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They keep the cabin burning for two weeks, and Travis spends most of his time looking after it. He barely moves.
Nat says winter will end soon– it must. Nat says the animals will return from their crevices and tucked away places, and the valley will flood with life again. Nat says the snow will melt, the woods will unfurl with green.
There are thirteen of them left. Taissa had already begun to rebuild the bones of civilization that first awful, freezing day, where they couldn’t do much but huddle and shiver and cry. Van has taken to telling stories. Shauna sits with her back to the group; she is angry and quiet. Nat has taken kindly to being their leader, smart and kind and tough. Her hair is longer; bottled blonde still clings to the split ends.
Travis can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think without thinking of his brother. It sticks to him, sometimes, fastens to the skin over his ribs and column of his spine. It loops. Nat brings him pieces of meat he can’t eat without dry heaving into the frozen ground. She sits beside him, quiet. Lottie takes her place and begs him to listen. With Nat busy and Travis still, Gen has become their hunter. She takes Travis’s father’s boots they dug up from his grave, shakes them of maggots, and packs them with the scraps of fabric they ripped from the seat backs of the plane.
The lake is going to thaw. They will eat more than pine bark and juniper berries and the organs of whatever small game Gen manages to trap. Nat says they have to keep the fire that took the cabin fed; if not for warmth, then some last ditch effort at rescue. Nat says they have to live.
At night, the mountains are screaming with the sound of a pair of wolves. The graying meat in the shed is running out. The clothing they packed, the blankets they saved, the things they pulled from the husk of the cabin before they decided to keep it burning are wearing thin. And the cold bites. It splinters. Breath comes out in clouds, piss steams in the snow.
Nat holds council in the clearing. She says they are going to hunt and kill and skin and eat the pack. She makes eye contact with Lottie and tells them they won’t be hungry much longer. They won’t be cold.
Van’s cheek pulls strangely against her scar when she grins.
Travis stumbles into standing. He sways, his bones creak and ache. Time has felt strange since the fire; he cannot remember if it was today or the day before or the day before that he stood to help Tai with bringing in more wood.
When he joins the group, Shauna scoffs. Across the circle, Nat is standing in her leather jacket, and the elbows have split open to reveal layers of hoodies and fraying fabric. She’s staring at him. Her lips purse and forehead wrinkles; Travis knows she is sorry. He wants to tell her it’s okay. He wants to tell her he’s sorry, too. He looks down, lets his hair fall into his eyes.
“I want in,” he says. “Let me help.”
It’s the first words he’s spoken in weeks.
Javi started haunting him the day after the cabin burned. Travis doesn’t know how it happened. He left the huddle for a piss and found himself wandering.
And it just slipped. The split of a smile in between the trees, flickering with firelight. The shine of their mother’s thick, dark hair, snow dusted in the shadows. The sound of laughter. The corner of his brother’s untied converse laces.
Travis shuddered. He’d wandered further. The wind came in cold and quick; it tangled at him like briars, sharp. Each inhale felt like glass. His fingers burned numb, and the moon was bright. The woods smelled like smoke, but he was too far to hear the low shuffle of the girls moving around the fire, moving around each other, trying to stay warm. Trying to live.
“Travis,” Javi said.
He’d been a tiny baby. He’d been premature; when Travis was four, that was all his parents talked about. Is Javi hitting his milestones. Is Javi gaining enough weight. Is Javi warm enough. Is Javi breathing right. Is Javi breathing at all.
“Travis,” Javi said. “You have to go back.”
The snow was brittle and perfect. It shone blue-bone-white. In his New Balances, Travis’s toes felt frozen solid, his fingers burned. He pushed further into the trees; he pulled the dry wood of twigs back to climb in deeper.
“You’re dead,” Travis whispered into the quiet, and the wilderness swallowed it. No birds echoing, no creaking of trees.
“Yeah,” Javi said. “Like Miss Elena’s cat. He froze, too. Remember?”
Travis didn’t respond.
“Travis,” Javi said. “You have to go back. It’s too cold out here.”
There was something keening and terrible growing in Travis’s throat. When he opened his mouth to respond, his breath rasped, wet.
“You have to live. It has to mean something. You have to let it mean something.”
The woods were so quiet. They pressed against Travis’s sternum, tight. That silence. That voice without a body, that body cut up and cooked, that body burned and smoldering. Travis could feel his heart beating sluggish and crooked in his chest. There was snow in his lashes, heavy. He twisted his grandfather’s ring around and around his finger.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“You’re dead,” he said.
He pulled himself from the trees. He followed the plume of smoke high in the sky. He entered the clearing to see the pile the rest of the team had made with their bodies, shuddering against the neon yellow-blue-red of fire to keep warm. Van and Tai were entwined. Nat and Lottie laid close enough to look friendly. Shauna was sat up, pillar against the flames, keeping lonesome watch.
He doesn’t know how it happened. It just slipped.
Beside him, Nat is carrying the gun. It’s early morning; soon, the sun will warm the horizon, and the snow will glow clear and white. The rest of the team trudges behind them. Nat’s their leader, now. Where she goes, they follow.
It feels like months since Travis has even touched the barrel. It feels like years since it was just the two of them out here, walking, tracking, trying to hunt. She’s still got her hair pinned down with the scrap of fabric he watched her rip from a Mudhoney t-shirt and braid into a headband.
She’s skinny. They all are, but Nat has gotten especially smaller in a way Travis can’t ignore. Her cheeks have hollowed, there’s a wrinkle between her brows. Maybe she’s just older. It hits him, ankle deep in the type of icy snow skiers would probably bitch about, that he doesn’t know if she’s already turned 18 out here. He’s not sure if his birthday has passed, either.
“It’s nice of you to join us,” Nat says, glancing over. When they did this daily, Travis would always go first to cut a path in the snow for her with his body. Now, he walks beside her, hands stuffed into his pockets. His back hurts. He can feel the metal hardware that fuses his spine, aching.
He grunts.
Nat hikes the strap of the gun further up her shoulder.
“We need all the help we can get, is all I’m saying. Even if there’s only two of them.”
Gen had been the first to jump on the idea. To prove herself, maybe. And Van is excited. Van needs a win, a better coat. Van, that first night, shook so hard Tai had to keep fixing the blanket around her shoulders. Van cried and screamed and begged Lottie why until exhaustion.
Javi’s yammering. Travis is trying hard to ignore it, but it’s hard with his brother talking about the Mets, about his 4th grade crush on Jenny Walsh in Math class, about Slater from Saved by the Bell. He catches dark hair against the blinding white of the snow. A flash of the blue and yellow of their father’s coaching zip-up.
“Yeah,” Travis says. It comes out thick and rough. “Of course.”
Nat isn’t looking at him. Once they reach the ridge, she’ll take a group into the valley. Gen, with Travis, Shauna, Akilah and Misty, will wander East and then follow. They’re just back-up. They only have the axe.
“Hey,” Javi says. “Can you even eat wolf? Don’t they have, like, worms or–”
“It’s good to see you up,” Nat interrupts. Her knuckles are white around the barrel of the gun.
Those first weeks after the fire, she wouldn’t quit saying sorry.
“Oh,” Travis says. He tries to remember how to speak. He could tell her Javi’s beside her, grinning like a kid in a candy store. He could tell her he misses her. He could tell her he’s not sure why they’re all still alive. “Don’t wolves have parasites, anyway?”
She looks at him. The corner of her mouth curves up.
Behind them both, Van begins to howl. Tai laughs before joining in.
Below them, past where the mountain slopes down, the wolves in the valley howl back.
There’s a hundred ways Travis could do it.
Shauna’s playing with her knife as she walks. She flips it into her palm, brushes the edge with her thumb to check its sharpness. Recently, she’s made herself scarce. She doesn’t seem to care about Nat or Lottie or much of anything. Her hut is right next to Travis’s– every morning, Shauna wakes him up with her rustling. She disappears into the treeline for an hour. She comes back.
Nat’s group has already descended into the valley. Something howls below the ridgeline. He only knows it’s human because it cuts off into laughter, echoing. The shape of their voices echoes through trees, the steep slope of the mountain. The sun is a sliver above the horizon; it turns the snow sparkling and soft. Van is too loud. She wasn’t like this before the fire. She doesn’t really seem to listen to Lottie much anymore.
“This is stupid,” Javi says beside him. He kicks at the snow with the toe of his shoe. “Someone’s gonna get hurt.”
Travis could use a knife to play civilized. He could tie together the clothing they have left. He could toss himself from the cliff they throw their shit off of. He could wander from the group and fall asleep in the snow. He could step onto the frozen surface of the lake and wait for it to break, wait to drown. It’s not hard to imagine starving.
“I thought you were smarter than this.”
Travis snorts. In front of him, Shauna whips her head back to look at him.
“What?” she hisses.
“Um,” Travis says. Javi smiles at him. “Nothing.”
“You should talk to her,” Javi whispers. He’s on Travis’s right side now, glancing down the hill. “She’s really nice once you actually get to know her.”
Something crawls up Travis’s throat, thick and heavy. It’s got a taste.
Right after the crash, when it was still green out, when Javi finally got the message that Travis didn’t want to talk about Dad, he’d spent most of his time following Shauna around. Travis would look across the fire pit and they’d be talking quietly. When Jackie slept in, the two of them would pair off during the day to do chores. Javi would follow her to the lake to do laundry. He’d watch her tan deer hide with the knife. Travis had kind of figured Javi had a crush.
“She was always nice to me.”
Travis swallows.
There’s a mat in the back of Shauna’s hair. She’s wearing a sweater they scavenged from the crash site. One of the pilot’s, probably. Its side seams were split sometime in early winter to accommodate the baby.
“Do you,” Travis starts. He coughs into his shoulder, shuffling faster through the snow to catch up with her. “Do you think this will work?”
“What?” she asks again. She looks up from her knife, finger still resting on the blade.
“The hunt.”
“There’s only two of them.”
Travis shrugs.
“I guess.” He turns his head to look for Javi, but he’s gone. The sun swells in the sky; he has to squint to look at Shauna’s face. Her lips are chapped, cheeks fever-red from the cold. “Is the knife sharp enough?”
It’s skinned deer. Lottie brained the bear with it. Shauna used it to split open the skin of Travis’s neck; there’s still a mark.
“Yeah.”
He shivers.
Something howls. This time, he can tell it’s not human. Low and mournful, closer than they thought.
In front of them, Gen stops. She turns her ear towards the sound. She points to where the tree cover tangles. It’s still too dark to see anything. The shadows are too deep.
Misty grips her spear tighter. Shauna quits playing with the knife. Travis doesn’t have a weapon. Nat has the gun. Nat’s in the valley.
“Shhhhhhh,” Gen whispers, echoing the wind.
They’re bigger than Travis thought. Even starving, with their ribs showing, the wolves are huge. Gray. They don’t resemble the dachshunds and beagles and mutts people take on walks in Wiskayok. They look like wild animals.
One paws at the ground. The one on the right inches closer. There is a low rumble that must be a growl.
“Fuck,” Gen says, glancing down into the valley. The cold outlines her breath. “Nat’s got the–”
Travis blinks, and it’s all movement. Snow kicked up. The sun in the trees. A smear of gray, a cut off shout.
Travis blinks, and one of the wolves slams sideways into Gen.
Shauna moves forward. She skids in on her knees; she yanks at the wolf’s mangy fur. The blade disappears into its neck. Red blooms.
The wolf yelps. Shauna stabs it again. Again. Again. It’s Gen, maybe. Crying. She could be dead. Travis isn’t sure. He couldn’t see if it got anything other than her pant leg. The thing is whining. Wriggling in the snow. Shauna won’t let it up. He knows the knife is sharp; she’s used it to carve muscle from bone, slit skin open to bleed–
Travis can’t look. He turns his head.
Across the clearing, the other wolf is circling. Its head hangs low, shoulders hunched.
Travis is pretty sure he knows what’s going to happen. Behind him, the noise of the first wolf dying is loud and wet. It’s like staring down the barrel of a gun. It’s the feeling of falling, a hollow opening under his ribs.
There are a hundred ways Travis could do it.
The wolf leaps. It catches Travis’s sleeve in its teeth, trying for his shoulder, but all it gets are the five layers of fabric he’s wearing. Travis falls back in the snow.
It smells. God, it reeks. Like wet fur, bad oil, dirt. He can see the black in its gums. It shakes its head, yanks. Impulse has him trying to kick at it with his feet. His breath hisses.
Its jaw unhinges, gnashing. Drool on his face, hot. It's going, Travis knows, for his neck.
When Travis’s grandmother died, he was 12. It was the summer his back started to hurt bad enough that he’d whine about going to school, church. His mom woke up two nights before, knowing her mother was about to go. She’d called it God, then, but the whole family knew she’d been sick for a long time.
He hopes his mom felt it when Dad died. He hopes she knows, somewhere, that both her sons are gone. He hopes some part of him makes it back to Jersey.
There’s a sound like a firework. Wood splitting.
The wolf jerks off him.
There’s something wet all over his face, in his mouth.
He looks to the right. Nat’s on the crest of the ridgeline. The gun is still aimed, resting against her shoulder.
“Travis,” Javi says.
The sun has risen. The sky is pale winter blue.
“What?” he breathes.
“Spit it out. The parasites, remember?”
The wolf lies twitching, dying against his side. It’s a steaming, stinking corpse.
Travis rolls over.
He spits the blood into the snow.
They cook the meat until it’s gray.
It smells terrible, tastes worse, but they eat. Travis goes to bed with his stomach tight and full and painful. Satiated. He does not lose it in the snowbank; the taste is unfamiliar, too foul to be quite the same.
In the morning, he sits by himself by the treeline. The woods, the cold, press against his back. He watches Shauna disappear into the woods. When she returns, he watches her resume scraping flesh from the wolf's pelts. He watches Mari and Van and Tai and Akilah rustle and stumble from their huts. Nat holds her council. She doesn’t look at him.
There are birds again. Maybe Nat was right; Misty swears she can feel it getting warmer.
It’s Lottie who joins him.
“It’s almost Spring,” she says. Her face is tilted towards the sun, skin clear of Shauna’s beating, eyes closed.
“Yeah,” Travis says.
The stillness behind them. The sound of Shauna raking her knife over the skin. Van’s laughter. Bird song. The promise of life. The terrible pain in his gut that means survival.
“You can hear it,” Lottie says. She’s smiling. “Can’t you?”
Javi’s voice on the wind. His grin in the sliver of moon at night. His untied shoes.
The blood in his mouth. The fullness. The taste of meat.
“Yeah,” Travis says. He closes his eyes, too. “I can.”