Kim Robinson - Shaman

Then Click whistled sharply, pointed behind them. They turned and saw that the black dots pursuing them were on their ridge, still well behind, but on the ridge. Thorn cursed them:

and so on as he led them at speed to the next high point on the ridge, where they could drop again and get out of sight. He could spout curses all day without ever repeating himself, as Loon well knew.

Over the knob, out of sight of the ice men, Thorn stopped to look down a steep headwall into a canyon to the west. The steep slide down looked like it was snow-free ground all the way, although there was a section so steep that they couldn’t see it from above, which was never good. Below that drop, trees furred the cleft of the canyon, which curved down and to the south.

Thorn said,—Let’s get down this while they can’t see us. This looks like it will go.

The other three were willing. The steep section would hopefully be snow-free. It seemed worth trying. It would not do to stay on the ridge; it was beginning to look like the ice men might be faster than they were. And they couldn’t go any faster.

So they started the descent off the ridge. As they dropped, it occurred to Loon that another good thing about this canyon was that it was short, and debouched into a valley trending south, so that they would be able to continue more or less toward home.

As it turned out, the part of the slope that had been invisible from above was a steep field still covered by old snow, suncupped heavily in lines that left many long vertical troughs. The whole slope gleamed with waterdrops, it was so wet and soft in the afternoon sun.

Thorn hesitated at the top of this slope for a time. He edged down, stomped on the highest snow: he stepped right through to the rock below. Soft snow indeed. He got out of the hole by hauling himself back onto the rock, thought about it a while, then sat with a grunt on angled rock and took the snowshoes off the back of his sack, then began to tie them back on his feet.

—We have to get down this, he said.—We’ll leave tracks, if they come to this spot and take a look, but after that we won’t. He gestured briefly downcanyon.

So they sat beside him and tied their snowshoe bindings onto their boots, lashing them down hard. They stood again. Loon bent his knees and felt little crampy pings sparking in his thigh muscles. It was going to be a tough descent.

Loon went last again, and did his best to step down into the snowshoe prints of the other three. They were mostly one set of tracks that all three of his companions had used, sloppily laid over each other, and very deep. Some were thigh deep, and some of these burst under Loon toward their downhill side, forcing him to stop himself from a further slide with an abrupt shift of weight onto his uphill leg. That was Goodleg, thankfully. Actually it would have been better to have Goodleg on the downhill side of him, but the slope was angled such that there was no choice but to traverse to the right as one looked down. Occasionally Thorn had tried to turn left, to carve a little switchback into the slope, but quickly the slope forced him to turn and head down to the right again.

This meant Badleg had to take Loon’s weight on the downhill side, and do the real work. Every lead step down had to be made by Badleg; there was no other way, the land itself forced it. As he continued, step after step, the down step on Badleg began to hurt from the ankle up to the hip, stabbing him so that he wobbled, and could not trust the leg not to give under him. But there was no choice: he had to extend down on it straight-legged, stepping into the uncertain support of the deep smeared snowshoe hole the other three had left for him. He dropped into that pain, put his weight on it and ignored the agonizing little crunch inside his ankle, did his best to quickly move Goodleg down into its higher hole, then use it to lift his weight off his left side. Then he held steady for a moment on Goodleg, taking a few breaths, before committing to the biting pain of the next step down. When the lower snowshoe holes burst under his weight he had to ride down the collapsing snow until enough of it gathered to stop his slide; after that, hopefully the higher line of tracks had not become too high for him to step up into, or he would have to kick an in-between step. When getting back up like this he had to stick Thirdleg into the snow as high as he could reach, to help pull himself up.

He kept on, step after plunging step, the pain from Badleg shooting right up through his pizzle to his gut. The traverse down to the forest by the creekbed was less than halfway done.

Loon began to examine the slope below them during his frequent pauses, wondering if it would be possible to sit down on the snow and slide down one of the vertical gullies of linked suncups. The problem with that was there were big rocks at the foot of the slope, the usual spall of boulders big enough to tumble that far down. The snow was so soft now, just possibly he could dig in with his pole and his snowshoes as he slid down. But it was too steep to try it and see. He might slide too fast to stop, right down onto the rocks. Even if he managed to stop himself in the snow above the rocks, he would then be in a hummocky mare’s nest of bumps and hollows and big boulders. Getting through that mess, or traversing above it, would be just as hard as what he was doing now, maybe harder. And he couldn’t safely slide down there anyway!

He had to stick each left step as well as he could. Step down directly in the hole, then bear down on the pain, make that footing hold if he could; then a quick recovery step onto the right leg, doing everything he could on that side to take all his weight. Step after step, with the penalty for soft snow or a misstep an extra stab.

He was sweating profusely with the effort and pain. He paused from time to time to scoop some of the wettest snow into his mouth, chilling his teeth and the roof of his mouth, briefly wetting the parched dryness rasping in his mouth and throat. He could feel that he was considerably water-short by now, and knew that was part of what was making his legs crampy. When they reached their next source of water he was going to drink till his belly was round. Another six steps, another rest. The suncupped slope blazed. Sweat burned in his eyes, the light burst blackly off the snow; he could hardly see, but there was nothing to see anyway except the snow under him, so it didn’t matter. There was nothing now but snow mashed by the double line of snowshoe prints pulsing under him, coated or filled by blackness. The blackness was strange, because the snow was as white as could be, and yet stuffed with blackness. Watery granules of white in black. Blind though he was, he could still see if the next smush of snow was going to hold him or not. That was all the sight he needed.

Then the snow under Badleg gave way as he stepped down, and he slipped and instantly was sliding on his side down the snowy slope, scraping down so quickly that he couldn’t stop himself with the edges of the snowshoes, couldn’t stick Thirdleg in. He could only try to ride the snowshoes down sideways, try to keep from going any faster. He was headed for a shallow hollow, and he saw it was the best chance he was going to get to stop himself before he ran into the boulders at the bottom, so he tensed himself, waited, and then in the hollow dug in with snowshoes and elbows and Thirdleg, and came to a crunching stop.