Pugs of the Frozen North

by Philip Reeve

  Sika thought about that. It did sound as if something strange was going on, but it was hard to work out what, because the noodles tasted so lovely that they kept distracting her.

  “These must be MIND-CONTROLLING NOODLES!” SNOBOT was saying. “The yetis mean to keep you all here as their slaves!”

  “Mmmm,” said Sika, helping herself to some more noodles. And then suddenly all the noodles were gone!

  “More noodles!” roared the yetis at the table, and their human guests all joined in. “More noodles!”

  “Just coming,” said one of the yeti chefs, gathering up their empty bowls and the dirty forks, spoons, and chopsticks. “But first, you travelers must pay for the noodles you’ve already eaten.”

  “What?” cried Mitzi. “You never said anything about paying….”

  “You didn’t think they’d be free, did you?” growled the yetis. “The sign outside says Noodle Bar, not Free Noodles.”

  “Do you take major credit cards?” asked Shackleton Jones.

  “Cash only,” said the yeti chef, and the other yetis rose to their feet and looked down menacingly at their guests, who suddenly felt very small and a little frightened and yet, at the same time, still hungry for more noodles.

  “If they can’t pay,” said one of the yetis, “there’s only one thing for it. They’re going to have to…do the dishes!”

  He kicked open the double doors into the kitchen. The last time she peeked in, Sika had been too interested by the snow-into-noodles machine to notice much else. Now she saw that the far side of the kitchen, where the sink was, was piled from floor to ceiling with teetering stacks of bowls, plates, jugs, saucepans, forks, spoons, and trays, all smeared and crusted with years of dried-on pieces of noodle.

  Those yetis loved making noodles, and they loved eating noodles, but they absolutely HATED washing up.

  “Do the dishes!” they chanted, picking up their human captives and carrying them toward the kitchen. “Do the dishes!”

  And the humans were too full of noodles, and too afraid that the yetis might not allow them any more noodles, to resist.

  So this is why no one ever returned from the Lost Hope, thought Sika as big yeti hands lifted her out of her chair and carried her toward the kitchen. They get lured in with noodles, and then have to stay here, washing up for the rest of their lives!

  She looked around and saw SNOBOT watching her. He wasn’t at all interested in noodles, so the yetis weren’t interested in him. She beckoned him closer, and while her yeti was lining up to carry her into the kitchen after the others, she whispered quickly, “Shen’s camped not far away! Tell him not to come here! Tell him to keep going! All the way to the top of the world!”

  SNOBOT hurried off on his mechanical legs. The yeti lurched into the kitchen with Sika, and the doors swung shut behind her.

  Shen was back on the Lucky Star, sailing homeward on a warm and sunny evening, and all the pugs were crowding at the ship’s prow, wagging their tails and watching for the first sight of land. But just as he was about to dig into the nice fat ice cream that Captain Jeggings had handed him, an icy breeze began to blow. The top blew off the ice cream and landed in Shen’s face, which woke him up.

  “Yuck! Brrr!” he said.

  The tent flap was open, and SNOBOT was leaning over him. The robot was covered in snow, and a big dollop had just dropped off him and landed in Shen’s face. Shen sat up, wiping it away.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Where’s Sika?”

  SNOBOT explained.

  Kidnapped by yetis??? Shen wondered if he should just harness up the pugs and sled off fast, before the yetis caught him, too.

  But no. Sika was his friend. She was the first real friend he had ever had. “Friends don’t leave friends behind to wash dishes for yetis!” he said. “We have to do something!”

  But what?

  He wiggled out from under the sleepy pugs and went outside. How clear and cold it was! He could hear the gruff singing of the yetis coming from behind the rocky island. He woke the pugs and harnessed them to the sled, but he did not get aboard it; he just wanted it to be ready if he needed to make a quick getaway. Then he set off on foot, tramping around the end of the island. The pugs followed him, with SNOBOT perching on the sled as it shushed along behind them, leaving no tracks in the blindsnow.

  Then they hit a patch of a different type of snow. It sang in a little squeaky voice each time Shen put his foot down, and when SNOBOT and the pugs and the sled hit it, it sounded like a snowy opera.

  “Shhhh!” hissed Shen, afraid that the singing snow would warn the yetis somebody was coming.

  “Shhhh!” said a patch of snow nearby.

  “Who said that?” whispered Shen.

  “Who said that?” said the snow quite loudly. It was echosnow, which repeats anything you say to it, only louder. It started all the pugs yipping, and the echosnow yipped back at them more loudly, which made the pugs yip louder still. Shen stood in a storm of yips and waited for the yetis to come and find him.

  But the yetis were far too busy enjoying themselves. It was a big treat for them when newcomers arrived and they had someone else to do the washing up for a change. They had locked the doors of the kitchen, and they were all outside on the deck, bathing in the green glow of the northern lights and singing their yeti songs.

  After a while, when he realized that the yetis were not going to come for him, Shen had an idea. He tiptoed over to the patch of echosnow and started clumping it into snowballs. He showed SNOBOT how to make snowballs, too, and together they quickly piled the sled high with them. Then they hurried on toward the Lost Hope. While SNOBOT took the sled to where the other sleds were parked and started getting them ready to leave, Shen went around to the other side of the old ship alone. From there he could see the big, shaggy shapes of the yetis above him, dancing on the icy deck. He could also see a steamed-up porthole that must have been the kitchen, where the washing up was happening.

  Shen picked up a snowball and threw it as hard as he could at the yetis. It was a brilliant shot, and it hit the biggest yeti right in the face. The yeti roared:

  “It was me!” whispered Shen, throwing another snowball.

  “It was me!” shouted the snowball, landing behind the yetis. They turned to see who had spoken. Shen whispered, “Over here!” and threw another.

  it called, hitting the biggest yeti’s head.

  The biggest yeti scowled at the others.

  “It wasn’t us!” they said.

  said a snowball, landing out of sight.

  said another snowball.

  The biggest yeti pulled some snow out of his fur and squeezed it into a snowball. The others scooped snow off the decks and the roofs of the cabins. Soon the air on deck was full of flying snowballs as the yetis pelted each other.

  Shen kept throwing snowballs, too. “Missed me!” Shen’s snowballs jeered, and “Hey, Fur Face! Over here!”

  And the yetis picked up the burst balls of echosnow and made fresh snowballs from them, and the echosnow echoed their own angry shouts as well as the things that Shen was whispering. Before long the snowball fight had turned into a full-scale snowball battle.

  None of the yetis noticed a small boy scrambling up the side of their old ship and knocking on the kitchen porthole.

  The poor washer-uppers inside had not thought to open that porthole. Helga Hammerfest and Mitzi von Primm and Shackleton Jones could never have squeezed out through it, and Sika was too busy drying to have even noticed it. Shen tumbled in, bringing a cold blast of air with him, which startled the washer-uppers to their senses.

  “The yetis are having a snowball fight! SNOBOT is waiting with the sleds. We must leave quickly!” He stopped, his mouth hanging open, staring at the grown-ups. Was it just his imagination, or had they changed?

  Sika saw it, too, now. Helga Hammerfest had always had a beard, but it had not been quite that long before, or quite that soft, and it had not been white. Shackleton Jone
s had a white beard, too, and white side whiskers, and bushy white eyebrows. But it was Mitzi von Primm who had changed most of all. She had put on so much weight that her pink designer racing outfit was starting to split at the seams. Her face and hands were covered with soft white fur, and her eyes glowed blue.

  “They’re turning into yetis!” said Shen.

  “It must be a side effect of the noodlesnow!” said Sika, and she checked her reflection in the bottom of a freshly cleaned saucepan to see if she was turning into a yeti, too. She wasn’t, which was a relief. She supposed it must have been because the others had all been eating at the Lost Hope for much longer than her, and they had eaten way more noodles.

  “That must be who these yetis are!” she said. “They are the sailors from the Lost Hope, and other poor souls who have happened by, all transformed by eating noodlesnow….”

  “Mmmm, lovely, lovely noodles,” said Mitzi von Primm, stroking her own soft white fur.

  Shackleton Jones said, “That is completely impossible! How could anyone turn into a yeti? Most unscientific, I say.” Then he caught sight of his own reflection in the pan that Sika held up in front of him. “Aaaargh!” he shrieked. “I don’t want to be a yeti!”

  His shriek startled Helga Hammerfest from her own trance. “Neither do I,” she said. “There was something…something I had to do…that’s right…the race! I was on my way to the North Pole….”

  “Then you’d better get out of here and stop eating noodlesnow!” said Shen.

  “But the doors are locked!” complained Sika.

  “Helga,” said Shen, “you can open them, can’t you?”

  Helga stomped over to the doors and leaned on them with all her weight. There was quite a lot of Helga’s weight, and the doors smashed open easily. They all ran out into the ballroom, past the empty tables. All except Mitzi, who stopped to pick up a few stray noodles that had fallen on one of the tables.

  “Come on!” shouted Sika.

  “And don’t eat any more of those!” cried Shackleton Jones.

  “But I like them!” said Mitzi, slurping the noodles up. “And I like being a yeti. Look at my lovely silky fur!” And she shook off the tatters of her racing outfit and stretched out her long white hairy arms, admiring the way the candlelight shone on her pelt.

  “She had more noodles than any of us,” said Helga.

  “But, Mitzi, what about the race?” asked Shen. “What about the Snowfather’s palace? Don’t you want to be the first to reach the top of the world?”

  “Oh, you go on without me,” said Mitzi happily. “I’m going to simply love being a yeti, and I already have my wish—all the lovely noodles I can eat.”

  There wasn’t really any more that they could do. Mitzi was a proper yeti now, as big as Helga and probably twice as strong, so they could not have dragged her away from the ship. And anyway, she really did seem happy, and it was true, she was a very pretty yeti. So they left her there and hurried outside to board their sleds, before the rowdy snowball fight on deck ended and the yetis came back below to see if the washing up was finished yet. But just in case Mitzi ever decided she had had enough of yeti-ing, they left her sled behind, and Shackleton Jones left her his robot huskies and harnessed her team to his high-tech sled.

  “This is SO embarrassing,” SNOBOT said, cracking his whip above the heads of the pink pooches.

  “Not as embarrassing as losing the race will be!” called Helga as her polar bear–powered sled went racing past him. Now that the spell of the noodles had faded, she was remembering how much she wanted to win the race. She waved to Shen and Sika. “Thanks, kiddies! I’ll see you at the top of the world!”

  “Jeepers, SNOBOT!” shouted Shackleton Jones. “Let’s get moving, or the bearded lady will be there before us!”

  And pretty soon both their sleds were just dots in the distance, and Shen and Sika were losing the race again.

  The days that followed weren’t really days at all; sunrise was just a faint silvering of light upon the southern sky. The pugs ran north as fast as their two hundred sixty-four little legs could carry them, following the tracks of the other sleds.

  There are fifty different types of snow in a True Winter, and Shen and Sika had soon seen nearly all of them.

  They crossed patches of blindsnow and patches of echosnow. They plunged through warbling drifts of songsnow and screaming mounds of screechsnow. They crossed a broad, rolling plain of slumbersnow, which snored and mumbled and farted like someone asleep under a huge white comforter.

  Helga and the rest were so far ahead now that it barely seemed worth going on. How could Sika and Shen hope to reach the North Pole first? But Sika said they had to try. “Maybe the other sleds will all drop out,” she said. “Or hit a patch of shrinksnow and be miniaturized, or a patch of stonesnow and be turned to statues….”

  After that, Shen kept a look out for statues and miniature sleds, but he didn’t see any, just the tracks of the other racers, leading endlessly on over the horizon.

  They came to a waste of weresnow, which kept shaping itself into snowmen when they weren’t looking. They would stop the sled for a while to look at the compass or cook food on their camping stove and look up to find that they were surrounded by a ring of snowmen. And these weren’t nice snowmen with scarves and carrots for noses. Oh no. These were horrible snowmen with sharp, icy teeth and frozen claws and open, hungry mouths.

  It was all very unsettling.

  Before long, Shen and Sika were so tired of being unsettled that they almost thought of turning back. But the pugs weren’t frightened of the weresnow, not even when it tried forming itself into scary snowdogs. The pugs just yipped at them, and eventually some of the braver ones started biting the snowmen’s snowy bottoms. After that the weresnow stopped its tricks, though Shen and Sika could still feel it sulking at them as they sped on into the north.

  But there was not a lot of north left to speed on into now. Pretty soon they would reach the top of the world, from where, whichever way you go, you’re going south. As the last silver smear of the short day faded behind them, they saw something glinting and glittering far ahead. It was the northern lights reflecting on the frosty spires of the Snowfather’s palace.

  “We’ve done it!” said Sika. “We’re nearly there!”

  “But I bet one of the others has gotten there already,” Shen said. He thought that if he kept saying that, it would not be so disappointing if they found that Helga, Shackleton Jones, or Sir Basil was already there. But he could not help hoping, secretly, that Sika was right. They could still be first, if only something had delayed the other racers.

  And after a little while longer, when they had crossed a particularly smelly patch of stinksnow, they found that something had.

  The Snowfather’s palace was not far off now. They could see it sitting there on the horizon like a gigantic, beautiful igloo. But between them and the palace was a deep chasm. The chasm’s walls seemed to reach all the way down to the floor of the sea. Across the chasm, like a web of lace, there stretched a maze of snow bridges.

  “It’s beautiful!” said Shen.

  “But I’m not sure it can take our weight…,” said Sika.

  Very slowly, very carefully, they steered the sled onto one of the bridges. It trembled and creaked, and chunks of snow dropped from its underside and tumbled down into the shadows at the bottom of the abyss. Shen peered down after them and saw spiky white shapes moving down there. Snowtrolls, waiting to eat anyone who fell…

  “Help!” cried a voice, echoing between the leaping arches and tall, spindly pillars of the snow. The northern lights were pulsing brightly overhead, and by their glow the children saw Helga Hammerfest.

  Poor Helga! She had done her best to stick to the thickest bridges, but even so her mighty bog-oak sled had been too heavy The middle of one of the bridges had dropped out as she tried to cross it. Her polar bears, Snowdrop and Slushpuppy, sat unhappily on the far side of the gap. The sled, which was still at
tached to them, dangled in midair above the chasm. Helga dangled from the sternpost of the sled.

  She had tied herself on to it with her beard.

  From time to time, Snowdrop and Slushpuppy scrambled to their feet and tried to heave the sled up. It would rise a few feet, but it was too heavy for them to drag it back onto the bridge. Each time they tried, more snow fell from the bridge, spattering Helga and her sled and then tumbling down into the depths.

  Shen and Sika looked at each other. It would have been easy to keep going, but they could not leave Helga hanging there.

  “Mush!” shouted Shen, and the pugs surged. Shen and Sika’s sled was so much lighter than Helga’s, and the pugs were so much lighter than polar bears, that even the flimsiest of the bridges could hold them. They threaded their way across the maze until they were on the part of the broken bridge where Snowdrop and Slushpuppy sat.

  “Thank you, children!” Helga shouted, from down in the blue depths of the chasm. “Please cut my poor polar bears loose. They’re getting tired, and I don’t want them to fall along with me.”

  “No!” called Shen. “We’re going to pull you up!”

  “Boo!” shouted the snowtrolls, down in the shadows below. They had been looking forward to Helga falling so that they could eat her. They started hurling big splinters of ice up at the bridge, hoping to dislodge her before Shen and Sika could save her. But the abyss was deep, and the trolls were horrible throwers, so the shards all fell back harmlessly.