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 east—Joss, 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 feathers—weird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leeward—and made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fast—our 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.