I stumble backward all the faster and take a big fool backwards step and drop in deeper, and lose my stick, too. But thank God the big wolf behind me is over his head already, he’s barely holding on to the rocks under him and half-swimming, and I see with his fur wet the cuts in him as he bobs up and down coming at me, and suddenly he slips and the water gets under him hard and he’s washed loose. He bangs into the smaller wolf downstream and knocks him into the current too and the third looks to the big wolf washing down, unsure, suddenly, and loses his footing too and all three are suddenly washing down, toward a little wash-hole by the bank we came from, and they start to climb back out and slip but they get out to the ice, they look smaller, spike-furred, and I see cuts and gashes on the others too I didn’t know were there, I don’t know when they got them from us but somewhere they did. They stand on the ice, watching us. I look ahead to Henrick and the others and they are still okay, they are getting across, step by step.
But Knox does something, he laughs, seeing them wash down like that and as he laughs he loses his feet or slips off a rock, I don’t know, and he goes under suddenly but he pops back up grabbing for the rock, he looks OK again but before he’s steadied himself he slips again, into the same hole or something and he goes under again, and this time he comes up a few feet downstream but he’s washing on to downstream rocks I think he'll get a hold of, and he just doesn’t. He doesn't even look worried, he just sort of touches the rock and slides around it like he doesn’t understand he needs to grab it.
“Grab that!” I yell to him but he’s past it, and there is another he’s coming up on and I point to that.
“Grab that one! Knox!” By now Henrick and Tlingit have seen and they're watching him, and yelling too, and I’m starting downstream for him but he's already far, and somehow Knox can't get a hold on the next rock either and he dips and slides over a ledge and drops under and when he comes up he's going fast, and I watch, and so do the wolves, as the current shoots him straight for the bank where the wolves are. He goes under again and comes up again trying to push and swim away from that bank but he is getting sucked across into the far shallows and he manages to get to his feet a few yards from the wolves.
“Get back in the water. Get to the middle!” I yell, and the others are yelling his name, and the wolves run off the bank into the shallows before he can get himself back into deep enough water fast enough, they circle around him and the big one pulls him down with his teeth and the others swarm over him.
We stand there, barely holding on, helpless again, and one of the wolves pulls Knox up on the ice by the bank, red dragging over it, and they rip into him again and then stop, they circle and trot around him and then stop again, mouths red, soaking wet, looking across at us.
“Go. Keep going.” I yell to Henrick, and he turns and pushes the rest of the way across, and I look back at Knox, on the ice, and the wolves, watching us, and I watch them to see if they come into the water after us again. They don’t.
When I think my legs aren’t going to work anymore I see Henrick get to the ice on the other side, and flub around trying to get up over it but it keeps breaking under him and dropping him back in. Finally he sees the ice is broken closer to the banks further down and he makes for that, gets his knees up on rocks, and stumbles forward back out to thicker ice and then snow and he’s home. Tlingit does what he did and I come out behind them. I get on to the snow and look back across as the wolves look at us and trot away, along the bank and then up over a hump of snow and disappear.
We’re jumping up and down and half crying with the pain of the cold out in the air, the air feels weird warm, if it’s possible, over the bone pain, but whatever that cold did to our flesh we are paying for now, the cold’s infecting us, there’s a long deep pain coming out and I wonder if the water’s killed the last of us. Henrick’s kneeled down then gone over on his side and he’s lying in the snow balled up and Tlingit stays jumping and stomping, I jump and stomp too and hope the pain is going to stop before my heart does. Henrick looks bad, I think it did something to him, his insides are gripping, or something. I go across the bank, look down at him.
“You’ve got to get up,” I tell him. He nods, understands, I think, he should be up and moving or something worse might be happening to him.
I realize though we need a fire right now, and that I didn’t think of that, didn’t pick the spot for its firewood. I didn’t pick it at all.
“Let’s make a fire,” I say, and hustle toward the trees, it hurts like hell to move but I tell myself it’s good to move, so I keep going, and I think if we get a fire going we’ll stay alive, but it feels like if it isn’t going in about a minute we’ll probably die of this. I know I have more time than that, it just feels like I don’t. I scramble for whatever little pieces I can and Henrick and Tlingit have hustled over with me to do the same and we lay it down a little off from the river because cold air is rushing over the river from the water, a little in from the bank it feels warmer. We don’t want to use the pieces we’ve carried for clubs, none of us feels like we won’t need them again, and they got soaked anyway crossing, like our sticks did, and we’ve lost those, anyway.
I fumble for the lighter in my top pocket where I’m glad I had it, because I was so scared stupid I didn’t do anything to keep it dry crossing, and the water was just about as high as the pocket it was in, and was only higher when I stumbled, but it’s dry enough to spark and it lights.
The first twigs won’t light at all but I keep the flame on drying them and heating them until they will but I see the little bit of fluid through the casing and there isn’t much, so I wonder if they’ll catch before it runs out, and then it hisses, and sputters out. I flick and flick it and it sparks and hisses but doesn’t light again, and my heart is getting tighter and tighter, and our clothes are stiffening on us, turning to ice. Finally I see there are needles on one twig that have dried a little, next to the ones that burned away without catching when I had the thing lit, they’re yellowed brown and look dry enough to catch, so I spark the wheel at them and I can see sparks hitting and glowing and needles curling away but not lighting.
I try the other lighters Tlingit got from Feeny but they got too wet, they’re no good, not even sparking. I think they might dry eventually but we need heat now or that’s that, got past the wolves and froze dead on the spot. I shake the first lighter and hold it upside down a minute and try again and it lights and blows out before the needles or the twig light, so I go back to just trying to get sparks on the needles. The guys have made a wall around it to stop the wind, shivering, wet, dying by inches maybe, but we’re all watching this stupid fucking disposable flint-wheel sparking pointlessly, over and over.
The needles still don’t light, and then suddenly one glows and curls and catches, and the needles next to it that have dried out catch, and the tiny bit of sparrow-leg branch it’s on catches, and I hold another twig up over it and get a little flame going. I burn my fingers but I’m not dropping it if it burns my whole hand off. I lower it to the other twigs and hold it there, my fingers probably burning off by now and I don’t care, I can’t tell the difference between that and the cold anyway, and some bigger pieces catch and I let go and we lay on. We all hover over it to be warm but also out of fear it will blow out, there are gusts that could blow it out it seems.
“What do we do, take our clothes off so they dry?” Henrick asks. Sitting out here naked in the wind doesn’t seem too happy, either.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We get it going big enough we’ll dry a little, maybe.” Henrick nods.
“Let’s get more,” he says, and he huffs back to the trees, Tlingit with him. I stay here to guard the thing, or stay warm, probably that. They hustle back with some broken pieces of green branch they twisted off, more like boughs, needles and all, but even green needles like that are good, they go up like crazy for the little time they burn and help dry the wood. Doesn’t last long, but doesn’t hurt.
We all take t
urns running for more and we get it going to a ridiculous size. We can’t get warm, however big it is, but we don’t feel as bad as we did.
“We should eat something,” I say, because I realize with nothing inside us we might all sit down for naps now and just freeze like meat in a freezer.
We pull whatever wet crap we have in our packs, bags of chips and peanuts, a couple of granola bars. Tlingit’s got an apple, somehow, and I’m amazed he’s been carrying this red round thing around that survived a crash and getting chased by wolves, it’s been riding in his back-pack like school lunch on a field-trip. He tries to bite into it and I see from his face it’s frozen, but he chews it and passes it to Henrick and we all get a bite each and we think we’re in heaven. With most of us dead, we still can chew a frozen apple and think we’ll live.
We eat some peanuts but we have to choose between starving later or dying of cold now and I don’t know how frozen apple is on that account or how much food will stop us from freezing to death but we guess a few bites each might keep us alive.
I look back across the river, for the wolves, and I still can’t see them anywhere, and I wonder if they really can’t get across, if this was all we had to do, get across a river, to live. We feel a little better, on this side, and we have our river to follow, and we’re half-warm for now or less frozen, and half-dry, or less cold-soaked, and we start to think maybe the others who died were the ones to die and we’re the ones who lived through it.
Maybe we're looking back, imagining looking back, telling the story of how guys all around us got killed but we came through, like my dad in the bar, because we’ve lived through everything so far, so that must mean we’ll live through this. Ojeira and the rest thought the same thing, until they stopped thinking. But we’re happy we’re on one side and the wolves are on the other, and that the wolves tried but couldn’t make it over, and we’re happy that if we’re bright enough to follow the river and not die of something else, we might get to the ocean.
Finally I tell myself we’re dry enough, which we aren’t, at all, or as dry as we’ll get, but as hard as it is to leave the fire I feel like we should move.
“Should we move?” Henrick asks. I nod, and we pick up our packs and our knives, we still have those, and head on. We’re excited we might be through it, and we want to rush away, rush out of it, if we can. But we all look back at the fire like we’re leaving home.
We get back on the slog downriver. We keep going, sloping down sometimes, over long flats others, but we keep going, and the light seems to be holding, still, and no wolves for what seems a very long time now. You want to think things. Hopeful things.
We follow another long curve, another big looping patient bend we have no patience for, but we keep going, and there it is, a round little lake, looking at us, not that big even, a stupid little frozen pond, and suddenly I don’t see my river or what I thought was my river coming out of it. It dead-ends.
We sag, looking at it, but we keep along the curve of the lake, better than halfway around, most of it ice, until we’ve seen all sides, and the stupid stream we thought was a river dead-ending in it, the river we thought was between us and the wolves isn’t anymore.
“That’s done,” I say.
I sit in the snow. Look at it. Light is suddenly going paler, pale grey, way home is gone. My hand is red-black again, new blood, the old washed off in the river. The sky looks like an eye, closing.
10
We could keep going but the river’s discouraged us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us or don’t know there isn’t a river between us anymore, and we’re going to stumble, mad with cold, to our deaths without even knowing we’ve gotten away. I feel sure suddenly I have less than the required amount of blood in my brain, and I’m blinking and frozen, down to some place between slow-witted and half-witted.
Maybe we’ll give up here and let them have us, when they get around to understanding we’re still here, if they trot around the end of this fucking fool pond, staring at us. It doesn’t look like a bad place to quit. When you think of all the times in your life you might have, I wonder if the one you end up giving into is just that, the one you end up giving into.
“What do we do now?” Henrick says. I’m silent, because I want to say ‘Light a fire, and lie down and die.’
“Keep going,” I say, finally.
But none of us moves. We all sit, more ready to die, probably, than we were yesterday, or this morning, whatever morning was, here. We sit watching the water, the far curve of it, to see if wolves are there, if they’ve come down to meet us, knowing, unlike us, where the river ended.
Finally I take off my jacket pull up my sleeve to look at my arm. It isn’t very good. I wipe some snow on it, and it doesn’t look much better. Henrick and Tlingit look at it, assessing, I know, like I’m assessing. They’re guessing if it will kill me, one way or another, before something else does.
“That’ll be OK,” Henrick says, which is nice of him, but he’s not stupid. It doesn’t look like it’s going to help me get out of here, that’s clear enough. I use my knife to cut a strip off the shirt I found on the plane and tie the strip around my arm as tight as I can, and hope for the best. There’s a calculation to make, like everything, but I don’t bother to make it because I know it isn’t good, but what of it, and the wolves will probably find us again and kill us. Who gives a fuck. I get my jacket back on fast as I can, half-wet or not.
After that, we get up, start walking, leave the pond or the lake and the dead-end river behind us. I haven’t come up with any more great-general ideas, or even pressed any of us to push along with the same one, because at some point there got to be less fight in me than what’s required too, I guess, or I used up enough of it, or seeing Bengt or Knox added to Ojeira added to the others finally took it away from me. So if there’s a plan, it’s blunder along toward what we think might still be west, pray we don’t get taken from the earth by what, let’s face it, is stronger than we are. Even knowing that doing that is as good as giving up, because more than likely, they will find us again, keep coming for us, and take the last of us and be done with us.
It’s still daylight, though I thought it was going. I’ve lost track of when there isn’t going to be any more of it, and it’s barely light at that anyway, it’s like weak water. Half-day. We’re all marching, half-stumbling, bloodied, battle-scarred, pale, starving, like ghosts, through another clearing, one of a chain of clearings strung together ahead of us, broken by little clumps of trees.
“I should have stayed home,” Henrick says. “Worked at 7-11. I’d be with my daughter right now.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or mumbling to himself.
I shrug.
“Or dead in a hold-up,” I say. He looks at me, doesn’t appreciate the perspective. I’m apologetic but I’m too tired to apologize.
“At least she’s known you,” I find myself saying.
Henrick keeps walking, not much comforted.
“She won’t remember me, though.” That he’s realized this seems to be the saddest thing in all the world he could ever think of, like all he’s known his girl so far will never have happened, and he’ll be dead, and what he thought his life was will just be taken away from what he thought the world was. I don’t know if she’ll remember him or not, or if that will matter to her or not, maybe better if she doesn’t, I don’t know.
“Maybe she will,” I say, finally. He shrugs, keeps going.
“I want mine to remember me,” Tlingit says. “He better.”
I nod. We fall quiet again, marching. My legs feel like part of the snow. All of me does, even my thoughts, what’s left.
“I want to go home,” Henrick says, after a while, like he said before. I know he does. Tlingit and I don’t say anything.
The little clearing runs into trees again, and then we come out into the next clearing, a bigger one, a great white sea of snow like the one we crashed in.
In the distance, on the snow, I see black
shapes, dotted across. For a minute I think we’re back in the clearing where we crashed, seeing dead bodies, and I feel panic, that we've come in a big circle back to the plane and the dead.
But then I stop, we all do, and stare at the dots. They look like wolves.
“Is that them?” Tlingit says, squinting.
But none of them is moving, they’re just lying in the snow. We keep on, staying on the edge, in the cover of the trees, and still watch the wolves, or whatever we’re looking at. Maybe they’re rocks or clumps of twisted wood, or dead caribou, we’re hoping. But we keep edging along, watching them, and finally when we get close enough I see they’re wolves, and they’re dead, dried in the cold.
We stop again, staring at them, long-dead as they look we’re afraid they’re going to get up and start running at us, or just as afraid of dead wolves as live ones. They’re bits of cold, tattered hide hanging off cold bones, moving in the wind, haunting us from there. We’re still hiding from them when we know they’re dead. They aren’t our wolves, anyway.
“It’s another pack,” I say.
Henrick and Tlingit nod. We stare at the carcasses, and see ourselves, lying there, another bunch of dumb animals who went to somewhere they shouldn’t have. I look around, and farther across the clearing. There are other carcasses too, some caribou after all, antlers sticking up out of the snow, meat stripped, part-bone, part dried-out hide. I’d thought the further-away ones maybe were just rocks or dead wood, but I see what they are now, and it feels like a dead place, and there’s more wind or a front is coming or I’m getting even weaker but it feels colder, much colder, bitter down to more bitter.
The Grey Page 12
