The Raven's Gift (23 page)

He pulled his bag up around his shoulders and then took off his wool hat and stuck his pistol in it near his head, where he could grab it quickly if he needed to.

“There’s people there,” the old woman said after a long silence. “Too many for them to all die. But some of them might be not the good kind, too. Bethel scared me even before this bad thing happened. Never much liked going there. I don’t know why you wants to go to
Bethel. We should keep going upriver. We should just go right past that place. Nothing for us downriver, and nothing there, not in that town. Nothing.”

“What do you think, John?” the girl asked as the old woman tried to muffle another cough.

“I think if she knows something, she should tell us.”

“I know they aren’t there,” the old woman said.

“But you don’t know
where
they are, either. Right?” He sighed and turned away from them.

“You know,” the old woman said to the girl.

“I don’t. No. I don’t,” the girl said.

“You do,” said the woman. “If they are still alive, you can find them.”

He dug a small handful of snow out from the wall of their dark little cave and put it into his mouth. They should have chipped and melted some ice or chopped a hole in the river. He was thirsty and his lower lip had started to bleed from the hunk of chapped skin he’d bitten off.

“I think I’m going to see if there’s anyone there who can help us,” John said. “See if anyone that knows what’s going on. I’m not going to pass up the biggest town in hundreds of miles. If someone is alive there, they should be able to tell us something. I want to know what happened.”

“When I was a young girl like you,” the old woman said, “I remember in the spring, before breakup, we would take our dog teams and go across the tundra to the mountains. All around we saw caribou, snowshoe hares, and porcupines. The men hunted and trapped, and us kids, we had so much fun. Lots of trees up near the mountains, and so many good firewoods. We always had a big warm fire with meat roasting on alder sticks, and we could sit at our camp and listen to the winds whispering through them branches. Then, when the long days came and the ice went out, the men would build boats and load up the
dogs and kids and everyone and float down to the tundra just in time to start king salmon fishing.”

“What did you see?” the girl asked John, as if ignoring the old woman’s story.

“I told you what I saw. Nothing.”

The old woman continued her story. “Big lakes up in those mountains too. Real big. Deep lakes with giant trout. They say one lake, Heart Lake, had a
palraiyuk
. Long, skinny monster, like one of those kinds that Crocodile man wrestled on TV. Yup’iks used to draw that creature on our kayaks. Real big long, narrow mouth with lotsa teeths, and little pokies sticking out all down its back to its tail. But there was a story about someone who killed the last big monster up there. The man’s wife was getting water and that creature jumped up out of the water and snapped its mouth down on her and slid back into the water with her. The man tried to shoot it, but his arrows just bounced off its armour. So he went and killed a caribou and used it like bait. When
palraiyuk
came back to eat the caribou he took his last arrow and shot it in the heart. He cut the monster open and saved his wife. My grandpa used to say they would climb through the backbone hole of the skeleton on the beach of that last monster the hero killed. But some people say those lakes might still have
palraiyuk
.”

“Scary,” the girl said.

“Lots of scary stuff out there. Sometimes there is only a real thin layer separating our world and the spirit world,” the woman said. “When I was maybe your age there was a young boy, Gabe Fox. You heard stories about him?”

The girl nodded, and said, “We always talked about him when we were out camping. Tell John.”

“He was real. A real boy. He was orphan, living at that place we call Children’s Home. That was up the Kwethluk River where they keeped orphans from the last epidemic. Gabe Fox didn’t like that place, maybe
the priests treat him bad or maybe he was in trouble, so he ran away. He
qimakalleq
, run away and become nervous and scare easy like a fox. People seen him all the time, but he either hiding in the wilds or he not wanna get catched.”

“What makes you think the kids did like Gabe Fox and
qimakalleq
?” the girl asked.

“Because they wasn’t in the gym,” the old woman said. “They run away to somewhere. Somewhere safe. But we need to find them before they
cillam quella
.”

“I don’t know that word,” the girl said.

“Maybe it means before they are made cold by the universe,” the old woman said. “
Cillam quella
.”

He turned his back to them and sucked the moisture from the handful of snow until all that remained in his mouth was a small ball of ice.

CARL AND HIS WIFE, Carrie, sat across the dinner table. They were their first dinner guests, in a village where sharing food and meals was nothing new, but formal dinners, complete with tablecloth, napkins, and the spoon-fork-knife set-up were unheard of.

“So fancy,” Carrie said, pointing to the display of silverware. “You guys always eat like this?”

“No, just for special guests.”

“I should have dressed up! I could have worn my town shoes!” Carrie said.

They laughed. John caught a glance between Carl and Carrie and suddenly felt very uncomfortable for them. Anna had overdone the table setting. The low lights. The candles. The separate serving dishes. It was overboard. Too much of a show for their guests.

Carl tried to make small talk. “Got a letter from my brother in Kuwait. Hundred and twenty degrees there, he said. He said he dreams of snow and ice. He knows pretty soon the river will freeze up and you
and me can start hunting ptarmigan. Maybe I’ll show you how to trap marten and otters.”

“That would be nice. I’d like that. Hundred and twenty. Ouch. Is he doing okay there?”

Carl shrugged. “Best he can be for an Eskimo in the oven.”

“Sorry we don’t have sour cream,” Anna said, setting a plate of baked potatoes on the table. John shot her a look, but she was too absorbed in delivery of the dinner to catch his telepathic messages. Had their kitchen been in a separate room from their dinner table he might have had a chance to whisper in her ear to quit with the fanfare, but he couldn’t, and he felt the damage was already done. He’d worked so hard to fit in with Carl, to just be a hunting partner and not an outsider, and dinner seemed like a good way to let Anna in on the fun.

Now, as Anna opened a sixty-four-ounce can of grape juice and poured it into wine glasses, he could only hope to ever be invited out hunting again.

As Anna poured the juice she said, “I sure wish we had a little white wine to go with the chicken, but since the village is dry, this grape juice will have to do.”

Carl and Carrie laughed. John eased up a bit.

“You could sit that juice next to the furnace with some yeast and make homebrew,” Carrie joked. “That’s what some people do around here. Too bad bootleggers don’t sell wine. Otherwise Carl could get a bottle from his no-good brother in Bethel.”

“You have a brother in the National Guard and a brother who bootlegs?”

“Anna!”

Carrie turned to John. “It’s okay. His brother there is a bum. Doesn’t work and only sells weed and vodka. Poisons his own people for sixty dollars a bottle.”

Carl shrugged. “He’ll get caught someday.”

Anna dished out the chicken and then passed her homemade gravy
across to Carrie. John realized Carl and Carrie were waiting, hesitating almost to serve themselves, so he dug in, leading the way. He took a spoonful of green beans and lumped them on his plate. He forked two large chunks of chicken beside the beans, stuck a potato with a fork, dropped it beside the chicken, and then smashed through the skin and made a decent trough for the gravy.

Soon they were all eating and chatting, the tension overcome with food and friendship. John squeezed Anna’s leg beneath the table and then lifted his wine glass full of grape juice in a toast.

“To our new friends. And to good duck hunting in the spring. Cheers.”

Their glasses clinked and they each took a sip.

“Next time,” Carrie said, “I’ll have you guys over for seal soup.”

HE STAYED IN HIS SLEEPING BAG well past sunrise. He thought the girl would think he was just sleeping, resting from the long day of walking. He wasn’t. Dawn came and went. The sun never broke through the clouds, leaving the sky above them a sullen white that blended with the horizon.

He had his back turned to her, to their snowed-in tracks. The man on skis could have followed them, and readied to attack, and he wouldn’t have seen it coming. Instead, he just remained frozen, on his side, and stared blankly at the white expanse in front of him, an endless emptiness that stretched out and almost seemed to curve with the earth, no trees, no brush, nothing but white upon white.

She was quiet for the longest time; perhaps she didn’t want to wake him, or she was scared something was wrong. The wind had died with the sunrise. The entire world fell silent, dead.

“It’s hard for you to breathe today,” she said. He could hear her working the grasses, braiding, twisting, her mouth opening and wetting them.

He said nothing. He had nothing to say.

“I can tell by how you take a breath and then hold it, for too long. I used to do that lots. Not just because I couldn’t see, but from other things. Other things in my life that made it hard, you know. Hard to want to take one more breath. I know how it feels.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel any warmth from it through the sleeping bag, but he could feel the weight of it, where she left it resting on his arm, and then she patted him gently, as if he were a sick puppy.

“There’s going to be days like this when we don’t want to live no more. I had plenty of days like that, so many days in that house by myself, you know. So many nights, when everyone was sick, all that sickness and dying. Crying at night. Screams. Then quiet. Just black nothingness. And those smells. I didn’t want to live with that quiet and those smells. I wanted to know why I was being punished again. I never did anything wrong and God was punishing me by letting me live.”

She took her hand away, maybe to brush at her tears, but he couldn’t be sure.

“I thought about walking out on the tundra or into the river. The .22 wasn’t powerful enough, you know, for that. And I couldn’t get my legs to take me outside. I was too scared of what might be outside. Sometimes I worried that I would go out there and I would see again. I would see everything that had been ruined.”

For a long while she fell silent. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her world for a moment. Perpetual darkness, a world of only sounds and smells—but then she had something else, that sense of hers, some ethereal understanding of the world around her. He wondered if this was common to blind people, or just the girl, and the strange circumstances that allowed her to still be there, alive.

“I wanted to die, but I was too scared. I didn’t want to die alone. Now I know at least I’m not going to die alone, and I’m not scared. We find reasons to want to live.”

He took a deep breath and let it out. The cloud of warm vapour from his lungs hung in the air around his face and slowly disappeared. He unzipped his bag and sat up.

“Let’s get moving,” he said. “Can’t mope around all day and feel sorry for ourselves, can we?”

She smiled and began packing her grass weaving bundle and her sleeping bag. He scanned the horizon in all directions to make sure they were alone and then stood up and stretched. He watched her bundle the sleeping bags and the grass inside the tarp and place them on the toboggan.

“You’re not going to die,” he said to her, and they started off across the snowy tundra, travelling east toward the river.

   24   

I
nstead of going to the town they turned and headed west a half mile toward what looked like a giant black drive-in theatre screen. The morning was calm, clear, and a slow gathering of light began to form to the east. He remembered his first flight out of town and the pilot mentioning something about White Alice, the tall Cold War relic, part of a radar shield to warn of incoming Russkies.