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.
8
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.