sitting in the snow, like I was when they dropped away.
I sit there, staring at the empty space off the cliff, I can’t see them below anymore, just empty grey air where the cliff drops away, and I stare and stare at it, and I start crying, out of my guts, with anger, because I wanted them to go home, I wanted to get them there. But as I cry I know I’m not crying because I wanted them to go home, only, I’m crying because I want to go home, and I’m alone now, and none of us has made it. I want to go home alive and find my son, whatever I am, however knowing me would ruin him, make him the murderous mess I am, I don’t care, anymore, I want to guard his life with mine, and guard my wife’s life with mine, and not leave it to anyone else ever again. I blink, slowly, with cold and blood going away from me, I feel like I’m sinking, falling away, like Henrick and Tlingit fell away from me.
Finally I’ve been sitting there long enough that the cold is moving up my bones again and I know I have to move. I look at the edge, where they fell away. God bless you, I think, looking at them. And then I say it, aloud, on the air.
“God bless you,” I say. “Bless you,” I say again, louder, for all of us. I know I can sit, and freeze, or wait for the wolves, or admit my chances are all gone, and that I’ll never get home, or I can get up. I feel like I weigh ten thousand pounds. Ten thousand years of ice. I could sit here, and freeze, and save everyone trouble. Maybe the time has been determined, anyway, finally.
I get up. I remember what I could see from the edge, looking downstream. I know the way I want to go, if I can keep the river and get lucky enough to get down to it and stay ahead of the wolves and get across wherever I can, I know what to do. I can walk home. I can want to, anyway.
I try to see the best way through the trees, and I see what looks like a way dropping down that might keep me close enough to the river and still lead me, if I keep on long enough, down to it. The cliff has to drop somewhere, and the river will go on, to the coast. I start off, and I find myself calculating how, if I can work my way down there, I could get back to Henrick and Tlingit’s bodies, to do what, I don’t know. See if they lived through it, or say goodbye, cover them in snow. Get their wallets, or the others Henrick had. Which are stupid thoughts, but I think them, anyway.
12
Heading down the slope I know I’m not walking as well as before. I look at my arm, again. Blood’s still crusted on my hand, but the skin under it looks white. I don’t know if it’s the bandage being wrapped too tight, or if my hand is just dying. I wonder if it can start in your hand and spread to the rest of you. That would have started in my head, I think, if that were true. I stop and look back, I don’t know why, at all the country behind me, where Henrick and Tlingit and all the others are lying dead, and where behind them, the plane with its dead are probably covered in snow by now.
I walk on, following the cliff, watching the light fade, trying to mark as best I can things I might know in the dark, in a few minutes, that might help me be less lost, if the cliff top pushes me away from the river, for any reason, if I can’t hear it anymore. But the river’s so loud, now, even louder than where I found it with Henrick and Tlingit, I think I can’t lose it, I can follow it home by its sound, if I have to, if I never see the sun again.
The trees open to a little clearing, ringed by another little bluff going up away from the cliff-edge. I look down to the edge again, and the river’s even louder, now, which makes me think the cliffs are lower, and I want to go to the edge to see how low. I think I even feel a cool push of air, up from the freezing water, but I don’t mind it. It feels wet, the air, or I think it does.
But I look back to what’s ahead of me, and, ahead, among the trees, and the rocks, and the snow, and the air, I see the wolves are there. The big one, again, and the others, more than I thought were left, up on a little hump of snow, between trees. They’re looking down at me like the rocks are looking, like the trees are, and the sky is, patiently, not angrily, in particular, that I can see, just looking, and the winds moves and that’s them thinking about me, I think, if they think anything of me, it’s no more than that, the air, moving through the trees, something to sense.
There’s enough light left I can see they’re cut, bloody, in places, their wounds look worse, somehow, than when I saw them before, and I realize why it’s seemed a long time since we saw them, they may have gotten tired of chasing us, and been distracted by dying, and by walking and walking to a place something was telling them they’d rather be. Like I’ve been doing.
Seeing them now, I know that to think I would have made it across the river, or made it home, without seeing them again, was something I was dreaming. I breathe, looking at them. I stare at them, a long time, before I do anything else. I know my knife is in my pocket, or I think it is, and I’m so tired, now, I don’t know if I can get it out, or want to get it out.
Finally, the big one snarls. I suppose we aren’t going to nod to each other, and let each other go on our ways, through the snow, to die, hour by hour, on our own, somewhere. I fumble my knife out of my pocket, and look at them. They step down, a little, looking weary, it looks like. They’re slowing, maybe, but they aren’t finished. The light’s going though, I don’t know what I’m seeing. It’s going from my head, too. I am in blur, more and more, I think they’re here, I think they’re real, but somewhere I’m not all the way sure of anything. The big one shows his teeth and barks, and comes at me, and the others come with him down the slope.
I blink, I suck in air, get my eyes open. The big one is the fastest and he is coming faster every stride, coming at me like a rocket, suddenly, the others chasing him. He looks like he’ll shoot a hole through me and not stop for ten yards after. But when he’s still a good way off, with the others at his flanks, he launches up at me, and so do the others, all at once, it seems. I see them jumping at me, and I know there won’t be any fighting this. This is dying now.
I swing my knife up at the big one, but not fast, and not very hard, my arm just won’t move any faster than it does. I feel bites and claws, I’m flailing, punching at where they seem to be, but everything is slowed, I can’t even tell with the big one up at my face, eye to eye with me, biting at me. So I’m punching, drunken, at wherever the pain is, the light is dropping away, darker, what there was, and I’m going to die now, at last light of the last day before the long night. The times I’ve thought I was going to die before seem comical, they were nothing, because even without them jumping on me I think I may be dying on my feet, anyway. Things are starting to go, away, to where they’ve been going since I got here.
The big one flies up at me, again. I didn’t know he was off me, I thought he was up at my face, but he mist have come off but now he’s up over me, on me again, and there are others still pulling at me, and I think I’m fighting, I don't know. I feel the big one slacken, somehow, like he’s sick of this game too, but I think I’m falling over, I fall to the snow with him on my knife, and as I try rolling out from under him and get up he’s flopping his paws in the snow, weakly, after me and then he drops. The others are off me, I can’t see them all, but I’m bleeding now from several new places, it feels like. It’s a lot of blood and I’m blurring, more, with cold, I’m fading away and disappearing, dreaming on my feet with, I think, the knife still in my hand.
