me, Tlingit on the other side, they’re both watching the dark, like I am.
“You’re OK to walk back?” Henrick asks.
“Yeah. I’m OK,” I say. And we join the others and get walking, and keep walking, lugging our loads. It still seems further than before back to the shell, and the fire that was up so huge looks to be down to a little glow by now, and far away. We keep looking around us, right and left and back, as we go, and we go quicker than we did before.
3
I’ve known wolves, when I was younger. I met them on hunts, going out with my father, or after my father, uninvited, tracking him. He was afraid of wolves, and hated them for it, and made it his business to punish every one he met for it. He knew he would drive them so bad one of them would kill him one day, I suppose, and he would make them all pay, in advance. Or they were something else to him, I don’t know what, darkness or death or fear, all the worst things he was, he saw in them, which none of them deserved, as far as I could see, anymore than any of us did. He took money to kill them some of the time, like his father did, and made it his mission the rest of the time. He got into blood feuds, contests, long wars, because it wasn’t always as simple a thing as him having a rifle and them not, there were wolves that would fox him and wolf him and fool him, curse him like he cursed them, his bullets would miss them, or go through them, they’d get out of traps, jump out of deadfalls, all of which they did to vex him, keep him poor, drive him mad. People call them ghost walkers, after all. “The wolf’s the only animal who’ll avenge his brother,” he’d say. And leave me to wonder what he meant.
I’ve watched wolves, tracked them to watch them, met them eye to eye in the woods, and a wolf will never do what these just did to me, as good as never, unless he’s rabid, which these weren’t, I think, or unless you give it nothing else it can do. You have to be determined to make a wolf do that, you’d have to be trying, like my father did, and even then, he’d rather snarl at you and lope away, or make friends, or stare you to death. Unless you’re another wolf, in which case he’ll kill you as soon as look at you, if you cross him. Or if you aren’t one of his, and you’re in his place of business.
So I did something to get hit like I did, I think. I lost my mind, probably, the wolf I saw was after some jerky the guy had, or a candy bar, and I had to charge at him and get my back skinned off. Or maybe the blood drew him, and he was after his corpse, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a wolf at a dead man, he’d have to be starving, but I’ve heard stories. Every hunter has stories. Maybe they smelled wolf on me, from years ago, and didn’t like it. Maybe they thought I was a wolf, and not one of theirs. We don’t belong here, after all. Maybe they smelled my father.
We finally come up to the heat of the fire, what’s left of it. Reznikoff and Ojeira and the others left behind have passed out, and it’s low, sputtering in the wind. We start getting it loaded up with the wood, and I stoke and stoke it until it gets going for real, then we all get it stacked up until it’s roaring again, which is stupid, I know, but a dickhead fire it is. I wonder how we’d have made one at all, if there was a real wind up, the usual wind, so we’re lucky. I try to soak what heat is coming off the fire into my body, and thawing a little I start to feel where I’m bitten and gashed a little more, and I’m dizzy again, suddenly, everything drifts and shifts as the heat comes up at me and I’m expecting to fall face-first into the fire, but I don’t, I just weave a little, and stare at the flames, an try to think about where we are and not the wolves that were at me. We all huddle into it.
“That feels fucking good,” Bengt says, huffing and blowing.
“It fucking does,” says Henrick.
“That’s the touch of a good woman, right there,” Tlingit says, and they all huff and groan, laugh a little, even Knox, who’s wide-eyed, mostly.
“Don’t fucking talk about that shit out here,” says Henrick. Then he falls quiet, thinking about what he doesn’t want to think about. The others do the same. I look at them.
“We’re not dead yet, boys.” They all shrug, laugh a little again, still thinking.
“Not yet,” Henrick says. It’s either hopeless or tough, depending on how you hear it. I remember sitting on the snow with a rifle in my mouth not that long ago and I remember fighting the wolves off, or trying to, and when I thought they had me it felt like a cliff I didn’t want to go off. I didn’t want them to take what I didn’t want to give them, I suppose. I remember the others looking at me after Lewenden, like hurt boys, babies, and I look at them standing at the fire now. Maybe I don’t want to leave them alone here. Maybe both things.
I’m thawed a little more it hurts a little more, so I turn and leave the fire and I go toward the piece of plane. The others come in too, for now, fire or not we all want to be inside something, and nobody wants to be out alone.
Inside the piece of shell there’s glow from the fire coming in, a little. It almost feels like we’ve made camp, just by setting fire to something. Ojeira and Cismoski are still alive, buried under jackets. They wake up when we come in. I think about carrying them out to the fire but they don’t look too bad. Staying in this bit of shelter with the fire taking some edge off the air by the opening kept them above freezing, I guess, or close enough.
I find one of the little flashlights they were using for Lewenden and wedge it into a bent arm-rest, and I start to take my jacket off, or try to, to see what the bites are like. Henrick and Tlingit help me with the jacket, it’s sticking to my shirt, blood dried, and frozen, and my shirt’s sticking to me. Luttinger and the others are watching, staring at me like I should be dead, again. Henrick holds up my jacket to show me. The thing’s in shreds, blood-soaked, shirt’s the same. I see why they’re all staring. I don’t suppose I look well.
As the air is hitting my back I start to be more aware of how deep it goes there, and as I move more I start to feel how bad they bit me and where, it feels a lot worse on my right sight, on my back, but it still doesn’t feel fatal. I can’t turn around to see it, but what I can see isn’t so bad, and Henrick pokes at it and wipes blood off with snow which doesn’t feel too marvelous but somehow it isn’t too bad, nothing like as bad as I was afraid. I put a hatchet through my knee once, chopping wood, and people were fainting, my knee-bone hanging out, big flap of skin, blood all over, but it barely hurt at all, felt like a little cut. One of those things.
There’s a piece of window still in its hole, near where I’m standing. I look at my face reflected, just, by the light from the fire, and the flashlight, and then I remember the one that was clamped onto my face. So I am not pretty. Maybe I do look dead. Maybe I’m a ghost walker.
I remember, now my shirt is off, and I see Henrick and Tlingit and Luttinger looking, the little pock-marks, the old holes, in my chest, and I look away from them before anybody says
