He squinted up through the snow at the ice-crusted rock-face and put that thought away. Sam’s body was tingling, his nerves coming back to life as the blood reached the frozen skin. He had stripped naked and waded through the half-frozen Wolf River for a quarter mile, his clothes in a bundle on his head, the floating wedges of ice banging against his torso, just in case the dogs managed to get this far into the forest. No dog would recover his scent now, nor any ranger pick up his footprints in the thick snow, even if they found the broken remains of his snow-hole. In fact, he was confident no man would find him. But then it was not men that he feared.

He could just make out the top of the tunnel arch from down here and knew that if he scaled this last piece of rock he would reach the dark safety of its black interior, a sheltered haven for another night. He had followed the tracks as far as he could, walking on the rails and leaving no prints, but when the tracks ran alongside the Trans-Canada highway for a time Sam was forced back into the forest. He took a tortuous route between the tall lodgepoles that kept him covered, stopping to listen occasionally as the chopper droned overhead or in the distance, presumably looking for him. It was hellish going and had taken him all day, picking his way through the dense snow-covered deadfall, but it brought him invisibly and safely out beneath a thirty-foot slab of rock that led up to one of the higher tunnel entrances. An entrance far from the road. The cliff was icy and sheer, but for one who had spent a boyhood of climbing such rocks to hide in their deeper crevices, not impossible.

Sam sucked his fingers to warm them and scanned the rock for holds. There was a route between the huge aquamarine icicles that looked passable, if he could stretch over the last smooth section and grab some jagged rock at the top that might bear his weight. There was no choice. He took his fingers from his mouth and bent to remove his Sorrels. The cumbersome snow boots served their purpose well, but not in climbing rock. That he would have to do barefoot, even though the day had produced nothing higher than minus fifteen.

He tied the boots’ laces together, stuffed them with his socks and hung them round his neck. He flexed his toes to keep the circulation going, shook his arms, then stepped forward and up onto the first foothold. Cold flesh slipped into the slit of the rough rock, but his hands had already found the next hold and he pulled himself up to a ledge below the bulbous blue ice. Four or five more moves and he would be there on the track.