Authors: Anthony Bidulka
out here and worse with the wind chill. Without
better clothing we’re not going to last long. We
have to find shelter of some sort.”
He nodded agreement and winced in pain as
he made a move to get up.
“Let me help you,” I said, slipping my arm
around his back. When we were standing I pulled
off my gloves and handed them to him. He shook
his head but I pushed them towards him. “We
have to take turns with these, Jared. Do you have
a hood on that coat?” He shook his head. “Let’s
switch,” I yelled over the bellowing wind.
“No!” he yelled back. “I’m not going to let you
freeze to keep me warm.”
“Jared!” I said, grabbing him by each shoulder
and bringing his face close to mine. “You’re hurt!
You’re bleeding! I can already see that you’re shiv-
ering and getting glassy-eyed. You could be going
into shock or getting hypothermia! Most of the
body’s heat escapes from the head. You need a
coat with a hood. Mine has a hood. And you need
366 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
to take my boots too.”
“No way!” he argued.
“Listen, we don’t have time for this! I’ll keep
the scarf! And I promise I’ll take the coat and
boots back when I’m feeling cold.” I was already
feeling cold and I hadn’t even taken them off yet,
but I knew I was right. I had to keep him warm or
he’d never make it. Rather than wait for his rebut-
tal, I unzipped my coat, slipped it off my shoulders
and handed it to him.
He hesitated and then thinking better of it
made the switch. I showed him how I could pull
the turtleneck of my reindeer sweater high over
my chin so that most of my head (up to my eyes—
which I was planning on using) was covered.
Then I fashioned my scarf into a protective tur-
ban/headband thing à la Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard
. I leaned against the desk and
began taking off my boots. Fortunately our feet
are about the same size. After exchanging
footwear I pointed in the direction the truck had
disappeared and said, “Well, time to head home?”
“Thank you, Russell.”
I avoided his eyes. I shrugged and laced my
arm through his and we headed north…or was it
west?
The going was tough. The wind pushed and
pulled at us, flailing us about like two puppets in
a whirlwind. Sometimes it came at us so hard and
cold we could barely breathe through our burning
nostrils. We’d stop and bow our heads against the
Anthony Bidulka — 367
onslaught until we managed to pull in enough
oxygen to continue. The falling snow was not the
soft, fluttery kind, but rather like a hail of hard lit-
tle pellets that pinged off our bodies as we strug-
gled through it. And even though we pushed our-
selves onward, it seemed we weren’t progressing
an inch. The scenery never changed. Everything
around us looked just as it did when we began—
white and miserable.
Although we were travelling on a road, we had
yet to see a car—or any other moving thing for that
matter. I concluded it was probably either an old
country road rarely used at the best of times, or,
more likely, the savage weather, not made for man
or beast, was keeping everyone safely tucked
away in their homes. Which was exactly where I
was supposed to be, curled up with my dogs in
front of a blazing fireplace, listening to Christmas
tunes and enjoying a yuletide evening with plen-
ty of eggnog and rum. What had happened to
that? How quickly everything had changed.
As we trudged forward I tried not to think
about how cold I was. “How are you doing?” I
called out. I had taken to asking the same question
of Jared every minute or so. Although he was still
on his feet he was wrestling to keep pace. I need-
ed to keep him moving.
No answer.
“Jared? How are you?” I said it louder, think-
ing the screeching wind had stolen my words.
He stopped and I did too. He turned towards
me, his eyes, sad and serious, glared out at me
from beneath the sheath of his hood.
368 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
“We have to keep going, Jared. We shouldn’t
stop. Keep going!” I demanded.
“I just realized…”
Even though I could see his lips moving, the
rest of his words were lost in the noise of our sur-
roundings and the scarf protecting my ears. I
leaned into him, the bounty of his coat’s hood cre-
ating a cocoon around our faces. “What did you
say?” the words slipping out of my mouth so thick
with cold I could almost see them.
And then, when I finally heard the words, I
pulled back as if their meaning had physically
repelled me. I stared at him, horrified. “Slowly,
but surely,” he uttered, “you and I are being mur-
dered.”
With the heavy blanket of the snowstorm threat-
ening to cover and suffocate us, Jared and I looked
at each other and I knew he was right. This wasn’t
a misunderstanding. This wasn’t a joke. This was-
n’t even an idle threat. This was the real thing.
This
was
murder. We weren’t meant to find our
way to safety. We weren’t meant to survive this.
We were meant to die.
I made some useless moves to tighten the ties
of the hood around Jared’s head, my freezing fin-
gers bungling the effort, and announced, “We’re
not giving up!”
He nodded supportively but with little real
confidence and pulled me close. As we embraced
I looked over his shoulder and that’s when I first
saw it in the far distance. A silhouette. Jared must
Anthony Bidulka — 369
have felt my body stiffen and released me to look
in the same direction. With our hands protecting
our eyes from stinging snow we tried to make out
the shape. Was it a house? A barn? Maybe a large
piece of machinery? It didn’t matter. It looked big.
Big enough to afford us at least some shelter from
the wind that was thieving the warmth from our
bodies and turning us into human snowmen. But
there was one problem. To get from where we
were to where it was would mean travelling cross-
country. We’d have to leave the road. In most
places higher than the fields that bordered it, the
road had remained surprisingly free of signifi-
cant snow build up and had allowed us compara-
tively easy passage. It also gave us a sense of secu-
rity (however false) and hope that perhaps a vehi-
cle might come by to rescue us. Leaving the road
would be a major decision. And what if we were
wrong? What if the shape we were seeing was
some kind of winterscape mirage? Would we be
able to find our way back to the road? Or would
we be lost to the unnavigable snowdrifts of an
abandoned and desolate field?
“We’ve got to go for it, Russell,” Jared said, his
words slightly slurred. “No one is coming to get
us. We have to try to save ourselves.” I’d noticed
earlier that the skin around his eyes and mouth was
turning grey and bloodless. He needed to get out
of the cold…fast.
“Here!” he said leaning over to pull off a boot.
“No!” I bellowed through the howling wind. “I
don’t need it. I’m fine. I can make it.”
“Tell you what,” Jared bellowed back, amaz-
370 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
ingly revealing a smile on his blanched face. Was
the cold making him delirious? “You take one, I’ll
take one.”
It seemed stupid, but why not I thought to
myself. I had been wearing the Nikes for several
minutes and was beginning to lose feeling in my
toes. Extremities. They’re the first to go. Besides,
there was no more time for this stand off. We
exchanged a boot for a shoe and then took the first
steps into the field. We were like two non-swim-
mers diving into water of unknown depth and
turbulence. I said a silent prayer, hoping we
weren’t making a last, fatal error.
Seconds passed like hours and minutes were an
eternity. The snow in the field was deep, at times
hard enough to walk on but then unexpectedly soft,
giving way and dropping us into a frothy mess up
to our waists. We’d fight a rising feeling of panic,
knowing what it must feel like to slowly be dragged
beneath the killing mire of quicksand and pull our-
selves out only to find that our goal, the elusive
dark outline, seemed to have moved farther away.
We trekked and traipsed and oftentimes pulled and
pushed one another beyond reasonable endurance,
but we kept on going. The conditions seemed only
to worsen. We trudged ahead, like two machines
that had stopped performing the function they were
meant for but still had a few ounces of battery juice
left to keep them moving forward. Jared became
quieter and slower. And then, just as my hopes were
collapsing, I saw the barn.
Anthony Bidulka — 371
Reaching shelter was better than arriving in
Mexico in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter,
better than showing up at your own surprise
birthday party, better than reaching the summit of
any mountain in the world. Reaching that barn
meant we might live. That barn was our world.
From the little I could see through the wild
snowstorm around us, the structure, with siding
and shingles of weathered grey wood, looked one
step from complete dilapidation. But it was still
standing, and that alone was no small feat in the
current weather conditions. It was a standard
1950s’ barn design with large sliding doors on
either end, a row of tiny, square windows running
the length of each side, and a high domed roof
beneath which was probably a hayloft. At each
corner of the aged structure was a clump of trees,
branches grotesquely gnarled, probably all that
kept it from falling down. When we reached the
end of the barn closest to us we threw ourselves
against it almost as if to hug it, but more likely to
keep ourselves from falling down. Our energy
level was extremely low but reaching our oasis in
the snow buoyed our spirits.
The feeling didn’t last.
We saw it at the same time and both gasped in
incredulous disbelief. A thick chain fastened with
a medieval looking padlock joined the two wood-
en handles of the sliding doors. For some insane
reason, the owner of the building had decided to
protect his disintegrating investment like a castle
fortress. I told Jared to stay put while I checked the
doors at the other end of the barn. The going was
372 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
rough and slow as the snow had accumulated to
four or five feet in some places around the build-
ing. At the other end I found the same thing. I was
devastated. Why did this have to be so hard? We
were trying to save our lives for crying out loud!
Didn’t we deserve some help? Some divine inter-
vention? Rather than one obstacle after another!
I hated the thought of having to go back and
disappoint Jared, but that is what I did. By the
time I returned he had slumped to the ground
with his back against the barn. His hood had fall-
en askew to one side of his head and he hadn’t
even bothered to put it back in position where it
might do some good. He was losing energy and
warmth faster than a colander loses water. I
adjusted the hood as best I could and knew I had
to do something fast. I considered the windows,
but even if I could get up high enough to break
one I was pretty sure they would be too small for
either of us to crawl through. In a fit of despera-
tion I clomped over to one of the nearby trees and
hacked at a branch with my fists until I loosened a
good sized branch. Weapon in hand I unleashed
the power of my frustration on the padlock. What
a time to be without my lock pick set. As I tried to
slaughter the heavy metal lock, Jared seemed
oblivious. I thought about shaking him awake, but
the grim reality was that if I didn’t find a way into
the barn it wouldn’t matter anyway.
I slashed away until the branch was but a
splinter. Ultimately the battering of the lock did
not work. In a war of metal against wood, metal
always wins. There had to be another way, I
Anthony Bidulka — 373
thought to myself.
Aha.
Instead of attacking metal that was constructed