Henrick looks up at me a second, like that’s what he’s thinking. ‘The chicken pox,’ I’ll say, if he asks me. But he gets on with the job and that’s that, and the others don’t say anything, either.
I get my pant leg up and that looks a good bit worse, it looks nasty, but they didn’t seem to get any tendons or arteries or anything, I walked the way back, after all, and maybe because of the cold, bleeding has stopped all over by now. Some other digs and nips all over, and my face is not pretty but all there, for better or worse, so I’m not dying tonight. Not tomorrow either, not from this. I figure in a certain number of days I could die from the bite in my leg which is deep enough to get infected and kill me. I wonder if this cold really kills infection, or I was making that up. Maybe I’ll need my leg whacked off, but I’m thinking by the time I’d die that way five other things will have killed me. I’ve got four or five days I think of free ride from this, anyway. Better than some of us here. Better than the ones who’ve gone.
Henrick puts all kinds of peroxide and triple ointment and bandages on me from the kit we found after Lewenden blew his artery and died, and he starts winding me up like a mummy. I admit it feels better, as he winds it on.
Everybody’s quiet, watching Henrick package me up. Then they’re looking out at the dark and they’re thinking about the wolves, I can see. As if freezing to death before we have a chance to starve to death before anybody finds us in the dark isn’t occupation enough. Finally I see Bengt look at me.
“What the fuck happened? They just jumped on you?” Bengt asks. I don’t know any more than he does.
“I must have pissed them off.” I say.
“Yeah, you must have,” he snorts. He’s either laughing at me, or mad at me for making the wolves dislike me, so now we have to worry about how much. Knox just stares, still wide-eyed.
“They were spooked, probably. Defending themselves,” I tell them. They all look at me as if they wouldn’t be surprised, but none of them really believes it, because they’re too scared.
“I tried to run one off a dead guy. He probably had food on him, or he was sniffing him out. The other was just protecting that one. More than likely they won’t bother us again.”
I look at them, to see if they’re going to keep worrying about the wolves, or if we can get on with trying not to die of all the other things we can die of. We sit, quiet, a moment, and sure enough we’re all sitting there worrying about wolves and being alone on the snow with no doors to lock, and Lewenden and the other dead, because they could be us, and the cold, and all the rest, missing hands and chopped-off feet and the possibility we might die here, after one or two increasingly uncomfortable days that’ll bind worse and worse until we die, and that this, looking back, might be the easiest minute we’ll have. We might never see people we love again, we’ve deserted them, they’ll be alone in the world, and what have we done to protect them, if we never come home? I know they’re thinking mostly of that, because even when a plane hasn't dropped them in the snow, that’s what most of them are worrying about when they stare across the bar, when they try to fall asleep. That’s the look they have now, only a good bit worse. If they die here, they’ve failed their loved ones, they’ve fucked up, mortally, and no remedy. We sit there, thinking, unused to that as we are, because what we’re used to doing is either worrying or resenting, and most of us are thinking about what ties us to this earth, or doesn’t.
I look for my watch suddenly, but it’s gone.
“What time is it?” I say. Reznikoff looks at his.
“Nine o’ clock,” he says, shrugs. “Little after.” Like it matters. We sit quiet, another moment.
“It feels later, doesn’t it?” I say.
They stare at me, then Tlingit laughs his funeral laugh.
“It fucking does,” he says. “I thought it was quarter-after fucked.”
Then all of us are laughing our marooned dead asses off. Three hundred dead guys not counting us, we’re hanging on like ten little ghosts, laughing in the wind. I remember some poem my wife would say, on sad days, something about somebody dying and dying, into the hands of the wind. Like we are. We fall quiet again. I see Henrick looking at Lewenden, and the other dead, sitting around us. We’re sitting with corpses, and barely thinking of it, till now. I see the others looking too.
Reznikoff looks at Ojeira and the other two, Cismoski and Feeny, passed out or sleeping, again. He goes and puts his hand on Cismoski suddenly, touches his face. Then he looks up.
“He’s dead.” We all look over at him, shine the light. Cismoski’s blue-white.
“I thought he was going to be OK.” Bengt says. Ojeira wakes up, looks around, so does Feeny. They see us staring, realize Cismoski’s dead, next to them. Nine ghosts, then.
“So did I.” Knox says, staring at him. Everybody’s staring at Cismoski. We should be expecting this kind of thing to happen but we aren’t. We haven’t understood where we are. I look at the guys.
“We should move him outside, maybe. Lewenden too, and the rest.” They look at me. Feeny looks uncomfortable, next to a corpse. Ojeira does too.
“Yeah?” I say. “Then we look for food, OK?” Nobody wants to pick up the dead and carry them, but we don’t want to spend the night with them, either.
We move them, carry them out one by one, as gently as we can, past the fire, out to the snow. Henrick and I take Lewenden out, and as I tilt to get down the slope through the opening Lewenden’s head rolls just like he’s decided to turn his head and look up at me. I look at him like I’m sorry, and I am. I don’t know if he was married, or had kids, I didn’t think so, and I should have said something when he was going if I had thought of it, like ‘
We come back and everyone stands, more silent than before, back by the fire to feed it and get warmer again.
“Anybody see any food?” I ask.
“Must be something,” Henrick says.
We pull ourselves away from the fire, which is not easy to do, and look for what food there is, by what light
