‘Lead, swing, wheel,’ Amelia repeated.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And how do we control them?’ Xander asked, sounding mildly interested.

  ‘There are four main commands. “Hike” means go. “Haw” means turn left. “Gee” means turn right. And “whoa” means stop. I use “all right” when they respond properly, so that’s a fifth, I suppose.’

  ‘What about “mush”?’ asked Xander.

  Amelia, clearly unable to help herself, turned to explain. ‘Mush originally came from the French word marche. It’s considered a bit soft, now. Doesn’t cut through the wind as well as “hike”. Dog sled drivers are still called mushers though. Go figure.’

  Tikaani looked interested. ‘You’ve done some research,’ she said.

  Amelia shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  We moved on. Having prepared one sled, Tikaani now demonstrated how to use it, instructing us to jog alongside and observe her at first, and then take turns having a go ourselves. Even though it was cold, running in snow gear meant we soon worked up a sweat. Steam rose from us when we stopped. I felt like the panting dogs. They clearly wanted to keep going.

  By mid-morning Tikaani’s instruction was over. We knew what to do in theory and had put it into practice, if briefly. I have to admit I was a bit nervous of simply launching down the trail once we’d hooked up the other sleds. But that’s what she intended. Over a lunch of hot chocolate, salami and cheese eaten in the warmth of her cabin, Tikaani showed us a map of our route. I studied it carefully, but could only see that we were to spear straight into what looked like remote wilderness.

  ‘You’re coming too, right?’ Xander asked Tikaani, for once sounding a little uncertain.

  ‘No, you go alone,’ said Tikaani. She seemed so matter of fact I actually believed her. But she continued, ‘Of course I’m coming. I’m the guide. We’re heading for this cabin here.’ She pointed at a dot on the map with the tip of the cheese knife.

  ‘That’s … what? About thirty kilometres away?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-three. The dogs can cover many more than that in a day. Our only issue is the weather. It was set to be clear, but I learned this morning that we may have more snow on the way.’ She puffed out her cheeks and said, ‘Still, no big deal. Meet me at the sleds with your kit and you can help re-harness the dogs. I want to be under way within thirty minutes. OK?’

  19.

  Wrapped up from woollen-hatted head to ski-sock-and-snow-booted toe, and with goggles to help against the glare and wind, we were heading out into the snowy wilderness well within Tikaani’s thirty-minute deadline, each of us pulled by our own team of sled dogs.

  The hiss of the snow under the runners; the muffled padding of the dog’s feet, and their panting; the gentle clattering of buckles and clips; the faint musky smell of the dogs and the clear, cold wind in my face; the effort of balancing on the footboards and deploying the drag mat and leaning into the corners, steering the right course, holding the correct pace, keeping everything in check and balanced; hiking, hawing, geeing and whoa-ing the dogs at the right time – it was all engrossing.

  Tikaani led the way. Our dogs were no doubt following her. But it seemed that they responded to the commands I called out after she had given hers. The trail was hard-packed at first. It ran between frosted trees and bushes laden with snow. The sky was white-blue, whisked with clouds. When we hit an incline, Tikaani ran behind her sled to ease the dogs’ burden. I copied her. Running was punishing work dressed in all that heavy kit, but it felt fair: though the dogs seemed to have limitless energy, they had to be hurting. Compared to them I was barely doing anything, but within a few hours I was feeling the strain of hanging on and balancing and running in the snow in my back, arms and legs.

  In a clearing, we paused. The dogs instantly began nipping at the fresh snow. It was theirs to drink. I checked the GoPro camera that I’d strapped over my hat. Tikaani saw me and said, ‘You mentioned filming with a drone too?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Xander.

  ‘Well, now’s your chance, before the weather closes in,’ she said.

  I took off my goggles and looked up at the sky. Bar the wisps of cloud it seemed pretty clear, though I had to admit the wind had got up.

  ‘We’ve got thirty minutes, forty-five at most,’ she said, sounding more resigned than worried.

  Xander steered his sled around Tikaani’s and let his dogs pull him a little way ahead. Then he moved to the side of the trail and deployed the drone, filming us as we drove our dogs towards him. After we had passed him, he pulled back into line, having programmed the drone to follow above us. I could imagine what his footage would be like: combined with my point-of-view stuff, I hoped it would be pretty epic.

  Tikaani’s weather forecast was, if anything, optimistic. Xander had not long brought the drone in when a thick cloudbank appeared on the horizon, and in minutes it had overtaken us. All shadows disappeared, the white expanse ahead flattening and foreshortening and filling with gauzy snowflakes, which seemed not to be falling from the sky but swirling up from the ground. We pushed on ahead, the dogs undeterred, as the flurry thickened, and we’d not been going long like that when I saw them.

  Off to our left, no more than thirty metres away, dark figures loping between bushes that looked like scribbles in the snow. I yelled out to Tikaani ahead of me and the others behind, ‘Look – wolves! To the left!’

  Immediately, Tikaani’s sled halted. I had to stamp on the bar brake to avoid running into her. Behind me, Caleb wasn’t quite so quick: he veered off the trail to miss me. The others halted too.

  ‘Did you see them?’ I called out.

  ‘Where?’ Tikaani asked.

  ‘Running alongside us. To our left.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  She had turned around to face me. Her expression wasn’t disbelieving, more interested. ‘Very rare,’ she said, and at precisely that moment, behind her, the wolves crossed the trail.

  I pointed, and she swivelled to look. We all saw them this time. Two, four, five, seven wolves, calmly trotting across the trail. The dogs saw them too. Tikaani’s erupted in an excited rush of barking, which spread back down the line. The last wolf to cross stopped to look at them. It was huge and pale and, in the moment of its pausing, so still. After what seemed an age but was probably only five seconds it walked on again, looking completely unbothered.

  ‘Is that, like, a problem?’ asked Xander.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Tikaani. ‘They rarely approach humans.’

  The snow fell harder as we got under way, and the visibility gradually worsened. Before long, we were hacking on through a proper whiteout. Tikaani’s sled was just metres ahead of Brando and Dame, my lead dogs, but she kept flickering in and out of view. We’d been making good progress, with the dogs trotting at a steady ten or twelve kilometres an hour, and we’d been going for over three hours, so we had to be nearly there, surely? Now our progress slowed. The cold bit harder. I was exhausted. I was troubled too: I couldn’t stop myself wondering whether the wolves had veered from our course, or were they alongside us, tracking us even? What did Tikaani’s ‘I doubt it’ mean?

  20.

  In the whiteout, time seemed to stand still. Without being able to see the horizon ahead or trees flickering past, it was hard to believe that we were making progress. Yet eventually Tikaani made an abrupt left turn and not long afterwards, a shelter loomed ahead of us. It looked smaller than Tikaani’s own cabin. After we’d fed the dogs – dry food this time – and tethered them on a bed of fresh straw in the lee of the hut (Tikaani assured us they’d slept out in worse conditions than this) I was relieved to step inside.

  Caleb had some colour in his cheeks at last. He’d enjoyed the mushing, I could tell. It had invigorated him. He helped bring everyone else’s kit inside, as well as his own, and offered to build a fire in the little stove. This was our only source of heat, for both warmth and cooking – or, rather, defrosting the blocks of stew Tikaani plonked unceremoniously in a big metal pan.

  ‘Can anyone stay here?’ Xander asked her.

  ‘No. There are open wilderness huts dotted about Lapland, but this one is privately owned. Mr Lukas reserved it.’

  ‘It’s quite basic,’ said Amelia, hastily adding, ‘I like it.’

  She need not have worried about offending Tikaani, who replied, ‘I’m glad someone does. It’s better than nowhere. For a night it’ll do.’

  Darkness was already descending. When I glanced out of the uncurtained window, it seemed that the snow was easing up too. Caleb had volunteered to stir the thawing stew, so I listened to the quiet, which was broken only by the moaning of the wind and the sizzling of the frozen stew heating up.

  Amelia sat down between Xander and me and said, ‘I’ve been thinking,’ her voice low.

  ‘About?’

  ‘The missing film, of course.’

  The mention of it dropped a weight on my shoulders.

  ‘It makes no sense for someone to have deleted it,’ she said. ‘For any number of reasons. For a start, you signed a non-disclosure agreement giving them the right to veto sharing it.’

  ‘Just because you agree to something doesn’t mean you have to stick to it,’ Xander said.

  ‘Fair enough. But deleting the film doesn’t delete your memory of what went on in that room, does it?’

  ‘Not everyone has a memory like yours,’ I replied.

  ‘True,’ she conceded. ‘But between the two of you, can’t you piece together what you heard?’

  Xander and I looked at one another. ‘It was pretty boring, if I’m honest,’ he said. ‘Not a lot stuck.’

  Amelia rolled her eyes. ‘Boring on the surface, maybe. But for someone to go to the trouble of deleting the recording suggests that something must have been said that, in the right – or wrong – hands, could be valuable. Talk me through what you can remember, at least.’

  It didn’t take that long. Amelia tried hard to hide her frustration, but when we got to the bit about the equations – which neither of us could remember that well – she puffed out her cheeks and shook her head. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘We thought we had them on the film though,’ I said lamely.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But even so.’

  We might have gone around in circles talking about it for longer, but we were interrupted by the dogs barking. It wasn’t the excited yipping and yowling of the morning, but a cacophonous barking, signalling fury and alarm. Tikaani sprang from her seat in the corner, pulled a pistol from the top pocket of her backpack, and leapt outside. I followed her, Caleb close behind. We rounded the corner of the hut to find the dogs nearest us straining against their tethers, hackles up, barking for all they were worth. But the bigger commotion was at the far end of the line, where three enormous wolves had ripped a sled dog free of its leash and were tearing it apart.

  21.

  One of the wolves had the husky pinned down by the throat. Another was savaging its exposed belly. The dog’s back legs were jabbing the air frantically as it tried – and failed – to kick the wolf away. The third wolf darted in, snarling and snapping at the poor husky’s frenzied legs.

  Tikaani raised the pistol but didn’t fire it. Was she frightened of hitting the sled dog? That seemed absurd; in seconds the husky would be dead anyway if we couldn’t drive the wolves away. But instead of shooting, Tikaani stared at the gun in disgust then threw it to one side. Clearly it wasn’t working.

  She snatched a log from the stack beneath the eaves and hurled it at the wolves. But she missed: the log fell short of the fight. I had better luck with the lump of wood I grabbed; I hit the wolf that had the dog pinned down, square on the back of its head. But my attempt was no more use than Tikaani’s. The wolf didn’t even look up.

  I picked up a heavier chunk to throw as the third wolf darted in again. It took hold of the husky and dragged it – and the two other snarling wolves – backwards. Tikaani was still yelling and the sled dogs were barking as I drew back my arm to throw another log, but Caleb was suddenly in my way. Surging past me, he ran around the barking sled dogs and straight into the middle of the attack.

  My cousin didn’t have so much as a broomstick to hand. Unarmed, the best he could do was punch and kick. I couldn’t believe his bravery. The wolves were fearsome, intent on one thing: killing the dog. And he was putting himself directly in their way. He was bellowing loudly enough to be heard over the cacophony, and he lashed out with a couple of well-aimed kicks, forcing the wolf savaging the husky’s belly to slink backwards a couple of paces, if only for a second.

  Next Caleb grabbed the wolf that had the dog by the neck. He kicked it and punched it and tried to rip the husky free. But as Tikaani and I ran to help him – I couldn’t just stand there watching, and neither could she – he slipped and cried out. Suddenly all three wolves, a mass of bared teeth and flattened ears and raised hackles, had hold of the husky and were yanking it clear.

  In an instant they’d dragged it ten, twenty, thirty metres away, well beyond the pool of light cast by the cabin. The dog was still screaming, but its cries faded as the wolves pulled it into the darkness.

  The clamouring of the sled dogs quickly subsided, leaving an awful, hollow silence. The night seemed suddenly immense, the cold intense. Caleb, breathing heavily, was still on his knees in the snow, holding his left forearm against his chest with his right hand.

  I knelt next to him. ‘You OK?’

  ‘That poor dog,’ he said, rocking forwards and backwards.

  Tikaani, having picked up the pistol, came across to us with it. ‘Idiot,’ she muttered. ‘Idiot.’

  ‘Did it jam?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it out of bullets?’

  ‘Again no. It’s loaded all right. I am to blame. In my panic, I failed to undo the safety catch.’

  Amelia and Xander were standing in the snow, Amelia wearing socks, and Xander framed in the doorway.

  ‘They took Mikka,’ Tikaani explained, shaking her head.

  ‘I saw,’ said Amelia. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I hadn’t realised it was Mikka, Tikaani’s prize lead dog, that the wolves had attacked; the half-light and the frenzy had obscured her. Seeing Tikaani with the dogs throughout the day, I knew how keenly she would have felt the loss of any one of them, but for it to have been Mikka was an added cruelty. As if to rub it in, the thin, high note of a wolf’s howl welled up through the silence. Another wolf answered the first and, as we stood quietly, unable to comfort the guide, more wolves chimed in.

  ‘How did they undo her chain?’ Amelia asked.

  I put my head in my hands. It was a good question, but now wasn’t the moment.

  Tikaani replied, ‘They didn’t undo it. The fixing was weak. I spotted it when I chained her up, and that’s why I put her there. Of all the dogs, she would have been the least likely to stray.’

  It struck me that if poor Mikka hadn’t been tied up, she might at least have had a chance to make a run for it, but she’d been overpowered and unable to escape. I shuddered. Caleb looked ashen, as shocked as I was by what he’d witnessed.

  ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry,’ he kept repeating.

  ‘It is not your fault,’ Tikaani reassured him. ‘If anything, it’s mine. How stupid could I be with the gun?’ She shook her head. ‘You were brave; I am grateful. But I am also worried – are you hurt?’

  Caleb had climbed to his feet, but he was still holding his arm in front of his chest. ‘No, no. I’m fine. A scratch, I think.’

  ‘Come inside. Let me look,’ said Tikaani.

  ‘What about the remaining dogs?’ asked Amelia. ‘Might the wolves return?’

  ‘It is very rare for them to take a sled dog, or to approach humans at all,’ Tikaani said. ‘All I can think of is that their resources must be very low, leading them to attack out of desperation.’ The guide’s voice was quiet. ‘But they have Mikka now; I doubt they’ll return.’

  ‘You doubted they would be a problem at all when Xander asked earlier,’ Amelia pointed out. ‘I suppose what I’m after is more of a sense of the probabilities involved.’

  I put a hand on Tikaani’s shoulder and said, ‘Amelia cares. She really does.’

  ‘I know,’ the guide replied. To Amelia she said, ‘If the wolves do return, the dogs will raise the alarm.’

  ‘Yes, but by then it might already be too late,’ Amelia said. ‘Going on experience to date, I mean. Also, we’ll be slower to react if we’re asleep.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay awake,’ Tikaani said. ‘And I’m not about to make the same mistake with the pistol’s safety catch again.’

  Xander stood to one side of the cabin’s front door to let us guide Caleb inside. Following us in, he said, ‘We can take turns to listen out.’

  I nodded my agreement and was encouraged to see Xander do the same.

  ‘Let’s look at this scratch, then,’ I said.

  Caleb seemed reluctant to hold his arm out for inspection, and only did so when Tikaani gently prised it from his other hand. He was wearing a black wool base layer. When he took his fingers away, it was immediately apparent that the sleeve had been shredded. Blood ran thick and bright red through the sodden tear.

  22.

  ‘Some scratch,’ said Amelia.

  Tikaani sucked air through her teeth and said, ‘You were bitten.’

  ‘Seems so,’ said Caleb. ‘But really, it doesn’t hurt.’

  I doubted that. While Tikaani retrieved a medical kit from her pack I helped Caleb to take off the base layer, while he tried to keep pressure on the wound. The ripped sleeve was heavy with blood, which dripped from his fingertips.

  ‘This will sting,’ said the guide, holding a plastic bottle of clear fluid – alcohol, I assumed – up for Caleb to inspect. ‘But we need to wash the wound before we close it.’

  In fact, she meant ‘wounds’ plural. Whether it was a wolf or the desperate Mikka that had caught Caleb’s arm, his skin had been punctured in five places, two of which were badly torn. I bit down hard in sympathy as Tikaani sluiced the cuts with alcohol, but to his credit Caleb barely flinched. She dabbed each cut repeatedly with a soaked pad of cotton wool, then closed the open wounds with steri-strips. Amelia explained that they were every bit as effective as stitches. That may have been true, but a little blood seeped through the butterfly plasters all the same.