The Raven's Gift (18 page)

“I hope it doesn’t last. We’ll be in trouble.”

“Could last forever,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

The day before they had come across a fox with a fresh snowshoe hare kill, and he’d shot a round from his pistol in the air and scared the fox off. The girl called it the raven’s gift. She said that was the luck the raven gave them. He cut a small piece of the half-frozen meat from a back leg and roasted it over the fire. As the meat cooked, he wondered if it was the same fox he’d seen in the village.

“I heard the elders say that a long time ago it was warm here and that it could get warm again. King salmon would even spawn in winter when there was no ice,” she said.

“That’s impossible—the elders couldn’t know of a time like that. That would be tens of thousands of years ago. There’s no evidence in recorded history of a warm time like that.”

“So,” she said, pulling out a newly braided section of grass and sticking it in her bundle. She crawled out from her bag and pulled on her jacket. She began stuffing the sleeping bag into the backpack. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about how the rest of the world lives
like the world is theirs. But when the world says that’s enough and when they get sick, and things aren’t working, like TV and computers, who is going to tell the story of your people? What could you tell your kids about you
kass’aq
people and how your people lived?”

He took a small bite of the charred leg. The outside was black, but the meat just below was still deep red, raw, and cold. “Who said I’m gus-suck? And who cares? I won’t be having kids,” he said.

“Even so, what could you tell them about how your people lived?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I could tell them nothing about my people.”

   18   

T
hey stood outside the old woman’s house, and for the longest time no words passed between them. The old woman looked down toward the riverbank and then at the clouded white sky to the west. She looked back at them and then away again and squinted.

The girl kicked the snow crust around her black boots. He could tell she didn’t want to leave the old woman and that something else was bothering her.

“Another big storm coming soon,” the old woman said. “The bad month is coming, too. Maybe cold weather starts tomorrow night. If you travel like I told you, then you’ll be by Bethel when it storms. I don’t think you should go in that town. I told you that. I think the hunter came from that ways. He’ll be going back. Watch for him. Maybe wait for night and see if there’s any lights. Even before all this dying, on clear nights we could see the lights from Bethel and other villages in the sky. Not any more. The sky is always dark at night over that way now.”

She pointed toward the northeastern sky, and then said, “But if I seen lights in Bethel now, I think I would be scared.”

“Where are my cousins?” the girl asked, and then repeated something in Yup’ik in the same tone.

The old woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “If they are
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, then they are out there somewhere. You know more than me about where they can hide. Maybe by the mountains, but I’m just an old woman.”

“Come with us,” said the girl. “We need you to find them. We need to protect them from the hunter. If he finds out they are alive, he will kill them all.”

“There’s nothing for me up that river,” the old woman said. “Now go, I want to get back to my fire.”

The old woman turned and slowly hefted herself up the wooden steps. She stopped at the top and turned back to them. “Trust her eyes,” she told him. “She sees more than me and you ever will.”

JOHN POPPED HIS HEAD into her classroom and watched as Anna helped one young girl pull her rubber boots on. The other students had already left for the day. She’d told him about this girl a few days ago. Something was happening at home, and every day the chubby little second-grader was reluctant to leave the classroom. Anna lifted up the girl and sat her on her desk. Tears streamed down the girl’s cheeks.

“Why don’t you want to go home?” Anna asked.

The girl tucked her chin down into her thin pink jacket, avoiding all eye contact with her teacher.

“It’s okay,” Anna said, “you can tell me.”

The girl whispered something, but John couldn’t hear her.

“Who is drinking at your house?” Anna asked. “Is there somewhere else you can go? Maybe I can walk you to your grandma’s house? Okay?”

The girl looked up and spotted John. Her face flushed and she lunged toward Anna and buried her face in Anna’s arms.

Anna held the girl and told him to get home, school was over for the day and he had work to do.

“What work?” he asked.

“You need to put some food on our table. Go home and get your rain gear on. You’re going hunting with Carl. I’m going to go for a little walk with Nina here.”

He started down the hall toward his room. She’d concocted some sort of plan, and just the thought of getting out was enough for him to forget their little squabble earlier that morning about whether they should spend the fifteen hundred bucks it would cost to leave during the holiday break, still three months away.

He pulled his jacket on and kicked off his loafers and began pulling on his green rubber boots, then returned to her classroom. She stood in the doorway, holding the little girl’s hand.

“My guns aren’t even here yet. Plus, I don’t have a shotgun.”

“You’re going with Carl. He said you could use his gun until yours get here.”

“What are we going hunting for?”

“Birds, he said. I told him you’d meet him down at his boat around four.”

As he passed her in the hallway he stopped and kissed her. He patted the little girl on the head. “I’m sorry for today,” he said. “I just … cabin fever, like you said.”

“You just need some fresh air.”

He kissed her again. “Thanks, thanks for always saving me,” he whispered into her ear. “Isn’t she the best teacher in the world?” he asked. Nina looked up at him and smiled. She nodded and wrapped her arms around Anna’s leg.

“No swans,” she said. “I don’t think I can eat swan just yet.”

THE MORNING AFTER John spotted the fox with the hare hanging from its mouth, he cooked a single leg over a small driftwood fire. They had made camp in the willows along the river and he thought they should stay and rest for a day before moving on. He wanted to think the broth from the night before had given him a little boost of energy, because when he woke up, he felt stronger. One more night of rest and a little more protein and he felt they could push on and reach the next village.

The girl walked down to the riverbank and returned with an armload of driftwood. For a blind girl, she had an ability to walk over uneven terrain that impressed him. Initially he didn’t think she would make it very far with him, but she was slowly proving herself.

“That smells so yummy,” she said.

“It’s almost ready.”

“Upriver, I don’t know how far, we might see some moose or caribou. You could shoot one and we would have more than we could eat. We could follow the herd and have enough food forever. We would never go hungry again. That’s if you’re a good enough shot.” She paused and then added, “I jokes.”

She dropped the wood near the fire and warmed her hands.

“If it gets really cold,” she said, “we’re going to need a shelter, not just this tarp. You know, if your feet get cold you can put grass in your boots like I got. You need some?”

He shook his head. “Do you think it’s going to get colder? This is cold enough,” he said.

“I don’t know when, but it will get cold. Real cold.”

“I’ll figure something out when it does,” he said.

“I know.”

He took a bite of the hare leg, and then took his knife and cut off half for her. The dark red meat, charred black on the outside and deep red on the inside, tasted wild and rich. His body screamed to him to cook up the rest and devour it all.

She ate silently, and when she finished he asked if she wanted the leg bone. She did. He watched as she chewed the end off with her teeth and then sucked at the marrow. She turned the bone around, bit through the other end, and handed it to back him.

“Here,” she said, “this will give you more energy.”

He took the bone and followed her example. The marrow tasted like he’d bitten his own tongue, bloody and raw.

“Do you think the rest of the world is having to do this?”

“Eating hare?” he said, trying to joke, not wanting to contemplate a real answer.

“I mean survive like us. What’s the rest of the world doing right now? Don’t you wonder that? Are they starving too, or are we the only ones who’ve been forgotten?”

He handed the bone back to her and placed a few more sticks on the fire. He didn’t have an answer for her. He rarely did. Instead, he just let the silence hang over them like the smoke that rose from the embers and drifted through the willows along the riverbank like a parade of spirits.

   19   

H
e stopped at the riverbank and looked back. “Is she watching us? Is the hunter going to follow our tracks?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

And he didn’t. Instead, his thoughts were on the school, the food in the school, and the missing kids. The sled was loaded with all he could pull. Any more would be wasting his energy. The two of them had food now and that was all that mattered. That and moving on up the river. They had already stayed too long. The cold was coming. He could feel it in the wind. He wondered if he shouldn’t go back and burn it before someone else, the hunter, discovered the gym full of bodies and put the pieces together.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pulled the rope tight around his waist. He’d retrieved the ice pick from the school, and one quick glance inside the gym confirmed it—there were only a handful of kids. Four or five. There should have been at least thirty or forty. He hoped they had escaped the sickness, the outcasts, and the hunter, if there really was such a person. Ski tracks and an old woman’s ramblings were all he had to go on. He couldn’t let a mystery man continue to haunt him.

He tapped the point of the pick into a frozen chunk of dirt at the top of the riverbank.

“Let’s get moving,” he said.

“Will you talk while we’re travelling today? I just want to listen to you talk. Talk about anything,” she said.