Far North

by Will Hobbs

  I caught my breath, warmed my hands. Then I took down three small dead spruces and dragged them over. Raymond wanted to help, so I had him start melting some snow.

  I kept the fire blazing, scooped more snow into the pot, built a lean-to, then talked Raymond into lying down. He kept trying to help, but I was afraid he’d fall, and that would make things worse. I could see how tough this was going to be on Raymond, not being able to do hardly anything. I started some water to boil meat, drank some of the hot water I’d already made, and took some to him.

  “You’re like a house burning down,” Raymond said. “Where’d you learn all this stuff?”

  “Texas hill country. In Texas it gets a lot colder than here, and the canyons are a lot deeper.”

  “And there’s little animals that look like armored cars?”

  “Exactly. In the winter they just roll themselves up in a ball and freeze solid. What’ll it be for dinner tonight?”

  He flashed his bright smile. “How ’bout some moose?”

  “Good selection. Specialty of the house.” I took the ax and hacked out maybe a couple of pounds. After I got the meat boiling, I made some more hot water in the second pot. I knew I was already getting dehydrated and that would be a big danger, as hard as I was pulling. At night I had to make sure to drink all the water my body could take.

  With the first sign of twilight in the morning it was time to convince bone and muscle that I could even get out of the sleeping bag. The pain in my knee was still there. I needed to find more firewood, I needed to get some water going, I needed to get a little more food in my belly and Raymond’s too. I needed to remember before we started out again to fill both of the water bottles full of hot water.

  At last it was all done. I packed Raymond into the toboggan, laced up my snowshoes, took my place up front, stepped inside the rope. I asked Raymond if he’d ever had a dog team.

  “Snowmobiles are better,” he said. “Go faster too.”

  He could see I was playing games with my head, just stalling for time. “Don’t they break down?” I asked.

  “Then you fix ’em.”

  Once I broke the toboggan loose and started it forward, all my conversations had to take place in my head alone. Imaginary conversations, remembered conversations. Conversations with my father, conversations with Raymond, conversations with my coach back in San Antonio. My coach was trying to get me to stay. Lots of compliments. “You’re hard to knock off your feet,” that’s what he’d said. “I like how you get the extra yards after you get hit.”

  I turned a bend in the canyon and saw up ahead what I’d been dreading most: a black strip of open water snaking its way down the canyon. There was an ice bridge across it, but fortunately we didn’t have to try it. There was room to get around the open water on the left.

  On the third day a gift came along. Just like the creeks do, the Nahanni had burst its frozen lid and spilled overflow slush for miles, melting the drifted snow that had covered the ice and refreezing it into a surface as hard and solid as an interstate highway. For a few miles we went flying around the bends in the canyon—at least that’s what it felt like. I pictured it would be like this all the way down to the hot springs at the foot of the canyon. But the free ride ended where the now-frozen overflow had encountered a patch of open water. The open water was easy enough to get around, but now I was back to breaking trail through the drifts.

  The following day, no more patches of open water. Maybe they were all behind us. Pull, you mule, you donkey, you draft horse, you dog team, you musk-ox. Think about the winter bear, the way it laid its ears back right before it charged. It can’t hurt you now. Maybe it never came back because Raymond called it friend, spoke to it in Slavey. More likely it got scared off by that threat about flossing its teeth. Think about the old man finding those beaver hideouts. Now, that was slick.

  Think about Johnny Raven. Remember his voice, the rivers in his face, the quills in his chin. Think how fond he became of Raymond. Think how much he wanted Raymond and you to live. Think about his hand drum, how Raymond rebuilt it, think about it right here in your packsack, going back home with Raymond. Picture your model log house, complete with tiny rock fireplace, sitting on the table back at the cabin. How your dad would love to see that model. Try to remember everything about Johnny’s letter. “Take care of each other,” that’s what he’d said.

  My heart skipped a beat when I saw that, up ahead at a bend, open water was pushing up against a cliff on the right. But we were able to pull around it once again, on the left side this time. The canyon narrowed. More open water, which was rushing out from under the ice and down to a cliff on the left side. We crossed to the right to avoid it. But the open water, after it hit the cliff on the left, angled back across the canyon, under an ice bridge, to another cliff on the right. It was the exact same situation we’d faced before.

  This time the open water was only thirty feet across at the ice bridge. The bridge itself was fifteen feet wide. I stood there, imagining my body disappearing under the Nahanni ice. Eventually it would get hung up on the limbs of a tree pinned in the riverbed, or else it would just keep tumbling all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

  Raymond broke the silence. “You should go across with just a packsack, with everything you’ll need to make it to Nahanni Butte.”

  I asked him, “How come is that?”

  “In case it breaks behind you. If it holds you, you can do another load and so on, until it’s just me on the toboggan without any gear. That way we won’t have any more weight on the bridge than we have to.”

  “And if I don’t make it across…,” I said. “If I fall in, like last time…”

  “I guess I can’t pull you out. Anyway, we can’t turn around and go back this time.”

  “So if I make it across, but the ice breaks behind me, or if I don’t make it and I end up in the river, in either case you’re sitting here in the toboggan—and then what?”

  “Out of luck, I guess.”

  I thought for a second, but I already knew how I felt. I said, “How about we both make it or we both don’t? That’s the way it should be. Quick and dirty.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why not?”

  I looked at the bridge a long time, breathing deep, thinking about what I had to do. This time I wasn’t going to tiptoe and get caught halfway, but I couldn’t stomp across either—the bridge might be as fragile as the one before. I was going to try to go fast as I could, keeping it as smooth as I could. Better to go fast in case something happened.

  I studied the bridge some more, stalling for time. I said to Raymond, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Johnny’s letter, all the things he said.”

  “Me too.”

  “I forgot to ask you if you left it in the cabin where it could be found.”

  Raymond tapped his chest. “I’ve got it right in my pocket. I wanted to read it at the potlatch.”

  “Then we have to make it,” I said. “Or what he said is all going to be lost.”

  “We’ll make it. I have a feeling we’re going to make it.”

  Then Raymond croaked like a raven, two, three times, a perfect imitation. The sound carried far in the cold air.

  “Raven medicine,” I said with a smile.

  We waited then, savoring our friendship, knowing that everything could end in moments.

  I asked Raymond if he was ready. He said, “Anytime, little brother.”

  I was ready too. Whatever happened, I thought, we’d done our best and you can’t ask for more than that.

  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 sl
ab 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.

  22

  MY 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 afrai
d?”

  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.