Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (5 page)

“
Hey
—” I yell again. 

Then he seems to split in two, or I see something jumps off him, half a second, looks up, then jumps back on him. 
Some fucking thing, an animal.
 

“
Hey!
”  I yell as loud as I can, as if this guy, who I realize is dead, probably, cares.  But I yell, and run faster.

“
Get the fuck off him!
” I yell.

Its head comes up, looks at me.  It’s a wolf, ripping at the guy, and I see, now I’m closer, the guy is dead, if he was alive at all.  It was the wolf I saw moving.  The wolf just stares at me. 

I charge at it, screaming.  I don’t know why I’m charging, but the wolf looks up and stares at me and just watches me come at him.  I’m thinking he killed him, he was alive and this fucker killed him, or he was dead and he’s got food on him, or he’s at his guts, I don’t know, but I’m charging, yelling, and expecting him to twitch or flinch and turn tail and jump off but he isn’t fucking moving, he’s just watching me.

Then I’m hit sideways.  I think I’ve been hit by a piece of plane, I’m in a blur, slammed, and I’m in the snow with my eyes open getting snow jammed up my nose and under my lids again and something’s digging and dragging into my fucking back and dragging me, and somewhere in getting tossed upside down I think it’s the wolf, but it can’t be, and I understand it’s another wolf, locked onto the back of my jacket, or my back, I can’t tell, but it’s tunneling into me, the best it can, and I’m face down in snow now and I get half up off the snow, almost standing, but he hangs on, I pick him up with me, or most of him, by his teeth.  I hear him growling. 

Then I’m hit again, at the back again but the other side, up under my arm, the other one’s hanging off me now.  I’m standing with two of them hanging on to me by their jaws, and they aren’t letting go, and I’m trying to swat with my elbows and grunt and I can’t see them but I think one drops, I think there’s only one now, behind me where I can’t see him or get at him but as I twist I smell fur and his breath and I finally get around enough to see the top of his head and his ears, and I smell more fur, more hot breath, he’s buried in my armpit burrowing his teeth in.  Now I see the other is off me.  He’s bouncing left and right behind me looking for the next place to latch on while I spin the one on me around, I’m swinging, frantic, trying to shake him. 

I can’t tell if the one still on me’s really got his teeth in me or he’s mostly eating jacket.  I feel his teeth crunching in, but I don’t know how far they’re in me, or if they’re in me or just hurting.  I’m still swinging and trying to stop him getting leverage to really bite, I’m trying to smash him all the harder now that I can see something and I try to twist further and I pull his ear and I bash and bash with my elbow at his head, as hard as I can, like I’m trying to crack his skull. I’m waiting to hear a cracking sound, as if I’m going to be able to hit as hard as that.  I hear jacket ripping and I feel muscle or something tearing under my arm and he seems to come loose, but he bounces up again, gets a new bite on my back.  I’m still praying he’s getting more jacket than me and he’s snorting, growling, but he is not flinching except to get a better and better grip and
try
to get the damn jacket out of his way or get more muscle.  It’s hurting enough, stabbing,
sharp,
I think that he must be in me by now. 

I look up as the other one
hits
me again, on my leg, and I kick as hard as I can before he can sink in too deep.  He gashes me, feels like, but he comes loose.  He took a piece or didn’t, I don’t care, if he’s off me.  It hurts, but in the cold it all does, he’s got my whole leg for all I know and I’m nothing but spinal cord on my back, for all I know, I’m a meatless stack of bones fighting when I’m already gone into something’s mouth, nothing to save, but still fighting as if there is. 

The one I kicked off jumps up at me, again, and I get my arm up in time, barely, and he locks on my arm in front of me, I get a face-full of his teeth.  His breath’s hot.  I spin again, the other still on my back, and I get my other arm up and smash him as hard as I can again.  He lets loose and tries to get another hold but he misses the bite this time, and drops, and somehow the one who came at my face drops, I think I finally pulled his ear half-off, something came loose, maybe fur.   He drops and I spin, and I’ve got the two of them in front of me, and I can see them both for the first time. 

I don’t think of running because I know they’d run me down and in the half-second I thought that, I’m thinking,  ‘
OK, we’ll calm down now, we’ll look at each other and we’ll settle
,’ and as I think that they come at me again.  I realize I can die now or do otherwise so I charge at one in front and roar and try to seem big and threatening like they tell you to do with other animals, and he leaps right up and goes for my side but he misses.  I turn in time and step after him and kick at the side of his head as hard as I can.  He backs off a step and I charge again because I can’t run and I can’t stand there, and he almost gets my whole leg in his jaw this time but I snap back and he grazes off, I get my leg out, he doesn’t get a hold, and I kick at his face again, harder, somehow, and he hesitates this time.  He doesn’t come in at me, for a second.  But the other one
jumps
right up over my arm and closes his mouth on my face, over my eyes. 

I get my hands up trying to wedge him away but I fall back in the snow with him on me, locked on my face and squeezing, and the other one’s on my chest trying to get up under my neck but I think my arm’s in his way and he jumps off, I can’t see anything with this one’s mouth over me and I’m wondering as I try to leverage him off when his teeth will puncture bone and my skull will crack in two, and I feel the other one land on me again.  I’m dead now, I think, I’m pushing and kicking but it feels like digging in water, they’re going to get into me and go through me now and that will be that, I’m pushing their weight and trying to twist away but one’s on my leg and I can’t.  A few more seconds, maybe.

I hear yelling, stomping, coming across the snow, guys charging and boots thumping, heavy thuds coming through the wolf on me to my chest, my knuckles and my head are getting smashed, with lumps of wood.  I see Henrick with a piece of wood in his hands, swinging, Luttinger and Tlingit too, the others, but I still have the wolves on me.  Then Tlingit swings his log like a bat and knocks one right off me, and Henrick swings his down on the other.  It jumps loose, and the wolves hop away, and turn and face us.

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.

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.