Jerry looked worried. “You know what they say about shooting fish in a rain barrel? Well, if one of those slugs ever ricochets inside here, we’ll be dead fish.”
“It’s our only chance,” Sandy said. He loaded the gun, cocked the hammer and nudged off the safety with his thumb. Holding the gun at arm’s length away from him, he pointed the muzzle at the end where the entrance had been. “Better make sure your hood is pulled tight over your ears,” he advised Jerry.
“I’m all set. Let ’er go.”
Sandy shut his eyes and tightened his finger on the trigger. The explosion reverberated like a bomb in the small lean-to. Sandy felt the shock wave slam into his face, and the recoil almost tore the gun out of his hand. He sat there stunned for a while.
Jerry’s voice screaming in his ear brought him out of it. “Sandy, it worked!”
He opened his eyes to the most wonderful sight he had ever seen. A beam of sunlight was pouring through an opening in the ice wall. The potent, snub-nosed .45 slug had blasted a hole almost four inches in diameter. In the light of the flashlight, he also observed that the ice around the hole was shattered and veined from the shock wave.
Dropping the gun back into his pocket, Sandy got on his knees and began to work on the opening with his hands. Snow and ice crumbled easily, and before long he had enlarged the hole so that he was able to squirm through. Jerry was right behind him. Painfully, they stood up.
“Oh,” Jerry groaned. “I feel like a dog on its hind legs.” Looking up at the clear blue sky, he threw kisses into the air with both hands. “Mr. Sun, I never figured we’d ever see you again.”
It was a perfect, cloudless day without even a breeze. Looking around him, Sandy realized that the high winds of the night before had exaggerated the intensity of the blizzard. Except where it had drifted around the sled and lean-to, no more than twelve inches of new snow had fallen. He discovered, too, that they had been traveling along the ridge of a low hill and had stopped on the most exposed spot in all the surrounding terrain. On either side, the ground sloped away gently into protected valleys thick with fir trees.
After spending hours shut up in the gloom of the lean-to, the boys found the sunlight on the snow blinding. They dug their smoked glasses out of their packs and put them on. The dogs crowded around them, yelping and wagging their tails.