Bo was a beagle with one very important job.
At the bottom of Crabapple Hill, he stood in the snow with a red-and-white striped tube roped to his collar. The Hendersons at the top needed it back before the light went thin and gold. Bo's nose twitched. Pine sap. Wet bark. Something that might — just might — be a cheese sandwich three trees to the left.
Sniff, sniff, sniff.
Bo took one step toward the cheese sandwich smell. The tube, being round and slippery and completely unhelpful, rolled the other direction — bump, bump, bump — down the hill without him. Bo scrambled after it, ears flopping, paws skidding, collar jerking him sideways until the rope pulled taut and stopped them both in a heap.
Right. Uphill. That was the direction.
Bo hauled himself forward. The pine trees smelled absolutely extraordinary today — like cold and green and something sticky — and Bo paused, just briefly, just one sniff, to press his nose against a low branch. The tube bumped him from behind. He sneezed. A clump of snow fell off the branch and landed on his head with a soft, cold whump.
Sniff, sniff, sniff.
Halfway up the hill, Bo stopped. There was a smell he didn't recognise. Small. Nutty. Coming from a little hollow in the snow beside a tree root. Bo pushed his nose into the crust — and found a tiny mouse wedged inside a snow-packed acorn cup, arms out, completely stuck, staring up at him with enormous black eyes.
"I have been in here," said the mouse, "for quite some time."
Her name was Wren. She was very small and very cross and very stuck. Bo tilted his head. He thought carefully. Then he swung one long, floppy ear — slow and low — and swept it gently under her, and Wren popped free like a cork from a bottle, landing upright in the snow, slightly dizzy, whiskers spinning.
She looked at the tube. She looked at Bo. She looked up the hill.
"I can see over the snowdrifts," said Wren. "You absolutely cannot." She scrambled onto the top of the tube, sat up very straight, and cupped her paws around her mouth. She had an extremely loud voice for a mouse.
"LEFT," bellowed Wren. "No — RIGHT. More right. STOP. Okay, go."
Sniff, sniff, sniff.
Bo hauled the tube uphill through the deep powder, paws punching into the snow with every step, breath coming out in white puffs. Wren hollered. Bo steered. The tube bumped over a hidden root and spun sideways, and Wren hollered louder, and Bo corrected, and together — lurching, panting, shouting — they crested the top of Crabapple Hill just as the light turned the colour of a cut orange.
The Hendersons were delighted. They clapped and cheered and gave Bo a piece of bread crust, which he ate in one bite. Then Mr Henderson looked at the tube, and at the slope, and at Bo's quivering, expectant tail.
"Go on, then," he said.
Bo sat on the tube. Wren tucked herself into the warm fold behind his ear, holding on with both paws. Someone gave them a push.
The hill dropped away. Cold air rushed past. Bo's ears flew straight out behind him — horizontal, enormous, completely useless as wings but magnificent anyway — and snow sprayed up in a white rooster tail and the trees blurred green and the bottom of the hill came up fast and then —
Thump.
A long skid. A snowdrift. Silence.
Bo trotted home through the blue dusk, breathing hard, and dropped into his basket by the radiator. Wren curled into the crook of his ear, nose tucked under her tail, a single whisker twitching once, then still.
