Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (15 page)

I look down, suddenly, at my arm, where my wolf bit it.  I squeeze it hard as I can above where teeth went in, or whatever happened.  It didn’t seem as bad at first, but now it hurts more than the ones I got before.  It feels deeper.  Tlingit and I look at each other. 

“Come on,” I say. 

We scramble to get sticks and knives in our hands, again, and we head back out the gully the way we were heading, but we tumble down into a deeper, narrower part of the gully. Nearer the rocks, which makes me nervous, and when I turn to look back and up behind us there he is, on a rock, or jumping off a rock, down at us.  This time my knees just fold and I fall backwards and Tlingit is just turning to look up when it lands on him and gets the back of Tlingit’s neck in his mouth, barely, but not enough to hold on and Tlingit knows he’s trying to and Tlingit twists and jumps down with all his might and the wolf falls off him into the snow.

I’m on my feet by now, and charging in at him, and Tlingit’s up too but I go down, face first in the snow, I slipped off some root or something I couldn’t see, I don’t know but the snow comes up and hits me in the face again and Tlingit almost falls over me and the wolf springs right up at him, mouth open as Tlingit’s catching himself.

He gets Tlingit’s neck again but the side this time and again Tlingit is so fast again somehow the wolf doesn’t get a good grip, or Tlingit shoves him so hard he comes off, but the wolf angles his head and is straining to get around and under Tlingit’s throat while I scramble up and he’s stretching and working his teeth forward under Tlingit’s chin, after his life, as hard as Tlingit’s trying to pull him off, but he isn’t bothering with me.  I get my stick up again and I take a bead on his side and I drive at him yelling, it shoots through him, comes out the other side. Tlingit blinks, yanks his head back,
it
just misses his cheek.

But he shoves the wolf off now, and falls back, as I feel all the weight of the wolf on my stick again and I drop him down to the snow, like I did the other, and I want to jump back away this time too but I hold on, leaning the stick into him, afraid to let go or let it up, this time.  But he stops moving.  I’m still as sick as glad and don’t know why.  Don't want to.

Tlingit grabs him up from the snow, hoists him with all his might, roars at him, then throws him, heaves as far as he can across the snow again, still yelling. It isn’t respecting a dead foe but I don’t blame him.  But I don’t feel like crowing, either. 

Sometimes it happens you have to do a final thing like this, you have to do it and you have to choose, so you choose.  I look at the wolf in the snow where Tlingit threw him, shrinking already, it looks like, in the dark, and my mind is running off, again, up roads I don’t need it to run.  Tlingit’s gone quiet, staring at it too, breathing, nodding, maybe he’s embarrassed of the whooping, and his village past is shaming him.  You dance for a dead seal, but never a wolf, whatever it did to you.  When you kill a wolf you carry him on your shoulders, you lay a feast for him, you say you’re sorry, wrap him up in sacred things, give him a burial.  You don’t dance, unless you’re dancing your regret.  If your brother’s trying to kill you, and you kill him, are you rejoicing?  Are you alive, anymore, even?  Maybe you carry your dead with you, and never lay them down, and they take you to death with them, one day, anyway.  Day by day, they carry you over with them.

 I pull the stick out of Tlingit’s wolf and get my knife, and we set off.  I feel myself worrying about the others, and I start to trot, best I can, through the deep snow, which lasts about a step.  But I try to trudge faster than before, and Tlingit huffs along with me, we’re half-dead but we want to be away.  I see dead trees,
ahead, that I didn’t see before,
and I see the first wolf, still lying there, sad and black in the snow.  I take the stick out of him and I wonder if what made me sick was sadness, instead of fear, or something else.  I remember other dead animals I don’t want to think about.

I try to find the ground I thought I saw before, ahead, where it looked like the gully met the rise, and Tlingit and I head out of the gully, past the dead trees, into what looks like forest, again.

We keep going, watching the trees ahead, looking to the sides, and behind us, all we can.  I’m listening, but I can’t hear much more than our feet thudding the snow, and our breathing.  We come up nearer the trees, finally, and we slow down, I don’t know why, I'm expecting to find wolves or the others or an ambush, but aside from little puffs of wind still blowing through it nothing’s moving. 

We’re into trees again, with
less moon
than we had out in the gully.  As we go I keep seeing shadows in the corner of my eye.  Every time I’m sure a wolf is walking alongside us in the dark it isn't there.  We walk and walk, through a long dark gallery.  I stop, or Tlingit does, if either of us thinks we hear something, behind us or ahead, that might be others, or a wolf.  We know we could wait for them, but if we do, they may never come, and then we’ve died, waiting.  So there's nothing to do but keep on.  And I stop over and over for shadows in my eye, and little sounds buried in the wind, but there’s never anything, the others or a wolf.  

But finally I think I do hear something, a low-growl, and I stop.  Tlingit does too.

“You hear it?”  I say.  Tlingit stays still, listens.  It’s a wolf talking, or wolves talking, or it’s growling, or it’s the others.  Just shreds of sound, coming and going as wind wanders this way or that, like the river I thought I heard before.  We’re afraid to move, I am, anyway, I stay still listening, and hear another shred, then nothing.  The ground seems to be dropping away again, in front of us, I can’t see trees. I edge forward and there’s another lip of hard snow and a bank dropping down, and coming closer to it I hear Henrick, I think.  Not a wolf.

We edge out to get over the lip, and I look down.  There’s isn’t much moon but I can tell this isn’t like the other
one,
it’s just a little drop.  We clamber down toward the sound, to the side and back of us, we overshot them and got high over them somehow, but we found them. 

“
That you?
”
  I hear Henrick yell out to us, through the dark.

“
Yeah
,” I yell back, and wonder what I would have said if I was a wolf.  When we get down where we can see each other Henrick’s standing up and the others are all sitting on their haunches, frozen, terrified, like we are, still thinking we might be wolves, not quite believing we aren’t until they’ve stared at us a little.  They’re relieved to see it’s us, finally.

“Did you see any?”  Henrick asks. 

“Two.”  Tlingit says.  “We got the better of them.”  He’s quieter about it now.

Bengt looks at us, surprised. 
Knox and Henrick too.
  Nobody’s whooping, this time.  They’re just surprised. 

 “What about you?”  I say.

“Four of them were over there,” Henrick says.  “They just stared at us, lined up. We didn’t have the balls to charge them and they didn’t come at us.  They just went.
After a while.”

“Did you see the big one?” I ask.  Henrick nods.

“Yeah.”
 

I look around us.  I’m trying to think what they got out of staring at Henrick and the others, why they didn’t go at them, and if they’re going to come at us now.  We’re all watching the dark, which I realize is what Henrick and the others were doing when we got there.  I don’t blame them for not charging at them when they saw them.  Four of them, with the big one, I don’t know if I would done any different except run away, or surrender.

They look at me.  They’re all exhausted, scraped-up, battle-scarred, freezing, dying,
too
far from home.

I stare at the dark like the rest of them are doing, breathing, trying to think what to do next.  Bengt’s staring at his boots, going to sleep, or going away. 
Going home maybe.

Something
comes
flying at him, jumps out of the dark and locks on to Bengt’s face.  He screams, turning and falling over and getting his hands up.  Henrick and Knox just stare at him with their eyes wide a half-second, I probably do too, I’m trying to remember if wolves crack skulls and how thick our skulls are compared to a caribou’s but as I start at him with Tlingit and I see Henrick getting his stick up, about to charge too when he’s hit sideways, like I was before, it smacks him into a tree before I’ve gotten to Bengt.  But before I can do anything to help Bengt, the wolf lets Bengt go, jumps off him, lopes off, leaving Bengt bleeding, and I turn to the one on Henrick, who’s still pinned against the tree the wolf slammed him into trying to fight it off, flailing at it with his knife with one hand trying to push it off him with the other.  Then just as suddenly the wolf on Henrick snarls and flips away, hops off Henrick, runs into the dark, just like that.  Maybe he thought we could kill him, I’m not sure we would have.  If he’d stayed and tried he might have killed all of us. I look to Henrick, on the ground, he’s spent, more than he was before, if he could be.  I’m surprised he held that one off alone, that long.

We all scramble up to get to Henrick and he’s got new bleeding.  Might kill him, might not.  I wonder if they did it on purpose, just run in and wound us, let us bleed, I don’t know.  I run over to Bengt, as well as I can run, and he’s bleeding too, I can’t tell how
bad
, but he’s awake.  I realize I can’t see Knox anywhere, but we’re alone, suddenly, and I look for Knox, expecting the worst.  But he’s sitting against a tree, staring, I think he sat through the whole thing too scared to do anything, and nobody blames him, because not one of us didn't want to do the same thing he did.  And he lived through it, sitting there holding his knees, so good for him.  Bengt sits in the snow, heavy as a corpse, he just thuds down, staring, bleeding like hell, I see now. 
His face, a bit of his neck.
 
Bleeding into the snow.
  I try to think of how to wrap him up.  He shakes his head.

“Sweet God,” he says.  And he starts to sob, very tired fearful small sobs, coming quietly out of him, in the cold.

The biggest wolf comes out of the dark, at as hard a run as I’ve seen any of them do, and he smacks into Bengt like a bullet, Bengt barely looks up before he closes his jaws around Bengt’s neck and shoulder and doesn’t seem to slow down at all, I see blood pop out where the wolf grabs him in his teeth and the wolf running away into the dark with Bengt, who doesn’t get a sound out, he just flies out of sight over the snow, under the wolf, and I’ve just stood there too stopped still to do anything.

“
Bengt
!”
Henrick yells, and we run after them, Henrick and Tlingit and
I
, Knox following, all of us yelling for Bengt over and over, stumbling around in the dark, and there’s nothing, no snarling, no other wolves, no Bengt calling back, there’s nothing.  We walk this way and that and yell and yell out for him, in the dark of the forest all around, but there’s nothing else, he’s gone.

We stop yelling and look at each other.  We knew he was gone when the wolf grabbed him, but we stop now.  He’s gone.  I feel my lids getting heavy on me, which is a strange thing, in all this. 
The cold maybe.
  I’m weaving too, I think I am. I’m not sure, or the air or the mountains are sliding under me, a little, back and forth.

I feel something, suddenly, and look down at my arm where the wolf in the gully got it.  I’m bleeding, from a little thing like this, quite a bit.  My hand is crusted in
blood,
sticky-cold, dried, but new blood is coming down, sheeting over that, dripping off my fingers, now.  I hadn’t noticed.  I blink, slowly, thinking, or trying too, in the cold, knowing this little bite could kill me, more than the others I got.  I stop thinking about who I can’t get home, who I’ve failed and left out here, and think I’m alive, for now, and Knox and Henrick and Tlingit are.

But things are drifting, I know, to an end not victorious.  And I am drifting with them.

We keep steeping through the snow, and the dark, fewer again.  I look at my boots, like I did when I had a wire tied on one.  I remember on hunts in the snow with my father, watching his boots, him telling me to walk in the holes his boots made, so I wouldn’t get stuck in the snow, and I remember trailing and trailing those boots, through the snow, and night, sometimes, hunts longer than they should have been, I suppose, but he didn’t know when to leave off, I suppose.  I keep going, listening for Henrick and Tlingit and Knox behind me, keeping an ear to them if not an eye, keeping them with me, or I think, anyway.