Both Arnie and Mikhail were nearing exhaustion. They’d been off ice for several hours. That meant breaking through snow in a frustratingly slow and demoralizing slog. Get a ski up on fresh snow from where it had been over a foot below the surface. Push forward. The forward ski breaks the crust and sinks. This leaves behind the other ski still buried from the previous effort. The thigh muscles quiver with the exertion. The hind ski is lifted, putting more weight on the forward ski, sinking it farther into the snow. Balance is thrown off, requiring exertion to regain it. Poles are pushed deeper, requiring more exertion to pull them clear. The floundering is repeated. And repeated. And repeated.
Arnie was frustrated. He’d gotten a glimpse of Mikhail about a kilometer off, looking to Arnie to be slightly ahead. The terrain had changed to what in summer would be marshy, boggy ground. Now it was frozen over. Almost all of Arnie’s experience of cross-country skiing had been in mountains. When he saw the flat frozen surfaces of the marsh, with puffs of plants pushing above the ice, it looked nearly as good as a frozen lake or stream. He shoved off over the marsh before him, thankful to be once again moving rapidly, piling on as much distance as he could before darkness and exhaustion stopped him. He took his first Benzedrine pill.
Mikhail, too, had entered the same marshy, boggy terrain. He, however, had skied similar ground in Finland, in Belarus, and in Poland. He knew that organic material in the bog bottoms constantly generated heat. The heat had to escape somewhere. In winter, it came through what the local Finns called bog eyes. During the 1939–40 winter campaign in Finland, while negotiating a bog much like the ones he was encountering now, he’d watched his friend, Ivanov, vanish. There was a cry, a crunching and splashing sound, and then Ivanov was gone, taken down by his heavy gear. The Finns had been pressing them on their flanks, so after only a couple of minutes of lying spread out on the ice and fruitless poking with tree branches, hoping Ivanov would grab one and be pulled free, he had to make the decision to move on. Ivanov’s body might still be there, a skeleton, wrapped with straps and a rifle attached. He tried to shake the image. The memory, however, recalled that this year, the winter had been late. Although late arriving, when the snow came, it came hard and heavy. This meant less chance for ice to form.
He and Arnie were also moving steadily southward. Every kilometer farther south, the more likely they were to encounter areas where the snow simply covered water or very thin ice, forming a dangerous snow bridge.
He began to modify his route when he hit bogs, moving more elliptically instead of straight across, so he’d be near solid land if something went wrong. It was safer but slower.