The Raven's Gift (6 page)

“And you can see Lucy packs plenty of strips in her pocket,” Nita said, as the lamp lit up the screen behind them, projecting a giant frowning face of a young boy holding a green can of soda pop.

“That’s my grandson,” Lucy said. “He was mad I wouldn’t let him drink that pop.”

John laughed with the crowd at the presenters’ subtle joking. He noticed that the locals and the teachers who had been around awhile were quick to understand and enjoy the humour, while he and the rest
of the new teachers laughed with sincerity but also a slight awkwardness. The teachers didn’t want to offend during a lesson intended to help keep them from offending anyone.

Nita pointed a remote and a new photo appeared. Onscreen a giant fish hung from what looked like driftwood racks, the wood weathered white and grey.

“This is probably what you’re feeling like right now,” Lucy said, grinning. “Like a fish out of water?”

The crowd laughed.

“That looks like dinner to me,” Nita said.

The crowd laughed again.

The slide changed again, this one with a small boat brimming with freshly caught salmon, their scales glistening in the sun.

“The kids most of you will be teaching come from a subsistence background. This means that their families live maybe seventy to ninety percent off the land. As you might have guessed from these photos, salmon and other fishes are a huge part of our diet.”

“So when I teased Lucy about having strips in her pocket, I was talking about fish strips, or dried fish—fish we smoke or dry during the summer and eat year-round.”

The next photo revealed rows and rows of fiery red salmon strips hanging from what looked like a series of clotheslines, stretching along a steep riverbank. The photo after that showed three young Native men, buzz cuts and camouflage, holding M16s and grinning ear to ear. “We have the highest percentage per capita of military members in the country,” said Lucy. “Their deployment just started, too. Going to be really hard on us here, but we’re so sad for them over in that awful desert.”

The next photo revealed two young boys, shotguns slung over their shoulders, walking at the river’s edge, each of them carrying large dead birds. He thought one looked like a Canada goose; the other was some sort of large black duck he’d never seen before.

“I must be hungry,” Nita said. “These pictures are making my stomach rumble.”

The crowd chuckled. She smiled back.

“We hunt, fish, and gather pretty much all year round. The rest of the time we’re getting ready for the next season. Always getting ready, we say. Right now people are putting up silver salmon, and the men who aren’t overseas are already thinking about moose-hunting season.”

“That’s in September,” Lucy added, “when many of your students will leave upriver with their fathers. Some of them will be gone for one to two weeks. They will travel hundreds of miles to get to the moose.”

“Because sometimes,” Nita said as the slide changed to an old woman cutting a leg-sized salmon on a sheet of plywood, “sometimes we get tired of eating only birds and fish.”

The teachers didn’t get the give-and-take of cultural exchange, the ins and outs of verbal and non-verbal communication. The two women delivered their view of their own culture, and just from their presentation alone, the humour, the subtle joking, John felt more at ease and sat back in his chair.

Anna wheeled around and smiled a broad grin when a picture appeared of Lucy’s grandson straddling a dead seal. He wished for a moment he had sat beside her, so he could give her hand a squeeze.

HE DISCOVERED THE BLIND GIRL and her bundle of dried grass the afternoon before he planned to start up the river by himself. Finding her set back that plan, bringing the worst part of winter closer. At first he just told himself he’d sit by and wait for her to die. At first. Then, when her thin, leathery brown face began to come alive, to smooth and slowly fill in the hollows beneath her eyes and in her cheeks, the plan had to change.

That first night he almost shot her. He held the barrel of the black Glock inches from her skull with his finger just resting on the trigger guard. Blind. Starving. Dehydrated. She was already long past dead.
He knew from her heavy breaths that she hadn’t slept soundly for a very long time. How long, he couldn’t guess. One month? Two? How long had she been alone? How did she manage on her own, blind and malnourished?

He waited there beside her for hours on that first night. The pistol didn’t move. His finger didn’t move. He wanted to kill her for her own sake. For his own sake. She would be nothing but a burden. She would exhaust his supplies and require more energy than he could spare. She would drain him and the two of them would starve or freeze to death.

As much as it made sense to just squeeze the trigger, he couldn’t do it. He told himself that he would wait one day. If nothing changed by the next night, he would spare her the agony. One day, he told himself, he would give her that, but really, he knew. He knew he didn’t have what it took. He knew that already.

Even if the trip across the impossible expanse of snow, ice, and tundra would most likely kill them both, he couldn’t leave her to the cold, the empty cupboards, or the people she called the outcasts and their hunger.

Each sunrise brought no warmth. Most nights the two of them would bundle up in their sleeping bags and burrow inside a tarp to escape the incessant and violent winds. Each breath of winter air bit and crystallized the moisture about his nostrils.

The girl meant another human’s breathing to listen to at night. But mostly the girl provided a reason to go on, even if just for another day.

Then there was that eerie thing about the day he found her. How he stopped, as if some invisible bony hand grabbed him by the throat and began pulling him toward the one house in the village he hadn’t checked. The house he’d seen the red fox avoid. He told himself he was looking for extra matches, canned goods, or rifle shells, but instead, in the last house, in the last bedroom he would check, beneath a stained mattress, wrapped in an old, heavy grey wool blanket, he found her.

“It’s okay,” he told the small black spherical hole in the rifle barrel that sprang up when he pulled the mattress off her. He raised his hands, until he saw she couldn’t see him, the light reflected off her dull white eyes. He lowered his hands and she pointed the .22 at his skull.

“Let me smell your mouth,” she cried.

“What? I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay. My name is John. You’re going to be okay,” he said. “What’s your name?” he asked.

He leaned toward her and she took three deep sniffs of his breath and lowered the rifle. A thin, colourless line of foam gathered at the edges of her cracked and blood-scabbed lips. Her white irises searched the space between his body and hers.

“Please,” she whispered, “please help me.” She reached for him. “
Kaigtua
. I’m starving.”

   6   

H
e awoke in the morning to the crackling of twigs in the woodstove. The old woman stirred the remnants of the duck soup, and when she realized he was awake she quickly pulled up her long grey hair and refastened the blue and purple beaded hairnet she had been wearing the day before, a silent gesture to show her commitment to her dead husband.

After pulling his boots on he stood and stretched. His back ached from the hard plywood floor. He probably could have found a sleeping pad or mattress in one of the other houses, but to find one that wasn’t soiled with death, one that the girl could sleep on, wouldn’t have been worth the effort. A stack of her grass sat in a pile beside her. He wondered when she’d removed the grass from the sled, and how he hadn’t heard her. The yellow strands were woven together tightly in a long, flat braid, but he couldn’t tell what she was trying to make.

The stove creaked as the fire started to heat the metal sides. The old woman stirred. He held his hands out and warmed himself in front of the stove’s open door.

The woman took out a small white enamel saucepan with a broken black plastic handle and set it on the stovetop. She poured water from an empty coffee can into the pan and set the coffee can aside. From a tan plastic grocery sack she took a handful of thin green sprigs like pine needles and dropped them into the water.

He reached for the coffee can beside her and ran his fingers across the label: Rich. Dark. Satisfying.

“A cup of joe would be the bee’s knees about now,” he said.

She stirred the mixture in the small pan, using the same wooden spoon she’d used to mix the duck soup.

“We’ll have tundra tea when this done cooking. Too bad, I got no coffee.”

She caught him looking at the spoon.

“This soup is not what make you sick,” she said. “People didn’t die from birds. The earth didn’t make this disease, you know. Yup’ik people been eating birds forever. Yup’ik people been seeing bad sicknesses since when
kass’aqs
come here. Not the ducks. Not the birds that did this to the people. I’ve seen these kind of diseases before. When I was little
piipiq
. Smallpox, measles, influenza—so bad mostly everyone all on the river and the tundra villages die. My sisters tell me that when my mom died from smallpox, at night in our sod house, they let me sleep by her so I stop crying. Even they try to have me
aamaq
on her breasts to make me stop crying during the darkness.”

The water in the saucepan began to boil, a light green mixture, with the little needles floating and churning. She poked her spoon at it, filled the carved wooden depression, and brought the steaming liquid to her lips. She blew gently, and then sipped it.

“Mmm. Almost ready,” she said. “You ever tried our Eskimo tea? Labrador tea to you, maybe.”

“No.”

“You first-year teacher, ah?”

“Yeah.”

She pointed the wooden spoon at his wedding band.

“She teacher, too?”

He nodded.

“It will get easier. Not better. Just easier,” she said. “My first husband
die young. He go through the ice, and I never remarry for a long time, until maybe I was twenty.”

“How old were you when you first got married?” he asked.

“Maybe twelve. They marry early back then. I hardly knew that man at first, but he was a good man. They never found his body, and I said I would wait for him to come back. He never did, and then someone else try marry me.”

She took the saucepan and poured the contents into three green plastic coffee mugs. She handed one to him and called to the girl.

He sniffed at the tea. The steaming liquid had the light scent of gin, or of a juniper berry, but when he sipped it, the warm fluid puckered his lips and numbed his tongue. He ran his tongue against his top teeth to scrape the taste off. He took another sip, this time prepared for the bitterness. It warmed his throat and slithered down into his hungry stomach.

“Girl, have tea,” the old woman said. She pointed the spoon at his ring again, and said, “She not want you to walk heavy without her.”

The girl sat up and took the warm mug from the old woman. She held her nose to the rim and inhaled deeply. She smiled. The first real one he’d seen from her.

“
Quyana
,” she whispered.

“Ii-i,” said the old woman. She plucked a branch out from the saucepan and sucked on it and dipped it into her cup. “I don’t know who that hunter is. But I seen him. He wears a mask and white clothings. He think he is invisible like a snowshoe hare. He was going downriver. He never stopped here, just waited for a bit across the river, watched this way for a while, like he maybe hunting something, and then went floating away on top of the ice.”

“Why do you call him that?” the girl asked. “The hunter?”

“That’s what he is,” she said. “He’s a hunter. He hunting for someone, maybe those bad people, maybe all human beings left. Even us. But he not a real hunter from here. We don’t think when we hunt.
I don’t say, ‘I’m hunting caribou. I want caribou.’ I just go out and hope the earth will provide. A real hunter don’t think about what he hunts. Otherwise the hunted know he’s coming and they know what the hunter wants and they know how to get away.”

THAT FIRST NIGHT in Bethel, Anna and John roamed the streets. They held hands, but let go to cover their mouths against the plumes of fine dust that would billow up from the pickups, cars, and ATVs that raced past them. The intersections, some gravel, some paved, allowed for an odd sort of lawless short-cutting, with vehicles often leaving the roadways to cut off a meaningless amount of distance.