The Raven's Gift (37 page)

He opened his eyes and she held the parka open and he slid his arms around her naked body. She lifted the caribou skin just enough
that the morning sunlight radiated brilliant gold against the snow and reflected against her irises, forcing him to snap his own eyes shut tight against the glare.

But even with his eyes closed he could still see the piercing light, as if in that single moment the morning rays had somehow snow-blinded him.

He felt the caribou around them, running above their bodies, and below through the ground. He could smell their earthy hides, their wet, mossy breath. He could hear them panting, clicking, eating. Living.

He imagined the two of them melting together, the grass mat weaving itself into their skin, the hide becoming their own skin, the herd surrounding them, engulfing them.

Protecting them.

He kept his eyes shut tight as the blinding white enveloped them, bathing their bodies in warmth. The clicking of the hooves, the rumble of the herd against the permafrost, and their breathing coalesced into a single steady rhythm, into one beat that filled the world around him.

“Just listen to them,” he whispered, and he held her like he would never let go.

Beneath the heavy caribou hide the gunfire was muffled, the echoes and the sounds of a motor came from some distant place. The hunter would be coming and it didn’t matter any more. The hunter. The cold. The outcasts. Or the hunger. None of that mattered.

Under the warmth of the hide, the cold frozen world beneath them fell away. The light around the edges of the hide was too bright for him to see. He held her close, and imagined himself rising, escaping, her hands wrapped around him, his arms becoming two wide black raven’s wings. He flapped the wings once, rolled to his back looking down at the tundra below, and then lifted them into the sunlight.

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T
he black snout poking beneath the hide pulled him from his sleep. In the space between the hide and tundra he could see paws and furry muzzles.

“Wolves,” he whispered, feeling around for the pistol, “we’re surrounded.”

He found the pistol and readied to shoot the next snout that he saw.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Listen.”

Suddenly the hide lifted off them, and John pointed the pistol skyward.

“Don’t shoot, dude! Whoa, sorry!” the voice from above pleaded, and the hide was quickly dropped down on them again.

Darkness.

“Put some clothes on, man! What are you guys, animals?”

John knew the voice. He pulled the hide back and peered out. He squinted at the piercing sunlight that surrounded them. His eyes adjusted to the light and he saw the caribou were gone, and around them stood a team of panting sled dogs. The boy had levelled his rifle at them.

“Alex? That you? Alex!”

“John? Little Bug! No way!” Alex dropped the rifle to his side and knelt down and kissed Rayna on her forehead. She kept the hide pulled up to her neck. He looked at the old hide and then off to the south, the direction the caribou had gone. “Nice hideout. I thought
you guys were a sick caribou. Free dinner for the dogs. Why you ain’t got clothings?”

“My cousins, where are they?” Rayna asked.

“I’ll take you to them. They’re safe at Nyac Camp,” Alex said. “Did like you said, John. Took care of myself, and then the others.” He went to the bag on his dogsled and pulled out a pair of grey sweatpants. “Put these on,” he said, handing them to Rayna. “You can wear these, John,” he said. “I have two layers.” He pulled down his snow pants and tossed them to John. “And my jacket, for her.”

“Our stuff, back at the tent,” John said.

“Burned. Looks like Maggie used gas and torched the tent and the sno-go. Maybe she wounded him. I took the ice pick and food from the sled, though. Lots of food you guys had. His tracks went that way, followed the herd like a wolf. He thinks you’re hiding in the caribou.”

“We were hiding, just like she told me to,” Rayna said, with a sad smile. She turned her face away from them. “She said I would know when it was time. She was right. Is she gone?”

“She is, but she died fighting.”

“Before I left her she said a word,” John said. “
Be-you-gaw
. What is that?”

“
Piuraa?
I’ll see you,” Alex said. “We say that and not goodbye. We don’t say goodbye.”

“That’s what we say,” Rayna said, “but that’s not what it really means. My grandpa told me why we say
piuraa
. It means stay as you are. She was telling you to stay as you are, John.”

Alex laughed. “Maybe she meant she’ll see you, and you naked ones will bring her spirit back with a baby, ah? I jokes.” He pointed to the west. “We don’t have long. The good news is that bad weather is coming to cover our tracks. The bad news is that bad weather is coming and if we don’t get moving it will cover us. Get in the sled. Holy cow, the kids are going to be so excited to see you, Rayna. You too, Teach,” Alex said. He extended his hand and John shook it.

John pulled on Alex’s snow pants, his own jacket, and then crawled into the sled first with the rifle and the pistol. Rayna sat down on his lap and Alex rolled up the grass mat and stuffed it behind John’s back. Then he tucked the hide around the front of them to keep out the cold.

Alex lined out the six dogs and yelled, “Haw! Haw! Let’s go home, pups. Hike!” The leader started pulling left, and the team turned and followed him. Alex hopped on and off the sled runners and John could feel him pushing and running, jumping on and off the two thin rails jutting out the back of the sled.

The dogs moved silently, effortlessly, toward the low, rolling snow-covered mountains looming ahead of them. The plastic sled runners beneath them made a soft hiss and they picked up speed.

“I was just going out hunting. Lucky I found you guys,” Alex said.

“We would have found you anyways,” Rayna said.

“How many of you?” John asked.

Alex patted John on the shoulder. “Two groups. One at Nyac with twenty-two. They didn’t want us to know where the other group was going. Somewhere on the coast, I bet.”

“How did you guys get away?” Rayna asked.

“The village met in the gym and decided who would take the kids and hide in the mountains. Three dog teams and four sno-gos. The rest had to stay behind. I guess I was one of the lucky ones,” Alex said.

“We all were the lucky ones,” Rayna said. “Right, John?”

John wrapped his arms around her and held her close. He put his head on her shoulder and she turned her warm cheek and rubbed it against his. She pressed her lips against his ear and whispered, “I’m sorry if I made you break your promise to her.”

“You helped me keep my promise, Rayna.”

He tilted his head and looked up into the sky. Anna’s sky. He closed his eyes and could see her face, healthy, vibrant, her green eyes full of life, her smile bright and wide.

He kept his eyes closed as the sled raced forward. With the cold wind in his face, he soared with Rayna, into the air, becoming a raven again.

Far below he could see the snow-camouflaged hunter searching the herd, and in front of him raced two sleek wolves, one black and one grey, galloping shoulder to shoulder at the edge of a brown and white surging sea of thousands of caribou.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In July of 1881, the
Corwin
set anchor off the coast of St. Lawrence Island in southwestern Alaska to investigate “reports of massive deaths.” What Edward Nelson, the Smithsonian Institution’s premier field naturalist, discovered and documented was horrific. In
The Eskimo About Bering Strait
he estimated that over a thousand Yup’ik people on that island alone were dead from disease and famine. Nelson describes corpses “stacked like cordwood” in one village and in another, “bodies of the people were found everywhere in the village and scattered along in a line toward the graveyard for half a mile inland.”

I was haunted and angered by what I read. I grew up in southwestern Alaska. As a student of the amazing Yup’ik culture around me, I had heard the elders’ stories of famine and sickness, but I’d never learned of the magnitude of the death and destruction. I was in my early twenties when I first read Nelson’s book. Armed with this knowledge, I dove into the important works of Ann Fienup-Riordan, a local anthropologist. Ann’s work included historical information that wasn’t taught in our schools, and she also worked diligently to record the stories and wisdom of the remaining elders. Years later I encountered Yup’ik writer Harold Napoleon’s
Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being
. Napoleon’s book argues that the epidemics and famine led to generational post-traumatic stress and a widespread loss of cultural knowledge and tradition. I realized then that my friends and students were dying because they grew up as their parents and grandparents
had, immersed in a constant struggle for survival. The substance abuse, the suicides, and the violence were symptoms of an indigenous culture battling to maintain cultural identity in the face of a new and often oppressive and soul-consuming way of living—a new paradigm that at once demanded adoption of our consumer culture and rejection of a traditional way of life that had worked so successfully for millennia.

Napoleon’s book helped me understand the continual tide of tragedies sweeping across the Yukon-Kuskokwim river deltas. What I didn’t understand was why, at the very least, Alaskan youth weren’t learning about the history of contact. Why didn’t we learn about the destruction and disease brought by the Russians, the whalers, the gold miners, or the missionaries? Why did our Alaskan history studies begin with the struggle for statehood?

As a student of history and as a teacher, I was worried about being condemned to relearn the lessons and repeat the horrors of another epidemic and famine. For years this simple question kicked around in my head: What if?

Then in 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking H5N1 (“bird flu”), and fears of a global pandemic became nightly headlines. Very quietly the Alaskan government began making plans and asking area hunters to bring in dead birds they found while afield. Plans for quarantine and protocol were posted online. Meetings were held. But no one mentioned the epidemics and famines of old.

Suddenly my hypothetical “What if?” turned into a more ominous “When?”

This book is my attempt to share the stories that I grew up with, and to pass along the knowledge of survival in the face of disease and famine provided to me by my friends, their families, and the elders. The ancient stories the elders tell are all about survival. They provide clues not just about how to survive the elements but about how to live on this planet as human beings. The stories and the knowledge
contained in them will prove to be as powerful and important today as they were thousands of years ago.

In “Homemade Remedies,” Yup’ik elder Marie Nichols, from Kasigluk, reveals the importance of learning the ancient stories: “They also taught us how to live. One person can never erase what another has learned, can never steal what he knows … If a person has none of these teachings, he will be like someone lost in a blizzard. But the person who has the teachings will derive strength from them and use them like a walking stick to prevent himself from getting hurt.”

The process of writing this book has been magical. Perhaps that is the nature of working with ancient and powerful stories. They exist so that we may continue to exist.

Revisiting Edward Nelson’s work provided me with one of the most powerful and profound experiences I have had as a writer and researcher. Nelson wrote many ghastly descriptions of the villages destroyed by the 1880 plagues that struck southwestern Alaska, and the most haunting of all has continued to trouble my mind a full fourteen years after I first read it: “The total absence of the bodies of children in these villages gave rise to the suspicion that they had been eaten by the adults; but possibly this may have not been the case.”

I hold on to the hope that “possibly this may have not been the case,” just as I hope that this story isn’t a vision of what is to come, or a simple metaphor of what is happening right now in rural Alaska. I hope this story is a shared vision of what we can do to save a culture, and perhaps ourselves along the way.