Watermelon Snow

"Ow ow ow!  Don't touch the belly!"

"I'm just goin' to roll you over so I can see, keep calm, I know it hurts, stop hyperventilatin' you'll get dizzy, you can't stay on top of these rocks ---" 

"Ow ow ow!  Not the chest!"

Breaking the awful silence, a lone bird gearing up for dawn tweeted from a far above perch in the line of pine trees between Kastelholm and the road.  Private brushed away bloody gravel and many damaged feathers from Skipper's chest.  When he was done, he realized that Skipper had not said anything in a while.

"Breathe, Skippa!  Breathe!"  What sort of bird would keep on singing in a situation like this?  Kowalski would know.  And where were Kowalski and Rico?  Were they having such fun that they forgot the team?  Surely the noise of battle in the midst of all this countryside quiet penetrated their select little universe?

More silence.  A heaving breath, then, "Ow!  Hurts to breathe!  Damn you, Sasquatch!  You've done me in!"

Private's voice got very small as his world narrowed to just this moment.  "Don't go.  Don't die."

"Ow ow ouch owww.  Ugh. Uhhhhhnnngh ---  no good, I can't move.  You'll need to help me.  Don't touch that, it's sore.  That, either.  Aggggh, not the left side, ouch!"

"Sorry!  Sorry!  Sorry!"

At Private's distress, Skipper appeared to get it together.  "It's more like really ... uncomfortable," he amended.  

"Excruciatin'?  Tortuous?"

"Can't come up with a third thing?  Yeah, it's excruciating --- no, worse than excruciating. Worse than Doc's needles.  I think ... this is it, amigo."  There was little sense in the blank gaze.  "Everything looks so gray."

Private looked around desperately and saw Sasquatch disappearing through the pines as she sped over the horizon in the growing daylight.  Private should have tailed her.  He wanted to, but he wanted to hear Skipper's last words more.  "I've got it easy," gasped Skipper.  "I don't have to go back and tell them."

"Stay for me?  For us all?" 

Their lives as commandos were dangerous.  Even if every current team member survived for a considerable time against all odds, in the natural course of events his leader would always waddle ahead of him in the long penguin march into eternity.  

Skipper opened his eyes wide as if to memorize Private's face, but drowsiness won out.  "It would be the only reason I'd come back, if I could."  Even the lone idiot of a dawn bird kept its silence in this moment.  There was now no sense left in his leader's words or behind his gaze.  "The worms will get me," Skipper whispered.  He closed his eyes with a long sigh.

There was a crash and a spurkle behind them, followed by a crunch into slushy sounding snow.  Private scrambled to his feet to defend his own, but it was only an icicle falling from a barren linden branch.  With adrenaline pouring into his system but no outlet for it, he stood trembling for a moment and then sagged to the cold white earth.

IOIOIOIOIO

"It's a natural thing to die, it is."  Private rested on his bottom in the snow and his flippers drew idle circles at his side.  That stupid bird twittered again and the rising dawn breeze rustled pine needles until he thought he'd go mad.  The dumping of last evening's snow had mostly cleared the skies and it promised to be a cool but pleasant day to die in.  

It hurt like nothing else ever had to see Skipper's limp body.  He ran a claw up the sole of Skipper's uninjured foot and when this failed to produce the usual involuntary giggle followed by a reprimanding clout, he slumped further.  Then he slammed his flippers down and straightened his spine.  "Well, I reject nature!"

Private leaped to his feet, galvanized.  "Think, Private, think!  Wot would K'walski say?  Keep him warm, that's the ticket, hey!"  

He panicked.  "Wot do I do, wot do I do?"  

Blind instinct took over.  "Will he fit inside my brood pouch?  Ow!  No!  Try harder, Private.  Maybe just the top bits, then? Ow ow ow!  No flippin' way, he's too big for me!  Now you're bleedin', you git!  Stop hurtin' yourself then, you'll not do him any good."

Adrift on the ice floe that carried them all away from Antarctica to new adventures, there had been storms aplenty.  Skipper, Rico, and Kowalski exposed their own backs to the cold polar winds and cuddled newly-hatched Private on their nurturing feet.  Decency dictated that he return the lovingkindness.  As he pressed himself to Skipper's side and pinched the broken chest together in hopes of stopping a bleed out, Kowalski's words from long ago skittered through his mind.  They overpowered the annoying skrawking of the persistent dawn singer.  "Private, we are birds, and we heal fast with our metabolism.  We just need a fighting chance, that's all."

Private whimpered when his own front turned red like a cherry snowcone mixed with delicious passion fruit juice.  Blood mixed into the dirt of battle there to form a nasty mess.  He held the shreds of whitening skin together as time cascaded into a devouring flood.  Despair squeezed his heart when the coagulating drips of red seemed to be getting larger, not smaller.  

Something tickled his feet.  He kicked away first one, then a stream of black insects that foraged with the dawn despite freezing weather.  Now that the immediate press of battle morphed into lifesaving techniques, he scouted around for help from the environment.  Scrabbling from hundreds of tiny legs on top of snow reached his earholes.

The congada line of insects succeeded in making him even more miserable.  "Geroff!  Bloody aitch ee double hockeysticks!  You nasty ... little ... buggers ... eh?"  One black larva tweezered his left foot with outsized jaws, decided that he was not prey, and moved along in its own version of a March.  Abruptly, Private remembered Kowalski's fascination with a nature documentary about the Mbuti humans' clever medical techniques in the back country where Band-Aids were scarce.  He acted.

"Here now, show me you're good for somethin'!  Bite him hard!"  Private dangled a wiggling black insect over the largest gaping wound and the jaws pincered its edges shut like a suture.  With the gash reduced to a seeping slit, Private did the necessary.  "Sorry!"  He snapped off the larva's body to leave the head gripping firmly.  

"Sorry!"  

"Sorry!"

"Sorry!"

"Sorry!"

"Sorry!"

At last the worst of the bleeding stopped and Private huddled closer under Skipper's motionless flipper.  His team hadn't forgotten them, he was sure of it.

When Kowalski and Rico approached the cries of "Penguin down!", they found their youngest member pressed feather-to-bloody-feather with the leader of them all.  

Private saluted.  "Fightin' chance secured, sir!"  He burst into tears.

Rico said it first.  "Uh oh."

IOIOIOIOIO

TBC