“Think we can follow that?” Tlingit says.
We all look down the cliff. It’s dizzy and jagged. We’re standing on an overhang, it looks like. I look to the sides, and I don’t even see rock, hardly, the face is coated with ice that looks like it’s laid on winter after winter, layer after layer, packed snow and ice that must have driven and clung there over the years, a hundred years, or ten-thousand, all the way to the bottom.
I stare down at it, almost weaving, wishing I had more blood in me, but it looks beautiful. I look downstream and upstream to see if there any places this cliff will let us down to the water. It seems to go forever, but I look as far downstream as I can make out, and I think I can see it dropping, hard as it is to make out at that distance in all the white. It looks as if we’ll get down to it, if we follow the cliff far enough. It has to drop somewhere. Doesn’t matter, what matters is we see it and we can follow it. We’re all so beat and spent but I feel like, for the first time, if I don’t bleed out, we might get home. I’m confused that there’s still daylight but there is, I think this is the last day of light and it’s supposed to be the shortest, but today it seems to have stayed light longer. But if this is the last of the light now maybe it stayed light so we could find this, or I’m glad it did, anyway. But finally I see it is starting to fade, but I don’t mind, suddenly. The river’s so loud I can follow it even if the sun never rises again. I fall back, sitting in the snow.
I look at Henrick and Tlingit. They turn to me, and I find myself smiling at them, and they see me and they smile, too, and Henrick starts to laugh.
There’s a crack. I don't know what it is at first, but Henrick’s sliding backwards and then the snow under him and Tlingit just disappears and he and Tlingit drop away from me. I jump for them but I fall, smacking on the snow of the lip, tilting, face-down and feet up but holding on to the snow, my hands dug in, and watching them go, neither of them yelling out, and I see nothing’s between them and the bottom, nothing, they aren’t going to bounce or have a chance to break the fall or slow down, they are falling through the air away from me, and I’m roaring from my guts and looking at them as they finally start to scream, falling away.
Henrick hits the ice, at the bottom, and then Tlingit right after, two muffled little gunshots, far away. I stare down at them. They didn’t smash to pieces, they just landed on the snow near the river. But I see red leaking out around them, like halos. I keep looking down at them, not so many feet apart from each other but a hundred, maybe two hundred feet below me, but they haven’t moved, and I know they won’t, and there’s no going to get them. I remember Henrick had the wallets, the ones we got, anyway. So they’ll be buried there, with them, by the snow, or taken away by the wind, eventually. I lie there clinging to the broken edge and being afraid to climb up backwards and afraid what’s under me is going to give any minute like it did under them.
I start crawling backward, slowly, up away from the edge, still terrified the snow I’m on is going to slide off with me on it like it’s sliding off a roof, but I keep creeping up until I’m far enough back I think I’m on whatever is solid, and then I pull myself up and stumble back from the edge much farther than I need to probably and fall back sitting in the snow, like I was when they dropped away.
I sit there, staring at the empty space off the cliff, I can’t see them below anymore, just empty grey air where the cliff drops away, and I stare and stare at it, and I start crying, out of my guts, with anger, because I wanted them to go home, I wanted to get them there. But as I cry I know I’m not crying because I wanted them to go home, only, I’m crying because I want to go home, and I’m alone now, and none of us has made it. I want to go home alive and find my son, whatever I am, however knowing me would ruin him, make him the murderous mess I am, I don’t care, anymore, I want to guard his life with mine, and guard my wife’s life with mine, and not leave it to anyone else ever again. I blink, slowly, with cold and blood going away from me, I feel like I’m sinking, falling away, like Henrick and Tlingit fell away from me.
Finally I’ve been sitting there long enough that the cold is moving up my bones again and I know I have to move. I look at the edge, where they fell away. God bless you, I think, looking at them. And then I say it, aloud, on the air.
“God bless you,” I say. “Bless you,” I say again, louder, for all of us. I know I can sit, and freeze, or wait for the wolves, or admit my chances are all gone, and that I’ll never get home, or I can get up. I feel like I weigh ten thousand pounds. Ten thousand years of ice. I could sit here, and freeze, and save everyone trouble. Maybe the time has been determined, anyway, finally.
I get up. I remember what I could see from the edge, looking downstream. I know the way I want to go, if I can keep the river and get lucky enough to get down to it and stay ahead of the wolves and get across wherever I can, I know what to do. I can walk home. I can want to, anyway.
I try to see the best way through the trees, and I see what looks like a way dropping down that might keep me close enough to the river and still lead me, if I keep on long enough, down to it. The cliff has to drop somewhere, and the river will go on, to the coast. I start off, and I find myself calculating how, if I can work my way down there, I could get back to Henrick and Tlingit’s bodies, to do what, I don’t know. See if they lived through it, or say goodbye, cover them in snow. Get their wallets, or the others Henrick had. Which are stupid thoughts, but I think them, anyway.
12
Heading down the slope I know I’m not walking as well as before. I look at my arm, again. Blood’s still crusted on my hand, but the skin under it looks white. I don’t know if it’s the bandage being wrapped too tight, or if my hand is just dying. I wonder if it can start in your hand and spread to the rest of you. That would have started in my head, I think, if that were true. I stop and look back, I don’t know why, at all the country behind me, where Henrick and Tlingit and all the others are lying dead, and where behind them, the plane with its dead are probably covered in snow by now.
I walk on, following the cliff, watching the light fade, trying to mark as best I can things I might know in the dark, in a few minutes, that might help me be less lost, if the cliff top pushes me away from the river, for any reason, if I can’t hear it anymore. But the river’s so loud, now, even louder than where I found it with Henrick and Tlingit, I think I can’t lose it, I can follow it home by its sound, if I have to, if I never see the sun again.
The trees open to a little clearing, ringed by another little bluff going up away from the cliff-edge. I look down to the edge again, and the river’s even louder, now, which makes me think the cliffs are lower, and I want to go to the edge to see how low. I think I even feel a cool push of air, up from the freezing water, but I don’t mind it. It feels wet, the air, or I think it does.
But I look back to what’s ahead of me, and, ahead, among the trees, and the rocks, and the snow, and the air, I see the wolves are there. The big one, again, and the others, more than I thought were left, up on a little hump of snow, between trees. They’re looking down at me like the rocks are looking, like the trees are, and the sky is, patiently, not angrily, in particular, that I can see, just looking, and the winds moves and that’s them thinking about me, I think, if they think anything of me, it’s no more than that, the air, moving through the trees, something to sense.
There’s enough light left I can see they’re cut, bloody, in places, their wounds look worse, somehow, than when I saw them before, and I realize why it’s seemed a long time since we saw them, they may have gotten tired of chasing us, and been distracted by dying, and by walking and walking to a place something was telling them they’d rather be. Like I’ve been doing.