No One Cries For The Lost

VII: The Lonely Beyond

VII

The

Lonely Beyond

Day 21

"Sit. Sit. Good boy," I toss Martin a piece of liver from some kind of muskrat or something that I killed with my debris knife and cooked and cut apart not long ago. "hang tight pal, still morning, gotta log this one."

The marker's cold. I'll have to pull a new one from the pack in the cockpit soon. It's running dry again. Doesn't surprise me. It keeps getting colder. It is almost winter after all. By my count by now, it should be September 8th. I would be back in Winnipeg starting work today if the plane hadn't crashed and I hadn't gotten stuck out here. I'd be setting up the classroom, getting papers ready. Preparing for another year of educating young minds to set them on the path to enrichment and guiding them towards a better future.

I'm sure someone knows. Someone's seen that I haven't come in yet and they've phoned someone, they have to. Someone knows that I'm gone and they're looking for me right now. They're just not looking in the right spots.

I finish marking the twenty-first tally mark to the side of the plane's fuselage and then put the cap back on the marker and walk back over to the campfire. It's colder today. Much colder than it was yesterday. Much colder. Even my campfire is struggling against the high winds and heavy snowfall of the day.

I sit down in front of the fire across from Martin. He's enjoying more of that delicious fox we found just last night. Chomping down and tearing into the poor, dead little creature. He doesn't let any of it go to waste.

"Hey, don't be a pig."

I dig in with him, but I'm much more clean and polite when it comes to eating my food. For one, I don't mow down into it like a rabbid dog, which, in all fairness, I'll admit Martin is. But come on, we can be civilized.

"Hey, hey come on now Marty, table manners."

His eager growls are all I can hear aside from the smacking of his lips as he cleans the fox's left hind leg of any meat and then tops it off by licking the thing clean.

"You can keep the bone. Keep it as a little toy." I smile at him." You have fun with that one."

He looks at me while he continues to lick the bone.

"We've been out here three weeks Marty." I sigh as I look off to the distance. "Three weeks."

It honestly went by quick after the first ten days. I didn't even notice the extra eleven until after they had already passed.

"That must make you...what, two months now? About that?" I laugh," we'll just go with that for now."

He has gotten bigger since I first rescued him from that burning den. That one's for sure. No more tiny little fuzzy guy who can't even walk through the snow without being lost. Now he's more of a...semi-small guy who's just barely big enough to start play-fighting but not big enough to actually hunt yet. If he even does end up hunting. I don't know how in the hell to teach a male wolf how to hunt. And I doubt I'll be very good at trying to figure it out. But that's okay, I can't anyway. As long as he needs me, it's good. I need him here, keeping me company. Keeping my sanity from slipping. Or at least, keeping me from completely slipping right off the deep end. Even if my sanity has already cracked, at least it won't crack anymore with a companion around. One that I can at least talk to even if he will never talk back. It'll just make me more...stable. Speaking poetically, of course.