I 'll for thee provide, and thee I will hide

half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn't be suresix seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, severer by far than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silencea silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all. Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-maskit must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parkait was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enoughand probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn't like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin. Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them. "You all right, sir?" Joss asked. He took a step closer. "Good lord, you've lost your mask!" "I know. It doesn't matter." It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. "Did you get a bearing on that plane?" "Roughly. Due east, I should say." "Jackstraw?" "A little north of east, I think." He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind. "We'll go east." Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. "We'll go eastJoss, how long is that spool?" "Four hundred yards. More or less." "So. Four hundred yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we'll cut across them. Let's hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here." I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathersweird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leewardand made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fastour cheep slr digital cameras lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen neve that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor. We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring. Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs. The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-capif there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100 F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And even if we did get them all back, how to feed themfor our own supplies were already dangerously low? And where, in heaven's name, were we going to put them all? Jackstraw's shout checked me so suddenly that I stumbled and all but fell. I turned back, and Joss came running up. "The end of the line?" I asked. He nodded, flashed a torch in my face. "Your nose and cheek -both gone. They look bad." Gloves off, I kneaded my face