Frank Sinatra was giving it all he had in the chorus of ‘It Happened in Monterey’, when Ernie Legat’s horny hand stretched out to the cab’s stereo and cut the cassette. Ol’ Blue Eyes was God to Ernie, but he liked to hear what the engine was up to when he hit Wolf Pass. In weather like this, with a full forty-ton load of frozen seafood behind him, he would be lucky to see second gear. That would be on the way up. On the descent into Silver, he could probably do with a parachute.

The snow was coming at him in the headlights like a corny asteroid storm on Star Trek, hypnotizing him with flakes that became rods of relentless white motion as they streaked past the windshield, and despite the work of the snowploughs, the road wasn’t giving away many clues as to where it stopped being road and started being ditch.

Ernie coaxed the eighteen-wheeler into a first cautious gear change as the gradient started to introduce itself.

‘Come on, you bastard.’

Ernie reached his paw out again to turn up the heater, figuring getting more heat in the cab would take some of it out of the engine. The truck was doing its best.

In the back, two hundred lobsters, bound for plates on the east coast, slid backwards an inch on their plastic pallets as the Peterbilt started its journey up the one-in-fourteen pass.

The snow was getting thicker with every foot Ernie climbed, making him curse that last coffee he’d had at Mabel’s. No wonder he hadn’t seen another truck for twenty miles. The sneaky sons of bitches waving hello to him back in Lanark must have known how bad stuff was up here and either left hours earlier or cut loose for the night in the parking holes down on the Trans-Canada. Not a sniff of trouble on the CB.

Well shit on them. Ernie liked to get where he was going, and even though this was shaping up to be one of the worst winters he could remember, it would take more than a blizzard to knock the stuffing out of his schedule.

He was getting near the summit now, and the old tub hadn’t put a wheel wrong. Nice and slowly, that was how to take it. Ernie could feel the road flattening out, and even though all he could see in the dark and through the snow was about fifteen feet of white featureless ribbon, he’d worked this godforsaken road often enough in daylight to guess he was right underneath the peak of Wolf Mountain. That meant at least two miles of even cruising before it was hang on to your hat for the slide down into Silver.