After that, we get up, start walking, leave the pond or the lake and the dead-end river behind us. I haven’t come up with any more great-general ideas, or even pressed any of us to push along with the same one, because at some point there got to be less fight in me than what’s required too, I guess, or I used up enough of it, or seeing Bengt or Knox added to Ojeira added to the others finally took it away from me. So if there’s a plan, it’s blunder along toward what we think might still be west, pray we don’t get taken from the earth by what, let’s face it, is stronger than we are. Even knowing that doing that is as good as giving up, because more than likely, they will find us again, keep coming for us, and take the last of us and be done with us.
It’s still daylight, though I thought it was going. I’ve lost track of when there isn’t going to be any more of it, and it’s barely light at that anyway, it’s like weak water. Half-day. We’re all marching, half-stumbling, bloodied, battle-scarred, pale, starving, like ghosts, through another clearing, one of a chain of clearings strung together ahead of us, broken by little clumps of trees.
“I should have stayed home,” Henrick says. “Worked at 7-11. I’d be with my daughter right now.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or mumbling to himself.
I shrug.
“Or dead in a hold-up,” I say. He looks at me, doesn’t appreciate the perspective. I’m apologetic but I’m too tired to apologize.
“At least she’s known you,” I find myself saying.
Henrick keeps walking, not much comforted.
“She won’t remember me, though.” That he’s realized this seems to be the saddest thing in all the world he could ever think of, like all he’s known his girl so far will never have happened, and he’ll be dead, and what he thought his life was will just be taken away from what he thought the world was. I don’t know if she’ll remember him or not, or if that will matter to her or not, maybe better if she doesn’t, I don’t know.
“Maybe she will,” I say, finally. He shrugs, keeps going.
“I want mine to remember me,” Tlingit says. “He better.”
I nod. We fall quiet again, marching. My legs feel like part of the snow. All of me does, even my thoughts, what’s left.
“I want to go home,” Henrick says, after a while, like he said before. I know he does. Tlingit and I don’t say anything.
The little clearing runs into trees again, and then we come out into the next clearing, a bigger one, a great white sea of snow like the one we crashed in.
In the distance, on the snow, I see black shapes, dotted across. For a minute I think we’re back in the clearing where we crashed, seeing dead bodies, and I feel panic, that we've come in a big circle back to the plane and the dead.
But then I stop, we all do, and stare at the dots. They look like wolves.
“Is that them?” Tlingit says, squinting.
But none of them is moving, they’re just lying in the snow. We keep on, staying on the edge, in the cover of the trees, and still watch the wolves, or whatever we’re looking at. Maybe they’re rocks or clumps of twisted wood, or dead caribou, we’re hoping. But we keep edging along, watching them, and finally when we get close enough I see they’re wolves, and they’re dead, dried in the cold.
We stop again, staring at them, long-dead as they look we’re afraid they’re going to get up and start running at us, or just as afraid of dead wolves as live ones. They’re bits of cold, tattered hide hanging off cold bones, moving in the wind, haunting us from there. We’re still hiding from them when we know they’re dead. They aren’t our wolves, anyway.
“It’s another pack,” I say.
Henrick and Tlingit nod. We stare at the carcasses, and see ourselves, lying there, another bunch of dumb animals who went to somewhere they shouldn’t have. I look around, and farther across the clearing. There are other carcasses too, some caribou after all, antlers sticking up out of the snow, meat stripped, part-bone, part dried-out hide. I’d thought the further-away ones maybe were just rocks or dead wood, but I see what they are now, and it feels like a dead place, and there’s more wind or a front is coming or I’m getting even weaker but it feels colder, much colder, bitter down to more bitter.
I keep staring at the wolves, all they fought and hunted and played and mated, lying there. They don’t look like animals to me, anymore. If the pack hunting us are what hunted these down, I’m sorry for them. Anything dead I feel sorry for, now.
One of them is lying half on his side, away from the others, his head turned back face half in the snow, and my mind is wandering, again. This far away, walking into death, and my mind’s running where it isn’t wanted. You go through your time, you’ll gather places you never want to go to again, but your head will go there, without asking, just to gall you, I guess, or I don’t know why. It is biting colder, again.
11
The last hunt I went on with my father was cold like this, almost as cold. He had a pint-bottle he kept passing to me, then cursing me to get it back to him faster. I remember taking sips for me then pouring sips into the snow when he wasn’t looking to mess his day up without his knowing, leave him short for the way back.
“You piss me off,” he said, waiting for the bottle. He might not have said that, might have been something else, but that’s what I heard, I think. He said he was after this wolf he was convinced was there, again. He’d been after him all his life, he’d shot at it, tried to trap it. Why he said he was going to find him that day I don’t know, because I knew it was just a thing he said, but he was full of going-to-get-him-today and he sounded final like he knew he was going to get something that day even if he didn’t know what. It was all air, something he said, for all I know there never was any ghost wolf, probably it meant something else, or it was a story of his father’s, or some legend he liked to pretend for himself, and he lost the difference.
But there was a black-tailed deer, which is what we were really out after, dinners. Not huge, a good size though, down a slope, trotting to the left, after I don’t know what then stopping, and trotting the other way, to the river that was there, to drink.
“Well, there’s some dinners,” he said. He went to take his gun up, and stopped.
“You want it?” he said.
I shrugged. No I didn’t. He shrugged too, like I made no sense to him, then suspicious, because that’s what you are over anything that doesn’t make instant sense, like he looked standing at the bottom of my bed in the hospital when I was little. But he took his rifle up the rest of the way. He didn’t take much time sighting, he just raised the gun and fired, like he did to my mother and me, and the deer dropped without much fight and my father was already walking, then trotting down the slope, excited, I guess, to see his work.
I trailed him down, watching his back go down the hill, through the snow, cradling my rifle and judging, because he was not that far at all, if somebody was to stop walking and take a shot at the base of my father’s neck where the collar of his jacket sat, about, it would be hard to miss, even on the trot.
I stopped walking, watched him trotting away, closer to the deer, then I raised my gun and I sighted it and I shot him, though his collar. He dropped down very quick, quicker than the deer, like a string pulled him to the ground, and rolled and lay on his side, face half in the snow. When I got to him his eyes were going, already, he looked up at me, breathing a half-buried snort, confused, but not at all confused. He was fighting for breath, a little, like Lewenden did on the plane, and like Lewenden I put my hand on him. ‘It’s OK,’I said to him, like I said to Lewenden. I think now he looked like the wolf I killed with Tlingit, and the ones since, and finally, though he wasn’t too happy about it, I made some sense to him. I don’t know why that was the day, finally. Maybe because I didn’t plan to, that day. Remembering him lying like that I remember, I suppose, why the wolves I killed made me sick to see, because I wished I never had to kill them, or wondered what I killed them for, not why I killed them. I knew why. But not what for.