“What?” Henrick says. “You see something?” I shrug, and nod, which means maybe, or not.
“Anybody else see anything?” I ask.
Nobody did. We all stare though. They were there. Or never there. Brother ghosts. Brothers of the dead. Ghost walkers. Henrick looks at the snow where they marked, the paw-prints, the size of them, back at Luttinger.
“What do we do now?” he asks.
“Same as before. Get the fuck out.” Ojeira looks from Luttinger across the clearing.
“Maybe we should stay here,” Ojeira says. Knox nods.
“Yeah,” Knox says. They both look scared.
“They mean to have it,” I say again. Ojeira and Knox are still scared. The others too. All of us are.
“Get anything worth taking, and go.” I say it in a way they’ll understand we’re in a hurry now, but I didn’t need to, they’re scared now, for real, and nobody else is arguing for staying here, everybody’s moving. We look back at Luttinger, and go.
We start pulling together the stuff we’ve gathered the night before, but now we’re rushing. I’m finding I like the daylight, what little is left. I find a knife that must have come out of somebody's bag. Half the guys at the camp wear knives on their belts like they’re going to need to skin a deer before dinner. Henrick sees me pack the knife and he starts looking for one, and suddenly everybody thinks it’s a good idea to have one, rush or not. We look in the split scattered bags and all the loose crap around trying to find more, we get three more, a buck-knife, a couple of silly little jack-knives, take them all, not enough for all of us but still. Feeny gets up, holding his stump up, and finds the biggest, most asinine Bowie out in the snow wrapped up in somebody’s long-johns, it’s half a machete, and one hand or not he takes that for himself.
We find some loose backpacks we dump out, and a little more food than we found in the dark, and Feeny finds a couple more lighters. We go through loose clothes and pockets of the dead for more, and we find a few phones we take in case they suddenly start working, for telling us where we are, or calling the ambulance we wanted. Or a taxi.
Tlingit finds a tray full of mini-bottles they must have had locked on board somewhere, because there’s no booze on the north-bound plane, bar or no bar. He stuffs his pockets with those, which, hurry or not, at that moment seems pretty sensible, and he sits down on the snow a minute sampling them, which makes just as much sense. I’m tempted to sit there with him until they’re all down between us. But, daylight. Bengt sees him.
“Tlingit. Come on,” he says. Tlingit digs in his pocket and throws a bottle to Bengt, then more to the others, me too. I raise my bottle to the dead, and to us left.
“Fuck it,” I say, and drink it.
“Fuck it,” everybody else says, and drinks theirs. It’s as good a prayer as any.
Henrick heads over to the dead fire where there’s unburned wood left. He takes a ball bat-sized branch like the one he and Tlingit swatted the wolves off me with. He shoves it in his pack and it looks like a good idea, I go and get one, too, Tlingit and the others find the best pieces they can. We’re more or less ready.
Henrick looks at Luttinger, and out at the snow, then me.
“What if they come at us?” Henrick asks.
“Don’t run. Can’t outrun them. Stand your ground, try to look big. Better yet make noise, run right at them with that stick, pray they’ll think better of it.”
Everybody looks at me, all of us hunching against the wind.
“If they get on one of us, do like you did for me, gang up, swing at them. They’ll give up. They don’t want us here, but they don’t care that much about us. Maybe if they see us heading out they won’t come at us at all.”
They all look at me, skeptical again. I don’t know if I believe what I’m telling them but I am trying to, it’s what my head is telling me anyway. Bengt looks at me.
“Do you know what you’re talking about or are you blowing air so we’ll do whatever stupid thing you think we should do?”
“I know a little,” I say. “And I’m blowing air.”
“How do you know?” He asks.
I shrug. Doesn’t matter how.
Bengt shrugs too, nods, finally. He’s signed up anyway, he isn’t going to stay here on his own, and he’s halfway to dead anyway like the rest of us, he knows, so what of it.
It feels like the day’s waning already after twenty minutes and I’m thinking we should go, and I look out to what I think is west or my best guess of it and it seems, as far as I can tell, to be a far enough direction away from any of the places we’ve seen wolves. I know that makes no difference at all but it makes me feel a little better.
So I look out to mark a point that might be west, in the line of trees on the far side of the clearing much further away than the ones we crashed through, but it’s west, I think, and we haven’t seen any wolves that way. I think that, maybe, wherever their den is, it’s back in the trees by where we gathered the wood, and we’re lucky that west is the other way. If that’s west.
“That way, OK?” I say. There’s nothing to mark it, I see a peak, far past the trees, but it’s wide and buried in grey sky, and no mark at all anyway, because it’ll disappear, too easily.
“Try to use the plane behind us as a mark, take a line across, OK?” Everybody nods, and we’re about to set off when I see a wallet lying in the snow, and like an idiot I feel for mine, which is long gone, somewhere. I didn’t think of it till now.
“Lose something?” Tlingit seems to think it’s funny.
I shrug.
