Far North (17 page)

Go!

I started across, pulling hard as I could, trying to go fast without tripping myself up. I saw only the crust on the snow breaking into jigsaw pieces beneath my snowshoes. Right when I got to the far side of the bridge I heard it crack behind me. I never looked back; I broke into a run with the snowshoe tips high, heaving and exploding with everything I had, and then I felt myself going down. I lunged as far forward as I could, my face going down in a slab of snow.

Behind me I heard Raymond shouting for joy, and I looked up to see him in the toboggan right behind me. He was pointing downriver where the ice bridge was floating away.

I saw blood in the snow where I'd scratched up my face. I could have cared! I saw I'd broken one of my snowshoe frames. No matter! We still had Raymond's pair on the toboggan.

A half hour later the canyon walls began to dive down toward the river. Downstream, where they tailed into the river, we could see vapor
rising from the right bank. “The hot springs,” Raymond said.

 

There was no open water in the flat country beyond the canyons. Only distance to be closed, step by step, between us and that last isolated hogback of the Mackenzie Mountains that Nahanni Butte was named after. The village, Raymond said, sat barely above the river where it touched the foot of that hogback on the right-hand side.

In the days to come, I kept my eyes fastened on that mountain. I had to believe it was getting closer because for a long, long time it didn't seem that way. I was all out of strength. I knew I'd lost track of time, and I lost touch with Raymond too, as the places I was going in my mind became much more real than the frozen, featureless landscape around me.

Toward the end, I thought I was wandering around the streets of Yellowknife. A lady asked me if I wanted to come in for some tea. I realized it was my mother. I said I would sure like that, and she had me sit down at the kitchen table and she served me rose hip tea and some chocolate chip cookies. There was a porcupine in the corner of the room that was chewing on the leg of a
fancy china hutch. My mother said it didn't matter; it belonged to Johnny Raven. “This is Johnny Raven's house,” she explained. “He'll be coming home in a few minutes from work.” Then Johnny Raven came in, and he said he was glad to see me. I said, “Boy, am I glad to see you.” I asked if he'd seen Raymond, and he said Raymond was back in the mountains; I could go find him there. Johnny said he would like me to stay and visit some more, but I said, “No thanks, I better get going if I'm going to catch up with Raymond.” I hiked all the way back into the mountains, and I kept calling his name, but he couldn't hear me because the falls were too loud. Then at last I heard him calling
my
name. “Gabe!” he hollered. “Gabe, Gabe!”

My mind jerked back into consciousness. Raymond really was calling my name. I turned around and saw him there on the toboggan. “You fell asleep,” he said, “standing up. You've been standing there for a long time.”

It was twilight. “Look at that fog,” I said blankly, and pointed toward a low bluff up ahead.

Raymond looked where I was pointing, looked again, and said, “That's smoke from everybody's stoves!”

“Stoves?” I mumbled.

He said, “That's the village, Gabe! We're almost there!”

It got dark on us that last stretch. I remember pulling by the light of a crescent moon.

At last Raymond steered me to the bottom of a thirty-foot slope on the right-hand side of the riverbed. “Stop,” he said. “This is it.”

“I don't see anything,” I managed to say.

“It's right up above us, right here. We just can't see it.”

It was only fog after all, I thought. Not the village.

“It's right up there,” he said again. “Smell the woodsmoke.”

I thought I could smell woodsmoke, but I knew I might be imagining it.

A dog appeared atop the slope, some sort of husky, and broke loose barking. I knew I didn't have enough left in me to climb that hill. Much too steep. Maybe after I rested…

“Maybe we should camp here,” I said.

The dog kept barking. We heard someone yell at it to shut up. Raymond shouted, nobody heard. The dog kept barking. At last a human being appeared up there in the moonlight. A young boy. “Who is it?” he called, his voice thin and scared.

“It's Raymond.”

“Who?”

“Jimmy, it's me! Raymond Providence!”

The boy turned and ran. Raymond said, “That's my little cousin Jimmy.”

We waited, not very long. Within minutes, eighty-some people had run out, and they were all standing there on the top of the slope. They must've thought they were seeing ghosts. They weren't saying a word.

“It's me,” Raymond said. “It's me, Raymond, and my friend Gabe.”

A woman shrieked. Everybody came surging down the hill at once, and then they lifted us up and carried us into the village.

M
Y FATHER AND
I flew upstream over the frozen Liard River in a ski-equipped Cessna on the second of April. When we were still twenty miles from Nahanni Butte, I could recognize the shape of the hogback mountain. As we got closer we could see the village below with all its smoking chimneys. We could see cars and pickups crossing the Liard on the winter road, just upstream from where the Nahanni came in.

They came from Fort Simpson and Fort Liard and Fort Providence, from places like Red Knife River and Burnt Island and Slave Point. They came from all over, and they streamed into Nahanni Butte's community hall for Johnny Raven's potlatch.

It was warm inside, warm from the fire burning in the great fireplace and warm from being
packed with nearly three hundred people. They sat at tables and on folding chairs and they stood all along the walls, all these Dene faces from infants to elders who could've been in their nineties.

These old ones, I realized, had lived most of their lives outdoors. Like Johnny's, their faces were worn like maps of rivers and mountains.

There was fiddle music and there was food, mountains of food, traditional and modern, set out on two rows of tables that stretched across one end of the great room. In the open kitchen behind the tables, we could see the hot food steaming.

Before anyone ate, there were stories to be told, stories of Johnny Raven. Most of the elders spoke in English, and they told of Johnny's life, the things he had done for people. They never failed to mention Johnny's great success as a hunter. They would pause as they spoke, and the elder who was the emcee, at a second mike, would translate what had been said into Slavey.

One bent old man with hair white as Johnny's got up and spoke in Slavey. The emcee was translating his story into English. The old man began by saying that what he was about to say was rarely spoken of, but unless he told it, people in the
future would think that such things were only in the domain of legends. And then he told of accompanying Johnny Raven, when they both were young, on the last hunt of a grizzly with a spear. It was Johnny, he said, who spoke to the bear and called it Grandfather, called it out of its den, and planted the spear. It was because of Johnny's humility and worthiness, the old man said, that the great bear knew that its time had come and gave its life upon the spear.

When the old man was done he gave a piece of bear meat to the fire for Johnny's spirit, as other speakers had also given food to the flames.

There was a round of murmuring around the hall, in appreciation for what had been said and in anticipation of what was about to come. People seemed to know that Raymond was going to speak, and that he was going to speak last. The word had spread around the Dene country of Raymond's and my long ordeal in the mountains, and how it was the knowledge of an elder—Johnny Raven—that had made it possible for us to continue on our own.

We were in the folding chairs. Raymond was sitting on my left side, his foot and lower leg encased in a cast. He'd been home from the hospital in Edmonton for only a week. Next week
he'd be joining me back in school at Yellowknife.

My father was on my right side. Raymond's family was all around us, his parents and his grandparents, his big sister, Monique, his little brother, Alfred, and his little sister, Dora—lots of other relatives too. I could feel their pride swelling, though they were trying not to show it. And I felt their fear for Raymond too, that he had decided he had to do this, stand up in front of so many people and speak. I heard his little sister, Dora, whisper what they were all feeling. “Raymond, aren't you afraid?”

Raymond's fingers were tapping nervously on Johnny's hand drum. He whispered to his sister, “I sure am!” Then he glanced to his parents, who whispered their encouragement. The elder who was introducing him had nearly finished. I picked Raymond's crutches up off the floor and got ready to hand them to him.

Raymond whispered to me, “Gabe, how am I going to do this?”

He could hardly breathe. He looked pale. It was so warm in there in the first place, I thought he was going to faint.

I said, “Look at everything else you got through.”

The speaker had finished talking now. All eyes
in the room were on Raymond, and a hush fell over the hall. He stood up, steadying himself on my shoulder as I handed him the crutches. He was set to go, and then he nodded toward the drum on the chair and said, “I want to have the drum with me. Come up there with me, Gabe.”

We started across the open floor and steered toward the microphone. I was gimping alongside him, my knee still wrapped from my arthroscopic surgery in Yellowknife. When we got all the way up there, I turned around and saw the same sea of faces that Raymond was looking at. I noticed the curiosity in the faces of the kids our age clustered together down at the end of the hall, still and expectant like everybody else.

The elder who had introduced Raymond set up a folding chair for me to sit on. Raymond had freed up his right hand as he leaned forward on the crutches. His glance told me he wanted the drum. He held it in his right hand by the woven spruce roots that ran across its back. I heard him take a deep breath as I turned to sit down.

“This is Johnny's drum,” Raymond began.

He didn't say it very loud, and his voice was shaky. But everybody heard him.

“I'm sure Johnny made a lot of drums in his life,” Raymond said a little louder. “This was his
last drum. A wolverine got after it and tore the skin.”

Everybody laughed.

Raymond was surprised. He didn't know they were going to laugh. He relaxed. “So I made a new one for it.”

I thought he would open Johnny's letter right away. It was in the envelope that was sticking out of his shirt pocket. Instead he began to talk about Johnny, how he never really knew his great-uncle. Then he said that he was lucky to get to know him in the last two months of his life. He said he was going to tell about Johnny's last two months so everybody would know what he did.

Everyone in the hall listened intently as Raymond told his story, pausing to let the elder translate into Slavey. When he told of the airplane going over the falls, there was a gasp. He told what happened as we ran out of patience waiting for a search plane, how the two of us decided to build the raft and escape. He told of Johnny thinking it wasn't such a good idea, and his sorrow over leaving most of the moose meat behind. The old people around the hall were nodding their heads, understanding perfectly.

In every face in that room, I could see them imagining it all happening way back there in the
mountains. I could feel Raymond's confidence growing.

Raymond told how we were stranded in Deadmen Valley. He told how Johnny kept hunting even when he knew all the moose had probably left. He told of Johnny building the snowshoes. I could see Raymond's parents hanging on every word, my father too. My dad was sitting up to his full height, solemn and respectful as if he was at church, sneaking glances at me as if still trying to convince himself that I was indeed alive. I smiled thinking how it turned out I was right when I guessed he was in that airplane we'd heard flying above the clouds when we were down in the canyon on the raft.

Raymond told of Johnny leading us to the frozen beaver pond after our hope was all but gone. The people were hushed, listening intently. When Raymond told of pulling the beavers out onto the ice, a cry of joy and triumph went up from an old woman down by the kitchen, and applause began from the kids down on the other end of the hall. The applause grew and grew until it sounded like thunder.

When at last the applause had died down, Raymond said, “Johnny died soon after that.”

Raymond took the envelope from his shirt
pocket, took out Johnny's letter, gave a brief explanation of how we came by it, and began to read.

Raymond read it simply, humbly. I thought how it wasn't Raymond reading; to me it sounded just like Johnny talking, Johnny telling of his love for the land and his hopes for the young people. At the end, when Johnny said, “I miss the taste of moose tongue and beaver tail,” there were smiles and laughter all around the hall. Then Raymond finished with Johnny's last words: “And so I say to you: take care of the land, take care of yourself, take care of each other.”

The hall was profoundly quiet in the wake of Johnny's last words. Raymond turned and made his way on the crutches to the fireplace, clutching the hand drum with a couple of fingers. One of the elders brought up a TV tray with big straps of bear fat heaped on it. Raymond beckoned me over with a wave of his head. I took the drum so he could free his right hand. With a little toss, he threw a big strap of fat into the fire, and it started sizzling. He looked at it intently, and then he turned to me and said, “You too, Gabe.”

I placed another strap of fat in the fire. Raymond's head was bowed. I was remembering Johnny's gentle face in the firelight as he told the
old stories, sang the old songs. I could see him peeling back the flakes of pine bark and showing us where the camprobbers hid their blueberries. He was looking at the two of us, and he was smiling. “Thank you, Johnny,” I whispered. The silence in the room held another few minutes, and then everybody was streaming toward the tables filled with food.