there is. We find frozen dinners, pieces of sandwich, power-bars, juice-cans, water-bottles, frozen, bits and pieces. A couple of dozen bags of fucking peanuts and pretzels. We count and divvy and try to figure how long we can make what we have last.
“Maybe we can hunt, somehow,” I say. “Stretch this out.” What we’ll hunt, and what we’ll hunt with, I have no idea. Water isn’t a problem, we’re walking on it. We take a little food to Ojeira and Feeny, make sure they aren’t freezing. Then we get back to the fire again, stoke it again, try to get warmer again. We all eat a little, handfuls of peanuts.
“How many more days until it’s all night up here?” I ask.
”Three more?” Henrick says. “Four, maybe? It’s about an hour of day tomorrow, I guess. Less the next day.”
“Company will probably come for our bodies in the spring,” Tlingit says.
“If then,” Ojeira says.
Everybody nods. We’ve been busy with not freezing and dealing with dying and we haven’t even thought out loud about it.
“The company isn’t going to send out fifty planes to search half a million square miles in the dark, neither is anybody else. They just aren’t, except the insurance company, if they have insurance, and that’ll be for the plane, not for us. We’ll get a piper-cub and a guy with binoculars, maybe some samaritans, good bush neighbors. They’ll try a few days,” I say.
I know with the amount of daylight and the amount of empty space if we were off-course at all when we came down, all they’re going to find if they ever finally find us is wreck and frozen bones, and empty peanut-bags, good as likely. I look at the guys.
“So we gather our shit, as much food as we can find, and walk out,” I say. Nobody says anything. Most of them nod, after a while. Like there are a lot of fucking alternatives. I know they’re afraid to stay and afraid to go.
“The plane is shelter though,” Knox says.
“It is,” I say. “But we’ll die in it before anybody comes.” I look at them.
“OK? We get up first light, use whatever daylight we get, walk west,” I say. Nobody says we might just as well walk north, and I don’t know which way we’re more likely to hit ocean and help, I’m only guessing west, I don’t know what mountains I thought I saw or which side of them we’re on, what’s west is going to be a wild guess because the sun isn’t going to get much over the horizon anyway before it drops, I’m hoping it’ll come up and drop true south, and I’ll see it, and I’ll guess. They aren’t arguing. Everybody nods.
“OK,” Henrick says. The wounds on my face and back are hurting me more, my leg too. I still take it as good sign. Throbbing a little.
We split into watches to keep the fire going and some of the guys try to pull on enough jackets and extra thermal underwear from people’s bags, or from bodies, as much as we can find, and try to sleep. I’m supposedly one of the injured, as we’re calling them now, but I go out and sit up with Bengt and Knox and tend the fire anyway. The rest go inside the piece of plane, after clinging to the fire a while. They still feel better inside.
I look at the white all around us, and the trees, and before long I stop looking at the snow and the clearing and I just stare out, I watch the trees. Bengt finally falls asleep, but neither he nor Knox seem to sleep for long, I watch them wake up in shifts, then lie there, scared, of dying or cold or starving or the wolves now, and try to go back to sleep. Knox sleeps as near the fire as he can without setting light to himself, still looking worried. Bengt gives up, finally, sits up.
“You should sleep,” he says. “I can tend the fire.” I don’t want to sleep. I never do.
We tend the fire, and I watch. I don’t want to watch, because I don’t want to think about whatever it is I’m watching for, things I don't want to make happen by watching for them, making the air think about them. But I watch anyway, the trees, the shadows of the pieces of junk and wreck around, the bodies, the snow between us and where we went to get the wood.
Before long I see them, small dark lines, flitting between the edge of what I can see and what I can’t, dark in dark. I stand up, to see better I suppose. Bengt looks out, trying to see what I’m looking at, not that my eyes are any better, but I’m looking harder. Bengt sees them too, now. He kicks Knox, who looks at us, freezing, gets up, looks where we’re looking.
Inside, the guys who are trying to sleep but aren’t see us standing, staring, and they come out too, except for Feeny and Ojeira. We’re all standing, a knot of us, stone-still, staring like a pack, watching the same moving dark lines on the snow we don’t know how far away because you can’t tell how far away anything is. But they circle closer, I see them pretty well, the two from before maybe, with more, now, eight or ten together, dark lines, circling, looking at us, it looks like. Drawn by the fire, I’m wanting to think, or curiosity, they smell us and wonder what we are, they realize the asshole they ran into before hasn’t left yet, the fucker, pay him a visit, see him off. We’re a splinter, maybe, something you want out.
They draw in closer, then closer again, cutting around at an angle to us, watching, and we see them better and better, as well as you can see smoke at night in the distance, so barely at all. We watch. Nobody says anything.
They circle in closer again, turn toward us, this time. My hackles go up, my guts get tight, I feel the wounds on my back clench and crawl. One of them cuts out of the group, I see him against the snow, black fur, it looks like, bigger than the others. He sits, staring at us, twenty yards out maybe, a little glow from the fire reaches him, I’m surprised it throws that far. The others stop circling, spread out from him, sit down too, all staring at us, seconds slow-slapping by, my pulse going in my head, my neck.
I’m trying to see if I can tell which ones were on me, and I can’t, or I’m not sure, there are two smaller ones who look like they were the ones, I don’t know, I’m not naming them. I don’t mean to do it but I find myself staring at the big one, in front. I have the feeling he’s staring at me. He snarls, a little, a low snarl.
Then, he gets up and trots off, suddenly, just like that, and just as suddenly the others get up and trot off after him, toward the trees where they came from, disappear. The guys look at each other, at me.
“What the fuck were they doing?” Henrick asks. I look out, still watching, to see if they’re circling back in.
“They’re curious,” I shrug. “We’re on their turf.” This seems to make sense to everybody, but somehow it
