But I stop to listen to the hissing rattling raven sound and again I think it could be water. It’s my magic river, and I’m so tired I think I dreamed it into being and it’s going to lead us home. There isn’t enough wind in me to laugh or I would laugh a ghost’s laugh.
But I look at the others, breath cold in, breathe into focus, something like it, and I try to listen.
“I hear water. A river maybe.”
They nod, but it doesn’t mean anything to them, they're just nodding.
“We find a river, it might lead to the coast.”
I wait for them. Henrick nods.
We start to cut toward the sound, we have to, because I see the ground rising up so steep now to our side. The sound is funneling through this thicket, I guess, from wherever it is. But it can’t be far.
We make and make for it and like everything else in this place it seems like we’re slogging and standing still at the same time, it never feels closer. But the ground starts to drop further south and open up, I think, I’m making things up in the dark, but the sound is getting a little louder too. Thinner though, it sounds less like a river the closer we get to it.
It’s been bleeding light into the sky little by little and I finally realize it’s day, such as it’s going to be. It seems like it’s gotten as light as it’s going to get today, this might be the last day or there’s another, and there’s maybe going to be a few minutes or an hour of it, depending on when you call it gone, it’s barely getting here in the first place. A day of dawn then night, or dusk then night, either way as long as I’ve lived with it the way the endless winter night comes in feels like something that should be happening on some other world, not ours. But I’m glad to have the little light we get, now, makes us feel it’s morning, whatever it is. I tell myself the little curl the sun is going to do on one edge of the horizon is south, must be, so west must be to our flank. Unless, with the blood going out of my head, the sun rises and sets in the north, instead of south, but I think it’s south going into the long night. I’ve known my whole life but I’m tired, and bleeding, and frozen, and I don’t know the days of the week. I try to remember my son’s name, and I do. Then my wife’s. I remember hers too.
We keep going, following the sound, and I start to think I feel cold air, breeze or cold coming off the water, and I hear it running now. We start dropping down what I guess is bank toward it and now I feel like we’re on top of it, must be, and then we get up a little rise and the bit of daylight catches ice or water and I see it’s a decent stream, or a good little river, half frozen but enough is running that we heard it and stumbled toward it so I’m blessing this river and looking at it like holy water. Might go somewhere, might. Might go home.
We feel a little better but thinking a river will lead us to the coast after walking for two weeks isn’t going to save us from the wolves. But it feels better to hope we have something to follow.
But the smell of water has me giddy and we dare to drop down in the freezing sting of it running over the ice at the edge on this side and drink, as cold as we are I haven’t thought about being thirsty but we’re all frozen dry as dead men. We’re cupping it up in our hands but that hurts our hands too much so we just stick our faces in, that hurts too but we do it, looking up as we’re drinking, all around, in case something’s coming at us while we have our faces stuck in the water, and I realize we’re a pack of animals, just like the wolves think we are.
I sit back and look, watch, water dripping down me and I don’t even care that getting this wet with freezing water will probably kill me, I sit there looking out and seeing if that was enough water for me, I realize I’m using the water for food, trying to fill out my belly. But I’ve had enough I guess, the others have stopped too, by now.
Water in us, we’re up again and looking right and left and behind as we have all this time and I’m trying to scout the way ahead as best as I can for how we’re going to make a way if we’re following this thing but also for where they might come at us from, if they do. Each time they leave us alone a little I wonder if they’re done with us, if they think we’ve learned our lesson, gotten the idea, and each time no, apparently we’re still getting it wrong, we’re not going the way they want us to go, or like I said they just don’t like us and won’t like us till we’re all dead. Then they may like us fine.
Whatever way the river’s running, I figure is to some coast, north or west, I can’t figure anything from the sun anymore, it’s hazed over, the little glow of it, and I’m afraid I’ve lost whatever west it gave me. But I feel like the river is going to take us to the west, I don’t care, it takes us somewhere. So we follow it, we have a course, and we forget, or the others do, the obvious, that the wolves don’t care that we know where we’re going now, or imagine we do, they still hate us for being where we don’t belong and more than any wolves I suppose in the history of wolves they are not going to fucking take it. I think if wolves in ancient times had dealt with us like this, the world would be more theirs than ours. I think of the wolves they used to have, twice as big as these, and I remember the wolves we have now are what hunted those to death, or that’s how I remember it.
We keep along the river down around a wide bend that feels like it’s going in a big stupid loop to nowhere at all, the curve’s so big, but we follow it, and it occurs to me there are places we might cross, if we’re brave enough, that would put the river between them and us. I like that idea, they’re smart enough to stay out of the river and not drown, an ordinary wolf is, anyway. He won’t go into a river after an elk or a caribou unless he’s starving mad, he’ll just stand on the bank and wait for it to come back out, if it can’t get across, and they’ll kill it then, when it’s climbing back out, slower and weaker now, like a fool. I’ve heard of them forgetting all that if they are after another pack of wolves, or something else they want to kill to protect themselves, they’ll chase them into a river and as good as drown trying to kill them. But I still like being on the far side of this. I’m wishing we’d come on a place to cross sooner, but everywhere I’ve looked at has looked like a good place to drown in, in the state we’re in.
We come down the long curve, and I’m looking at a sharper bend where there are rocks it looks like we might use to hold on to and not get washed away, if we don’t get ourselves smashed on them. I know it can’t be too deep, but it doesn’t have to be that deep to get over your head and washed downstream and die. I wouldn’t mind, almost. It’s a way to get somewhere, but the cold would kill me, I know, before I got anywhere. That seems like a relief maybe too, but no.
“You think you could get across there?” I ask them. They all look at it. They all know the other side would be a better place to be than here, but it still looks like the river here could kill us so we’re not in a hurry to climb into it. The more we look at it the harder it looks to cross, I start to think we keep on downstream, hope for better.
“Maybe we could find better,” Henrick says. I nod.
“Yeah. Maybe.” There must be a place that looks less like it could kill us. But we are close to the edge, or where the ice starts, anyway, looking like we might want to cross.
That’s when they come on us again. I look up, and stare, so do the others. They’re trotting their slow trot, the big one and the others, edging along watching us, keeping a distance but angling closer, then half-charging closer still, running up and down along the bank behind us, staring at us.
“Fuck,” I say.
We back toward the river, the ice at the edge, and I’m damned if it doesn’t look like the big wolf doesn’t want us to leave at all, he’d rather keep us out of the river and kill us, to be sure we’ll never come back. But I know we’ll have some chance in the water. Henrick knows, too.