“Are you kidding me? You can make slipknots in the middle of a disaster and run dogsled teams, but you can’t make a fire?” Peter laughed so hard the sled shifted, waking up the dogs momentarily.
He sent her off with instructions and teased her mercilessly the whole time she was tromping around gathering things. She came back with the first load, and he got off the sled and hobbled to the spot she had picked, using his remaining snowshoe to dig out a firepit while she went for more wood.
By her fourth trip, he had the fire going well. She dumped another armload of dead branches in the pile and turned to get another. “There’s lots of wood there,” he said. “You don’t need to go so far.” She paused, looking back. He was pointing at a large tree nearby. The front of it was almost obscured by a raft of snow, the trunk sticking out like a mast.
“Where?” She looked at the snowbank and the dead branches that started at twice her height off the ground.
“Go around the snowbank. I bet there’s all kinds of stuff behind it.”
She went around it, and sure enough, the snowbank had acted like a winter beaver dam; the snow was trapped on one side, while the other was dry and filled with branches and driftwood and old grass. She hauled armload after armload of it back to the fire. Peter took select sticks and made several teepees to drape their frozen clothes over. He set them close to the fire to dry.
“You could have told me that earlier,” she said.
“What, and miss out on the fun?”
“It’s really not funny, Peter. I’m starving.”
They both were. The last energy bars had been eaten as soon as they had stopped shouting at each other.
“I’m sorry. You can stop. That’s more than enough wood for the night.”
Hannah dropped the last armload and went to the sled. She pulled out four more portions of dog food and was unwrapping them when Peter called to her. “Hey, what’s in that?”
“In what?”
“The dog food. Why does it look like that?”
“It’s special,” she said. “Dad makes it for them for sledding, then he freezes it so it’ll stack up nice and neat.”
“Well, what’s in it?”
“I don’t know, meat and stuff.”
“Is there any, like, real dog food in it?”
She understood that he meant kibble and shook her head.
“No, there’s peas and carrots and oatmeal and stuff. Blueberries, I think, but mostly meat.”
He looked at her and grinned. “Like beef?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like stew to me, Hannah.”
Her stomach smacked against her spine with a resounding yes that overrode the smaller part of her brain that said people didn’t eat dog food.
But they had lots of dog food. Lots and lots.
Peter dangled the largest pot from his hand. “Toss some over.”
She tossed two of the bricks over, then got two more, woke the dogs, and fed them a second time. They ate this meal just as quickly as they’d eaten the first. Sencha’s sides heaved as she chewed and ripped at her meal, her ribs and muscles showing clearly. Hannah went back to the fire to see the first two bricks of dog food sticking out of the pot. Peter was adding snow around them.
Soon, the meat and vegetables melted, and the snow melted, too; the dog food watered down with snow began to look less like lumps of brown junk and more like … stew. It smelled like stew, too.
Dog food stew.
Finally, Peter quit stirring and used his poker to grab the steaming pot from the fire, and then they feasted. Hannah burned her tongue and lips, but she didn’t care. After three days of half-frozen powdered meals and energy bars, the richness of the stew was like eating chocolate, honey, caramel, freshly baked bread … every good thing she’d ever eaten in her life paled in comparison to that stew.