Olly felt his heart sink as he gazed at the storm. Clouds as high as the mountains were charging down towards them. He didn’t feel he had any more strength in his body. His legs didn’t want to take another step.
But he would have to. He would force himself to keep up.
To Olly’s surprise, Bear didn’t keep on going. Instead he went to the side of the valley, where the ground started to slope and the snow was much deeper. He dropped his rucksack on the ground, thrust both gloved hands into the snow and scooped out a handful.
“Give me a hand?” he asked as he threw it to one side.
Olly blinked. What was Bear doing? How would digging a hole in the snow help?
Olly didn’t understand, but Bear was asking for his help and that was enough for him. He hurried to Bear’s side and they started to dig out a hole together. Olly copied the way Bear did it and put his hands together like a spade to scoop out chunks of snow the size of footballs.
“I reckon the snow here’s about four metres deep,” Bear said as they dug. “It’s perfect for what we want. Frozen solid on top, powdery underneath.”
“Why are we making a hole?” Olly asked.
“It’s going to be more than just a hole. We’re going to spend the night here.”
“What?” Olly stopped digging and stared at him. “In the snow?”
“Best place.” Bear didn’t stop. After a moment, Olly went back to digging as well. He had thought the tent back at Camp was uncomfortable. But spending a night under snow?
“We’ll freeze to death!” he argued as he dug. “Snow’s so cold.”
“It is,” Bear agreed, “but it’s also one of the best insulators in nature. Snow has millions of air bubbles trapped in it, which hold the warmth amazingly. This shelter will keep the cold air out and trap our warmth in. Clever, huh?”
Olly nodded. “Kind of like the Inuit in the Arctic when they use snow to make igloos?”
“Exactly.” Bear smiled. “Although we’ll be under the snow, not on top of it.”
Olly’s arms ached. He couldn’t dig any longer.
“I don’t think I can go on,” Olly said. “It hurts so much.”
Bear stopped digging. “I never promised that this journey would be easy,” he calmly replied, “but if you can find the strength inside you, you can overcome all things. Keep going, buddy.”
Olly kept digging.
The pair quietly worked together as a team. Bear didn’t need to tell Olly what to do. It just sort of happened.
The longer the tunnel got, the harder it was to throw the loose snow out at the end. So Olly would scoop it up behind him into lumps and throw it out into the open.
Olly found he had a strange feeling. It was a feeling he wasn’t used to.
He was enjoying this.
He wasn’t sure whether it was the teamwork he liked, or maybe the danger. Perhaps it was simply the fact that he was doing something that would help keep him alive. Whatever it was, he liked it.
Olly kept going.
He knew they were still in danger, but he believed that together they could handle it. His feet were still cold, but he would soon change his socks. At first his arms ached more and more as they dug, but then suddenly they felt fine. Tired, but fine. His body had got used to it.
And for the first time in his life, Olly felt proud of what he was making. Really proud. He smiled to himself.
Bear crawled back out of the tunnel when it was nearly two metres long.
“Now we need a wall across the entrance,” he said. “Like this.”
There were piles of freshly dug snow all around the entrance to the tunnel. Bear used his hands to work some of it into a block. Olly found that making blocks was like making square snowballs. He could press the white powder into small lumps, and then press them together to make bigger lumps. Bear showed him how to lay the first blocks in a line on the ground about half a metre from the hole. Then he put more blocks down on top of them.
“What’s this for?” Olly asked as he worked.
“The tunnel faces into the wind. We need the wall to keep the wind out. It’s the wind that will kill you fastest up in these mountains.”
Olly carried on making blocks while Bear crawled back into the tunnel.
“Good work, Olly,” he shouted back. “We’re really getting there now. But there’s still a bit more to do.”
“More?” Olly asked.
“Well, we’ve dug in. Now we need to dig up.”