The Grey

by Mackenzie Jeffers, Ian

  I try to get to my feet but all I do is slip over backwards and hit the snow. I pull up to see where the wolves are. They stare at me and at Henrick and Luttinger and Tlingit and the others, standing here with their logs, ready to swing. They stare at us and breathe, a few breaths, half a dozen, maybe. Then they just turn and trot off, into the dark. I fall back on the snow again. I feel less than safe lying there instead of up watching the wolves go, but I can’t hold myself up, anymore.

  My knuckles and arms are throbbing where the logs hit me, and my face and back are throbbing and numb, or bleeding, so are my legs, my face feels like it’s had nails driven into it, as if the teeth are still in my skull, I want to get a hand up to see what’s left of me, but I can’t, at the moment, lift my hands. I stay flat on my back, looking up, breath misting up, while Henrick and the others either stare at me or stare into the dark where the wolves went. Luttinger looks down at me, waiting to see if I want to get up, or if I’m going to.

  Finally I move, get up on my feet. Henrick and the others look at me like I’m not supposed to get up, because I should be dead. It’s so cold I still can’t tell if I’m in pieces or not. I think they didn’t get that much of me. Things are hurting everywhere, but I don’t seem to be gushing blood, and I don’t feel like falling over again, or at least it doesn’t seem a necessity, so that makes me think I’m not bucketing blood into my shoes without knowing.

  I look down, anyway. My pants are half-dark with blood. I feel them sticking, to the new blood and the blood that’s freezing, already. But I still feel like they didn’t get anything decisive of me. I feel okay.

  Henrick drops his piece of wood and starts prodding and patting me, trying to lift my jacket to see how bad it is. I’m looking too, but I’m looking over his shoulder and past the rest of the guys too, out toward the dark, wherever it is they went. The wolves are still gone, as far as I can tell. Or just gone from where I can see them.

  There’s enough moon that I see their tracks, all over, where they were jumping on and off me, and my blood in the snow, and their tracks past that, barely, leading away, toward the trees, I think. But they disappear too soon to say, and there’s nothing else, I’m not hearing anything. I look left and right across the ring of trees. I find myself staring at one particular point, then another, why those points and not others I don’t know, but I still don’t see them, they might be there, and I just can’t pick them out against the dark of the trees. Who knows. I want to tell myself I have a clue or a reasoned guess because the tracks seemed, maybe, to lead that way, but I don’t have any such thing. I look at the snow where I was down, and the blood, again, and I nod to Henrick and Tlingit and the others, which I mean as thanks, and they nod, which means okay.

  “Let’s get back,” I say. I start back across for the load of wood I dropped. I can feel them looking at me like I’m crazy, but we need the wood, and I’m alright. Henrick and Tlingit come with me and help. We get it all up, and the others have theirs picked up again and they look like they’re waiting for us to catch up. Henrick walks next to me, Tlingit on the other side, they’re both watching the dark, like I am.

  “You’re OK to walk back?” Henrick asks.

  “Yeah. I’m OK,” I say. And we join the others and get walking, and keep walking, lugging our loads. It still seems further than before back to the shell, and the fire that was up so huge looks to be down to a little glow by now, and far away. We keep looking around us, right and left and back, as we go, and we go quicker than we did before.

  3

  I’ve known wolves, when I was younger. I met them on hunts, going out with my father, or after my father, uninvited, tracking him. He was afraid of wolves, and hated them for it, and made it his business to punish every one he met for it. He knew he would drive them so bad one of them would kill him one day, I suppose, and he would make them all pay, in advance. Or they were something else to him, I don’t know what, darkness or death or fear, all the worst things he was, he saw in them, which none of them deserved, as far as I could see, anymore than any of us did. He took money to kill them some of the time, like his father did, and made it his mission the rest of the time. He got into blood feuds, contests, long wars, because it wasn’t always as simple a thing as him having a rifle and them not, there were wolves that would fox him and wolf him and fool him, curse him like he cursed them, his bullets would miss them, or go through them, they’d get out of traps, jump out of deadfalls, all of which they did to vex him, keep him poor, drive him mad. People call them ghost walkers, after all. “The wolf’s the only animal who’ll avenge his brother,” he’d say. And leave me to wonder what he meant.

  I’ve watched wolves, tracked them to watch them, met them eye to eye in the woods, and a wolf will never do what these just did to me, as good as never, unless he’s rabid, which these weren’t, I think, or unless you give it nothing else it can do. You have to be determined to make a wolf do that, you’d have to be trying, like my father did, and even then, he’d rather snarl at you and lope away, or make friends, or stare you to death. Unless you’re another wolf, in which case he’ll kill you as soon as look at you, if you cross him. Or if you aren’t one of his, and you’re in his place of business.

  So I did something to get hit like I did, I think. I lost my mind, probably, the wolf I saw was after some jerky the guy had, or a candy bar, and I had to charge at him and get my back skinned off. Or maybe the blood drew him, and he was after his corpse, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a wolf at a dead man, he’d have to be starving, but I’ve heard stories. Every hunter has stories. Maybe they smelled wolf on me, from years ago, and didn’t like it. Maybe they thought I was a wolf, and not one of theirs. We don’t belong here, after all. Maybe they smelled my father.

  We finally come up to the heat of the fire, what’s left of it. Reznikoff and Ojeira and the others left behind have passed out, and it’s low, sputtering in the wind. We start getting it loaded up with the wood, and I stoke and stoke it until it gets going for real, then we all get it stacked up until it’s roaring again, which is stupid, I know, but a dickhead fire it is. I wonder how we’d have made one at all, if there was a real wind up, the usual wind, so we’re lucky. I try to soak what heat is coming off the fire into my body, and thawing a little I start to feel where I’m bitten and gashed a little more, and I’m dizzy again, suddenly, everything drifts and shifts as the heat comes up at me and I’m expecting to fall face-first into the fire, but I don’t, I just weave a little, and stare at the flames, an try to think about where we are and not the wolves that were at me. We all huddle into it.

  “That feels fucking good,” Bengt says, huffing and blowing.

  “It fucking does,” says Henrick.

  “That’s the touch of a good woman, right there,” Tlingit says, and they all huff and groan, laugh a little, even Knox, who’s wide-eyed, mostly.

  “Don’t fucking talk about that shit out here,” says Henrick. Then he falls quiet, thinking about what he doesn’t want to think about. The others do the same. I look at them.

  “We’re not dead yet, boys.” They all shrug, laugh a little again, still thinking.

  “Not yet,” Henrick says. It’s either hopeless or tough, depending on how you hear it. I remember sitting on the snow with a rifle in my mouth not that long ago and I remember fighting the wolves off, or trying to, and when I thought they had me it felt like a cliff I didn’t want to go off. I didn’t want them to take what I didn’t want to give them, I suppose. I remember the others looking at me after Lewenden, like hurt boys, babies, and I look at them standing at the fire now. Maybe I don’t want to leave them alone here. Maybe both things.

  I’m thawed a little more it hurts a little more, so I turn and leave the fire and I go toward the piece of plane. The others come in too, for now, fire or not we all want to be inside something, and nobody wants to be out alone.

  Inside the piece of shell there’s glow from the fire coming in, a little. It almost feels like we’ve made camp,
just by setting fire to something. Ojeira and Cismoski are still alive, buried under jackets. They wake up when we come in. I think about carrying them out to the fire but they don’t look too bad. Staying in this bit of shelter with the fire taking some edge off the air by the opening kept them above freezing, I guess, or close enough.

  I find one of the little flashlights they were using for Lewenden and wedge it into a bent arm-rest, and I start to take my jacket off, or try to, to see what the bites are like. Henrick and Tlingit help me with the jacket, it’s sticking to my shirt, blood dried, and frozen, and my shirt’s sticking to me. Luttinger and the others are watching, staring at me like I should be dead, again. Henrick holds up my jacket to show me. The thing’s in shreds, blood-soaked, shirt’s the same. I see why they’re all staring. I don’t suppose I look well.

  As the air is hitting my back I start to be more aware of how deep it goes there, and as I move more I start to feel how bad they bit me and where, it feels a lot worse on my right sight, on my back, but it still doesn’t feel fatal. I can’t turn around to see it, but what I can see isn’t so bad, and Henrick pokes at it and wipes blood off with snow which doesn’t feel too marvelous but somehow it isn’t too bad, nothing like as bad as I was afraid. I put a hatchet through my knee once, chopping wood, and people were fainting, my knee-bone hanging out, big flap of skin, blood all over, but it barely hurt at all, felt like a little cut. One of those things.

  There’s a piece of window still in its hole, near where I’m standing. I look at my face reflected, just, by the light from the fire, and the flashlight, and then I remember the one that was clamped onto my face. So I am not pretty. Maybe I do look dead. Maybe I’m a ghost walker.

  I remember, now my shirt is off, and I see Henrick and Tlingit and Luttinger looking, the little pock-marks, the old holes, in my chest, and I look away from them before anybody says ‘How’d you get the holes in you?’

  Henrick looks up at me a second, like that’s what he’s thinking. ‘The chicken pox,’ I’ll say, if he asks me. But he gets on with the job and that’s that, and the others don’t say anything, either.

  I get my pant leg up and that looks a good bit worse, it looks nasty, but they didn’t seem to get any tendons or arteries or anything, I walked the way back, after all, and maybe because of the cold, bleeding has stopped all over by now. Some other digs and nips all over, and my face is not pretty but all there, for better or worse, so I’m not dying tonight. Not tomorrow either, not from this. I figure in a certain number of days I could die from the bite in my leg which is deep enough to get infected and kill me. I wonder if this cold really kills infection, or I was making that up. Maybe I’ll need my leg whacked off, but I’m thinking by the time I’d die that way five other things will have killed me. I’ve got four or five days I think of free ride from this, anyway. Better than some of us here. Better than the ones who’ve gone.

  Henrick puts all kinds of peroxide and triple ointment and bandages on me from the kit we found after Lewenden blew his artery and died, and he starts winding me up like a mummy. I admit it feels better, as he winds it on.

  Everybody’s quiet, watching Henrick package me up. Then they’re looking out at the dark and they’re thinking about the wolves, I can see. As if freezing to death before we have a chance to starve to death before anybody finds us in the dark isn’t occupation enough. Finally I see Bengt look at me.

  “What the fuck happened? They just jumped on you?” Bengt asks. I don’t know any more than he does.

  “I must have pissed them off.” I say.

  “Yeah, you must have,” he snorts. He’s either laughing at me, or mad at me for making the wolves dislike me, so now we have to worry about how much. Knox just stares, still wide-eyed.

  “They were spooked, probably. Defending themselves,” I tell them. They all look at me as if they wouldn’t be surprised, but none of them really believes it, because they’re too scared.

  “I tried to run one off a dead guy. He probably had food on him, or he was sniffing him out. The other was just protecting that one. More than likely they won’t bother us again.”

  I look at them, to see if they’re going to keep worrying about the wolves, or if we can get on with trying not to die of all the other things we can die of. We sit, quiet, a moment, and sure enough we’re all sitting there worrying about wolves and being alone on the snow with no doors to lock, and Lewenden and the other dead, because they could be us, and the cold, and all the rest, missing hands and chopped-off feet and the possibility we might die here, after one or two increasingly uncomfortable days that’ll bind worse and worse until we die, and that this, looking back, might be the easiest minute we’ll have. We might never see people we love again, we’ve deserted them, they’ll be alone in the world, and what have we done to protect them, if we never come home? I know they’re thinking mostly of that, because even when a plane hasn't dropped them in the snow, that’s what most of them are worrying about when they stare across the bar, when they try to fall asleep. That’s the look they have now, only a good bit worse. If they die here, they’ve failed their loved ones, they’ve fucked up, mortally, and no remedy. We sit there, thinking, unused to that as we are, because what we’re used to doing is either worrying or resenting, and most of us are thinking about what ties us to this earth, or doesn’t.

  I look for my watch suddenly, but it’s gone.

  “What time is it?” I say. Reznikoff looks at his.

  “Nine o’ clock,” he says, shrugs. “Little after.” Like it matters. We sit quiet, another moment.

  “It feels later, doesn’t it?” I say.

  They stare at me, then Tlingit laughs his funeral laugh.

  “It fucking does,” he says. “I thought it was quarter-after fucked.”

  Then all of us are laughing our marooned dead asses off. Three hundred dead guys not counting us, we’re hanging on like ten little ghosts, laughing in the wind. I remember some poem my wife would say, on sad days, something about somebody dying and dying, into the hands of the wind. Like we are. We fall quiet again. I see Henrick looking at Lewenden, and the other dead, sitting around us. We’re sitting with corpses, and barely thinking of it, till now. I see the others looking too.

  Reznikoff looks at Ojeira and the other two, Cismoski and Feeny, passed out or sleeping, again. He goes and puts his hand on Cismoski suddenly, touches his face. Then he looks up.

  “He’s dead.” We all look over at him, shine the light. Cismoski’s blue-white.

  “I thought he was going to be OK.” Bengt says. Ojeira wakes up, looks around, so does Feeny. They see us staring, realize Cismoski’s dead, next to them. Nine ghosts, then.

  “So did I.” Knox says, staring at him. Everybody’s staring at Cismoski. We should be expecting this kind of thing to happen but we aren’t. We haven’t understood where we are. I look at the guys.

  “We should move him outside, maybe. Lewenden too, and the rest.” They look at me. Feeny looks uncomfortable, next to a corpse. Ojeira does too.

  “Yeah?” I say. “Then we look for food, OK?” Nobody wants to pick up the dead and carry them, but we don’t want to spend the night with them, either.

  We move them, carry them out one by one, as gently as we can, past the fire, out to the snow. Henrick and I take Lewenden out, and as I tilt to get down the slope through the opening Lewenden’s head rolls just like he’s decided to turn his head and look up at me. I look at him like I’m sorry, and I am. I don’t know if he was married, or had kids, I didn’t think so, and I should have said something when he was going if I had thought of it, like ‘We’ll make sure so-and-so is OK,’ or ‘We’ll tell so-and-so you love them,’ but as he was going I didn’t think of it, I only do now, carrying him. We get him laid down and get all of them all out, lay them in the snow as decently as we can, and it makes us feel better.

  We come back and everyone stands, more silent than before, back by the fire to feed it and get warmer again.

  “Anybody se
e any food?” I ask.

  “Must be something,” Henrick says.

  We pull ourselves away from the fire, which is not easy to do, and look for what food there is, by what light there is. We find frozen dinners, pieces of sandwich, power-bars, juice-cans, water-bottles, frozen, bits and pieces. A couple of dozen bags of fucking peanuts and pretzels. We count and divvy and try to figure how long we can make what we have last.

  “Maybe we can hunt, somehow,” I say. “Stretch this out.” What we’ll hunt, and what we’ll hunt with, I have no idea. Water isn’t a problem, we’re walking on it. We take a little food to Ojeira and Feeny, make sure they aren’t freezing. Then we get back to the fire again, stoke it again, try to get warmer again. We all eat a little, handfuls of peanuts.

  “How many more days until it’s all night up here?” I ask.

  ”Three more?” Henrick says. “Four, maybe? It’s about an hour of day tomorrow, I guess. Less the next day.”

  “Company will probably come for our bodies in the spring,” Tlingit says.

  “If then,” Ojeira says.

  Everybody nods. We’ve been busy with not freezing and dealing with dying and we haven’t even thought out loud about it.

  “The company isn’t going to send out fifty planes to search half a million square miles in the dark, neither is anybody else. They just aren’t, except the insurance company, if they have insurance, and that’ll be for the plane, not for us. We’ll get a piper-cub and a guy with binoculars, maybe some samaritans, good bush neighbors. They’ll try a few days,” I say.

  I know with the amount of daylight and the amount of empty space if we were off-course at all when we came down, all they’re going to find if they ever finally find us is wreck and frozen bones, and empty peanut-bags, good as likely. I look at the guys.

  “So we gather our shit, as much food as we can find, and walk out,” I say. Nobody says anything. Most of them nod, after a while. Like there are a lot of fucking alternatives. I know they’re afraid to stay and afraid to go.