He was right. The sled was already on the ice bridge and it was far too narrow to risk jumping. If the wolves put even one foot out of place, they would all go tumbling over the side to their certain deaths. A couple of bags from the back of the sled came loose and fell straight over the edge, turning over and over until they burst open upon the rocks below, tins of Spam smashing on impact.
Stella could hear the unicorn cantering along behind them and hoped that it wouldn’t suddenly dig in its hooves and stop, causing them all to be pulled over the side. The four junior explorers could do nothing but try to remain absolutely still, and stared down in horror as the blades of the sled whisked perilously close to the edge of the bridge.
As they raced towards the middle, the wolves panting and drooling in panic, they had the perfect view of the mammoths below, their shaggy coats crusted in old snow, their great tusks curving upwards, ready to impale anyone who fell on them. It sounded like a respectable and worthy enough death for an explorer – tumbling from an ice bridge to be impaled upon a mammoth tusk – but Stella really, really didn’t want that to happen, just the same.
Beside her, Beanie screwed his eyes tightly shut and started muttering under his breath. Stella was horrified to realise that he was reciting explorers’ deaths. Reciting facts was something he did to calm himself down sometimes, but Stella wished he could have perhaps listed the different types of sea cucumber, or various species of giant butterfly, or pretty much anything, in fact, other than sticky ends for adventurers.
‘Captain James Conrad Copplestone,’ Beanie gasped beside her, ‘trampled to death by woolly mammoths in the Glacier Circle. Sergeant Arthur Primrose Poe: gored by sabre-toothed tiger in the Azurian Jungle. Sir Hamish Humphrey Smitt—’
‘Shut up, shut up!’ Ethan cried in a wild voice. ‘What’s wrong with you? No one wants to hear that stuff right now!’
Then – above the panting of the wolves, the trumpeting of the mammoths, the thundering of the unicorn’s hooves, Beanie’s muttering and the shouting of the explorers behind them – Stella heard a faint, dreadful sound. The quiet, deadly crack of ice breaking. She risked a glance behind, and saw hairline fractures crossing and criss-crossing out from the grooves left by the sled blades, a lethal spider-web of cracks sending up little puffs of ice dust as the entire structure groaned.
‘Sir Hamish Humphrey Smitt,’ Beanie groaned, his head in his hands, ‘ambushed by tiger poachers in the—’
But before he could even finish the sentence part of the bridge snapped away behind them. The ice shattered as it fell into the valley below, and Stella found she couldn’t breathe. Surely they weren’t actually going to die? Not on the very first day of her first expedition! It would be too awful if Aunt Agatha was to be proved right about exploring being too dangerous for girls, and she was sure to be extremely nasty to Felix about it too.
But then the racing wolves reached the other side of the bridge and the sled blades bit deep into snow – just as the last of the ice bridge collapsed. Stella looked behind her again, and felt a numb sort of horror at the sight of a vast, empty space where the ice bridge had been – where they had been – mere seconds ago. The terrified unicorn breathed out icy puffs of air in agitated snorts, cantering to keep up with the sled. Past the unicorn’s sweating flank Stella could see the explorers on the other side running around, waving their arms, chasing wolves and yelling their heads off in a general state of unhelpful pandemonium. She searched desperately for Felix but couldn’t pick him out in the crowd, although she thought she heard him shout out her name.
Then the wolves shot into a cave entrance carved deep into the mountainside, and the adult explorers were lost from sight as the sled entered the cold, eerily quiet world of a vast ice tunnel, taking them further and further away from the other members of their expeditions, and ever deeper into whatever perilous unknown lay ahead.
CHAPTER TEN
The wolves were terrified, and although Shay kept shouting out the commands for them to stop, they completely ignored him and continued running at full pelt through the twisting, winding ice tunnels.
‘We’ve got to do something!’ Stella gasped. ‘We’ve got to stop them!’
If they were on open snow they could let the wolves run until they burned all their fear and adrenaline away, but here in a narrow, twisting ice tunnel leading deeper and deeper into the side of a mountain, there could be anything up ahead. A gaping pit, a wall of rock, a hungry yeti. They had to get the wolves to stop, and quickly.
Shay chewed furiously at his lower lip. Suddenly his head snapped up. He looked at Stella and said, ‘Sparky, I’ve just thought of something! Can you skate?’
‘I skate every day on the lake at home!’
He reached into the bottom of the sled and fished out a tangle of skates. ‘We have to get to the wolves at the front,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way.’
‘You’re mad!’ Ethan exclaimed as Beanie continued muttering to himself under his breath. ‘You’ll get yourselves killed! No one can skate faster than running wolves!’
Shay ignored Ethan and spoke to Stella. ‘We’ll have to grab onto the harness to get to the lead wolves at the front. If we can calm them, the others will follow.’
The skates were all too large for Stella, but she took the smallest pair she
