by Will Hobbs
For several minutes I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. “Just keep trying,” I pleaded finally. “Just don’t give up.”
“Our meat will never hold out until we get a moose.”
All I could think of to say was “We have to keep trying.”
“You…you never even complain!”
“Neither do you,” I answered him, and it was true. “I’ll tell you, though, if you want to get me started, I feel like I’ve been pulled through six knotholes and poked in the eye with a sharp stick.”
With a weak smile, he said, “That makes me feel better.”
Late in the day we came across the fresh tracks of sheep, and of wolves that had walked in their trail. The tracks led down off the rim onto a bench pointing back to the east. “It’s not the direction we’re going,” Raymond said, “but we have to get some more meat. If we’re ever going to get a moose, we have to keep eating.”
“One bullet for a sheep and one for a moose?” I asked. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
With a shrug, he said, “I think that’s what Johnny would do.”
We came down off the plateau and along the foot of a long line of cliffs pocked with caves, following the trail of the sheep and wolves. Raymond stopped at a particular spot, I didn’t know why. I sagged, panting. Raymond stood there a long time eyeing the cliff and a cavern perched about thirty feet above us. Then he said, “Sheep went up there. Look,” he said, pointing, “right there the moss is torn off.”
At first I couldn’t see a thing. I looked harder. Yes, I could see it now, the torn pieces of moss. I could even see a few droppings on the route the sheep had taken to get up to the cave.
“Wolves can’t climb that,” Raymond said, suddenly intense. “That’s why the sheep go up there. After the wolves leave, the sheep can come down. But there’s a chance some are still up there where we can’t see them.”
“Then let’s go find out,” I said.
Raymond climbed first with the rifle. I scrambled up behind him. No sheep in sight, only an opening fifty feet wide and just as high, but there were plenty of droppings, some of them fresh. Sheep had indeed milled around here on the lip of the cave. “You were right,” I said.
The footing was treacherous. The water falling from seeps high above had built up a sheet of solid ice that inclined back toward the inside of the cavern. We inched forward until we could begin to see down and into the murkiness. The ice made a continuous slope that suddenly pitched down like a crystal slide to the floor of the cave twenty feet below. I thought I saw something move. I looked again. Standing there looking up at us from the darkness was a white sheep. A single white sheep. It was a big ram, quite alive and apparently in good condition, with tremendous, curling horns.
17
THE RAM WAS STANDING amid the skulls and skeletons of sheep that must have starved to death in this cave over the centuries. “Can we get him out of there once you shoot him?” I wondered aloud. “Slide down just like he did, then chop stairs back up with the ax,” Raymond said with a smile on his face, the first in a long time. The ram just stood there, looking up at us.
Raymond lay down on his belly with the rifle. He took aim and focused all his concentration. I’m sure the cold metal touching his bare hand burned like fire. I was just hoping that the ram didn’t make a sudden move. I expected the blast of the rifle at any instant.
Instead of firing, Raymond set the rifle down and reached for his glove. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking up at me. “Maybe we don’t have to shoot him. Maybe we can get him with the ax, and save this bullet.”
“Of course!” I said. “What a great idea! Should I slide down into the cave?”
“Let’s think some more about how we’re going to do it. This sheep isn’t going anywhere. Let’s find camp, start a fire, eat some food, get some rest.”
We climbed back down the cliff. A hundred yards farther along the base of the cliff we found another cave and made camp there. That evening we each ate three plates of stew. In the morning we ate three more, nearly finishing our rations.
The ram was lying down when it saw us appear. It stood, looking up at us. We took off our masks—they were such a hindrance. I slid down first, avoiding the scattered skulls and bones. The ram retreated into the poor light at the back of the cave, squared off, and lowered his head, fronting those huge horns. The cave had a faint sweetness to its musty air, an ancient residue of death. “The ax,” I called up to Raymond, wondering if the ram might charge me.
The ram stayed put as I began to chop out our stairs back up. When I finished the last step and joined Raymond at the top, the ram ran back into the light, stared up at us, and gave a snort. “Killing this ram might not be so easy,” I said, “even with the two of us.”
“You’re right.” Raymond nodded. “He could hurt us bad with those horns before we could get a swing at him.”
“How ’bout a lasso?” I suggested. “We could take apart the pull-rope on the toboggan.”
When the time came, the ram skittered back and forth across the dusty floor of the cave a couple of times, then froze at the back in the near darkness to face us. I had the lasso ready, but aiming was going to be difficult. I crept closer, knowing the ram was thinking about charging. If he did, I was going to get behind Raymond and his ax real fast.
A half-dozen times my crude lasso came close, striking the ram’s horns but falling to the ground. At last it settled over the horns and I cinched it down fast. “You got him,” I heard Raymond exclaim.
The ram bolted from the back of the cave, away from both of us, and I held on tight. Suddenly I lost my footing, went down hard, and was being dragged across the floor of the cave. I saw the ram kicking at the rope, fighting it, then he tripped up and went down, hoofs and horns flailing all over the place as Raymond came down on him with the dull butt of the axhead, again and again.
Shuddering, the ram was in his death throes. When I looked up at Raymond, I saw that he had taken a deep gash in his forehead and was bleeding all over his parka. He had his hand up against his head, trying to stop the blood. “Hoof got me,” he explained as I picked myself up.
“Look at all this meat,” he said, freeing his sheath knife. He bent over the ram and bled it at the throat.
“Let’s take care of you first,” I insisted. “Your forehead is bleeding pretty good.”
We got the blood stopped with Raymond’s bandanna, then climbed out and returned to camp. I boiled some water and cleaned his wound, about three-quarters of an inch long. Raymond didn’t want me to try stitching it up. “No way you’re putting a needle in my forehead,” he said. “Not without an anesthetic.” I used a couple of butterfly bandages on it and then taped down a gauze dressing over that. “Good work, cowboy,” he told me when I was done. “Let’s go get that sheep.”
Our feast began with two smoking-hot sheep kidneys that Raymond insisted couldn’t be wasted. We decided to stay for a few days, eat all we wanted, and get our strength back.
The next day we made an interesting discovery about our cave. The front edge of its floor was a rubbish heap of bones and broken arrow points. We figured out that the blacking on the walls of the cave must have come from the smoke of countless prehistoric cooking fires. Raymond’s ancestors knew this place well, we decided, and had camped here to take advantage of the sheep that fell down the slide in the neighboring cave.
A raven sailed by, eyeing us at close range. Raymond threw a few scraps to it. It came close, within ten or twelve feet, taking the food, watching us with a cold black eye. Raymond fed it all it wanted. The big bird did a few hops, both feet at once, then it flew away croaking, wingtips thrashing the heavy air.
I asked Raymond how it ever happened that he had stopped at the spot where the sheep climb to the cavern, and figured it all out. “I heard a raven flying around up there,” he said. “I think the raven could see the sheep.”
“Did you see the raven?”
With a shake of his he
ad, he said, “It was weird. I looked for it, but I couldn’t see it. I only heard its wings.”
After two days, with our strength returning, we knew we had to set out again and try to find a moose. Our breath made those crackling sounds again as it hit the air. It was fifty-five degrees below zero when we left the cave. We had to go slow in order to avoid getting our clothes damp from exertion. At this temperature we couldn’t afford any mistakes, and yet we had to try to get over the mountains and into the Yukon. Raymond mentioned that his father always said it was okay to be out in the cold working on the trapline “until nothing was moving in the woods.”
“Does it get this cold down at Nahanni Butte?” I asked. “At the village?”
“Sometimes, but we don’t even play street hockey when it gets this cold.”
“Does your father still run his trapline?”
“Two years ago he got the job keeping the diesel generator going. It makes the electricity for Nahanni Butte. He’s a great mechanic—that’s how I learned how to fix snowmobiles.”
Other than the occasional rifle-shot crack of a tree freezing and splitting, complete silence reigned in the woods, a profound stillness without even the suggestion of wind. The only sound was that of a raven sometimes overhead, its ragged wingtips beating the dense air.
The snowpack had set up like iron, and the snowshoes gave us complete freedom on it. Raymond’s frosty breath ahead of me made fog that swirled around his head and hung in his wake. Squirrels were still moving around in the trees, and sometimes we walked right up on snowshoe hares without seeing them until they suddenly darted away.
The waxing moon rode high in the sky, lighting our way for hours after twilight was gone. It was so bright, reflecting off the snow, I could have read a book by it. The mountain ranges stood out with amazing clarity as they shone in the moonlight, their countless jagged peaks rising from an all-white world that floated high above the dark forests.
I would have thought that the moon would hug the winter horizon in the North, like the sun does, but its arc carried it above the highest mountains. We benefited from it, putting on the miles. The northern lights would come and go, swirling and dancing and shape-shifting. They made me think of Johnny Raven. Sometimes I thought I heard a sound that accompanied them, like humming synthesizer music, and I guessed it was some sort of natural phenomenon associated with the lights, but then I decided it was only my mind playing tricks.
We were traveling through an unworldly dimension, yet it wasn’t dreamed.
Raymond and I almost never spoke. It felt like we both knew we were marching toward those black spaces between the stars. As I pulled the toboggan it helped to let my mind drift, having long conversations with my father. I lost all touch with Raymond, who must have been having conversations of his own in his head. Who with? His parents? His brother and sisters? Johnny Raven?
Hike, make shelter, get firewood, melt snow for drinking water, eat, try to get snatches of sleep while you weren’t fighting the cold or feeding the fire. Nothing could be accomplished without immense effort and the pain that reminded us we were still alive. The sheep steaks came out of the sack hard as bricks. To keep up our strength, we ate all we could. We no longer had the will to ration ourselves.
On our third day out of the cave we crested the mountains at a wide pass and paused to get our bearings. We had to be looking into the Yukon and the headwaters of the Beaver River on the other side, because as far as we could see, the land sloped down and away into a long river valley. We were both standing there, gasping for breath after the searing climb. Raymond looked up like he saw something, and then his eyes went to the rocky ridgeline up above us along the divide. After a minute he said to me, “That raven…”
I was still panting like a worn-out packhorse. All I could think about was how good it was going to feel to start on the long downhill. I hadn’t seen a raven.
“Didn’t you see that raven?” Raymond asked, his voice hoarse. His face was hidden behind the red mask, which was iced around the mouth and nose holes. His eyelashes had partially frozen together. His lips, like mine, were cracked and caked with dried blood.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“It flew right by, a minute ago. It tucked and rolled right in front of us. Then it flew over to that tree, way over there, the one by itself up in those rocks. It’s still there.”
Panting, he pointed out the tree, but I still couldn’t see the bird. Ravens are big and black. The tree was quite a distance off. I squinted, trying to make out a raven. “I can’t quite see it,” I said, but I wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him. “Sorry,” I said. “I just can’t see it.”
“You didn’t hear it either? It called, Ggaagga…ggaagga—‘Animal…animal.’”
I shook my head. “I was daydreaming. I’ve heard so many ravens, maybe I just tuned it out.”
“We’d have to do a lot more climbing to go up there,” Raymond said.
What was he talking about? Climbing way up on that ridge? After a raven?
For a second I thought I was going to lose it, blow up at him in utter frustration. I held on. I waited. I caught my breath. He’d never blown up at me.
I looked down into the Yukon side all laid out before us, its mountains worn down and subdued compared to all the jagged ranges behind us. It was more important to stick by Raymond than to make sense. “You’re our hunter,” I said. “You should call it. Even if it doesn’t work out—I could use the exercise.”
He laughed. A laugh was a scarce commodity.
I said, “I feel as strong as a half-dead musk-ox.”
Despite his mask, I could detect a weak smile. Raymond said, “You are a musk-ox, little brother.”
We struggled up the ridgeline to the wind-twisted spruce where Raymond’s raven had landed. No raven in sight. “Maybe I’m going crazy,” Raymond said.
Now what? I thought. Here we were at the absolute screaming dead end of nowhere.
Still perplexed, Raymond was looking all around for his raven. At last his gaze fixed on a narrow gap through the divide ahead of us and several hundred feet below. “I see blood on the snow,” he said.
I squinted hard. I thought I saw some spots of bright red. “I think you’re right,” I said.
I followed him down to the gap. We found a trail of blood and the tracks of a moose. Alongside the tracks of the moose, the tracks of wolves. I knelt to touch the blood, to tell myself I wasn’t imagining all of this.
It was real.
“Look at this,” Raymond said. He was pointing to large bird tracks in the snow. Raven tracks.
I shook my head, trying to add it all up. I couldn’t. The important thing was, here was the trail of a moose.
The blood trail had come from the Yukon side and was leading down into the headwaters of the stream that flowed off the divide into Deadmen Valley.
“Raymond,” I said. “I don’t get it how you saw and heard that raven.”
“He’s a trickster,” Raymond replied, as if that explained everything.
Then I remembered something. “In Johnny’s letter,” I said, “remember how he said he had strong raven medicine and wanted to pass it on?”
“I remember.”
“The night before he died, it was the middle of the night and I couldn’t sleep. I saw him standing over you, arms out wide like wings, making these little hops like the raven was making that you were feeding back in the cave.”
Raymond looked away, and then he murmured, “Raven medicine.”
“You never saw the raven when you found the sheep?”
“I only heard its wings.”
“Strange stuff,” I said.
Raymond pulled his water bottle from inside his parka and took a slow drink. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said finally. “Maybe all that medicine stuff the old guys talk about, they didn’t make it up. Out here, everything’s different from the way it is in town.”
“Should we go after this moose?”
For two days we followed the blood trail, using the moon to keep up, as it was approaching full. When it had some size to it, the moon was up practically around the clock, and high in the sky—”Like the sun is, in the summer,” Raymond explained. We didn’t dare to leave off pursuit to camp, cook, eat, or sleep.
It had warmed up to thirty-five below, a tolerable temperature compared to what we had experienced. My feet and fingers didn’t ache so badly. The sun, when it made its appearance, was copper-colored and hazy, with a ring around it. Raymond said that meant another cold spell was coming, a deeper, longer cold spell. We paused only to chop holes in the creeks and boil water. Drinking cold water or eating snow would chill us from the inside, and we knew that was dangerous.
At one point we heard a raven calling above us. We watched as it landed on a snowbank about a hundred yards in front of us along the trail of the moose. When we were halfway to the raven, it started sliding down a snowbank on its back. As soon as it got to the bottom, the raven would walk back to the top, then repeat the stunt. “I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Ravens do that kind of stuff,” Raymond said.
“He’s a real clown.”
“That’s what the stories say. He’s lazy, too, and a thief—hardly ever gets his own food. He fools everybody, so he gets by easy.”
“But Johnny was named after him.”
“Named after Raven’s eye, that’s what he said in the letter. Raven’s Eye is a good name for a hunter, don’t you think? Raven knows the land better than anyone; the old stories say he made it in the first place. Ravens see everything—they know everything that’s going on, what’s going to happen.”
As we approached the snowbank, the raven flew away, croaking.
“He never had to tell us about the moose,” Raymond said. “He didn’t need us. He’d get fed anyway when the wolves took the moose down. But everybody knows stories about ravens helping people when they feel like it.”