But things are drifting, I know, to an end not victorious. And I am drifting with them.
9
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.
When I was a boy about the age my boy is now, I guess, my father came home from a hunt one night, or some other thing, full of whiskey, or something else, and something blacker in his eyes than I’d ever seen, how I remember it, anyway. And he had his pistol and he raised it, weaving a little, at my mother who was at the stove, while I stared at him, and he said “You piss me off,” and as she turned around he shot her, in the chest. And when I stood up with my mouth open he looked at me and put two in my chest. I never knew why I deserved the two, maybe he just liked the rhythm, once he started. I believe, though it might have been a dream, that from the floor what I saw happen then was he sat down, on the bottom stair, and put the pistol to his head, and yelled his lungs out, like somebody crying, but I never heard a shot. Because he didn’t fire, if he even raised the gun to his head, or yelled out like that. Maybe I just wanted him to.
There were sheriffs and police at the hospital who came to see me and they said my father told them two men came in and took his gun and shot my mother and me, for thirty dollars in the flour-tin and my father’s gun and a box of my father’s bullets, and he got home after and found us, and they asked me if that’s what happened. I sat in the bed for a long time getting words, but I never told them anything different from what he said. That is a hard thing to understand, I don’t know why I did that for him. I might have done it for me. They went away, happy enough.
They let him in to see me then. He stood at the end of the bed. “I guess bullets go right through you, too,” he said. He looked nervous, as if he didn’t believe what he just got away with, and was waiting for something else. “They said I was a hero, to get you here when I did.”
Later he said he was sorry, something got in his brain, and took him over, so it wasn’t him that did it. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t run away, right off, and never did tell anybody. You live in houses that are damned, sometimes, and you stay, and when you leave you realize you’re the house that’s damned, so leaving didn’t matter, anyway.
“You’re a tough little animal,” the doctors said, for taking those bullets and living, though taking the bullets was nothing. After my holes healed up and I went home from the hospital and the house was emptier, as you’d expect it to be, and I went back to school, a little, long as that lasted, and went on hunts with him. I planned to kill him, every day, for a while, but that was a dead-born plan. It turned out I am not that kind of killer. Some other kind, but not that.
I think though I started my habit then of never going to sleep. I sleep, but I don’t lay me down and pray the Lord and go there willing, I stay awake until it comes over like somebody clubbing you from behind, because I can’t go on awake any more. My body does it I guess, but not me. If I can choose, I’m awake. He would come to the door of my room, middle of the night, I don’t know why, to see if I’d run off, or if I was loading his rifle in the dark. “You’re a night animal,” he would say. “A little wolf.” He told me a wolf was an unhappy animal, happier dead. I was left to reason he was helping me when he shot my mother and me, even if it wasn't him who did it. It was a lie he believed, like others. It felt more like he was talking about himself, anyway. You live in a damned house, lies buzz the air like flies, you wave them aside, try to ignore them, you go from wake to sleep when you have to and go on. When I was littler I had asked and asked my mother for a brother and a sister. “I’ll be your sister, when you want me to be, and you be your own brother,” she said. It was a given, I guess, my father wasn’t going to be anything but what he was. But I was glad, after, sitting in the hospital bed, nurses looking at me sorry and round-eyed, and home, after that, that she never gave me any brothers or sisters. I was glad I was alone.
The wind is darting around us, again. I feel like I’m dreaming, while I step over this branch, that root, winding my way, and wonder if I’m awake or asleep, or what I am, blood leaking out, what’s still in me freezing, slowly, no food in me, no sleep, or little as I could get away with, for thirty years. I wonder if it’s all a dream, since it seems I was always supposed to end here, what my father said about wolves and did to wolves, and here I am, here.
I’m still afraid, I think, in a half-dead way, remembering what the wolves felt like on me, what they might feel like on me again, how it might go another time, if they get further with me than they did. I keep looking to the others, listening for them, counting in case we’ve lost somebody else, somebody dragged away silently like Bengt and in my blur I haven’t seen it.
The trees are much thicker again and it’s harder to spot the others now as much as we are sticking tight to each other we’re having to weave through this thicket in this trench we’re in and I have to look though spaces and pick them out against tree trunks but we seem to have everybody, everybody left of us, and we keep going, looking back, up at the rises and ridges, out to the blind sides of us, looking and looking for wolves. Here’s to us who was like us, devil the few and all dead anyway, my father said, and totted his tot, cleaned his wounds, whatever they were, from the inside, from his glass.
You walk alone, as good as alone, in a night forest, death something you're breathing in and out, you remember things, dream things, imagine things, get lost, step after step, even this cold, this afraid, you’ve lost a mile, not knowing you were walking.
I catch myself smelling the air to see if I can smell them anywhere. I hear our boots thump and crunch, and our breathing still, and it seems to be all I can hear but I try to block it as if I’m going to hear a wolf walking in the snow, which I won’t, or a howl or a yelp, which they won’t make if they’re after us. After they get another of us they’d howl, maybe, but not yet. But I listen again and I think I hear hissing or breathing or a raven far off.
I’d like a raven for company for us, or an elk, or a caribou, but there’s been nothing, no birds, no foxes, nothing on the hoof, just us and the wolves, and I wonder, if it is a dream, like I thought before, if I did die in the crash and I’m bleeding out, on the snow, by the plane, while the wind covers snow over me forever, and I’m just walking now, a ghost, though snow, forever, paying for something. I know I lost a long time ago any idea of what west might have been, if west was ever the way to go, and I start dreaming, as I walk, about some magical river that will lead us to the coast, better, to a magic town with people who will take us in and give us magic blankets that are warm as love, and that stop the wolves from eating us.