The first twigs won’t light at all but I keep the flame on drying them and heating them until they will but I see the little bit of fluid through the casing and there isn’t much, so I wonder if they’ll catch before it runs out, and then it hisses, and sputters out. I flick and flick it and it sparks and hisses but doesn’t light again, and my heart is getting tighter and tighter, and our clothes are stiffening on us, turning to ice. Finally I see there are needles on one twig that have dried a little, next to the ones that burned away without catching when I had the thing lit, they’re yellowed brown and look dry enough to catch, so I spark the wheel at them and I can see sparks hitting and glowing and needles curling away but not lighting.
I try the other lighters Tlingit got from Feeny but they got too wet, they’re no good, not even sparking. I think they might dry eventually but we need heat now or that’s that, got past the wolves and froze dead on the spot. I shake the first lighter and hold it upside down a minute and try again and it lights and blows out before the needles or the twig light, so I go back to just trying to get sparks on the needles. The guys have made a wall around it to stop the wind, shivering, wet, dying by inches maybe, but we’re all watching this stupid fucking disposable flint-wheel sparking pointlessly, over and over.
The needles still don’t light, and then suddenly one glows and curls and catches, and the needles next to it that have dried out catch, and the tiny bit of sparrow-leg branch it’s on catches, and I hold another twig up over it and get a little flame going. I burn my fingers but I’m not dropping it if it burns my whole hand off. I lower it to the other twigs and hold it there, my fingers probably burning off by now and I don’t care, I can’t tell the difference between that and the cold anyway, and some bigger pieces catch and I let go and we lay on. We all hover over it to be warm but also out of fear it will blow out, there are gusts that could blow it out it seems.
“What do we do, take our clothes off so they dry?” Henrick asks. Sitting out here naked in the wind doesn’t seem too happy, either.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We get it going big enough we’ll dry a little, maybe.” Henrick nods.
“Let’s get more,” he says, and he huffs back to the trees, Tlingit with him. I stay here to guard the thing, or stay warm, probably that. They hustle back with some broken pieces of green branch they twisted off, more like boughs, needles and all, but even green needles like that are good, they go up like crazy for the little time they burn and help dry the wood. Doesn’t last long, but doesn’t hurt.
We all take turns running for more and we get it going to a ridiculous size. We can’t get warm, however big it is, but we don’t feel as bad as we did.
“We should eat something,” I say, because I realize with nothing inside us we might all sit down for naps now and just freeze like meat in a freezer.
We pull whatever wet crap we have in our packs, bags of chips and peanuts, a couple of granola bars. Tlingit’s got an apple, somehow, and I’m amazed he’s been carrying this red round thing around that survived a crash and getting chased by wolves, it’s been riding in his back-pack like school lunch on a field-trip. He tries to bite into it and I see from his face it’s frozen, but he chews it and passes it to Henrick and we all get a bite each and we think we’re in heaven. With most of us dead, we still can chew a frozen apple and think we’ll live.
We eat some peanuts but we have to choose between starving later or dying of cold now and I don’t know how frozen apple is on that account or how much food will stop us from freezing to death but we guess a few bites each might keep us alive.
I look back across the river, for the wolves, and I still can’t see them anywhere, and I wonder if they really can’t get across, if this was all we had to do, get across a river, to live. We feel a little better, on this side, and we have our river to follow, and we’re half-warm for now or less frozen, and half-dry, or less cold-soaked, and we start to think maybe the others who died were the ones to die and we’re the ones who lived through it.
Maybe we're looking back, imagining looking back, telling the story of how guys all around us got killed but we came through, like my dad in the bar, because we’ve lived through everything so far, so that must mean we’ll live through this. Ojeira and the rest thought the same thing, until they stopped thinking. But we’re happy we’re on one side and the wolves are on the other, and that the wolves tried but couldn’t make it over, and we’re happy that if we’re bright enough to follow the river and not die of something else, we might get to the ocean.
Finally I tell myself we’re dry enough, which we aren’t, at all, or as dry as we’ll get, but as hard as it is to leave the fire I feel like we should move.
“Should we move?” Henrick asks. I nod, and we pick up our packs and our knives, we still have those, and head on. We’re excited we might be through it, and we want to rush away, rush out of it, if we can. But we all look back at the fire like we’re leaving home.
We get back on the slog downriver. We keep going, sloping down sometimes, over long flats others, but we keep going, and the light seems to be holding, still, and no wolves for what seems a very long time now. You want to think things. Hopeful things.
We follow another long curve, another big looping patient bend we have no patience for, but we keep going, and there it is, a round little lake, looking at us, not that big even, a stupid little frozen pond, and suddenly I don’t see my river or what I thought was my river coming out of it. It dead-ends.
We sag, looking at it, but we keep along the curve of the lake, better than halfway around, most of it ice, until we’ve seen all sides, and the stupid stream we thought was a river dead-ending in it, the river we thought was between us and the wolves isn’t anymore.
“That’s done,” I say.
I sit in the snow. Look at it. Light is suddenly going paler, pale grey, way home is gone. My hand is red-black again, new blood, the old washed off in the river. The sky looks like an eye, closing.
10
We could keep going but the river’s discouraged us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us or don’t know there isn’t a river between us anymore, and we’re going to stumble, mad with cold, to our deaths without even knowing we’ve gotten away. I feel sure suddenly I have less than the required amount of blood in my brain, and I’m blinking and frozen, down to some place between slow-witted and half-witted.
Maybe we’ll give up here and let them have us, when they get around to understanding we’re still here, if they trot around the end of this fucking fool pond, staring at us. It doesn’t look like a bad place to quit. When you think of all the times in your life you might have, I wonder if the one you end up giving into is just that, the one you end up giving into.
“What do we do now?” Henrick says. I’m silent, because I want to say ‘Light a fire, and lie down and die.’
“Keep going,” I say, finally.
But none of us moves. We all sit, more ready to die, probably, than we were yesterday, or this morning, whatever morning was, here. We sit watching the water, the far curve of it, to see if wolves are there, if they’ve come down to meet us, knowing, unlike us, where the river ended.
Finally I take off my jacket pull up my sleeve to look at my arm. It isn’t very good. I wipe some snow on it, and it doesn’t look much better. Henrick and Tlingit look at it, assessing, I know, like I’m assessing. They’re guessing if it will kill me, one way or another, before something else does.
“That’ll be OK,” Henrick says, which is nice of him, but he’s not stupid. It doesn’t look like it’s going to help me get out of here, that’s clear enough. I use my knife to cut a strip off the shirt I found on the plane and tie the strip around my arm as tight as I can, and hope for the best. There’s a calculation to make, like everything, but I don’t bother to make it because I know it isn’t good, but what of it, and the wolves will probably find us again and kill us. Who gives a fuck. I get my jacket back on fast as I can, half-wet or not.