Tikaani followed Beck’s gaze. ‘Oops. We’re going to get snowed on?’
‘If we’re not careful we’re going to get dead,’ Beck said bluntly, ‘Feel like some digging?’
But he was already trudging up the side of the valley as fast as his snowshoes would let him, before Tikaani could answer. He didn’t go far – just until there was a good slope, about thirty degrees from horizontal. He thrust his stick into the snow and leaned all his weight on it. It went in as far as the very end, and even then it didn’t hit anything. Excellent, Beck thought. There was probably a couple of metres of snow between them and the rock. That would do.
Tikaani had caught up. ‘Digging?’ he asked.
Beck knelt down and punched his fists into the snow. There was a very thin crust of ice on the top, called névé, where the snow had thawed then refrozen. Below that, the snow was fresh and powdery. Ideal.
‘We’re going to make a snow shelter,’ he said. ‘Start digging.’
Tikaani crouched down beside him and did as he was told, scrabbling away like a human terrier. Their mittened hands made excellent shovels. ‘We just burrow down into the snow?’
‘Exactly!’ Beck agreed. He grinned without humour, and explained as their hole got deeper. ‘Snow insulates. It keeps cold out and warmth in—’
‘Excuse me,’ Tikaani interrupted, though he kept digging. ‘What kind of residence are Inuit famous for?’
‘Huh?’ Beck frowned for a moment, then his face cleared. ‘Oh, yes. Right!’
Tikaani was thinking of igloos, which were built on exactly the same principle. Snow, packed solid, was a good construction material and an excellent insulator. Beck probably couldn’t tell Tikaani anything he didn’t already know about snow.
‘Have you ever been in a snow shelter?’ he asked.
Tikaani shook his head. ‘No. They’re generally used by hunters and I’ve never been hunting. Or by people stuck out in storms . . .’ He smiled at Beck. ‘And I’d never done that either, until today. My dad was always very careful, making sure we didn’t get caught in a whiteout.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Unlike Tikaani, Beck had experienced a whiteout – deliberately. With a rope around his waist, so that he could be dragged to safety, the Sami had sent him out into a snowstorm just to see what it was like. He hadn’t been able to see a thing – not even which way was up or down. His sense of direction had vanished in about thirty seconds. Everywhere he looked, any way at all, there was just that whirling, ravenous white. If you got caught in a whiteout, the only answer was to stop moving and make a shelter. If you kept going, then you wouldn’t just get lost. You might not be able to tell if something was ground or just air full of snow, so you could fall and not even realize until you hit bottom.
By now there was a sizeable pile of freshly dug snow around them. Beck scooped some up into a block and squeezed it together. The loose powder compressed into a solid mass with only a little pressure.
‘So we’ve still got time to have a snowball fight?’ Tikaani asked sceptically.
‘Not really.’ Beck plonked the block down next to the hole and scooped up some more. ‘This hole is going to be our entrance, and so we need to block out the wind. This will be a little wall.’
Tikaani looked at the hole they were digging, realizing something for the first time. ‘This is facing right into the wind. It’s just going to fill up with snow again. Shouldn’t we dig on another slope, away from the wind?’
Beck shook his head. ‘The snow can just blow down a slope like that and bury everything there. If we’re on the windward slope, we know the snow will always blow past us, keeping the entrance free. So we use this wall to keep the wind out of our hole. Keep digging – I’ll give you a hand in a minute.’
It only took a couple of minutes for Beck to build his wall. It didn’t need to be high and it didn’t need to be perfect. The blocks were crude and misshapen, but they stuck together. Even that reduced the wind speed significantly, and the boys felt the difference. It was as if warmth was a flower inside them, and suddenly it could put out a tiny little bud that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
After about fifteen minutes the hole was deep enough for the two boys to crouch in, side by side. They were below the level of the snow and they could keep digging while the wind raged above them. It was already much stronger than it had been when the first snow was falling. It whipped past them – above them – in whirling clusters that stung the face whenever one of them peeked out. Inside the hole it was a couple of degrees warmer already.
‘We spend the night like this?’ Tikaani asked hopelessly.
Beck smiled. ‘Hey, we’ve only just begun!’
He took a final look outside, ducking as a particularly strong burst of snow came swirling towards him. A shape moved within it – a white shadow that glided with the wind.