Extract
December 30, 1943
The pilot paused at the end of the wood where already it was dark, oak-dark at midday. He propped himself against a tree, believing that in the shadows he was hidden, at least for the moment. The others had fled. He was the last out of the pasture, watching until they had all disappeared, one by one, indistinct brown shapes quickly enveloped by the forest.
All, that is, except for the two on the ground, one dead, one dying. He could no longer hear the gunner’s panicky questions. The cold and the wound had silenced him, or perhpas the morphin, administered by Ted’s frozen fingers, had dulled the worst of it. Dragging his own wounded leg through the battered bomber Ted had reached the gunner, drwan to him by the pitch of the man’s voice. He has separated the gunner from the metal that seemed to clutch at him and pulled the man out onto the hard ground, still white with frost even at noon. The wound was to the lower abdomen, too low, Ted could see that at once. The gunner screamed then, asked him, demanded, but Ted looked awaym businesslike with the needle, and whispered something that was meant to be reassuring but was taken by the wind. The gunner felt frantically with oily fingers for the missing pieces. The pilot and the navigator had held his arms, pinned him.
Possibly the gunner was dead already, he thought at the edge of the forest. There was too much blood around the body, a hot spring that quickly pooled, froze, on the ground. The other man, the rear gunner, the man who was undeniably dead, dragged also to lie beside the wounded, had not a scratch on him.
Ted slowly tilted his head back, took the deep air into his body. As a boy he had shot squirrels in the wood at home, and there were sometimes days like this, days without colour, when the sky was oily and gray and his fingers froze on the .22.