The first thing Sess did was halt the dogs under cover of the trees and tie up the sled. Then he pulled the.22 from the sheath he'd made for it just under the left handlebar and fired two useless shots into the night. “Fucking son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Fucking madman! Scumbag! I'll kill you!”
Suddenly it was cold. Intensely cold. The kind of cold that ran through you no matter how many layers of clothes you had on. Marco was numb, numb all over. He barely knew what had happened, gone from one dream right into the shroud of another, but he had the presence of mind to remember the dog. It was hurt. He could hear it whining, the thinnest paring of sound, like a violin careening to the top of the register. “Sess,” he said into the stiffening shroud of silence, “I think one of the dogs is hurt.”
It was a foot or a leg-Marco couldn't see for sure in the play of moonlight and shadow. He stood there, helpless, as Sess bent over the dog, removed it from the traces and lifted it up in his arms and carried it to the sled. He watched Sess set the dog in the body of the sled, beside the stiff-legged carcass of the coyote, and watched as Sess rearranged the dogs, the breath of dog and man alike hanging dense in the air. There came a distant sound at some point during this ordering of events-Marco couldn't have said when, exactly, whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes-and there was a flare of light some two or three miles off. “Good,” Sess muttered, working in the cold, every pause and syllable an engine puffing in the night, “good, the son of a bitch. Good. I hope he's burned up and dead.”
They reached the cabin in minutes, and minutes later they were going through the same ritual as the night before-unharnessing, staking, lighting the fire, settling the kettle and the big blackened pot on the stove-but they hardly spoke. They were like relief workers, methodical, bloodless, following the logic and the dictates of the moment. Sess brought the dog in-it was Sky, one staring blue eye, one deep unhurried brown-and set him on the floor under the light of the lantern. The dog whined softly and Marco saw that its right front foot was gone, or the toes anyway. Sess stalked across the room and came back with a bleached-thin flannel shirt and tore it into strips. “Can I do anything?” Marco asked and Sess said he could go out and feed the dogs, that would be a help.
Only after they'd eaten did the shock of what had happened let go of them to the point where they could begin to talk about it. Everything was quiet. The dog was back outside, its foot swollen with the knotted bandage it had no doubt already chewed off, the cabin-cruder and older than the one they'd inhabited last night, built by Roy Sender himself in a time before airplanes came to rule the country-had begun finally to hold the heat of the stove, the kettle was sending up steam and they were both staring into the residuum of coffee grounds in the bottom of their cups. Marco got up, warmed his hands at the stove. “You think they went down, don't you?” he said.
Sess looked up at him. “Yeah,” was all he said.
“Think they're dead?”
“I hope so. I pray to god they are. Because if they're not, I'm going to have to kill them.”
“I'm saying _they,__” Marco said, and he had to use one of his mittens to lift the kettle off the stove and pour scalding coffee into his cup, “but it could have been just Bosky, right?”
Sess held out his cup for a refill. “You can't fly and shoot at the same time.”
“So it was Ronnie? You think it was Ronnie too?”
“Son of a bitch,” Sess said. “Son of a hippie bitch. I want _him__ dead too.”
Eventually, without really discussing it or pausing to think it through, they both began to shrug back into their clothes, the two shirts, the sweater, the parka, the scarf Star had knitted, and Marco laced up his boots while Sess pulled on his mukluks, and then they were back out in the night, minus forty-four and dropping. The dogs stirred, and one or another of them let out a low interrogatory woof before they settled down again. Sess had the.22 in his hand. The snow shifted beneath their feet.
They retraced the trail to the meadow and then turned inland in the direction the plane had taken, walking at a good pace, the moon slanting through the trees to light the way. The country was dense here, off the broken trail, but they were anxious and they pushed through it as if they were passing down a long corridor in a hotel with one double door after another. Marco let his mind wander, thinking about Star, about Christmas coming and what he ought to get her, given his limited resources. Maybe he could make her something, he was thinking. Something for her hair-a barrette carved of wood or bone, or maybe bone earrings, something like that. And then he was thinking of Ronnie. Pan. If Pan was in that plane, and he had to have been, then Pan was dead, the first casualty of Drop City, the first postmortem. Norm would be back. Maybe even Weird George, Verbie and some of the others. But Pan wouldn't. The thought chilled him. Or he was already chilled-it depressed him, brought home the strangeness of all this, of walking the remotest hills anybody could hope to find on this earth beside a man with a gun in the deepest night he'd ever known. And where was his father now? And the Draft Board and General Hershey?
“Up there,” Sess said, and it was as if his voice were disembodied, as if the country itself were throwing its voice, the ventriloquism of the night. “See it-see that glow?”
They climbed a ridge and looked down on the light that seemed so wrong out here, a fire, a bonfire, snapping briskly at its tether on the numinous ground, color in a colorless place. There were two figures stretched out by the fire, one on the snow, the other propped against a tree in a bed of spruce cuttings, and beyond them, the settled shape of the burned-out plane. Nothing moved but the wheel of the fire, rising up and dying back, spitting embers into the sky, wavering and flaring again.
Marco came down the slope at a run, slamming through drifts, shattering tree limbs and the grasping fingers of dwarf willow, alder, birch and black currant, heedless, in the grip of something he couldn't name, even as Sess Harder stalked behind him, gun in hand. He went to Ronnie first, to Pan, and tried to turn him over, but Pan was stuck fast to the ground in a spill of frozen blood and mucus, and he was inflexible, dead, dead for sure, as stiff and dead and frozen as the coyote strapped to the sled. He didn't like Pan. He'd never liked him. But he didn't wish him this.
He looked up at the sound Sess Harder's hand-stitched mooseskin mukluks made in the snow, the soft susurrus of his walking. Sess was standing over Joe Bosky now, and Joe Bosky's eyes were open and he was trying to say something. There was no blood on him, not a spot, his white parka as pure and unblemished as the snow caught fast to the shell of the earth. His eyes shone in the firelight and he wanted to move, you could see that, to get up, to stand and accept the challenge, but he couldn't. A term came into Marco's head then, something out of the newspaper, out of the obituaries: _internal injuries.__
External injuries were bad enough out here, but internal injuries, what you couldn't see, didn't really offer up much hope. They would have to go back for the sled, load him into it, mush past Drop City, Sess's cabin, Woodchopper, and on into Boynton, and somebody would have to fly out of Boynton and take him to the hospital in Fairbanks, and all of that with internal injuries, the ruptured organs, the severed spinal cord, the slow seep of secret blood. But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you.”