I get my hands up trying to wedge him away but I fall back in the snow with him on me, locked on my face and squeezing, and the other one’s on my chest trying to get up under my neck but I think my arm’s in his way and he jumps off, I can’t see anything with this one’s mouth over me and I’m wondering as I try to leverage him off when his teeth will puncture bone and my skull will crack in two, and I feel the other one land on me again. I’m dead now, I think, I’m pushing and kicking but it feels like digging in water, they’re going to get into me and go through me now and that will be that, I’m pushing their weight and trying to twist away but one’s on my leg and I can’t. A few more seconds, maybe.
I hear yelling, stomping, coming across the snow, guys charging and boots thumping, heavy thuds coming through the wolf on me to my chest, my knuckles and my head are getting smashed, with lumps of wood. I see Henrick with a piece of wood in his hands, swinging, Luttinger and Tlingit too, the others, but I still have the wolves on me. Then Tlingit swings his log like a bat and knocks one right off me, and Henrick swings his down on the other. It jumps loose, and the wolves hop away, and turn and face us.
I try to get to my feet but all I do is slip over backwards and hit the snow. I pull up to see where the wolves are. They stare at me and at Henrick and Luttinger and Tlingit and the others, standing here with their logs, ready to swing. They stare at us and breathe, a few breaths, half a dozen, maybe. Then they just turn and trot off, into the dark. I fall back on the snow again. I feel less than safe lying there instead of up watching the wolves go, but I can’t hold myself up, anymore.
My knuckles and arms are throbbing where the logs hit me, and my face and back are throbbing and numb, or bleeding, so are my legs, my face feels like it’s had nails driven into it, as if the teeth are still in my skull, I want to get a hand up to see what’s left of me, but I can’t, at the moment, lift my hands. I stay flat on my back, looking up, breath misting up, while Henrick and the others either stare at me or stare into the dark where the wolves went. Luttinger looks down at me, waiting to see if I want to get up, or if I’m going to.
Finally I move, get up on my feet. Henrick and the others look at me like I’m not supposed to get up, because I should be dead. It’s so cold I still can’t tell if I’m in pieces or not. I think they didn’t get that much of me. Things are hurting everywhere, but I don’t seem to be gushing blood, and I don’t feel like falling over again, or at least it doesn’t seem a necessity, so that makes me think I’m not bucketing blood into my shoes without knowing.
I look down, anyway. My pants are half-dark with blood. I feel them sticking, to the new blood and the blood that’s freezing, already. But I still feel like they didn’t get anything decisive of me. I feel okay.
Henrick drops his piece of wood and starts prodding and patting me, trying to lift my jacket to see how bad it is. I’m looking too, but I’m looking over his shoulder and past the rest of the guys too, out toward the dark, wherever it is they went. The wolves are still gone, as far as I can tell. Or just gone from where I can see them.
There’s enough moon that I see their tracks, all over, where they were jumping on and off me, and my blood in the snow, and their tracks past that, barely, leading away, toward the trees, I think. But they disappear too soon to say, and there’s nothing else, I’m not hearing anything. I look left and right across the ring of trees. I find myself staring at one particular point, then another, why those points and not others I don’t know, but I still don’t see them, they might be there, and I just can’t pick them out against the dark of the trees. Who knows. I want to tell myself I have a clue or a reasoned guess because the tracks seemed, maybe, to lead that way, but I don’t have any such thing. I look at the snow where I was down, and the blood, again, and I nod to Henrick and Tlingit and the others, which I mean as thanks, and they nod, which means okay.
“Let’s get back,” I say. I start back across for the load of wood I dropped. I can feel them looking at me like I’m crazy, but we need the wood, and I’m alright. Henrick and Tlingit come with me and help. We get it all up, and the others have theirs picked up again and they look like they’re waiting for us to catch up. Henrick walks next to me, Tlingit on the other side, they’re both watching the dark, like I am.
“You’re OK to walk back?” Henrick asks.
“Yeah. I’m OK,” I say. And we join the others and get walking, and keep walking, lugging our loads. It still seems further than before back to the shell, and the fire that was up so huge looks to be down to a little glow by now, and far away. We keep looking around us, right and left and back, as we go, and we go quicker than we did before.
3
I’ve known wolves, when I was younger. I met them on hunts, going out with my father, or after my father, uninvited, tracking him. He was afraid of wolves, and hated them for it, and made it his business to punish every one he met for it. He knew he would drive them so bad one of them would kill him one day, I suppose, and he would make them all pay, in advance. Or they were something else to him, I don’t know what, darkness or death or fear, all the worst things he was, he saw in them, which none of them deserved, as far as I could see, anymore than any of us did. He took money to kill them some of the time, like his father did, and made it his mission the rest of the time. He got into blood feuds, contests, long wars, because it wasn’t always as simple a thing as him having a rifle and them not, there were wolves that would fox him and wolf him and fool him, curse him like he cursed them, his bullets would miss them, or go through them, they’d get out of traps, jump out of deadfalls, all of which they did to vex him, keep him poor, drive him mad. People call them ghost walkers, after all. “The wolf’s the only animal who’ll avenge his brother,” he’d say. And leave me to wonder what he meant.
I’ve watched wolves, tracked them to watch them, met them eye to eye in the woods, and a wolf will never do what these just did to me, as good as never, unless he’s rabid, which these weren’t, I think, or unless you give it nothing else it can do. You have to be determined to make a wolf do that, you’d have to be trying, like my father did, and even then, he’d rather snarl at you and lope away, or make friends, or stare you to death. Unless you’re another wolf, in which case he’ll kill you as soon as look at you, if you cross him. Or if you aren’t one of his, and you’re in his place of business.
So I did something to get hit like I did, I think. I lost my mind, probably, the wolf I saw was after some jerky the guy had, or a candy bar, and I had to charge at him and get my back skinned off. Or maybe the blood drew him, and he was after his corpse, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a wolf at a dead man, he’d have to be starving, but I’ve heard stories. Every hunter has stories. Maybe they smelled wolf on me, from years ago, and didn’t like it. Maybe they thought I was a wolf, and not one of theirs. We don’t belong here, after all. Maybe they smelled my father.
We finally come up to the heat of the fire, what’s left of it. Reznikoff and Ojeira and the others left behind have passed out, and it’s low, sputtering in the wind. We start getting it loaded up with the wood, and I stoke and stoke it until it gets going for real, then we all get it stacked up until it’s roaring again, which is stupid, I know, but a dickhead fire it is. I wonder how we’d have made one at all, if there was a real wind up, the usual wind, so we’re lucky. I try to soak what heat is coming off the fire into my body, and thawing a little I start to feel where I’m bitten and gashed a little more, and I’m dizzy again, suddenly, everything drifts and shifts as the heat comes up at me and I’m expecting to fall face-first into the fire, but I don’t, I just weave a little, and stare at the flames, an try to think about where we are and not the wolves that were at me. We all huddle into it.