The Extinction Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

returned to my neighbour’s to look for snowshoes. Sweeps of high-driftedsnow covered the porch steps and pressed against the door. With a small blue shovel, one better suited for the sandbox, I carved out a path.
    Inside, despite the creaking baseboard heaters, things were starting to freeze, so I fired up the wood-burning stove. And nailed a wool blanket over the broken window. While doing so I spotted something out front, half-coffined in snow. A Sno-Cat.
    This could solve all our problems, I thought exclamatorily, even though I’d never driven one of these before and had no keys. I wouldn’t need any, as it turned out, for after unburying the Cat I saw that she was wounded, fatally, with snipped tubes and severed arteries and an instrument panel that looked to have been staved in with an axe. I say this because an axe was stuck in the glass. A decal on the chassis said RIDE SAFE, RIDE SOBER . I trudged back inside, and with little else to do as my patient slept and the snow piled, I began to root around.
    Despite the deer head over the mantel, a trio of oil paintings of alpine grandeur, and a large calendar with a moose fending off wolves under a full moon, the place was more like a general store or survivalist refuge than a hunting cabin. A locked pantry, whose padlock I easily picked, contained a gas stove and canister, a survival blanket, Second Skin, bandages, compresses, a bivouac sack and liner, a GPS locator, a portable red flasher with cigarette-lighter adapter, and, best of all, a morphine shot. Inside a knapsack I found cashews, Jersey Milk chocolate, water, Advil, tea bags, and a hunk of mouldy cheese.
    But the most intriguing item was a large metal trunk, like one of those road cases that rock bands haul their equipment in. It had a high-tech digital lock on its clasp that wasimpossible to pick so I unscrewed the hinges, which took over an hour. I counted slowly to three before lifting the lid.
    Green plastic garbage bags, each of them knotted, enclosed other green plastic bags, in the manner of a Russian doll. The third and final one held a Christmas cache of treasures: a fleece pullover, thick wool socks, camouflage jacket, Gore-Tex snowboots, Frontiersman Bear Spray. I would have left it at that, but noticed that the floor of the box was a tad high, and not metal but wood. A double-bottomed box? I prised out the sheet of plywood and discovered a large black parka underneath, unwrapped. On its breast pocket was a blue and yellow crest: a rainbow trout and Canada goose in the middle, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR along the bottom, FISH & WILDLIFE along the top. From the parka’s bulging side pockets I pulled out a stun gun and service revolver. Inside the zipped-up coat was a Kevlar vest and a scabbard case, and inside the scabbard case was a .300 Winchester Magnum.

   III   
    T hat was the kind of roll I was on. I’d broken into the home of a law enforcer. But why was he living here, and why American, and where was he now? Where was his car or truck or whatever forest rangers drive? I’d heard about cars caught in whiteouts and not found until spring, when the coffin of snow had thawed. I’d heard about wardens shot by poachers and reported as hunting accidents or left in the forest to rot. Should I report this? How?
    I was debating these questions while clearing my driveway with my plastic shovel. It was backbreaking and rewardless work, like rolling snowballs up a mountain. I was about to call it a day when I heard a faint creaking, scraping sound, which got louder and louder. An airplane? An airplane with engine trouble?
    Some hundred yards away an odd-looking machine appeared on the horizon like a mirage. It rounded the bend, slowed on the downhill stretch, and passed in front of me, creating a higher bank of snow at the end of my drive than the one I’d just removed. It was a snowplow, either customized or from another era. It had a Plexiglas dome out front, attached to the cab window