each other we’re having to weave through this thicket in this trench we’re in and I have to look though spaces and pick them out against tree trunks but we seem to have everybody, everybody left of us, and we keep going, looking back, up at the rises and ridges, out to the blind sides of us, looking and looking for wolves. Here’s to us who was like us, devil the few and all dead anyway, my father said, and totted his tot, cleaned his wounds, whatever they were, from the inside, from his glass.
You walk alone, as good as alone, in a night forest, death something you're breathing in and out, you remember things, dream things, imagine things, get lost, step after step, even this cold, this afraid, you’ve lost a mile, not knowing you were walking.
I catch myself smelling the air to see if I can smell them anywhere. I hear our boots thump and crunch, and our breathing still, and it seems to be all I can hear but I try to block it as if I’m going to hear a wolf walking in the snow, which I won’t, or a howl or a yelp, which they won’t make if they’re after us. After they get another of us they’d howl, maybe, but not yet. But I listen again and I think I hear hissing or breathing or a raven far off.
I’d like a raven for company for us, or an elk, or a caribou, but there’s been nothing, no birds, no foxes, nothing on the hoof, just us and the wolves, and I wonder, if it is a dream, like I thought before, if I did die in the crash and I’m bleeding out, on the snow, by the plane, while the wind covers snow over me forever, and I’m just walking now, a ghost, though snow, forever, paying for something. I know I lost a long time ago any idea of what west might have been, if west was ever the way to go, and I start dreaming, as I walk, about some magical river that will lead us to the coast, better, to a magic town with people who will take us in and give us magic blankets that are warm as love, and that stop the wolves from eating us.
But I stop to listen to the hissing rattling raven sound and again I think it could be water. It’s my magic river, and I’m so tired I think I dreamed it into being and it’s going to lead us home. There isn’t enough wind in me to laugh or I would laugh a ghost’s laugh.
But I look at the others, breath cold in, breathe into focus, something like it, and I try to listen.
“I hear water. A river maybe.”
They nod, but it doesn’t mean anything to them, they're just nodding.
“We find a river, it might lead to the coast.”
I wait for them. Henrick nods.
We start to cut toward the sound, we have to, because I see the ground rising up so steep now to our side. The sound is funneling through this thicket, I guess, from wherever it is. But it can’t be far.
We make and make for it and like everything else in this place it seems like we’re slogging and standing still at the same time, it never feels closer. But the ground starts to drop further south and open up, I think, I’m making things up in the dark, but the sound is getting a little louder too. Thinner though, it sounds less like a river the closer we get to it.
It’s been bleeding light into the sky little by little and I finally realize it’s day, such as it’s going to be. It seems like it’s gotten as light as it’s going to get today, this might be the last day or there’s another, and there’s maybe going to be a few minutes or an hour of it, depending on when you call it gone, it’s barely getting here in the first place. A day of dawn then night, or dusk then night, either way as long as I’ve lived with it the way the endless winter night comes in feels like something that should be happening on some other world, not ours. But I’m glad to have the little light we get, now, makes us feel it’s morning, whatever it is. I tell myself the little curl the sun is going to do on one edge of the horizon is south, must be, so west must be to our flank. Unless, with the blood going out of my head, the sun rises and sets in the north, instead of south, but I think it’s south going into the long night. I’ve known my whole life but I’m tired, and bleeding, and frozen, and I don’t know the days of the week. I try to remember my son’s name, and I do. Then my wife’s. I remember hers too.
We keep going, following the sound, and I start to think I feel cold air, breeze or cold coming off the water, and I hear it running now. We start dropping down what I guess is bank toward it and now I feel like we’re on top of it, must be, and then we get up a little rise and the bit of daylight catches ice or water and I see it’s a decent stream, or a good little river, half frozen but enough is running that we heard it and stumbled toward it so I’m blessing this river and looking at it like holy water. Might go somewhere, might. Might go home.
We feel a little better but thinking a river will lead us to the coast after walking for two weeks isn’t going to save us from the wolves. But it feels better to hope we have something to follow.
But the smell of water has me giddy and we dare to drop down in the freezing sting of it running over the ice at the edge on this side and drink, as cold as we are I haven’t thought about being thirsty but we’re all frozen dry as dead men. We’re cupping it up in our hands but that hurts our hands too much so we just stick our faces in, that hurts too but we do it, looking up as we’re drinking, all around, in case something’s coming at us while we have our faces stuck in the water, and I realize we’re a pack of animals, just like the wolves think we are.
I sit back and look, watch, water dripping down me and I don’t even care that getting this wet with freezing water will probably kill me, I sit there looking out and seeing if that was enough water for me, I realize I’m using the water for food, trying to fill out my belly. But I’ve had enough I guess, the others have stopped too, by now.
Water in us, we’re up again and looking right and left and behind as we have all this time and I’m trying to scout the way ahead as best as I can for how we’re going to make a way if we’re following this thing but also for where they might come at us from, if they do. Each time they leave us alone a little I wonder if they’re done with us, if they think we’ve learned our lesson, gotten the idea, and each time no, apparently we’re still getting it wrong, we’re not going the way they want us to go, or like I said they just don’t like us and won’t like us till we’re all dead. Then they may like us fine.
Whatever way the river’s running, I figure is to some coast, north or west, I can’t figure anything from the sun anymore, it’s hazed over, the little glow of it, and I’m afraid I’ve lost whatever west it gave me. But I feel like the river is going to take us to the west, I don’t care, it takes us somewhere. So we follow it, we have a course, and we forget, or the others do, the obvious, that the wolves don’t care that we know where we’re going now, or imagine we do, they still hate us for being where we don’t belong and more than any wolves I suppose in the history of wolves they are not going to fucking take it. I think if wolves in ancient times had dealt with us like this, the world would be more theirs than ours. I think of the wolves they used to have, twice as big as these, and I remember the wolves we have now are what hunted those to death, or that’s how I remember it.
We keep along the river down around a wide bend that feels like it’s going in a big stupid loop to nowhere at all, the curve’s so big, but we follow it, and it occurs to me there are places we might cross, if we’re brave enough, that would put the river between them and us. I like that idea, they’re smart enough to stay out of the river and not drown, an ordinary wolf is, anyway. He won’t go into a river after an elk or a caribou unless he’s starving mad, he’ll just stand on the bank and wait for it to come back out, if it can’t get across, and they’ll kill it then, when it’s climbing back out, slower and weaker now, like a fool. I’ve heard of them forgetting all that if they are after another pack of wolves, or something else they want to kill to protect themselves, they’ll chase them into a river
