Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (18 page)

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.

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.

I keep staring at the wolves, all they fought and hunted and played and mated, lying there.  They don’t look like animals to me, anymore.  If the
pack hunting us are
what hunted these down, I’m sorry for them.  Anything dead I feel sorry for, now.

One of them is lying half on his side, away from the others, his head turned back face half in the snow, and my mind is wandering, again.  This far away, walking into
death,
and my mind’s running where it isn’t wanted. You go through your time, you’ll gather places you never want to go to again, but your head will go there, without asking, just to gall you, I guess, or I don’t know why.  It is biting colder, again.

The last hunt I went on with my father was cold like this, almost as cold.  He had a pint-bottle he kept passing to me, then cursing me to get it back to him faster. I remember taking sips for me then pouring sips into the snow when he wasn’t looking to mess his day up without his knowing, leave him short for the way back.  

“You piss me off,” he said, waiting for the bottle.  He might not have said that, might have been something else, but that’s what I heard, I think.  He said he was after this wolf he was convinced was there, again.  He’d been after him all his life, he’d shot at it, tried to trap it.  Why he said he was going to find him that day I don’t know, because I knew it was just a thing he said, but he was full of going-to-get-him-today and he sounded final like he knew he was going to get something that day even if he didn’t know what.  It was all air, something he said, for all I know there never was any ghost wolf, probably it meant something else, or it was a story of his father’s, or some legend he liked to pretend for himself, and he lost the difference.

But there was a black-tailed deer, which is what we were really out after, dinners.  Not huge, a good size though, down a slope, trotting to the left, after I don’t know what then stopping, and trotting the other way, to the river that was there, to drink. 

“Well,
there’s
some dinners,” he said.  He went to take his gun up, and stopped.

“You want it?” he said.

I shrugged.  No I didn’t.  He shrugged too, like I made no sense to him, then suspicious, because that’s what you are over anything that doesn’t make instant sense, like he looked standing at the bottom of my bed in the hospital when I was little.  But he took his rifle up the rest of the way. He didn’t take much time sighting, he just raised the gun and fired, like he did to my mother and me, and the deer dropped without much fight and my father was already walking, then trotting down the slope, excited, I guess, to see his work. 

I trailed him down, watching his back go down the hill, through the snow, cradling my rifle and judging, because he was not that far at all, if somebody was to stop walking and take a shot at the base of my father’s neck where the collar of his jacket sat, about, it would be hard to miss, even on the trot. 

I stopped walking, watched him trotting away, closer to the deer, then I raised my gun and I sighted it and I shot him, though his collar.  He dropped down very quick, quicker than the deer, like a string pulled him to the ground, and rolled and
lay
on his side, face half in the snow.  When I got to him his eyes were going, already, he looked up at me, breathing a half-buried snort, confused, but not at all confused.  He was fighting for breath, a little, like Lewenden did on the plane, and like Lewenden I put my hand on him.  ‘
It’s OK,
’I said to him, like I said to Lewenden.  I think now he looked like the wolf I killed with Tlingit, and the ones since, and finally, though he wasn’t too happy about it, I made some sense to him.  I don’t know why that was the day, finally. 
Maybe because I didn’t plan to, that day.
  Remembering him lying like that I remember, I suppose, why the wolves I killed made me sick to see, because I wished I never had to kill them, or wondered what I killed them for, not why I killed them.  I knew why. 
But not what for.