Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey

by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

  I keep staring at the wolves, all they fought and hunted and played and mated, lying there. They don’t look like animals to me, anymore. If the pack hunting us are what hunted these down, I’m sorry for them. Anything dead I feel sorry for, now.

  One of them is lying half on his side, away from the others, his head turned back face half in the snow, and my mind is wandering, again. This far away, walking into death, and my mind’s running where it isn’t wanted. You go through your time, you’ll gather places you never want to go to again, but your head will go there, without asking, just to gall you, I guess, or I don’t know why. It is biting colder, again.

  11

  The last hunt I went on with my father was cold like this, almost as cold. He had a pint-bottle he kept passing to me, then cursing me to get it back to him faster. I remember taking sips for me then pouring sips into the snow when he wasn’t looking to mess his day up without his knowing, leave him short for the way back.

  “You piss me off,” he said, waiting for the bottle. He might not have said that, might have been something else, but that’s what I heard, I think. He said he was after this wolf he was convinced was there, again. He’d been after him all his life, he’d shot at it, tried to trap it. Why he said he was going to find him that day I don’t know, because I knew it was just a thing he said, but he was full of going-to-get-him-today and he sounded final like he knew he was going to get something that day even if he didn’t know what. It was all air, something he said, for all I know there never was any ghost wolf, probably it meant something else, or it was a story of his father’s, or some legend he liked to pretend for himself, and he lost the difference.

  But there was a black-tailed deer, which is what we were really out after, dinners. Not huge, a good size though, down a slope, trotting to the left, after I don’t know what then stopping, and trotting the other way, to the river that was there, to drink.

  “Well, there’s some dinners,” he said. He went to take his gun up, and stopped.

  “You want it?” he said.

  I shrugged. No I didn’t. He shrugged too, like I made no sense to him, then suspicious, because that’s what you are over anything that doesn’t make instant sense, like he looked standing at the bottom of my bed in the hospital when I was little. But he took his rifle up the rest of the way. He didn’t take much time sighting, he just raised the gun and fired, like he did to my mother and me, and the deer dropped without much fight and my father was already walking, then trotting down the slope, excited, I guess, to see his work.

  I trailed him down, watching his back go down the hill, through the snow, cradling my rifle and judging, because he was not that far at all, if somebody was to stop walking and take a shot at the base of my father’s neck where the collar of his jacket sat, about, it would be hard to miss, even on the trot.

  I stopped walking, watched him trotting away, closer to the deer, then I raised my gun and I sighted it and I shot him, though his collar. He dropped down very quick, quicker than the deer, like a string pulled him to the ground, and rolled and lay on his side, face half in the snow. When I got to him his eyes were going, already, he looked up at me, breathing a half-buried snort, confused, but not at all confused. He was fighting for breath, a little, like Lewenden did on the plane, and like Lewenden I put my hand on him. ‘It’s OK,’I said to him, like I said to Lewenden. I think now he looked like the wolf I killed with Tlingit, and the ones since, and finally, though he wasn’t too happy about it, I made some sense to him. I don’t know why that was the day, finally. Maybe because I didn’t plan to, that day. Remembering him lying like that I remember, I suppose, why the wolves I killed made me sick to see, because I wished I never had to kill them, or wondered what I killed them for, not why I killed them. I knew why. But not what for.

  It wasn’t final, though, because he got right up and got in me, his ghost did, so I was done with part of it but never the ghost part. And here I am out here, dying, and I suppose the wolves are going to jump into me too, and the guys who have died, like he did, or they have already.

  His ghost got good and into me, I think, because evil and worthless, I loved my father. The boy of me did, before he did what he did, to my mother. He was a black-hearted man, but before what he did, I loved him, and, I suppose I did after, and that died hard, watching eyes his eyes turning to grey, and spittle and I his last breath coming out of him. I loved him, and he did what he did. And I did what I did.

  I dragged my father to the river where the deer was drinking before and used his jacket to tie the heaviest stones I could find to him, and dragged him in and lay him in a hole in the river I was sure enough wouldn’t go up dry any time of year. I found more stones to lay on, and carried them in too. I left the deer for anybody to find, I didn’t want it, and took his rifle with me. I never reported him missing, and nobody ever missed him, no sheriffs or deputies or police ever came, nobody asked, because I never talked to anybody. I walked away from the house soon after, one day, and never went back.

  Out in the world, I met my wife, the one who dreamed about wolves, and she was everything living. She was life, and my son, and she saw something in me worth marrying to, and making a son with. I never told her what my father did, or what I did about it. But bit by bit, those things welled up in me, and bled out of me, and I was no good, from the inside out, to her, or our boy. I asked myself what I could give my son what wasn’t spoiled in some way, and the best I could do was ask him to remember always that I loved him, and would always love him. That was a shallow cup to give him, and he stared at me, a hurt boy, and didn’t understand what I meant, not much more than a drop of it, anyway. But I prayed he’d remember, and that one day it would matter, and he’d believe it at a time it mattered. But I was afraid he never would. I tried to tell my wife the same, and because I never told her what I’d done, or what had been done to my mother, she couldn’t know why I haunted our house like someone who died before he grew up. So she didn’t think anything, I suppose, of me telling her I’d always love her. It was no good to her, by then, from a ghost she couldn’t even remember, so fully, anymore. I looked at her eyes and I saw brightness, even then, I saw my mother who died, the sister she said she’d pretend to be, the daughter I’d never get, and our son, and I went anyway.

  There was another day with my father, when I was much younger, I got out to the neighbor’s, a mile away. He had a dog meaner than my father or anybody, and I was cutting through to get up a hill I liked to go get lost on, and the dog got loose and got after me, and when my father rambled by in his truck he saw the dog had me in the dirt with its teeth at my neck and me looking up at it like a dead-baby-to-be and he was out of that truck and on that dog like lightning, he picked it up, barking mad, eighty pounds of pit-bull like it was a puppy and spun him across the yard yelping and growling. He didn’t have his gun or anything else, and he got between me and the dog and dared it to come, and I think if it came my father would have snapped its neck.

  “Get in the truck,” he told me, and I ran and got in, and the owner came out and my father told him he’d kill him and his dog if he saw either one of them anywhere near me again. Never mind I was asking for it, cutting through, he'd kill them. I watched him, thinking he was going to do it right then.

  Whatever happened to my father between that day and the other I don’t know, maybe it happened before I was born, like whatever made me no good to my son happened, I guess, before I got him. I was no good to my son because of what my father was and I was, and I thought too much about what my son was going to be if I had anything to do with him. I frightened him, I know, never wanting to, and I didn’t want to taint any of him with any of me. Things get in you that only grow later, and only decide you later, but they got half-decided so long ago you don’t ever even think about them, anymore, unless you’re going to die soon. Maybe you don’t ever know.

  It’s funny what comes out of you that never comes out of you other times. Get close to your death, I guess you wan
t to empty yourself out like a bucket. Be empty for the trip. Maybe there is no trip, just turning to meat, one day. Maybe I want to be empty for that. I don’t know yet.

  The clearing and the dead wolves are behind us, we’re in trees again, and there’s still light in the sky. I’m confused by the light, because this day should be the shortest, or shorter than the others, but the light’s holding on. Maybe it’s waiting for something, like I am. We follow a broad bank of snow through a break in the trees and it drops down, steeper, until suddenly we’re looking down a chute, a dead stream, maybe dead trees criss-crossing it, some kind of timber-fall. From where we are it looks to be the only way forward, or the easiest, hard as it looks. I can’t seem to get air in my lungs, or in my head. I'm dizzy again, but I don’t know what from, my arm bleeding or no food or no sleep or cold. We stand looking down the chute, the trees crossing it look like they stumbled into it and died while out for a walk one day, like us.

  But I see, where it bottoms out, there’s snow, and there’s a cliff-edge, past it, the snow and the trees drop off and there’s nothing past it, just air. I stare at it, figuring the way, through the broken trees, and I think I hear a river again. but it doesn’t sound like water running like before, it sounds like wind rumbling, thunder even. I stay still and listen, and I still hear it, rumbling, under ice maybe but something bigger than the last one is running, down below, off the edge.

  I start clambering down through the dead trees, Henrick and Tlingit climbing down behind me. I stumble out of the bottom of it, into a rocky gully buried in snow, and I think it must have been a waterfall once, or it is in spring.

  Down on the snow, I can hear water booming now, muffled still, but it’s a real river. Henrick and Tlingit make it down through the fall, and we go out, toward the ledge, toward the sound, and it gets louder and louder, and finally we see it. We all look down at it.

  Even far below us we can see it’s big, twice or three times as wide maybe as the one that fooled us before, and deeper, and running like a ribbon of big ocean through the snow, part-frozen but running, is thundering over the drops, full and fast. Boulders of ice run down it smashing when they land the drops.

  “That one might go somewhere,” I say.

  It’s a real river, or feeds one, it must. I’m convincing myself it goes somewhere that isn’t here, away from wolves. I don’t think it’s dead-ending in a lake somewhere. Tlingit laughs.

  “Think we can follow that?” Tlingit says.

  We all look down the cliff. It’s dizzy and jagged. We’re standing on an overhang, it looks like. I look to the sides, and I don’t even see rock, hardly, the face is coated with ice that looks like it’s laid on winter after winter, layer after layer, packed snow and ice that must have driven and clung there over the years, a hundred years, or ten-thousand, all the way to the bottom.

  I stare down at it, almost weaving, wishing I had more blood in me, but it looks beautiful. I look downstream and upstream to see if there any places this cliff will let us down to the water. It seems to go forever, but I look as far downstream as I can make out, and I think I can see it dropping, hard as it is to make out at that distance in all the white. It looks as if we’ll get down to it, if we follow the cliff far enough. It has to drop somewhere. Doesn’t matter, what matters is we see it and we can follow it. We’re all so beat and spent but I feel like, for the first time, if I don’t bleed out, we might get home. I’m confused that there’s still daylight but there is, I think this is the last day of light and it’s supposed to be the shortest, but today it seems to have stayed light longer. But if this is the last of the light now maybe it stayed light so we could find this, or I’m glad it did, anyway. But finally I see it is starting to fade, but I don’t mind, suddenly. The river’s so loud I can follow it even if the sun never rises again. I fall back, sitting in the snow.

  I look at Henrick and Tlingit. They turn to me, and I find myself smiling at them, and they see me and they smile, too, and Henrick starts to laugh.

  There’s a crack. I don't know what it is at first, but Henrick’s sliding backwards and then the snow under him and Tlingit just disappears and he and Tlingit drop away from me. I jump for them but I fall, smacking on the snow of the lip, tilting, face-down and feet up but holding on to the snow, my hands dug in, and watching them go, neither of them yelling out, and I see nothing’s between them and the bottom, nothing, they aren’t going to bounce or have a chance to break the fall or slow down, they are falling through the air away from me, and I’m roaring from my guts and looking at them as they finally start to scream, falling away.

  Henrick hits the ice, at the bottom, and then Tlingit right after, two muffled little gunshots, far away. I stare down at them. They didn’t smash to pieces, they just landed on the snow near the river. But I see red leaking out around them, like halos. I keep looking down at them, not so many feet apart from each other but a hundred, maybe two hundred feet below me, but they haven’t moved, and I know they won’t, and there’s no going to get them. I remember Henrick had the wallets, the ones we got, anyway. So they’ll be buried there, with them, by the snow, or taken away by the wind, eventually. I lie there clinging to the broken edge and being afraid to climb up backwards and afraid what’s under me is going to give any minute like it did under them.

  I start crawling backward, slowly, up away from the edge, still terrified the snow I’m on is going to slide off with me on it like it’s sliding off a roof, but I keep creeping up until I’m far enough back I think I’m on whatever is solid, and then I pull myself up and stumble back from the edge much farther than I need to probably and fall back 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 cr
usted 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.