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The party had slimmed down to a manageable thirty-odd, now; the Readstown forester, the ten questers, and the rest the pick of the Southside Freedom Fighters. Most of them were between the vehicles, gliding forward with the swooping push their hosts in Ingolf?s birthplace had taught them. As if to give Ingolf the lie, one of them tangled his skis and pitched sideways; it was just barely visible a quarter-mile away, with the snow thickening between them by the minute. Two of his fellows stopped on either side and heaved him upright, dusting off the snow in a process that was half an exasperated drubbing as well. ?Surprised they all learned how to handle skis this quickly,? Ingolf said, unconcerned.
Rudi shrugged.?We?re all in hard condition and supple,? he said; every physical skill you learned made the next one easier.?And there?s nothing else to do, sunrise to sunset!?
Though even he had ached a bit the first few days. This way of travel used every muscle you had, and not in quite the same way as anything else. ?It?s easy enough to learn passably, though I?d be saying it?s a while before we?ll all do it really well.?
He could tell that Ingolf gri
Ingolf threw a mock punch at Rudi?s head, and the Mackenzie rolled his head aside. He was feeling fairly good himself. They were up to about twice easy walking speed now, making up to forty miles a day and looking to do better; if they could keep that up, they?d reach the eastern ocean fast. There was an edge in the other man?s voice, though. ?Something the matter?? Rudi said.
Ingolf rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his right glove, squinting into the rising weather. ?This isn?t even November yet, not quite, and it?s feeling more like February. Yah hey, we got weather here in wintertime, but this is earlier than I can ever remember it. Not so much the snow; that can happen, in a bad year. It?s the cold. We shouldn?t be getting ice yet, not real river-and-lake ice. That?s earlier than Pierre Walks Quiet can remember, and he was pushing fifty when the Change came. And lived up here in the North Country all his life till then. He was a guide, too. Spent most of his time in the woods, knew every trick the winter could throw.? ?Good luck for us, then, traveling so,? Rudi said.?Some of the small rivers are already frozen solid.? He nodded downslope:?That?ll be solid enough to bear weight in a week. I expected it to take longer, that I did.? ?Uff da, so did I! We wanted cold and snow, yah hey, but… too much is worse than not enough!?
Rudi nodded.?A man can die of thirst, or drown,? he agreed.
Then he pulled his goggles down, and they swooped off towards the others; it wasn?t steep enough to glide by gravity alone, but they could build up to something faster than a man could easily run. The rhythm was becoming as natural as walking, after the better part of two weeks; push -with-one-foot, slide with the other, then switch, always remembering the poles-though you could do it without them if you had to. Ingolf still had to hold back a little to let Rudi keep up; his boyhood was returning to him, and with it a skill that wasted no energy at all. The extra speed drove fingers of cold through every possible crevice in Rudi?s armor of cloth and leather and fur, tiny little daggers that only the heat his body generated could hold at bay. ?Hungry!? he said, though they?d eaten well at lunchtime.
Ingolf laughed, pacing it to his breath.?Nothing in the whole world like a trek on skis to give a man an appetite! You go fast, but you have to pay for it.?
The sandy plains they?d crossed lately had been going back to scrub woods, with farms and villages here and there like oases; most had been willing enough to swap a little, with harvest close past. Now it had been days since the last sign of human beings, and they were starting to come into real forest; white and red pine, darker green hemlocks, bare-limbed maple and beech and birch and oak. The ground was still flattish but with occasional low hills, and here and there a granite boulder. One loomed ahead, like a red and pink and speckled egg under a cap of white. They swung left and right around it, and came up alongside the dogsled. ?Pete!? Ingolf shouted.?Hold up!?
The old Anishinabe called to his team and rested his mittens on the twin handles of his sled; the dogs laid themselves down, noses tucked under tails, and in seconds their pale fur looked like lumps in the snow. He turned before he pulled down the knit mask that covered most of his face; the wrinkled lips were drawn thin, and his eyes a little sunken. He was nearly seventy now, and though he had the endurance of a fit man a generation younger… that still made him the equivalent of middle-aged among a band whose next eldest were not quite thirty. ?I don?t like the smell of this merde,? the Indian said, nodding his head backward into the building wail.?It?s not right, not this early; snow, yah, but not this cold all the time. I think this one?s going to be worse. Goin? get cold, too much, you bet. We better look for some place to hole up, and fast.?
Rudi nodded; when three experienced men all had the same bad feeling, you were well advised to listen. At need the sleds and dome-tents would take them through even a very bad blow, but he?d prefer something stouter to break the force of the wind if it was available. ?The twins should be reporting in soon,? he said.?Matti! Pass the word that we?ll be camping.?
His half sisters did come in with the wind behind them, but in the interim the storm built from nasty to a low howl through the pines. Rudi felt an impulse to hunch as he faced into it; instead he just leaned a little. When the two Rangers came in sight, they were only twenty yards away. ?Old farmhouse, sheds and barns,? Ritva said, slapping snow off her ermine-trimmed hood and white face mask and pointing behind herself. ?The farmhouse is down,? Mary continued.?Looks like it was abandoned before the Change and collapsed a couple of years ago. Lots of nice dry wood.? ?One barn is still mostly up,? Ritva continued.?We didn?t check inside, but the roof?s on. It?s one of those potato barns. No tracks we could see, but that doesn?t mean much in this. It?s about a mile; up past that low rocky hill, right on an old laneway through some hemlocks.? ?Good!? Rudi said.
They?d seen many of the potato barns in the sandy district behind them; they were three-quarters sunken in the earth to insulate the root crop for storage over winter. That would make it relatively snug. He thought for a moment, then: ?Matti, get the train moving. Fred, Virginia, rearguard. Ignatius, you?re point for the train with Jake. Mary, Ritva, Ingolf, Edain with me; we?ll break trail.? ?Me too,? Pierre Walks Quiet said. ?All right. Let?s be going. Faster we?re settled in, the faster we can cook supper!?
The wind was hard enough to make skiing into it a chore now, even with pine and birch closing in around them; he was glad of the dogsled to hang on to sometimes, and they all gave a little collective grunt of relief as they came into the shelter of the hill. The laneway was probably a farm track by origin, invisible dirt taking off from equally invisible broken pavement in the growing white mist. Half the snow was fresh, slanting down from the low clouds, and half whipped off the ground by the snarling wind, hiding his own legs when he looked down. When they came through the hemlocks the impact was enough to snatch his breath away; even Garbh hesitated a little before bounding forward at Edain?s side, rising and falling in fresh spurts of snow.
It got a little better when they reached the tumbled ruins; someone had planted windbreaks long ago, sugar maples mostly, and beeches. They were bare now, but they were big, towering eighty feet or better, and there were a lot of them with trunks nearly as thick as a man. The farmhouse had been substantial, and old-its remains didn?t have the matchstick look that structures from just before the Change displayed when they went down.