The Grey

by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

  “The plane is shelter though,” Knox says.

  “It is,” I say. “But we’ll die in it before anybody comes.” I look at them.

  “OK? We get up first light, use whatever daylight we get, walk west,” I say. Nobody says we might just as well walk north, and I don’t know which way we’re more likely to hit ocean and help, I’m only guessing west, I don’t know what mountains I thought I saw or which side of them we’re on, what’s west is going to be a wild guess because the sun isn’t going to get much over the horizon anyway before it drops, I’m hoping it’ll come up and drop true south, and I’ll see it, and I’ll guess. They aren’t arguing. Everybody nods.

  “OK,” Henrick says. The wounds on my face and back are hurting me more, my leg too. I still take it as good sign. Throbbing a little.

  We split into watches to keep the fire going and some of the guys try to pull on enough jackets and extra thermal underwear from people’s bags, or from bodies, as much as we can find, and try to sleep. I’m supposedly one of the injured, as we’re calling them now, but I go out and sit up with Bengt and Knox and tend the fire anyway. The rest go inside the piece of plane, after clinging to the fire a while. They still feel better inside.

  I look at the white all around us, and the trees, and before long I stop looking at the snow and the clearing and I just stare out, I watch the trees. Bengt finally falls asleep, but neither he nor Knox seem to sleep for long, I watch them wake up in shifts, then lie there, scared, of dying or cold or starving or the wolves now, and try to go back to sleep. Knox sleeps as near the fire as he can without setting light to himself, still looking worried. Bengt gives up, finally, sits up.

  “You should sleep,” he says. “I can tend the fire.” I don’t want to sleep. I never do.

  We tend the fire, and I watch. I don’t want to watch, because I don’t want to think about whatever it is I’m watching for, things I don't want to make happen by watching for them, making the air think about them. But I watch anyway, the trees, the shadows of the pieces of junk and wreck around, the bodies, the snow between us and where we went to get the wood.

  Before long I see them, small dark lines, flitting between the edge of what I can see and what I can’t, dark in dark. I stand up, to see better I suppose. Bengt looks out, trying to see what I’m looking at, not that my eyes are any better, but I’m looking harder. Bengt sees them too, now. He kicks Knox, who looks at us, freezing, gets up, looks where we’re looking.

  Inside, the guys who are trying to sleep but aren’t see us standing, staring, and they come out too, except for Feeny and Ojeira. We’re all standing, a knot of us, stone-still, staring like a pack, watching the same moving dark lines on the snow we don’t know how far away because you can’t tell how far away anything is. But they circle closer, I see them pretty well, the two from before maybe, with more, now, eight or ten together, dark lines, circling, looking at us, it looks like. Drawn by the fire, I’m wanting to think, or curiosity, they smell us and wonder what we are, they realize the asshole they ran into before hasn’t left yet, the fucker, pay him a visit, see him off. We’re a splinter, maybe, something you want out.

  They draw in closer, then closer again, cutting around at an angle to us, watching, and we see them better and better, as well as you can see smoke at night in the distance, so barely at all. We watch. Nobody says anything.

  They circle in closer again, turn toward us, this time. My hackles go up, my guts get tight, I feel the wounds on my back clench and crawl. One of them cuts out of the group, I see him against the snow, black fur, it looks like, bigger than the others. He sits, staring at us, twenty yards out maybe, a little glow from the fire reaches him, I’m surprised it throws that far. The others stop circling, spread out from him, sit down too, all staring at us, seconds slow-slapping by, my pulse going in my head, my neck.

  I’m trying to see if I can tell which ones were on me, and I can’t, or I’m not sure, there are two smaller ones who look like they were the ones, I don’t know, I’m not naming them. I don’t mean to do it but I find myself staring at the big one, in front. I have the feeling he’s staring at me. He snarls, a little, a low snarl.

  Then, he gets up and trots off, suddenly, just like that, and just as suddenly the others get up and trot off after him, toward the trees where they came from, disappear. The guys look at each other, at me.

  “What the fuck were they doing?” Henrick asks. I look out, still watching, to see if they’re circling back in.

  “They’re curious,” I shrug. “We’re on their turf.” This seems to make sense to everybody, but somehow it makes things seems worse. They nod, turn back toward the shelter of the hull. Bengt looks at me.

  “If we’re on their turf, are they going to make us get off?”

  “They might be passing through,” I say. “Most likely they’ll leave us alone.”

  “You said that before,” Bengt says. And they have left us alone, I want to say. But I don’t want to argue.

  “We’re walking out tomorrow. That’s all we need to think about. OK?”

  Everyone looks back, thinking about going back inside, but as safe as that seemed before, now nobody wants to leave the fire, as if the fire gives us anything. But Henrick and the others go back in, looking back, at us, and at the dark. I can see through the little windows everybody trying to settle back into their places. We stay awake, out here. Nobody sleeps, for a long time.

  4

  There’s whistling, rattling, creaking, clanking. I blink awake. The sun is up, its little bit, grey, snowing heavier, now, and sideways. The wind is up, too, for real, blowing through the wreckage, little sheets of broken metal and sheets of plastic panel flap back and forth, little pieces of debris fly past, some pamphlet about something, somebody’s scarf blows across the snow. With everything blowing and ticking and knocking it still seems quieter than it did before, somehow. The fire’s out, I’m unhappy to see, and Knox and Bengt are sleeping on the snow near me.

  I look to see if they’re frozen to death or just sleeping. They’re sleeping, I think, or in comas, but if I woke up they will too, probably. But that’s miracle enough, because letting the fire go out was stupid enough to kill us. Maybe it didn’t go out that long ago. I’m unhappy it’s daylight, too, and we’ve wasted it already, and that it's colder, again, with the wind. I want to start the fire again but I hope we won’t be here that long. My eyes are sticky, burning kind of, from frost or wind and whatever scraping they got from the wolves. When I was sleeping the bit I did I would see them over and over but all in blur, like coming out of the plane. I look out as far as I can see, across the snow in the grey light. No wolves, which is what I was looking for, and I feel like a fool because I know I'm afraid. Instead of thinking.

  Everybody but Ojeira’s still asleep, I think. Ojeira’s sitting in the opening, looking at the wind, looking anxious. I can’t see anybody in the plane, nobody’s passing the little windows. I get up, twist around, trying to put my spine and my ribs back where they belong, jump up and down to get warmer. I shake Bengt and Knox, because sleeping in the cold like that too long, they’ll just die, I know. They have to move. They look at me, bleary, blinking, with we’re-still-alive looks, and the cold hits them and they hunch over and rock and yell out, get themselves up, saying “Shit” and “Fuck” as many times as somebody can in a few seconds. I look at the snow, all around, again. I walk out a ways, daring myself, doing what I don’t know, checking on things. What things, I don’t know. But I think if I walk out further and up a rise and look out and see no wolves I’ll know what a fool I am, then I get on with the job of getting out of here, without dying.

  I don’t go all that far before I stop, freezing. I keep staring at the snow, and then I see tracks, as my eyes get used to the white. Big tracks, big paws, all around us, filling over with snow, but still there. This isn’t where they were when they were staring at us, these are in close, they were sniffing us out, I think. I look back over to the plane, measuring the
distance, and the snow to left and right. Then I see brown dots and blotches here and there, all over, not all covered by snow yet. They pissed out territory all around us, and I wonder what else they’re going to do.

  I take a few steps up the rise, and I can see a little further, out near where we laid the dead, not too far off. I see red, smeared across. It doesn’t look like it’s from any of the dead we brought out, we didn’t drag them, we carried them. I look back at the plane again, around at the snow, nothing moving, just Bengt and Knox still jumping, Bengt taking a piss. Ojeira’s still by the opening, watching me, still anxious.

  I go out to the red snow, staring at it, trying to figure out what I’m seeing, then I see Luttinger. I come up on him. He’s all ripped, inside out, black and red, blood, frozen blue-white, the rest of him, snow piling up at his edges as the wind blows at him, it’s started to cover him. He came out to take a leak in the night, I guess, and this is what happened to him. I think what an idiot, to come this far out, then I see the gully in the snow, red in it fading away, where they dragged him from, I don’t know why. Like an angry thing, dragging, maybe.

  I lean closer to Luttinger, I don’t know why, to be sure he’s all the way gone I suppose, and he is, I feel stupid, checking. Henrick’s stepped out from the piece of plane past Ojeira, sees me standing over Luttinger, starts out to me, hunching in the wind. When he gets here he just looks at him. Bengt and Knox and Reznikoff and Tlingit, all come out too, following Henrick, even Ojeira, who’s kind of hop-walking, but he looks better doing it than he did before. They all stare at Luttinger. He was a big guy, strong, and he looks like very little, right now.

  “What the fuck,” Bengt says.

  “They fucking ate him? They ate the fucker?”

  I’m wishing I spoke the language, or understood the rules, but it isn’t complicated, they want us dead, or gone. I look at him again. I add him up, the pieces, he’s all this way and that but he’s all there, just scattered.

  “They weren’t eating him,” I say. “Just killing him.” They all look at me. I nod to the snow, around us.

  “They pissed all over this place. They mean to have it,” I say. “They don’t want us here. We don’t belong here. That’s all.”

  A wolf can kill a bear, or a mountain lion, if he doesn’t want them around, if they’re too near his den. He won’t eat those either, he just doesn’t want them around. I’ve offended them, or scared them, or they don’t like our smell, and they’re going to correct the matter. When my father was young he was a deputy one winter he needed the money, in a town on the coast, before he found his calling, slaughtering things. He walked into a bar with his gun on and his badge on his stupid hat like a ‘shoot me’ sign, he said, and guys jumped up and chairs went over, a bunch of guys thought he was there to get them, they came off a stolen boat, full of stolen shit, whatever it was, and guns came out and he killed three of them, downed the other two and took four bullets himself and lived. People would ask him how he lived through that. “Bullets just go through me,” he’d say. A secret of survival, he’d say, was not coming at anything sideways unless you knew you were doing it. He gave lessons in survival, of all kinds. So I pissed off the wolves like that, or scared them, like he did the guys in the bar, so now it’s going to be to the death, possibly, as unexpected as that seems, a conversation consisting of killing us all until the last word is dead on the snow.

  I look out around us, again. I know we have to move, now, but thinking feels slow, in the cold. Thoughts are freezing, and the dead are slowing me down, instead of making me quicker, as they should. I look down at Luttinger again, which has no point to it, but I do, and then out again, around us, looking for a line across the snow, what feels like west. But I look back to where we dragged the wood from, again, and out where the snow’s blowing thick I think I see blur-lines moving through the snow. Wolves maybe. Or nothing. I keep watching, wait. The others see me looking, they start staring, dead-still, like the night before. I try to look through the snow until finally I figure they’re faded back. Or were never there. The guys see me staring.

  “What?” Henrick says. “You see something?” I shrug, and nod, which means maybe, or not.

  “Anybody else see anything?” I ask.

  Nobody did. We all stare though. They were there. Or never there. Brother ghosts. Brothers of the dead. Ghost walkers. Henrick looks at the snow where they marked, the paw-prints, the size of them, back at Luttinger.

  “What do we do now?” he asks.

  “Same as before. Get the fuck out.” Ojeira looks from Luttinger across the clearing.

  “Maybe we should stay here,” Ojeira says. Knox nods.

  “Yeah,” Knox says. They both look scared.

  “They mean to have it,” I say again. Ojeira and Knox are still scared. The others too. All of us are.

  “Get anything worth taking, and go.” I say it in a way they’ll understand we’re in a hurry now, but I didn’t need to, they’re scared now, for real, and nobody else is arguing for staying here, everybody’s moving. We look back at Luttinger, and go.

  We start pulling together the stuff we’ve gathered the night before, but now we’re rushing. I’m finding I like the daylight, what little is left. I find a knife that must have come out of somebody's bag. Half the guys at the camp wear knives on their belts like they’re going to need to skin a deer before dinner. Henrick sees me pack the knife and he starts looking for one, and suddenly everybody thinks it’s a good idea to have one, rush or not. We look in the split scattered bags and all the loose crap around trying to find more, we get three more, a buck-knife, a couple of silly little jack-knives, take them all, not enough for all of us but still. Feeny gets up, holding his stump up, and finds the biggest, most asinine Bowie out in the snow wrapped up in somebody’s long-johns, it’s half a machete, and one hand or not he takes that for himself.

  We find some loose backpacks we dump out, and a little more food than we found in the dark, and Feeny finds a couple more lighters. We go through loose clothes and pockets of the dead for more, and we find a few phones we take in case they suddenly start working, for telling us where we are, or calling the ambulance we wanted. Or a taxi.

  Tlingit finds a tray full of mini-bottles they must have had locked on board somewhere, because there’s no booze on the north-bound plane, bar or no bar. He stuffs his pockets with those, which, hurry or not, at that moment seems pretty sensible, and he sits down on the snow a minute sampling them, which makes just as much sense. I’m tempted to sit there with him until they’re all down between us. But, daylight. Bengt sees him.

  “Tlingit. Come on,” he says. Tlingit digs in his pocket and throws a bottle to Bengt, then more to the others, me too. I raise my bottle to the dead, and to us left.

  “Fuck it,” I say, and drink it.

  “Fuck it,” everybody else says, and drinks theirs. It’s as good a prayer as any.

  Henrick heads over to the dead fire where there’s unburned wood left. He takes a ball bat-sized branch like the one he and Tlingit swatted the wolves off me with. He shoves it in his pack and it looks like a good idea, I go and get one, too, Tlingit and the others find the best pieces they can. We’re more or less ready.

  Henrick looks at Luttinger, and out at the snow, then me.

  “What if they come at us?” Henrick asks.

  “Don’t run. Can’t outrun them. Stand your ground, try to look big. Better yet make noise, run right at them with that stick, pray they’ll think better of it.”

  Everybody looks at me, all of us hunching against the wind.

  “If they get on one of us, do like you did for me, gang up, swing at them. They’ll give up. They don’t want us here, but they don’t care that much about us. Maybe if they see us heading out they won’t come at us at all.”

  They all look at me, skeptical again. I don’t know if I believe what I’m telling them but I am trying to, it’s what my head is telling me anyway. Bengt looks at me.

  “Do y
ou know what you’re talking about or are you blowing air so we’ll do whatever stupid thing you think we should do?”

  “I know a little,” I say. “And I’m blowing air.”

  “How do you know?” He asks.

  I shrug. Doesn’t matter how.

  Bengt shrugs too, nods, finally. He’s signed up anyway, he isn’t going to stay here on his own, and he’s halfway to dead anyway like the rest of us, he knows, so what of it.

  It feels like the day’s waning already after twenty minutes and I’m thinking we should go, and I look out to what I think is west or my best guess of it and it seems, as far as I can tell, to be a far enough direction away from any of the places we’ve seen wolves. I know that makes no difference at all but it makes me feel a little better.

  So I look out to mark a point that might be west, in the line of trees on the far side of the clearing much further away than the ones we crashed through, but it’s west, I think, and we haven’t seen any wolves that way. I think that, maybe, wherever their den is, it’s back in the trees by where we gathered the wood, and we’re lucky that west is the other way. If that’s west.

  “That way, OK?” I say. There’s nothing to mark it, I see a peak, far past the trees, but it’s wide and buried in grey sky, and no mark at all anyway, because it’ll disappear, too easily.

  “Try to use the plane behind us as a mark, take a line across, OK?” Everybody nods, and we’re about to set off when I see a wallet lying in the snow, and like an idiot I feel for mine, which is long gone, somewhere. I didn’t think of it till now.

  “Lose something?” Tlingit seems to think it’s funny.

  I shrug.

  “My wallet,” I say, and he laughs, like I’ll be needing it to get a drink somewhere. I shrug again. Nothing much in it that should matter to me, true enough. But not nothing.

  I pick up the one in the snow and look at it, his license, no idea who the guy is, who it belongs to, smiling like a goon and dead, somewhere around here, or fell out of the sky miles away. His wife and kids are in there, their pictures, smiling, and I wonder if they’re on hold with the company while the company gets ready to tell them they will be sure to find him or his remains very soon and that pension benefits, which will cover a trip to the grocery store, will be paid promptly. I look at his kids.