Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (17 page)

We come down the long curve, and I’m looking at a sharper bend where there are rocks it looks like we might use to hold on to and not get washed away, if we don’t get ourselves smashed on them.  I know it can’t be too deep, but it doesn’t have to be that deep to get over your head and washed downstream and die.  I wouldn’t mind, almost.  It’s a way to get somewhere, but the cold would kill me, I know, before I got anywhere.  That seems like a relief maybe too, but no.

“You think you could get across there?” I ask them.  They all look at it.  They all know the other side would be a better place to be than here, but it still looks like the river here could kill us so we’re not in a hurry to climb into it.  The more we look at it the harder it looks to
cross,
I start to think we keep on downstream, hope for better. 

“Maybe we could find better,” Henrick says.  I nod.

“Yeah.
 
Maybe.”
  There must be a place that looks less like it could kill us.  But we are close to the edge, or where the ice starts, anyway, looking like we might want to cross.

That’s when they come on us again.  I look up, and stare, so do the others.  They’re trotting their slow trot, the big one and the others, edging along watching us, keeping a distance but angling closer, then half-charging closer still, running up and down along the bank behind us, staring at us.

“Fuck,” I say. 

We back toward the river, the ice at the edge, and I’m damned if it doesn’t look like the big wolf doesn’t want us to leave at all, he’d rather keep us out of the river and kill us, to be sure we’ll never come back.  But I know we’ll have some chance in the water.  Henrick knows, too.

“Fuck it,” Henrick says, and steps off the ice into the water, and starts across, Tlingit and Knox splash in after him.  I don’t know if the water or the wash will kill us, but we’re going.  I watch the wolves and wait to go last in case anybody loses their footing and I have a chance to grab them before they get sucked down.  I want there to be a chance they won’t bother to come in after us, they’ll wait us out, or watch us cross and finally figure us gone enough.  Something has to be a boundary for them, if it wasn’t the cliff, maybe the river.   

But no.
  The big one is coming at us, running down the bank, he doesn’t want us in the water, he’s going to hit us before we get too far and get away from him.  The others charge with him. 

I’m not in the water more than a few seconds before they’re jumping right off the bank after us.  I stumble and splash backward through the water hoping it’s going to get deep enough to lose them.  I look at Henrick and I can see he’s having it hard to cross but he’s doing it.  I keep backing up, holding my stick,
watching
the wolves. 

“Don't step in a hole,” I call to Henrick.  “You go under when you don’t expect to, you’ll be gone.  OK?”

Henrick nods, still feeling his way across, using the rocks, Tlingit after him, fast as he can, then Knox.
  After a few more steps Henrick loses the stick he has, or lets it go, because it’s too hard to hold the rocks and a stick at the same time.  It’s stronger than it looks, though, the wash, and everybody has to hold hard, I do, I have to use all I have to hold my feet and not to go down, I feel like I’m cutting my hands up grabbing the rough parts of the rock that stick out and haven’t been smoothed round, and trying to keep my balance and keep my stick out ready to point at the wolves, and the wolves are splashing right behind us, coming up on me.  The pain in my legs and my middle from the cold feels as sharp as anything the wolves got into me before and it seems to be mounting, getting worse as I go, and we’re all panting and feeling our insides trying to crawl up into our chests, trying to stay ahead of the wolves. 

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 turns 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.