Far North

by Will Hobbs

  Raymond said, “Johnny means it won’t be all frozen solid down there like we think it will be.”

  “But this patch will freeze over later, right? After a few more weeks of cold? There shouldn’t be any open spots anywhere, after a while. We can walk out then. Didn’t you say people drive cars over the Liard River on your winter road?”

  “That’s the Liard—it’s slow and wide, and it’s out in the open country. I’ve always heard people say the Nahanni is a tricky river, even in the winter. Maybe that’s what they’re talking about, that it won’t freeze solid, just like Johnny’s saying.”

  We spent the days following the old hunter around Deadmen Valley, setting snares and hauling logs around to help make deadfall traps. We were always keeping an eye out for the few cranberries, currants, blueberries, and raspberries that remained. Rose hips were easier to find, and we were able to keep making tea.

  Every time we had to use our bare fingers, we paid the price. Once cold, they took a long time to warm again. At least I had my oversize mittens to pull over my ski gloves. Raymond’s wool mittens weren’t large enough to accommodate his gloves inside. Johnny had only a pair of winter gloves.

  One day Johnny stopped at a certain tree, some sort of pine, and started peeling back the little flakes of bark with the sheath knife. Behind every flake was a blueberry cached for the winter. “Camprobber,” the old man said, using their nickname for the gray jays. Raymond started prying out blueberries with his pocket knife, and I joined in, all three of us working on that tree like woodpeckers. It was a tough way to make a meal.

  Raymond always wore the packsack, and I had my daypack, in the hope that we might find something to stuff in them and bring home. So far we were collecting just enough small animals from the deadfalls and snares to keep us alive—a few snowshoe hares, a couple of red squirrels, a marten. Along with a few berries and rose hips, that was our diet now. Even in my sleep I was starving.

  Sometimes we couldn’t find any berries or rose hips. One day the old man made a tea of spruce tips. It tasted awful pitchy. Raymond said it tasted much better in the spring when the tips were new.

  When we went out in the bush with Johnny Raven, we walked quiet as deer. Johnny led with the rifle, Raymond followed, carrying the ax, and I came last. Johnny would never wear the turquoise headband over his ears when he was hunting. I wondered how he could stand the cold and why he hadn’t lost his ears to frostbite.

  On the twenty-first of December we followed Johnny several miles south, toward the glowing orange horizon. It was my birthday, and it was also the shortest day of the year.

  It was Raymond’s birthday as well. When I wished him a happy birthday, he was surprised I knew. “It’s mine, too,” I told him. “We both just turned sixteen. I found out we had the same birthday back at the boarding school, when I was getting my room assignment.”

  “Who’s older, I wonder?” Raymond said as we followed behind Johnny. “My mother said I was born at eight in the morning.”

  “I was born at five in the afternoon.”

  Raymond stopped walking and gave me a poke in the arm. “Happy birthday, little brother.”

  I had to laugh. It felt good, him calling me that.

  Johnny was disappearing ahead of us into the trees. We hustled to catch up and found him inspecting a clearing—a beaver pond, I realized, all frozen over. A huge mound of sticks and mud stuck out of the iron-hard ice, and beaver-chewed aspen stumps circled the pond. “I bet Johnny’s wishing he had the stuff he needs for trapping beavers under the ice,” Raymond remarked.

  “Is that possible?” I wondered aloud.

  “My father used to do it back when he had his trapline. You have to be able to figure out where all the beavers’ runways out of the main lodge are, where the runways go to the feed pile, and where they have their hideout houses—those are extra places besides the lodge where the beavers can get up and breathe air. You have to be able to read all different kinds of ice and keep a map of everything in your head. They use steel chisels and chain saws to get through the ice down to the runways so they can set the snares.”

  The old hunter was out on the pond, studying the ice. We watched from the bank, stamped our feet in the cold, and waited while he looked closely at different spots all around the pond and its banks. “What could he be doing?” I asked Raymond.

  Johnny marked a spot with a stick, eventually three more. Then he took the ax from Raymond and proceeded to chop away at one of the spots along the bank. At last he exposed a small hollow place with open water. “One of the hideout houses, I think,” Raymond said. The old man rested as the water in there froze over in a matter of minutes.

  Raymond cut open the second hideout house, and I cut open the third, making the ice chips fly. Raymond said I should slow down. It was dangerous to work up a sweat in this cold and get your clothes wet. The two of us shared the fourth hideout den as Johnny Raven looked on approvingly. Then we began to cut open the main lodge from above. Raymond and I took turns. The sticks and the mud were frozen together like concrete. Finally Raymond broke through into free air. The roof of the lodge had been a little more than a foot thick.

  Now we worked to enlarge the hole in the top of the lodge, until we could look in, and then we saw the wide tail of a beaver as the animal splashed into the water from a platform above the waterline. Johnny pulled a long hefty stick free and set it aside. He had us keep working until we had chopped away a good part of the top of the lodge. We could see beavers in the water snatching a breath of air, then disappearing through their runways. After a minute they’d be back. I realized that they were finding their hideout spots frozen shut, then returning to the main lodge, which was the only place where they could breathe.

  Johnny Raven began to act out a pantomime for Raymond, throwing in a few English words and a few in Slavey. I thought I knew what he was trying to describe, but it didn’t seem possible. I wouldn’t have thought Raymond could accept what the old man seemed to be suggesting. But when Raymond turned to me, his dark eyes were filled with determination. He said, “Johnny says the beavers are too big for him to lift. He wants me to get down in there and lift them out. Then you club them with that stick.”

  I said, “Their teeth could take your fingers off!”

  Raymond was trying to stay calm. “He says they’ll give their lives to us if we do it right.”

  I said, “Have you ever heard of this before?”

  He shook his head. “Johnny says as long as I don’t show any fear I’ll be okay. I want to do this—I want to do something for him. He thinks I can do it.”

  There was nothing I could say. We needed the meat.

  Raymond turned away for a minute to collect his thoughts. Then he took off his gloves and climbed bare-handed into the lodge, kneeling on the beavers’ platform, keeping still. I held my breath. After a few minutes the commotion in the water ceased. Five beavers were resting their chins on their platform as if they were waiting for Raymond to take them, just as the old man had said.

  I stole a glance at Raymond’s eyes, which were focused on the eyes of one of the animals. He had fully given himself over to believing this could be done. Then, with a smooth motion, he took the largest beaver by the front legs and lifted it past his chest and face, rising with it and lifting it out of the lodge. I clubbed it decisively on the skull, ending its life in an instant. I was surprised by its size and its weight as I lifted it out of the way—fifty pounds, I thought. Four times Raymond repeated this feat, and four more times I gave them a quick death with no suffering.

  Raymond didn’t climb out of the lodge jubilant. He was stunned and shaken. The old man had a tear in his eye as he helped Raymond pull his gloves over his freezing fingers. “Per-fec,” Johnny said.

  “I can’t believe what I just saw,” I said.

  “I know,” Raymond sputtered. “I’ve heard my father talk about things kind of like this. He always said that sometimes the animals give their lives willingly to the hun
ter. But I never really believed it before.”

  Johnny Raven gutted the beavers right there and tossed their entrails into the water, each time saying the same few words in Slavey as they made a splash. Recovering from his shock, Raymond said, “My father told me what it means when they say that. It means, ‘Make more beaver.’”

  That night Raymond gave the first of the beaver meat to his great-uncle, a big piece of the fatty tail. I could see the quiet pride in both their eyes, to be able to give and receive according to the old tradition.

  As Raymond took a piece of the tail, Johnny encouraged me to try it, too, and I did. It was almost all fat and tasted a lot better than I thought it would, kind of like the greasy fat on the baby back ribs I used to eat back in Texas. Raymond started giggling: the fat was running down our faces. To look at us, we didn’t have a care in the world.

  Now we were wealthy in meat, or at least it felt like we were. We knew better than to ever eat our fill—we didn’t know how long it was going to have to last. But it sure felt good having all that beaver meat up in the cache.

  In the middle of the night, I happened to waken. The fire had nearly gone out, and Johnny Raven was stoking it, as he did every few hours to keep it alive. I lay awake aching from the nightly ordeal of spending the endless hours on the ground. I kept picturing Raymond, the way his eyes and the eyes of the beaver were locked together. Then my thoughts drifted back as they often did to an image I kept seeing of my father, always looking down out of the window of an airplane.

  I was within a moment of falling back asleep when, through my lashes, I saw the white patch of the old man’s hair bobbing in the near darkness of the cabin. When I looked again, I saw the dark outline of his body with arms outspread. Johnny was flapping his arms like the wings of a bird. He was standing over Raymond and was taking little hops, both feet at once, hopping and flapping his “wings.” He did this dance for several minutes, and then he lay back down in his blanket.

  What did it mean, Johnny dancing over Raymond like that? A celebration for what Raymond had done that day? A kind of prayer? I fell back to sleep wondering, knowing I’d seen something Johnny hadn’t even meant Raymond to see, much less me.

  A foot of new snow fell while Johnny was out moose-hunting the next day. With the beaver meat, we were all eating well enough to get our strength back. Johnny had stretched the beaver pelts on hoops of willow and hung them along the walls. In the evenings he was tanning the pelts with a paste that he made from the brains. He was going to make a pair of oversized mitts for Raymond. With difficulty, he made a joke that the women better not come up to Deadmen Valley and see him doing the tanning. When his hands weren’t busy making something, he tapped the drum and told the old stories in his own language. Raymond listened, and he started to try out the Slavey he remembered from school, and to ask for the meaning of other words. Johnny Raven was pleased in his quiet way.

  On Christmas Day, Johnny Raven prepared as usual for his hunt in the morning twilight. Raymond asked if we should go with him. The old man patted him fondly on the shoulder but indicated that he would go alone. We made the circuit of the snares and deadfalls but didn’t find anything. We talked about Christmas, and how we didn’t have anything to give each other. “Wishes?” I volunteered. “What else do we have?”

  “You go first,” Raymond said.

  I said, “I guess I wish you get home safe to your family and live a long life, big brother.”

  Raymond smiled and said, “You can’t beat that. I wish that you surprise your father by living through this.”

  When we returned to the cabin just after dark, Johnny wasn’t there. “He’s always back before dark,” Raymond muttered. We set out on his trail, lit brilliantly by a half-moon reflecting off the snow. We found him no more than a mile from the cabin, pitched forward in an unnatural position in the snow. He was frozen stiff.

  At first we could only stare, trying to comprehend what had happened. We knew in an instant what this meant for us, and at the same time could hardly begin to imagine the enormity of our loss.

  It looked like he’d never even had time to try to get up. “Heart attack?” I wondered aloud.

  Raymond didn’t answer. He just knelt in the snow beside Johnny, his eyes closed, and then he let out a wail that might have been heard in Nahanni Butte. The tears welled in my own eyes and froze as they ran down my face.

  At last Raymond stood, slowly, then picked up the rifle. He turned and stared past me, and he looked lost. “They always told us to learn everything we could from the elders,” Raymond said. “We never paid any attention. We thought it was just some crafts that we didn’t need anymore. Johnny was trying to show me everything, everything I would need. I never got to tell him that, to thank him. I never got to tell him anything!”

  “You said a lot without words,” I said, knowing it to be true. “He really cared about you.”

  As much as we hated to, we knew we had to leave his body there overnight. We covered it with spruce boughs, then retreated to the cabin, numb and full of dread. It was over for us now. We both knew it. There was nothing more to say.

  Raymond remained silent for a long time. He stoked the fire; then he stared at the door of the woodstove, his eyes never even blinking. “He should be buried in the ground,” Raymond said finally. “But that’s impossible.”

  “What about cremation?”

  “You mean burning?” Raymond thought awhile. “I think that would be okay. I think they even used to do it in the old days, before the missionaries. His spirit’s not in his body now anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter. The way the elders talk about it, his spirit will stay close for a long time to the places he lived, before it goes on its long journey.”

  “That’s good for us,” I said. “If he stays close, I mean.”

  “Do you think that could be true?” Raymond asked, looking right at me. “About someone’s spirit staying around after they’re dead?”

  “I was seven when my mother died,” I said. “The way I think about it, as long as I can remember her, she’s still around to help me.”

  In the morning we felled five dead spruce that we found not far from where Johnny had fallen. It took us all day to build a huge platform of dry timber over a core of kindling and split wood. When we were ready, in the late twilight, I could see Raymond was reluctant to do what had to be done: bring Johnny’s body. I told him I would do it.

  As I approached the body, I was trembling. “Thank you, Johnny Raven,” I whispered aloud as I removed the spruce boughs. “You kept us alive. If I’d listened to you in the first place…”

  I had never touched a dead person before. I tried to keep my mind clear. I needed to do this right. I held my breath and turned him over. His face showed him caught by surprise, with a thought in his eyes that was never finished. It occurred to me that his last thought may have been of us, the fix we’d be in.

  My eyes fell on his moccasins. I realized that they could save us if one of us got our feet wet. It was difficult to remove them with his feet frozen solid, but at last I succeeded.

  “What else?” I said aloud. “I know you’d want to help us any way you could.”

  With great difficulty I removed his parka, down vest, and sweater. I noticed that one pocket of his wool shirt was bulging. Inside I found a thick envelope, folded in half and sealed. I stuffed the envelope in my parka pocket and zipped it shut. I checked the rest of his pockets in case there was something else. There was nothing. I saved his belt and the sheath knife that was attached to it.

  I lifted his body over my shoulder. It was lighter even than I would have guessed. I was thankful my ribs had mostly healed, and that I still had the strength to carry him. I walked with him through the woods, fear finding my bones worse than the cold ever had.

  Raymond was nowhere around, but when I’d placed Johnny’s body on the top of the pyre, Raymond appeared out of the trees with a wad of shredded birchbark in his hands. Taking the flint-and-steel fire starte
r from around his neck, Raymond said, “He really liked this thing. I think it would be good for me to start the fire with this.”

  Raymond pulled the fire starter apart, roughed up the little white cube with his pocket knife, then propped up shreds of birchbark above the cube. In the darkness, the steel striker made a brilliant shower of sparks, white-hot at the center. Some of the sparks fell on the cube and a flame was born. The flame quickly rose above the cube. Raymond fed the fire with tiny pieces of tinder, then reached in with two little sticks and retrieved the cube. He spit on it to put it out, saying, “Johnny wouldn’t want us to waste one of these.”

  The fire advanced quickly through the tinder and dry sticks. I pulled Raymond back as the big logs caught on fire. The heat was growing dangerously intense. We stepped back even farther. A few minutes later, Johnny’s body was going up fast in a column of black smoke.

  When the logs began to collapse upon themselves, I tugged at Raymond’s parka and said, “He’s gone, Raymond. It’s you and me now.”

  We turned away, stopping to collect Johnny’s things. Raymond took the sheath knife from the belt and hung it from his own. We started back toward the cabin. From far off we could still hear the popping and crackling of the burning spruce, and when we turned we could see the flames lighting the shaggy trees all around.

  Just then the northern lights swept over Deadmen Valley from the mountain rims, streaming and spiraling all around with reds and purples in addition to the greens and yellows I’d seen before. From horizon to horizon the sky was ablaze with magic bonfires. “There’s an old story,” Raymond said, his voice breaking, “that the northern lights are the spirits of great warriors.”

  “I like that,” I said.

  “I don’t think Johnny would’ve wanted to die in a house or a hospital. This way he got to die up the Nahanni, where he was born.”