Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey

by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

  “Bengt!” Henrick yells, and we run after them, Henrick and Tlingit and I, Knox following, all of us yelling for Bengt over and over, stumbling around in the dark, and there’s nothing, no snarling, no other wolves, no Bengt calling back, there’s nothing. We walk this way and that and yell and yell out for him, in the dark of the forest all around, but there’s nothing else, he’s gone.

  We stop yelling and look at each other. We knew he was gone when the wolf grabbed him, but we stop now. He’s gone. I feel my lids getting heavy on me, which is a strange thing, in all this. The cold maybe. I’m weaving too, I think I am. I’m not sure, or the air or the mountains are sliding under me, a little, back and forth.

  I feel something, suddenly, and look down at my arm where the wolf in the gully got it. I’m bleeding, from a little thing like this, quite a bit. My hand is crusted in blood, sticky-cold, dried, but new blood is coming down, sheeting over that, dripping off my fingers, now. I hadn’t noticed. I blink, slowly, thinking, or trying too, in the cold, knowing this little bite could kill me, more than the others I got. I stop thinking about who I can’t get home, who I’ve failed and left out here, and think I’m alive, for now, and Knox and Henrick and Tlingit are.

  But things are drifting, I know, to an end not victorious. And I am drifting with them.

  9

  We keep steeping through the snow, and the dark, fewer again. I look at my boots, like I did when I had a wire tied on one. I remember on hunts in the snow with my father, watching his boots, him telling me to walk in the holes his boots made, so I wouldn’t get stuck in the snow, and I remember trailing and trailing those boots, through the snow, and night, sometimes, hunts longer than they should have been, I suppose, but he didn’t know when to leave off, I suppose. I keep going, listening for Henrick and Tlingit and Knox behind me, keeping an ear to them if not an eye, keeping them with me, or I think, anyway.

  When I was a boy about the age my boy is now, I guess, my father came home from a hunt one night, or some other thing, full of whiskey, or something else, and something blacker in his eyes than I’d ever seen, how I remember it, anyway. And he had his pistol and he raised it, weaving a little, at my mother who was at the stove, while I stared at him, and he said “You piss me off,” and as she turned around he shot her, in the chest. And when I stood up with my mouth open he looked at me and put two in my chest. I never knew why I deserved the two, maybe he just liked the rhythm, once he started. I believe, though it might have been a dream, that from the floor what I saw happen then was he sat down, on the bottom stair, and put the pistol to his head, and yelled his lungs out, like somebody crying, but I never heard a shot. Because he didn’t fire, if he even raised the gun to his head, or yelled out like that. Maybe I just wanted him to.

  There were sheriffs and police at the hospital who came to see me and they said my father told them two men came in and took his gun and shot my mother and me, for thirty dollars in the flour-tin and my father’s gun and a box of my father’s bullets, and he got home after and found us, and they asked me if that’s what happened. I sat in the bed for a long time getting words, but I never told them anything different from what he said. That is a hard thing to understand, I don’t know why I did that for him. I might have done it for me. They went away, happy enough.

  They let him in to see me then. He stood at the end of the bed. “I guess bullets go right through you, too,” he said. He looked nervous, as if he didn’t believe what he just got away with, and was waiting for something else. “They said I was a hero, to get you here when I did.”

  Later he said he was sorry, something got in his brain, and took him over, so it wasn’t him that did it. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t run away, right off, and never did tell anybody. You live in houses that are damned, sometimes, and you stay, and when you leave you realize you’re the house that’s damned, so leaving didn’t matter, anyway.

  “You’re a tough little animal,” the doctors said, for taking those bullets and living, though taking the bullets was nothing. After my holes healed up and I went home from the hospital and the house was emptier, as you’d expect it to be, and I went back to school, a little, long as that lasted, and went on hunts with him. I planned to kill him, every day, for a while, but that was a dead-born plan. It turned out I am not that kind of killer. Some other kind, but not that.

  I think though I started my habit then of never going to sleep. I sleep, but I don’t lay me down and pray the Lord and go there willing, I stay awake until it comes over like somebody clubbing you from behind, because I can’t go on awake any more. My body does it I guess, but not me. If I can choose, I’m awake. He would come to the door of my room, middle of the night, I don’t know why, to see if I’d run off, or if I was loading his rifle in the dark. “You’re a night animal,” he would say. “A little wolf.” He told me a wolf was an unhappy animal, happier dead. I was left to reason he was helping me when he shot my mother and me, even if it wasn't him who did it. It was a lie he believed, like others. It felt more like he was talking about himself, anyway. You live in a damned house, lies buzz the air like flies, you wave them aside, try to ignore them, you go from wake to sleep when you have to and go on. When I was littler I had asked and asked my mother for a brother and a sister. “I’ll be your sister, when you want me to be, and you be your own brother,” she said. It was a given, I guess, my father wasn’t going to be anything but what he was. But I was glad, after, sitting in the hospital bed, nurses looking at me sorry and round-eyed, and home, after that, that she never gave me any brothers or sisters. I was glad I was alone.

  The wind is darting around us, again. I feel like I’m dreaming, while I step over this branch, that root, winding my way, and wonder if I’m awake or asleep, or what I am, blood leaking out, what’s still in me freezing, slowly, no food in me, no sleep, or little as I could get away with, for thirty years. I wonder if it’s all a dream, since it seems I was always supposed to end here, what my father said about wolves and did to wolves, and here I am, here.

  I’m still afraid, I think, in a half-dead way, remembering what the wolves felt like on me, what they might feel like on me again, how it might go another time, if they get further with me than they did. I keep looking to the others, listening for them, counting in case we’ve lost somebody else, somebody dragged away silently like Bengt and in my blur I haven’t seen it.

  The trees are much thicker again and it’s harder to spot the others now as much as we are sticking tight to 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 so
mething. 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 and as good as drown trying to kill them. But I still like being on the far side of this. I’m wishing we’d come on a place to cross sooner, but everywhere I’ve looked at has looked like a good place to drown in, in the state we’re in.

  We come down the long curve, and I’m looking at a sharper bend where there are rocks it looks like we might use to hold on to and not get washed away, if we don’t get ourselves smashed on them. I know it can’t be too deep, but it doesn’t have to be that deep to get over your head and washed downstream and die. I wouldn’t mind, almost. It’s a way to get somewhere, but the cold would kill me, I know, before I got anywhere. That seems like a relief maybe too, but no.

  “You think you could get across there?” I ask them. They all look at it. They all know the other side would be a better place to be than here, but it still looks like the river here could kill us so we’re not in a hurry to climb into it. The more we look at it the harder it looks to cross, I start to think we keep on downstream, hope for better.

  “Maybe we could find better,” Henrick says. I nod.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” There must be a place that looks less like it could kill us. But we are close to the edge, or where the ice starts, anyway, looking like we might want to cross.

  That’s when they come on us again. I look up, and stare, so do the others. They’re trotting their slow trot, the big one and the others, edging along watching us, keeping a distance but angling closer, then half-charging closer still, running up and down along the bank behind us, staring at us.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  We back toward the river, the ice at the edge, and I’m damned if it doesn’t look like the big wolf doesn’t want us to leave at all, he’d rather keep us out of the river and kill us, to be sure we’ll never come bac
k. But I know we’ll have some chance in the water. Henrick knows, too.

  “Fuck it,” Henrick says, and steps off the ice into the water, and starts across, Tlingit and Knox splash in after him. I don’t know if the water or the wash will kill us, but we’re going. I watch the wolves and wait to go last in case anybody loses their footing and I have a chance to grab them before they get sucked down. I want there to be a chance they won’t bother to come in after us, they’ll wait us out, or watch us cross and finally figure us gone enough. Something has to be a boundary for them, if it wasn’t the cliff, maybe the river.

  But no. The big one is coming at us, running down the bank, he doesn’t want us in the water, he’s going to hit us before we get too far and get away from him. The others charge with him.

  I’m not in the water more than a few seconds before they’re jumping right off the bank after us. I stumble and splash backward through the water hoping it’s going to get deep enough to lose them. I look at Henrick and I can see he’s having it hard to cross but he’s doing it. I keep backing up, holding my stick, watching the wolves.

  “Don't step in a hole,” I call to Henrick. “You go under when you don’t expect to, you’ll be gone. OK?”

  Henrick nods, still feeling his way across, using the rocks, Tlingit after him, fast as he can, then Knox. After a few more steps Henrick loses the stick he has, or lets it go, because it’s too hard to hold the rocks and a stick at the same time. It’s stronger than it looks, though, the wash, and everybody has to hold hard, I do, I have to use all I have to hold my feet and not to go down, I feel like I’m cutting my hands up grabbing the rough parts of the rock that stick out and haven’t been smoothed round, and trying to keep my balance and keep my stick out ready to point at the wolves, and the wolves are splashing right behind us, coming up on me. The pain in my legs and my middle from the cold feels as sharp as anything the wolves got into me before and it seems to be mounting, getting worse as I go, and we’re all panting and feeling our insides trying to crawl up into our chests, trying to stay ahead of the wolves.