see my river or what I thought was my river coming out of it. It dead-ends.
We sag, looking at it, but we keep along the curve of the lake, better than halfway around, most of it ice, until we’ve seen all sides, and the stupid stream we thought was a river dead-ending in it, the river we thought was between us and the wolves isn’t anymore.
“That’s done,” I say.
I sit in the snow. Look at it. Light is suddenly going paler, pale grey, way home is gone. My hand is red-black again, new blood, the old washed off in the river. The sky looks like an eye, closing.
10
We could keep going but the river’s discouraged us. Maybe they’ve forgotten us or don’t know there isn’t a river between us anymore, and we’re going to stumble, mad with cold, to our deaths without even knowing we’ve gotten away. I feel sure suddenly I have less than the required amount of blood in my brain, and I’m blinking and frozen, down to some place between slow-witted and half-witted.
Maybe we’ll give up here and let them have us, when they get around to understanding we’re still here, if they trot around the end of this fucking fool pond, staring at us. It doesn’t look like a bad place to quit. When you think of all the times in your life you might have, I wonder if the one you end up giving into is just that, the one you end up giving into.
“What do we do now?” Henrick says. I’m silent, because I want to say ‘Light a fire, and lie down and die.’
“Keep going,” I say, finally.
But none of us moves. We all sit, more ready to die, probably, than we were yesterday, or this morning, whatever morning was, here. We sit watching the water, the far curve of it, to see if wolves are there, if they’ve come down to meet us, knowing, unlike us, where the river ended.
Finally I take off my jacket pull up my sleeve to look at my arm. It isn’t very good. I wipe some snow on it, and it doesn’t look much better. Henrick and Tlingit look at it, assessing, I know, like I’m assessing. They’re guessing if it will kill me, one way or another, before something else does.
“That’ll be OK,” Henrick says, which is nice of him, but he’s not stupid. It doesn’t look like it’s going to help me get out of here, that’s clear enough. I use my knife to cut a strip off the shirt I found on the plane and tie the strip around my arm as tight as I can, and hope for the best. There’s a calculation to make, like everything, but I don’t bother to make it because I know it isn’t good, but what of it, and the wolves will probably find us again and kill us. Who gives a fuck. I get my jacket back on fast as I can, half-wet or not.
After that, we get up, start walking, leave the pond or the lake and the dead-end river behind us. I haven’t come up with any more great-general ideas, or even pressed any of us to push along with the same one, because at some point there got to be less fight in me than what’s required too, I guess, or I used up enough of it, or seeing Bengt or Knox added to Ojeira added to the others finally took it away from me. So if there’s a plan, it’s blunder along toward what we think might still be west, pray we don’t get taken from the earth by what, let’s face it, is stronger than we are. Even knowing that doing that is as good as giving up, because more than likely, they will find us again, keep coming for us, and take the last of us and be done with us.
It’s still daylight, though I thought it was going. I’ve lost track of when there isn’t going to be any more of it, and it’s barely light at that anyway, it’s like weak water. Half-day. We’re all marching, half-stumbling, bloodied, battle-scarred, pale, starving, like ghosts, through another clearing, one of a chain of clearings strung together ahead of us, broken by little clumps of trees.
“I should have stayed home,” Henrick says. “Worked at 7-11. I’d be with my daughter right now.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or mumbling to himself.
I shrug.
“Or dead in a hold-up,” I say. He looks at me, doesn’t appreciate the perspective. I’m apologetic but I’m too tired to apologize.
“At least she’s known you,” I find myself saying.
Henrick keeps walking, not much comforted.
“She won’t remember me, though.” That he’s realized this seems to be the saddest thing in all the world he could ever think of, like all he’s known his girl so far will never have happened, and he’ll be dead, and what he thought his life was will just be taken away from what he thought the world was. I don’t know if she’ll remember him or not, or if that will matter to her or not, maybe better if she doesn’t, I don’t know.
“Maybe she will,” I say, finally. He shrugs, keeps going.
“I want mine to remember me,” Tlingit says. “He better.”
I nod. We fall quiet again, marching. My legs feel like part of the snow. All of me does, even my thoughts, what’s left.
“I want to go home,” Henrick says, after a while, like he said before. I know he does. Tlingit and I don’t say anything.
The little clearing runs into trees again, and then we come out into the next clearing, a bigger one, a great white sea of snow like the one we crashed in.
In the distance, on the snow, I see black shapes, dotted across. For a minute I think we’re back in the clearing where we crashed, seeing dead bodies, and I feel panic, that we've come in a big circle back to the plane and the dead.
But then I stop, we all do, and stare at the dots. They look like wolves.
“Is that them?” Tlingit says, squinting.
But none of them is moving, they’re just lying in the snow. We keep on, staying on the edge, in the cover of
