Then all of us are laughing our marooned dead asses off. Three hundred dead guys not counting us, we’re hanging on like ten little ghosts, laughing in the wind. I remember some poem my wife would say, on sad days, something about somebody dying and dying, into the hands of the wind. Like we are. We fall quiet again. I see Henrick looking at Lewenden, and the other dead, sitting around us. We’re sitting with corpses, and barely thinking of it, till now. I see the others looking too.
Reznikoff looks at Ojeira and the other two, Cismoski and Feeny, passed out or sleeping, again. He goes and puts his hand on Cismoski suddenly, touches his face. Then he looks up.
“He’s dead.” We all look over at him, shine the light. Cismoski’s blue-white.
“I thought he was going to be OK.” Bengt says. Ojeira wakes up, looks around, so does Feeny. They see us staring, realize Cismoski’s dead, next to them. Nine ghosts, then.
“So did I.” Knox says, staring at him. Everybody’s staring at Cismoski. We should be expecting this kind of thing to happen but we aren’t. We haven’t understood where we are. I look at the guys.
“We should move him outside, maybe. Lewenden too, and the rest.” They look at me. Feeny looks uncomfortable, next to a corpse. Ojeira does too.
“Yeah?” I say. “Then we look for food, OK?” Nobody wants to pick up the dead and carry them, but we don’t want to spend the night with them, either.
We move them, carry them out one by one, as gently as we can, past the fire, out to the snow. Henrick and I take Lewenden out, and as I tilt to get down the slope through the opening Lewenden’s head rolls just like he’s decided to turn his head and look up at me. I look at him like I’m sorry, and I am. I don’t know if he was married, or had kids, I didn’t think so, and I should have said something when he was going if I had thought of it, like ‘We’ll make sure so-and-so is OK,’ or ‘We’ll tell so-and-so you love them,’ but as he was going I didn’t think of it, I only do now, carrying him. We get him laid down and get all of them all out, lay them in the snow as decently as we can, and it makes us feel better.
We come back and everyone stands, more silent than before, back by the fire to feed it and get warmer again.
“Anybody see any food?” I ask.
“Must be something,” Henrick says.
We pull ourselves away from the fire, which is not easy to do, and look for what food there is, by what light there is. We find frozen dinners, pieces of sandwich, power-bars, juice-cans, water-bottles, frozen, bits and pieces. A couple of dozen bags of fucking peanuts and pretzels. We count and divvy and try to figure how long we can make what we have last.
“Maybe we can hunt, somehow,” I say. “Stretch this out.” What we’ll hunt, and what we’ll hunt with, I have no idea. Water isn’t a problem, we’re walking on it. We take a little food to Ojeira and Feeny, make sure they aren’t freezing. Then we get back to the fire again, stoke it again, try to get warmer again. We all eat a little, handfuls of peanuts.
“How many more days until it’s all night up here?” I ask.
”Three more?” Henrick says. “Four, maybe? It’s about an hour of day tomorrow, I guess. Less the next day.”
“Company will probably come for our bodies in the spring,” Tlingit says.
“If then,” Ojeira says.
Everybody nods. We’ve been busy with not freezing and dealing with dying and we haven’t even thought out loud about it.
“The company isn’t going to send out fifty planes to search half a million square miles in the dark, neither is anybody else. They just aren’t, except the insurance company, if they have insurance, and that’ll be for the plane, not for us. We’ll get a piper-cub and a guy with binoculars, maybe some samaritans, good bush neighbors. They’ll try a few days,” I say.
I know with the amount of daylight and the amount of empty space if we were off-course at all when we came down, all they’re going to find if they ever finally find us is wreck and frozen bones, and empty peanut-bags, good as likely. I look at the guys.
“So we gather our shit, as much food as we can find, and walk out,” I say. Nobody says anything. Most of them nod, after a while. Like there are a lot of fucking alternatives. I know they’re afraid to stay and afraid to go.
“The plane is shelter though,” Knox says.
“It is,” I say. “But we’ll die in it before anybody comes.” I look at them.
“OK? We get up first light, use whatever daylight we get, walk west,” I say. Nobody says we might just as well walk north, and I don’t know which way we’re more likely to hit ocean and help, I’m only guessing west, I don’t know what mountains I thought I saw or which side of them we’re on, what’s west is going to be a wild guess because the sun isn’t going to get much over the horizon anyway before it drops, I’m hoping it’ll come up and drop true south, and I’ll see it, and I’ll guess. They aren’t arguing. Everybody nods.
“OK,” Henrick says. The wounds on my face and back are hurting me more, my leg too. I still take it as good sign. Throbbing a little.
We split into watches to keep the fire going and some of the guys try to pull on enough jackets and extra thermal underwear from people’s bags, or from bodies, as much as we can find, and try to sleep. I’m supposedly one of the injured, as we’re calling them now, but I go out and sit up with Bengt and Knox and tend the fire anyway. The rest go inside the piece of plane, after clinging to the fire a while. They still feel better inside.
I look at the white all around us, and the trees, and before long I stop looking at the snow and the clearing and I just stare out, I watch the trees. Bengt finally falls asleep, but neither he nor Knox seem to sleep for long, I watch them wake up in shifts, then lie there, scared, of dying or cold or starving or the wolves now, and try to go back to sleep. Knox sleeps as near the fire as he can without setting light to himself, still looking worried. Bengt gives up, finally, sits up.
“You should sleep,” he says. “I can tend the fire.” I don’t want to sleep. I never do.
We tend the fire, and I watch. I don’t want to watch, because I don’t want to think about whatever it is I’m watching for, things I don't want to make happen by watching for them, making the air think about them. But I watch anyway, the trees, the shadows of the pieces of junk and wreck around, the bodies, the snow between us and where we went to get the wood.
Before long I see them, small dark lines, flitting between the edge of what I can see and what I can’t, dark in dark. I stand up, to see better I suppose. Bengt looks out, trying to see what I’m looking at, not that my eyes are any better, but I’m looking harder. Bengt sees them too, now. He kicks Knox, who looks at us, freezing, gets up, looks where we’re looking.
Inside, the guys who are trying to sleep but aren’t see us standing, staring, and they come out too, except for Feeny and Ojeira. We’re all standing, a knot of us, stone-still, staring like a pack, watching the same moving dark lines on the snow we don’t know how far away because you can’t tell how far away anything is. But they circle closer, I see them pretty well, the two from before maybe, with more, now, eight or ten together, dark lines, circling, looking at us, it looks like. Drawn by the fire, I’m wanting to think, or curiosity, they smell us and wonder what we are, they realize the asshole they ran into before hasn’t left yet, the fucker, pay him a visit, see him off. We’re a splinter, maybe, something you want out.
They draw in closer, then closer again, cutting around at an angle to us, watching, and we see them better and better, as well as you can see smoke at night in the distance, so barely at all. We watch. Nobody says anything.