Flight of Aquavit (46 page)

out here and worse with the wind chill. Without

better clothing we’re not going to last long. We

have to find shelter of some sort.”

He nodded agreement and winced in pain as

he made a move to get up.

“Let me help you,” I said, slipping my arm

around his back. When we were standing I pulled

off my gloves and handed them to him. He shook

his head but I pushed them towards him. “We

have to take turns with these, Jared. Do you have

a hood on that coat?” He shook his head. “Let’s

switch,” I yelled over the bellowing wind.

“No!” he yelled back. “I’m not going to let you

freeze to keep me warm.”

“Jared!” I said, grabbing him by each shoulder

and bringing his face close to mine. “You’re hurt!

You’re bleeding! I can already see that you’re shiv-

ering and getting glassy-eyed. You could be going

into shock or getting hypothermia! Most of the

body’s heat escapes from the head. You need a

coat with a hood. Mine has a hood. And you need

366 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t

to take my boots too.”

“No way!” he argued.

“Listen, we don’t have time for this! I’ll keep

the scarf! And I promise I’ll take the coat and

boots back when I’m feeling cold.” I was already

feeling cold and I hadn’t even taken them off yet,

but I knew I was right. I had to keep him warm or

he’d never make it. Rather than wait for his rebut-

tal, I unzipped my coat, slipped it off my shoulders

and handed it to him.

He hesitated and then thinking better of it

made the switch. I showed him how I could pull

the turtleneck of my reindeer sweater high over

my chin so that most of my head (up to my eyes—

which I was planning on using) was covered.

Then I fashioned my scarf into a protective tur-

ban/headband thing à la Norma Desmond in

Sunset Boulevard
. I leaned against the desk and

began taking off my boots. Fortunately our feet

are about the same size. After exchanging

footwear I pointed in the direction the truck had

disappeared and said, “Well, time to head home?”

“Thank you, Russell.”

I avoided his eyes. I shrugged and laced my

arm through his and we headed north…or was it

west?

The going was tough. The wind pushed and

pulled at us, flailing us about like two puppets in

a whirlwind. Sometimes it came at us so hard and

cold we could barely breathe through our burning

nostrils. We’d stop and bow our heads against the

Anthony Bidulka — 367

onslaught until we managed to pull in enough

oxygen to continue. The falling snow was not the

soft, fluttery kind, but rather like a hail of hard lit-

tle pellets that pinged off our bodies as we strug-

gled through it. And even though we pushed our-

selves onward, it seemed we weren’t progressing

an inch. The scenery never changed. Everything

around us looked just as it did when we began—

white and miserable.

Although we were travelling on a road, we had

yet to see a car—or any other moving thing for that

matter. I concluded it was probably either an old

country road rarely used at the best of times, or,

more likely, the savage weather, not made for man

or beast, was keeping everyone safely tucked

away in their homes. Which was exactly where I

was supposed to be, curled up with my dogs in

front of a blazing fireplace, listening to Christmas

tunes and enjoying a yuletide evening with plen-

ty of eggnog and rum. What had happened to

that? How quickly everything had changed.

As we trudged forward I tried not to think

about how cold I was. “How are you doing?” I

called out. I had taken to asking the same question

of Jared every minute or so. Although he was still

on his feet he was wrestling to keep pace. I need-

ed to keep him moving.

No answer.

“Jared? How are you?” I said it louder, think-

ing the screeching wind had stolen my words.

He stopped and I did too. He turned towards

me, his eyes, sad and serious, glared out at me

from beneath the sheath of his hood.

368 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t

“We have to keep going, Jared. We shouldn’t

stop. Keep going!” I demanded.

“I just realized…”

Even though I could see his lips moving, the

rest of his words were lost in the noise of our sur-

roundings and the scarf protecting my ears. I

leaned into him, the bounty of his coat’s hood cre-

ating a cocoon around our faces. “What did you

say?” the words slipping out of my mouth so thick

with cold I could almost see them.

And then, when I finally heard the words, I

pulled back as if their meaning had physically

repelled me. I stared at him, horrified. “Slowly,

but surely,” he uttered, “you and I are being mur-

dered.”

With the heavy blanket of the snowstorm threat-

ening to cover and suffocate us, Jared and I looked

at each other and I knew he was right. This wasn’t

a misunderstanding. This wasn’t a joke. This was-

n’t even an idle threat. This was the real thing.

This
was
murder. We weren’t meant to find our

way to safety. We weren’t meant to survive this.

We were meant to die.

I made some useless moves to tighten the ties

of the hood around Jared’s head, my freezing fin-

gers bungling the effort, and announced, “We’re

not giving up!”

He nodded supportively but with little real

confidence and pulled me close. As we embraced

I looked over his shoulder and that’s when I first

saw it in the far distance. A silhouette. Jared must

Anthony Bidulka — 369

have felt my body stiffen and released me to look

in the same direction. With our hands protecting

our eyes from stinging snow we tried to make out

the shape. Was it a house? A barn? Maybe a large

piece of machinery? It didn’t matter. It looked big.

Big enough to afford us at least some shelter from

the wind that was thieving the warmth from our

bodies and turning us into human snowmen. But

there was one problem. To get from where we

were to where it was would mean travelling cross-

country. We’d have to leave the road. In most

places higher than the fields that bordered it, the

road had remained surprisingly free of signifi-

cant snow build up and had allowed us compara-

tively easy passage. It also gave us a sense of secu-

rity (however false) and hope that perhaps a vehi-

cle might come by to rescue us. Leaving the road

would be a major decision. And what if we were

wrong? What if the shape we were seeing was

some kind of winterscape mirage? Would we be

able to find our way back to the road? Or would

we be lost to the unnavigable snowdrifts of an

abandoned and desolate field?

“We’ve got to go for it, Russell,” Jared said, his

words slightly slurred. “No one is coming to get

us. We have to try to save ourselves.” I’d noticed

earlier that the skin around his eyes and mouth was

turning grey and bloodless. He needed to get out

of the cold…fast.

“Here!” he said leaning over to pull off a boot.

“No!” I bellowed through the howling wind. “I

don’t need it. I’m fine. I can make it.”

“Tell you what,” Jared bellowed back, amaz-

370 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t

ingly revealing a smile on his blanched face. Was

the cold making him delirious? “You take one, I’ll

take one.”

It seemed stupid, but why not I thought to

myself. I had been wearing the Nikes for several

minutes and was beginning to lose feeling in my

toes. Extremities. They’re the first to go. Besides,

there was no more time for this stand off. We

exchanged a boot for a shoe and then took the first

steps into the field. We were like two non-swim-

mers diving into water of unknown depth and

turbulence. I said a silent prayer, hoping we

weren’t making a last, fatal error.

Seconds passed like hours and minutes were an

eternity. The snow in the field was deep, at times

hard enough to walk on but then unexpectedly soft,

giving way and dropping us into a frothy mess up

to our waists. We’d fight a rising feeling of panic,

knowing what it must feel like to slowly be dragged

beneath the killing mire of quicksand and pull our-

selves out only to find that our goal, the elusive

dark outline, seemed to have moved farther away.

We trekked and traipsed and oftentimes pulled and

pushed one another beyond reasonable endurance,

but we kept on going. The conditions seemed only

to worsen. We trudged ahead, like two machines

that had stopped performing the function they were

meant for but still had a few ounces of battery juice

left to keep them moving forward. Jared became

quieter and slower. And then, just as my hopes were

collapsing, I saw the barn.

Anthony Bidulka — 371

Reaching shelter was better than arriving in

Mexico in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter,

better than showing up at your own surprise

birthday party, better than reaching the summit of

any mountain in the world. Reaching that barn

meant we might live. That barn was our world.

From the little I could see through the wild

snowstorm around us, the structure, with siding

and shingles of weathered grey wood, looked one

step from complete dilapidation. But it was still

standing, and that alone was no small feat in the

current weather conditions. It was a standard

1950s’ barn design with large sliding doors on

either end, a row of tiny, square windows running

the length of each side, and a high domed roof

beneath which was probably a hayloft. At each

corner of the aged structure was a clump of trees,

branches grotesquely gnarled, probably all that

kept it from falling down. When we reached the

end of the barn closest to us we threw ourselves

against it almost as if to hug it, but more likely to

keep ourselves from falling down. Our energy

level was extremely low but reaching our oasis in

the snow buoyed our spirits.

The feeling didn’t last.

We saw it at the same time and both gasped in

incredulous disbelief. A thick chain fastened with

a medieval looking padlock joined the two wood-

en handles of the sliding doors. For some insane

reason, the owner of the building had decided to

protect his disintegrating investment like a castle

fortress. I told Jared to stay put while I checked the

doors at the other end of the barn. The going was

372 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t

rough and slow as the snow had accumulated to

four or five feet in some places around the build-

ing. At the other end I found the same thing. I was

devastated. Why did this have to be so hard? We

were trying to save our lives for crying out loud!

Didn’t we deserve some help? Some divine inter-

vention? Rather than one obstacle after another!

I hated the thought of having to go back and

disappoint Jared, but that is what I did. By the

time I returned he had slumped to the ground

with his back against the barn. His hood had fall-

en askew to one side of his head and he hadn’t

even bothered to put it back in position where it

might do some good. He was losing energy and

warmth faster than a colander loses water. I

adjusted the hood as best I could and knew I had

to do something fast. I considered the windows,

but even if I could get up high enough to break

one I was pretty sure they would be too small for

either of us to crawl through. In a fit of despera-

tion I clomped over to one of the nearby trees and

hacked at a branch with my fists until I loosened a

good sized branch. Weapon in hand I unleashed

the power of my frustration on the padlock. What

a time to be without my lock pick set. As I tried to

slaughter the heavy metal lock, Jared seemed

oblivious. I thought about shaking him awake, but

the grim reality was that if I didn’t find a way into

the barn it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I slashed away until the branch was but a

splinter. Ultimately the battering of the lock did

not work. In a war of metal against wood, metal

always wins. There had to be another way, I

Anthony Bidulka — 373

thought to myself.

Aha.

Instead of attacking metal that was constructed