I galloped through the snow in eleven below (Gertrude)
It is eleven and a quarter degrees below zero and Miss Gertrude McFuzz is cold and wet and tired and hungry and coming down with the flu and has absolutely no idea where she is.
She crash-landed here about a week ago when, flying through the fog straight out of the biggest theoretically-a-cranberry-bog you could ever imagine, she was attacked by a gang of angry geese. And since then, she's been slogging non-stop through knee-high snow, in a featureless landscape with only the occasional tip of an overwhelmed tree poking out through the whiteness to reassure her that she isn't going around in very small circles. She suspects she's somewhere in Canada, but it could be Siberia for all she knows about geography. The single thing she carries is Horton's clover, tucked in her bodice to keep it from freezing; if the speck really does have people living on it, as he insisted so adamantly it did, the last thing she wants to do is deliver them to him freeze-dried. And... and besides, at this point it's the closest thing she has to remember him by. She keeps it right next to her heart.
That clover, the constant, immediate reminder of Horton, is the one thing keeping her going. If it wasn't for the memory of him, and his own caring and generosity and self-sacrifice, she would have laid down in the snow and given up days ago. She doesn't even know for sure that he's alive, but she tells herself there's certainly a good chance, since she is almost sure she remembers the hunters saying in that one horrible and confused moment that he'd be worth much more to them as a living curiosity than as a dead source of ivory. What a world this is, Gertrude reflects, that a person performing an act of kindness for another person is a saleable curiosity. She thinks annoyedly, as she kicks snow out of her path in a random fit of pique, that it's a good thing nobody else is around to see her, or she might very well end up as a curiosity herself. 'Come See the World-Traversing, One-Feather-Tailed Bird in Search of an Elephant!" she mutters aloud to herself, kicking through the snow as though she has a personal grudge against it. At this point, she does.
Well, at least it's character-building, she tells herself over and over again. It's character-building that my limbs are all frozen so numb that I can't even feel the blisters my feet have become. By the time I find Horton, which I will if it takes me the rest of my life, I'm going to have so much character that it won't all be able to fit in the same room as me. I'm going to have so much character that nobody will ever notice what my tail does or doesn't look like. I'll rescue Horton all by myself, and then he'll notice me even if I have to hold him down and bang his head against a wall until he does. This time I will not back down.