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By Root 733 0

of igloos they built and noticed that some of the younger Wendron Witches had taken to dropping by with small offerings of food and drink. Soon it became rare for Sarah to find her boys without at least two or three young witches helping them cook a meal or just sitting around the campfire laughing and telling jokes. It surprised Sarah just how much fending for themselves had changed the boys—they all suddenly seemed so grown up, even the youngest, Jo-Jo, who was still only thirteen. After a while Sarah began to feel a bit of an interloper in their camp, but she persisted in visiting them every day, partly to keep an eye on them and partly because she had developed quite a taste for roast squirrel.

29

PYTHONS AND RATS

The morning after the arrival of the Big Freeze, Nicko opened the front door of the cottage to find a wall of snow before him. He set to work with Aunt Zelda’s coal shovel and dug a tunnel about six feet long through the snow and into the bright winter sun. Jenna and Boy 412 came out through the tunnel, blinking in the sunlight.

“It’s so bright,” said Jenna. She shaded her eyes against the snow, which glinted almost painfully with a sparkling frost. The Big Freeze had transformed the cottage into an enormous igloo. The marshland that surrounded them had become a wide arctic landscape, all the features changed by the windblown snowdrifts and the long shadows cast by the low winter sun. Maxie completed the picture by bounding out and rolling in the snow until he resembled an overexcited polar bear.

Jenna and Boy 412 helped Nicko dig a path down to the frozen Mott, then they raided Aunt Zelda’s large stock of brooms and began the task of sweeping the snow off the ice so that they could skate all around the Mott. Jenna made a start while the two boys threw snowballs at each other. Boy 412 turned out to be a good shot and Nicko ended up looking rather like Maxie.

The ice was already about six inches thick and was as smooth and slippery as glass. A myriad of tiny bubbles was suspended in the frozen water, giving the ice a slightly cloudy appearance, but it was still clear enough to see the frozen strands of grass trapped within it and to see what lay beneath. And what lay beneath Jenna’s feet as she swept away the first swathe of snow were the two unblinking yellow eyes of a giant snake, staring straight at her.

“Argh!” screamed Jenna.

“What’s that, Jen?” asked Nicko.

“Eyes. Snake eyes. There’s a massive snake underneath the ice.”

Boy 412 and Nicko came over.

“Wow. It’s huge,” Nicko said.

Jenna knelt down and scraped away some more snow.

“Look,” she said, “there’s its tail. Right by its head. It must stretch all around the Mott.”

“It can’t,” Nicko disagreed.

“It must.”

“I suppose there might be more than one.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Jenna picked up the broom and started sweeping. “Come on, get going,” she told the boys. Nicko and Boy 412 reluctantly picked up their brooms and got going.

By the end of the afternoon they had discovered that there was indeed only one snake.

“It must be about a mile long,” said Jenna as at last they got back to where they had started. The Marsh Python stared at them grumpily through the ice. It didn’t like being looked at, particularly by food. Although the snake preferred goats and lynxes, it regarded anything on legs as food and had occasionally partaken of the odd traveler, if one had been so careless as to fall into a ditch and splash around too much. But generally it avoided the two-legged kind; it found their numerous wrappings indigestible, and it particularly disliked boots.

The Big Freeze set in. Aunt Zelda settled down to wait it out, just as she did every year, and informed the impatient Marcia that there was no chance whatsoever of Silas returning with her KeepSafe now. The Marram Marshes were completely cut off. Marcia would just have to wait for the Big Thaw like everyone else.

But the Big Thaw showed no sign of coming. Every night the north wind brought yet another howling blizzard to pile the drifts even deeper.

The temperatures