The Great Death (2 page)

Sometimes, Millie hated her little sister.

Nadaeggi

(Two)

Raven was flying around when he saw a village at the edge of the frozen sea. He landed and spoke to the chief of the village.

“Oh, wise chief,” he said cunningly, “the village up the coast is planning to attack your village.”

The old chief was very concerned. “What shall we do?” he asked.

A
COMMOTION AROSE
at the lakefront. Dogs were barking, and everyone in the village was running to see what the excitement was. Millie and Maura raced down the little hill and joined the crowd, most of whom were standing along the upper beach watching three men approach the village. Still far away, they walked along the shore from the direction where the river begins, about a mile down the lake.

“Who is it?” an old woman asked.

A boy replied, “I don't know, grandmother. I can't see them from here.”

“Is it a chief from downriver?” someone else asked.

Every village had a chief.

The elder men talked among themselves and quickly agreed to dispatch several young men to meet the approaching party halfway. They ran along the path that meandered close to the lakeshore. On reaching the men, they stopped and spoke briefly to them, and then the group walked together to the village, several of the loose dogs sniffing the strangers.

One of the men was from a village downriver. He was a cousin to several older villagers, and they clasped his hands when they saw him. But the two men with him were strange-looking. Their skin was light, almost white. One had red hair, while the other's hair was like that of a light-colored grizzly bear. Both had blue eyes!

Millie and Maura had never seen anyone like them before, though they had heard of such people in stories told by the men who sometimes left the village to go downriver to trade their furs for large sacks of flour and dried beans and tea and other goods, such as small glass windows, iron cooking kettles, metal axes, saws, guns, bullets, knives, and steel animal traps.

The two girls pressed through the crowd so that they could see better and hear the conversation. They wondered if the men were friendly or if they meant harm. The strangers were taller than any man in the village by a head. Their clothes were different. Their boots were different. Even the outsiders' words were different. No one in the village understood what they were saying. The strangers had to speak first to the man from downriver, who turned and spoke to the villagers in their language, even though some of his words sounded a little different because he spoke another dialect.

The white men asked how many people lived in the village, how many men and women and children. They asked if there were other villages farther up the wide valley. The chief, an old man whose hair was mostly gray, answered the man from downriver, who turned to tell the strangers, one of whom quickly scrawled a little stick against broad, white leaves bound in hide, which he had retrieved from a rucksack.

“Have you any news?” the chief asked the man from downriver.

The man coughed into his hand a few times before answering.

“Yes,” he said, clearing his throat. “Many of the old ones have died this summer. So have some of the very young. It has been a bad time.”

Then he began to recite the names of the dead. Some were relatives of those who stood quietly listening, shocked by the long list. They had seen some of those very people only the previous spring.

“What can we do to help?” the chief asked.

“Nothing,” replied the other Indian. He looked to be a few years older than Millie and Maura's father, who was standing beside the old chief. “Our shaman exhausted himself trying to heal the people. But then, old as he was, he too died from the sickness, and now we have no shaman. Death is everywhere, in every house.”

The shaman from Millie and Maura's village had died of old age during the winter. Some people said he was ninety years old.

The man coughed again, harder this time, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Little red spots dotted his hands and arms, which no one had noticed until then. Neither Maura nor Millie had seen such spots on a person before. Millie wondered if he had been bitten by a hundred mosquitoes.

One of the strangers, the red-haired man, reached into his pack and pulled out a brown wooden box. The other man untied something from the side of his pack. It had three wooden legs, which he stretched out longer and longer. The red-haired man set the box atop the three-legged device. He looked closely at the thing, his fingers working little levers and dials. Then he spoke to the man from downriver, who told everyone to stand close together while the man squatted behind the device.

Millie and Maura giggled. Others laughed as well. The strange red-haired man looked funny hunched behind the box, glancing up and motioning for the people to move closer together.

A sharp sound came from the box, like the snap of a dry twig when it's broken and thrown into the cooking fire.
Click.
Maura grabbed Millie's hand, frightened by the noise, but when nothing happened, she let go. After a moment, the man looked up, lifted the thing—legs, box, and all—and moved it a few steps closer and to the side before hunkering behind it again.
Click.

Both men then walked around the village, setting up the device here and there, the man with light brown hair continually scrawling on the white hide. Most of the villagers followed them, curious about what they were doing and what it was the man saw of such great interest inside the little box. Perhaps it was some sort of ritual. Sometimes the men asked villagers to stand before a cabin or a tall cache or a rack full of drying salmon. Sometimes they asked individuals to squat beside a dog or a canoe. They asked Millie and Maura's father to stand beside the bearskin stretched and nailed to the outside wall of their cabin. It was a very large skin, at least nine feet long. Then the red-haired man gestured for Millie and Maura to stand alongside a dogsled with tall grass and fireweed growing up through its runners. When they didn't understand, he took them by the shoulders and gently pushed them closer to the sled. Maura didn't like the man touching her, but she moved all the same.

After a while, the women began to prepare a great meal. The men and children followed the strangers, watching them curiously. It seemed like every dog in the village sniffed them. A few kept their distance, barking until someone led them away and tied them up. Smoke from a dozen fires drifted in the air. Everyone was busy. Millie and Maura helped their mother, while some of the other children continued to follow the strangers around the village. Both girls wanted to be outside too, but Mother insisted that they help her with the preparations. The man from downriver spent most of his time speaking with the men of the village and visiting in the homes of some of his relatives, talking about those who had died.

When the sun hung low on the edge of the horizon, the women and girls began to carry food into the community house, a long log house in the middle of the village used for special events and ceremonies, like the potlatch—a ritual involving feasting, dancing, singing, and the giving away of gifts to strengthen the bonds between kinsmen and clans and villages. They brought boiled porcupine and beaver, roasted bear and moose meat, roasted and dried salmon, and pots of fish-head soup. Maura carried a birch-bark basket partially filled with blueberries and cranberries, for they were ripe in the hills, while Millie carried a basket brimming with golden-brown fry bread, her favorite.

Everyone was smiling and talking about the visitors and how good the food smelled. When everything was ready, the entire village joined in the feast welcoming the guests. There hadn't been such a celebration since before the snow melted in the spring. After supper, elder men sang and drummed while the People danced—the men and boys in the center of the circle, women and girls in the outer circle, as was the custom. Millie and Maura took turns dancing and carrying their baby cousin, speaking to him softly, rocking him in their arms, and smiling. People thanked the man from downriver for bringing the news, for though it was unhappy news—and so heavily received—they would not have known otherwise. In this rugged country, word traveled slowly, like the distant glacier, or not at all.

That night the three visitors slept in the community house, and the next morning, the strangers and their guide, who looked very sick indeed, began the long trek downriver. Millie and Maura stood among the people on the beachfront watching as the party disappeared down the trail along the lapping lake's edge. The sisters wondered if they'd ever see the mysterious men again. They wondered about the hundred mosquito bites on the man from downriver.

“Do you think they itch?” Maura whispered to Millie, imagining how terrible it would be if they all itched at the same time.

The villagers were thankful to have had guests, to have welcomed them properly and according to tradition, even thankful in their own way to have received the grim news. Several of the village dogs followed the men for a ways but eventually turned around and trotted home.

When the strangers were no longer visible, the villagers returned to the busy work of survival, catching and drying salmon, repairing snowshoes and dogsleds, collecting and sawing firewood, scraping and tanning hides, and mending and fashioning warm clothes against the winter, which still seemed far away, biding its time in the distant white mountains, nestled against glaciers, awaiting its coming release to the world.

The People always prepared against death, for they knew how it crept steadily down the mountains toward them.

“Life goes on,” they thought as they busied themselves with work. “Life always goes on.”

Taa
'
i

(Three)

Raven had a wicked plan. “You must ambush the enemy on their way to your village,” he said, his black eyes blinking. “You must catch them by surprise.”

“Where shall we wait to ambush them?” asked the chief, thankful for Raven's help.

T
HE
G
REAT
D
EATH BEGAN
on a cloudless fall day. Geese flying overhead on their long journey south called down to the People, telling them farewell. Others, resting on a far shoreline, turned into the wind, clambered into the sky, and joined their cousins.

Several days after the strange men left the village, the chief awoke with small red spots all over his body. Since there was no shaman in the village, some of the old women rubbed bear grease and ash on his skin and gave him weak tea made from the leaf of a local plant to drink. The men readied a steam bath hot enough to drive out the sickness. One of his sons even made him a pot of bear-heart soup, a traditional remedy to bolster courage and vigor.

Two days later, some of the other men had the spots, then their children and their wives. In a week, almost everyone in the village had red spots like the man from downriver who had guided the strangers. Everyone remembered what the man had said about the deaths in his village.

“The very old and the very young,” he had said.

But they also remembered how sickly the man had looked when he left with the two white men. Death trudged along the path beside that man like a shadow, like a huge tiredness hanging off his shoulders. The people began to worry that whatever had befallen the village downriver was now upon them.

At first the spots were unpleasant to look at but they were not debilitating. But day after day, the infected grew increasingly weary, until the entire village could be divided in half: those who were too weak to work or move about and those who looked after them. No one was hunting or cutting firewood or picking berries. No one was catching fish for the winter, though the salmon splashed weakly in the shallow stream, spawned out and dying. Their bodies were growing blood-red, their heads dark green, their mouths gnarled and hooked.

Because there was so little activity throughout the village, bears grew bold, wading in the shallow creek below the footbridge to catch salmon. Soon, the creek banks were lined with partially eaten salmon, rotting and maggot-infested. Flies were everywhere, and the smell brought more bears.

Some of the more fearless bears stole salmon from the drying racks, the people's vital winter supply. The village dogs tried to drive them away, but the bears were unafraid. Bears, and especially wolves, were known to eat dogs, and so the dogs relented.

Then the chief died. Everyone mourned his passing, but they were too sick to honor him with a potlatch, too sick even to bury him. His wife died two days later. Then four other elders died, and then the babies began to die, and then the children. Winter had descended only partially down the hills, and yet death was among them.

It was a season out of season.

For reasons no one understood, least of all the girls or their parents, Millie and Maura were unaffected by the plague. Perhaps, said one old woman between hacking coughs, the owl, that harbinger of death, simply could not see them. But no one could say for sure.

The girls stayed in their house caring for their parents. Father had been among the first of the strong men to be stricken. The red spots were all over him. His body was always hot or cold, afire or shivering. Mother wasn't as sick, though she also had the spots, but she was too weak to haul water or cook meals. Maura wiped sweat from Father's face when he was hot, covered him with blankets when he was cold. Millie swept the earthen floor and cooked meals, though neither parent would eat or drink anything. She had to force herself to eat.

“We have to stay strong for Mother and Father,” she told Maura, who had also lost her appetite. “We have to take care of them.”

The fresh water and firewood ran out. Millie turned to Maura and said with hesitation in her voice, “We need to fetch water and firewood, and the honey bucket is full.”