Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers Read Free Book Online Page A

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 ‘ How’d you get the holes in you?’ 
    Henrick looks up at me a second, like that’s what he’s thinking.  ‘The chicken pox,’ I’ll say , if he asks me.  But he gets on with the job and that’s that, and the others don’t say anything, either.
    I get my pant leg up and that looks a good bit worse, it looks nasty, but they didn’t seem to get any tendons or arteries or anything, I walked the way back, after all, and maybe because of the cold, bleeding has stopped all over by now.   Some other digs and nips all over, and my face is not pretty but all there, for better or worse, so I’m not dying tonight.  Not tomorrow either, not from this.  I figure in a certain number of days I could die from the bite in my leg which is deep enough to get infected and kill me.  I wonder if this cold really kills infection, or I was making that up.  Maybe I’ll need my leg whacked off, but I’m thinking by the time I’d die that way five other things will have killed me.  I’ve got four or five days I think of free ride from this, anyway.  Better than some of us here.  Better than the ones who’ve gone.  
    Henrick puts all kinds of peroxide and triple ointment and bandages on me from the kit we found after Lewenden blew his artery and died, and he starts winding me up like a mummy.  I admit it feels better, as he winds it on.
    Everybody’s quiet, watching Henrick package me up.  Then they’re looking out at the dark and they’re thinking about the wolves, I can see.  As if freezing to death before we have a chance to starve to death before anybody finds us in the dark isn’t occupation enough.  Finally I see Bengt look at me.
    “What the fuck happened?  They just jumped on you?”  Bengt asks.  I don’t know any more than he does. 
     “I must have pissed them off.”  I say.
    “Yeah, you must have,”   he snorts.  He’s either laughing at me, or mad at me for making the wolves dislike me, so now we have to worry about how much.  Knox just stares, still wide-eyed.
    “They were spooked, probably.  Defending themselves ,” I tell them.  They all look at me as if they wouldn’t be surprised, but none of them really believes it, because they’re too scared. 
    “I tried to run one off a dead guy.  He probably had food on him, or he was sniffing him out.  The other was just protecting that one.  More than likely they won’t bother us again.” 
    I look at them, to see if they’re going to keep worrying about the wolves, or if we can get on with trying not to die of all the other things we can die of.  We sit, quiet, a moment, and sure enough we’re all sitting there worrying about wolves and being alone on the snow with no doors to lock, and Lewenden and the other dead, because they could be us, and the cold, and all the rest, missing hands and chopped-off feet and the possibility we might die here, after one or two increasingly uncomfortable days that’ll bind worse and worse until we die, and that this, looking back, might be the easiest minute we’ll have.  We might never see people we love again, we’ve deserted them, they’ll be alone in the world, and what have we done to protect them, if we never come home?  I know they’re thinking mostly of that, because even when a plane hasn't dropped them in