’m not ambidextrous,’ she laughed as her left hand tried to assume the dexterity of its useless right partner. ‘Try again.’

A spark caught a twist of paper on the fifth attempt and a piece of firelighter puffed into flame. Issie let out a yelp of pleasure. The feeble flame almost died but she cupped her hand around it and then lowered her body to shelter it from the whips of wind that flew through the branches of the hedge. The kindling was dry and flamed quickly but even the small twigs took a long time to catch and steamed first before reluctantly glowing red and flickering alight. When they did she learnt that they would then burn fast so that she had to wiggle in another piece quickly. It was a delicate balancing act: too much and she would kill the flame; too little and the heat would be insufficient to dry the next twig for it to burn. But Issie had been making campfires since she was six and her
instincts were still there, fatigued and drowsy, perhaps, but enough to guide her.

For more than ten minutes Issie nurtured and coaxed the tiny fire, watching as it smouldered, flared and started to die. She used a match so that the flare of sulphurous heat could kindle another firelighter. As she put the last fragment in, she prayed and added a slightly bigger piece of wood as all her twigs had gone.

The branch hissed and sizzled, moisture oozing out of the end furthest from the heat.

‘Please, please, please …’

There was a splutter and a tongue of flame licked upwards greedily. Issie poked another piece of fallen wood into the middle of the flames and watched as it lay there, smoking, reluctant until it too started to sweat out its moisture and, finally, caught fire.

‘Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you.’

She kissed the next piece of wood and placed it very carefully on one side of the fragile, falling pyramid. She watched as it lay there, inert and unhelpful but then slowly it too started to smoulder and a spurt of gas ignited from one side. Issie had no idea how long it had taken – she had lost all sense of time – but finally she had a proper little fire going. It was no bigger than the size of a dinner plate but slowly she was able to enlarge it and soon had to go for more fuel.

There were plenty of fallen twigs, branches and sprays of dead leaves around her but to gather them she had to leave the fire exposed to the wind, which gusted through the hedge unpredictably. Issie took her backpack and propped it up carefully between two of the larger branches in an improvised windbreak. Then she moved as quickly as she could and gathered more wood, still handicapped by a useless right hand but at least she could wedge the sticks under her arm and keep the left hand free.

By the time she returned the fire had sunk low, so she added twigs first, some of the driest dead leaves and held her breath waiting for them to catch. The leaves took first, bursting into sudden flame that ignited the twigs. She added a stick about the width of her thumb. It was the driest she had found; would it take? It started to smoke,
moisture bubbled, and then the underside glowed red and it finally caught fire. Issie laughed and added a few more twigs. Hissing, smoking, protesting, her fire had finally decided it was not going to die.

Satisfied that she could focus on something else for a few minutes Issie turned her attention to fixing one of the bin liners – split along one side and the bottom to open it out – across the thickest part of the hedge. She used the thorny hawthorn to spear it and then tied pieces of string from the puttees around convenient branches to hold it firm, using her teeth to do a lot of the work. After ten minutes she had one liner attached. It billowed and sucked as fingers of wind tormented it but by resting her pack against the bottom edge she took much of the stress off the bindings and it relaxed. So did Issie.

The shelter cut down the wind substantially. It was just two feet high, and draughts still whistled beneath the lower edge as she hadn’t been able to get the plastic flush to the ground, but it was a huge improvement. Plus the more it snowed the thicker the drift became on the far side of the hedge and bizarrely that would help protect her. After tending her fire, Issie managed to secure a second liner in the same way, widening the windbreak.

The fire by now was the size of a large frying pan and able to cope with branches half the width of her wrist. It still hissed horribly with each new piece and some of the snow from the branch canopy melted in the heat and dampened the flames. Issie decided to attach a further bin liner to the branches above her, blown almost horizontal by decades of prevailing wind. It took her longer, much longer, to complete this task and by the time she had finished she could barely see what she was doing, even with light from the fire, but it made an enormous difference. Next she managed to fasten another liner to the hedge and pulled it down to the ground, weighted with stones and her bag of wet clothing so that her shelter was now just open to the lee side where the fire was.

There was now virtually no snowfall in her little den beneath the trees. She cleared what was left of it away with her feet and
found a few more twigs, which she placed immediately on the fire. It was smoky but not too bad. She could afford to make herself comfortable. Issie crawled out and went foraging again, this time looking for as many branches as she could find so that she could place them as a frame to keep her off the frozen ground, with leaves and dead bracken to make a bit of a cushion. She couldn’t spend as much time on the task as she would have liked because of the fire but she gathered enough for a thin layer. She unrolled her sleeping bag, slipping it inside the last of the bin liners from her pack before placing her remaining spare clothing – a shirt and two jumpers – underneath. Then she unwrapped the last puttee, ripped it along the seams and put it on top of the thin mattress she had made before laying the sleeping bag on top of it.