“My wallet,” I say, and he laughs, like I’ll be needing it to get a drink somewhere. I shrug again. Nothing much in it that should matter to me, true enough. But not nothing.
I pick up the one in the snow and look at it, his license, no idea who the guy is, who it belongs to, smiling like a goon and dead, somewhere around here, or fell out of the sky miles away. His wife and kids are in there, their pictures, smiling, and I wonder if they’re on hold with the company while the company gets ready to tell them they will be sure to find him or his remains very soon and that pension benefits, which will cover a trip to the grocery store, will be paid promptly. I look at his kids.
I want to get out of here but I go back over to the dead we brought out and reach and roll, looking to see if anybody has wallets, Lewenden, Luttinger, throw them in a pile, and I check the other dead I can get to also. Henrick comes over, he and the others stare at me, like I’m a lunatic.
“We should take them,” I say. “For the families.”
They all nod, suddenly. Henrick takes off the backpack he’s put his food and his knife in, stuffs the wallets in. It’s foolish, with so many we haven’t gotten, but we do it anyway. We find ourselves looking at the bodies lying there. Henrick wants to have a service for them, say something, at least. They’re all frozen stiff by now, and we’ve turned them all this way and that for knives and cell-phones and satellite phones and now their wallets. We tried to lay them straight after that but we’re hurrying, now.
“Should we cover them over, at least?” Henrick says. I don’t want to. I don't feel good staying another minute, I feel stupid enough taking the wallets. The light already looks weaker.
“The snow will do it,” I say.
Henrick looks at the ones we brought out and the rest, all we can see, Lewenden, the others, and the ones we can’t, I suppose.
“God bless everyone who died here,” he says. “Us too.”
He stops, doesn’t know what else to say. But we’ve sent them off as well as we’re going to, and now there’s us. I see we’re standing there looking at each other.
I pull my bag over my shoulder on my good side, turn to the trees.
5
The clearing is bigger than it seemed. We’ve been walking a long time, we can barely see the plane behind us, anymore, we’ve as good as lost it as a mark, but somehow the trees don’t look any closer. The daylight bled away before we even hit our stride, went to dusk, now it’s hanging there between that and night again. We’re out in the middle between what seems like the safety of the plane and the trees, feeling stranded, gone wrong already, Ojeira and Feeny struggling to keep up, falling behind.
“Should we stop? Make a fire?” Henrick asks.
I don’t know. I look at the trees, try to guess how far. And the wind is getting up even more than the morning, so I don’t know if we could, and all we have to burn is the wood we took for clubs.
“We should keep on, if we can,” I say. “They might let us slide if we make the trees. If they’re still around. We’d be less obvious, maybe.”
“How much further are the fucking trees?” Bengt says. As if when we’re in the trees we’re home free, which isn’t what I meant.
“I don’t know. I misjudged the distance.” Bengt looks at me like I’m a tour guide who doesn’t know his job.
“That’s fucking great. So we’re here for the night?” Bengt says. It’s all night, more or less, from here. And the trees aren’t going to save us from wolves, if they want us. But I don’t say anything to him. I keep looking back to where I think the plane is, along our tracks, and Ojeira and Feeny trailing behind.
Ojeira’s at the back, hobbling pretty bad, but he's still going better than he was before. I think maybe he’s not as bad off as he seemed, after all, even with his hernia or whatever it is he doesn’t know about, if he still hasn’t noticed. He didn’t want us to help him like Luttinger and I did before, maybe he’s mending already. Feeny’s with him, he’s only got the missing hand, but he might have fever or something, he’s wobbling, walking drunken, it looks like. He looks worse than Ojeira. The snow’s hip-deep in places so none of us are going that fast, and they haven’t dropped behind too badly. But they will before long, as slow as we’ve been going, they’re going slower. They’re strung pretty far back already.
“We should wait a little for those two, though,” I say.
The others look back, waiting. After a minute Tlingit and some of them sit, breathing hard. We look around, again and again, I do, the others too, and I know we’re looking for the wolves that are supposedly going to leave us alone, and not come at us, because we think we’re trying to respectfully go the fuck home. Ojeira and Feeny barely seem to be getting any closer, and Feeny keeps stopping to hold his stump up high. I think it’s hurting whenever any blood fills into it so he gives up and walks with his hand in the air like he’s on strike for something. We should have stopped sooner. As I look again Feeny looks like he’s dropped further back than Ojeira. The wind is creeping up harder, getting to be a slam, pushing cold through us, making it harder for Ojeira and Feeny, us too. I stare back at them, in the half-light that’s left, waiting for them, wishing they’d hurry.
Then, like before, I see something I’m not sure I’m seeing at all, lines moving in the dark, grey or black, two from the right, two from the left, one from behind, coming at Feeny. They don’t seem interested in Ojeira. They’ve chosen Feeny, like they choose any animal, based on some invisible thing, though not so invisible this time, and that’s going to be that, nothing will turn them away, unless it’s a threat.
I start running before the others seem to see them. I start straight for Feeny, but then I shift, head for the one of them coming from the right, the one closest it looks like, waving my arms, shouting, trying to look like a threat. I hear the others doing the same, behind me, same as they did to beat that one off of me. We’re far away. Feeny looks at us, sees us running, looks around. He sees the one from the right I’m charging at but he doesn’t see the ones from behind him, or the left. Ojeira looks too, almost falls backwards but catches his balance, stands there, frozen, then he starts jump-hobbling as hard as he can to help Feeny, yelling like the rest of us, but all they seem to care about is Feeny. They don’t even care about me, so I yell louder and wave my arms. I realize there’s a log and a knife in my pack and I’m empty-handed, running at them, but there’s no time.
