The Raven's Gift

by Don Reardon

  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.

  “What did you think about today’s festivities?” Anna asked.

  “The in-service? I don’t know. Guess I just want to get out there and see the classroom and get ready. This is just a strange distraction.” John squashed a mosquito on his forehead. He looked down at the small spot of blood on his finger and wiped it against his jeans.

  “I liked the whole culture presentation. I’m not so worried now,” Anna said.

  A cherry-red monster-sized truck roared by them. The muffler and bass boomed.

  “That’s obnoxious,” Anna said. “It could shake those houses off their little stilts!”

  “I would have thought we could escape that crap.”

  “They can’t have trucks like that in the village, can they?” Anna asked.

  John reached down and picked up a flattened plastic soda bottle. “I hope not. I don’t think they have roads.”

  “Look,” Anna said, stopping and pointing to a reed-filled pond alongside the road. Two young Yup’ik boys stood inside a large white plastic box. “What are they doing? What is that?”

  “It’s a fish tote, for commercial salmon fishing probably. I think they’re going to try to float in it.”

  The boys pushed off from the bank, each of them attempting to paddle with sticks. The white box began to tip and the boys lurched to the far side. Water poured in as the box began to sink. The boys crawled over the edge and jumped to shore. The box sank until it sat just at the surface. The boys threw the sticks at it and meandered away.

  “Are they just going to leave it there?” Anna asked.

  John gestured to a blue van, its tires flattened, the windows broken out. “Looks like things get left where they die out here on the tundra,” he said.

  HE WATCHED THE GIRL eat the last bit of creamed corn. Of the remaining supplies, the creamed corn was the easiest to part with, and probably the easiest for her to stomach. Even starving, he hated creamed corn.

  At first he didn’t want to share any of what little food he had left. It didn’t seem possible that she had lived as long as she had, and he’d read plenty of stories about people who survived against incredible odds, only to die almost immediately after being rescued. If she ate up a bunch of his food and then just died, he would have just wasted months and months of calculated and torturous rationing. He would also have to rethink his food supply for the beginning of his trip.

  When she was finally able to sit up and feed herself again, she would tell long, rambling stories that helped him understand how she’d managed by herself. Alone. Blind. Starving.

  “My dad was a nukalpiaq, a good hunter and fisherman. A good provider,” she said. “And my mom dried more fish than anyone. Not just salmon and whitefish, but pike and smelt, blackfish, and lush fish too. Our whole entry was full, and two freezers full of strips and caribou or moose meat. Before they got sick, he started protecting and hiding the food. He even hid salmon strips in the walls. He showed me where. Said people might go hungry and crazy if help never comes. He said when he was young the elders would tell scary stories about the old days when things like that happened.”

  He held another spoonful in front of her mouth and she lifted her head, opened, and let her dry lips close around the spoon. He scraped the bottom of the can and gave her the final bite.

  “It’s hard for me to understand how you survived so long,” he said. “How did you get water? And what about summer? The mosquitoes?”

  “For water, I would go as long as I could. Until my mouth burned. Until my tongue bled. When there was snow, I would sneak out at night and scoop some up in a bowl, and after breakup and the ice melted I would sneak down to the river at night. Sometimes I would drink out of the river like a dog, I was so thirsty. I even think about it now and my mouth gets dry. Mosquitoes must have felt sorry for me. You?”

  “They almost killed me. Then I found a bug net.”

  “Lucky.”

  She reached for the water, sitting in a red plastic cup beside her. He helped her hold the cup to her lips. She finished and sighed deeply. The sound of her relief scared him.

  “Before my dad got sick. He took all the food out of the freezer and tipped it over. He hid the meat behind it. Said he wanted it to look like people already stole everything. Left a couple old chunks of bad meat. ‘They will get like dogs,’ he said. ‘They will take what is in front of them and leave the rest for me.’”

  Tears slipped from the edges of her white eyes and froze to her cheeks.

  “Maybe he knew I would live and you would find me. He told me when everyone was gone to hide in the back room under a flippe-dover mattress in the daytime. ‘Eat just a tiny little bit,’ he said, ‘and use your other way of seeing. You’ll be saved.’ That’s what he told me.”

  “Where did you put them? Their bodies? There were no bodies in your house.”

  More tears. She didn’t say anything for several minutes. He wished he could take the question back, and in his own mind tried not to see the flickering flames on the quilt he had wrapped around Anna. He imagined the blind girl dragging her mother, her father, the brothers and sisters—down the steps and somewhere out on the tundra in the dark of night.

  “He took them out to the cemetery, one by one,” she finally whispered. “Until it was just us. Me and him. Then he said he had to try to keep me safe. He was really sick, and I told him to stay. I would take care of him. Keep him warm and he would be okay. But I could hear him loading his guns and he kissed my forehead and said, ‘Tangerciqamken,’ I’ll see you, and he left. I heard a gunshot, not long after he left. Then another. Then another. Then more. One or two shots. Then nothing for a long time. Then three together: pop, pop, pop.”

  7

  He opened the backpack and began pulling out the contents while the girl and the old woman watched. He set each item on the floor, thinking about the individual weight and usefulness. He could pull quite a bit in the sled, but if he had to carry the pack, he’d need to really think about what would get left behind.

  “She wants to know if you’re going to leave me with her,” the girl said, licking the end of one long, flat dried stalk of grass.

  “Why would I do that?”

  She turned to the old woman and asked a question and the woman responded with a question.

  “Because the bad months are coming, and she wants to know where you’ll take me.”

  “Where does she think I should take you? Why are you translating for me again?” he asked, and then directed his question to the old woman. “Where should I take her?”

  He pulled a knife from the pack and gently set it on the floor. His grandfather had given him the knife. He had always liked the feel of the moose-antler handle.

  “You think I should leave her here with you?”

  “Why doesn’t she come with us?” the girl asked.

  “Not a chance,” he replied.

  “We’re going to leave her by herself? The man … the hunter,” she said, and set the grass braiding on her lap and sighed.

  He took a water-filter pump from the bag. His wife had given it to him after their run-in with Montezuma’s revenge while backpacking through the Yucatán. With the sickness he’d now been exposed to, he wouldn’t need to carry the filter any further.

  The old woman sucked at her lips again and said, “This is my village. My body should stay here, so my anerneq stay here, too. My spirit belongs here. I’ll take care of this girl if you leave her. We can hide from the hunter, but then no one’s left to take care of you. Without her, you won’t make it very much ways upriver. Even she’s blind, she knows better than you. And besides, that
man will find you.” The old woman picked up the girl’s work and inspected it. She took the girl’s hand, said something to her, and the girl began unravelling the grass weaving.

  “Thanks for the optimism,” he muttered. “Why are you undoing all your work?” he asked the girl.

  The old woman spoke to her again in Yup’ik and the girl nodded. She continued to unravel the braids of grass.

  “She said the only imperfections should be intentional. Only the creator can make perfection.”

  “Yeah, well, the creator made a perfectly good mess this time,” John said.

  He emptied the last can of fruit cocktail from the bag and tried to ignore how the heft of the gallon USDA-stamped can caused his stomach to burn with hunger.

  “Maybe you’ll stay one more night,” the old woman said. “Tonight, you’ll finish the soup. Rest. I’ll tell you how to get upriver a ways. Then maybe tomorrow you leave.”

  “I think we’ll get moving this afternoon,” he replied.

  “Maybe it will storm tonight,” the old woman said. “You’ll be warmer maani. Here. Maybe you got a few more days before it starts to get real cold.”

  “Maybe she’s right,” the girl added. “Plus, I feel stronger today, from the soup. You should have some tonight.”

  He took another inventory of his stuff, eight extra rifle shells, a flint for fires, his grandfather’s knife, the water filter, the tarp, some string, ten feet of rope, duct tape, remnants of a first-aid kit, the gallon can of fruit cocktail, a gallon can of tomato paste, a gallon of red plums, and a 9-mm Glock with two clips and a spare box of hollow-point bullets.

  He took the Glock, slid it into his parka pocket, and stood up.

  “I’m going to go look around, get some wood for tonight. We’ll stay, but I’m not eating duck soup.”

  HE COULDN’T SLEEP that first night in Bethel, so he slipped out from their bed-and-breakfast and walked across town toward the river. Midnight in the middle of August and he walked down the street needing no light to guide him. A haze of pink sat on the horizon to the north, bathing the town in a flat, pale glow.

  “Damn!” he said in amazement when he reached the grassy slope that led down to the river. The enormous body of water swept silently and quickly past the town. At the farthest point he guessed the river was nearly a mile wide. He leaned his weight back against a guardrail and just stared out across the water.

  A short open-bow aluminum skiff skipped across the glassy surface, the high-pitched motor buzzing downstream. He imagined the family of four, perhaps somehow related to him, sitting on the benches inside the skiff, headed toward the village he would soon be calling home, too. Long after they disappeared from his sight, the wash from the boat lapped at the row of white and grey boulders protecting the city from erosion like a crumbled castle wall.

  Farther upstream, a quarter-mile-long row of wide steel pipes rose from the water’s edge like a line of giant limbless redwood trees. He guessed the wall of pipes was part of the city’s attempt to keep the monstrous river at bay. Downstream he could see a steep bank, towering twenty or thirty feet above the river.

  As the greenish brown water rolled past he wondered how it could be that he’d never even heard of the Kuskokwim River before. All those waterways he’d learned as a kid. How could a river so impossibly huge be so invisible to the outside world?

  A lone hooded figure walking upstream toward him caught his attention. The person seemed to be struggling, carrying something heavy and working to keep from stumbling on the boulders. The person stopped for a while and rested and then continued the trek upriver. Curious, John started down toward the river’s edge.

  “Mind if I ask what you’re carrying?” John asked as the woman approached. She had long black hair stuffed into a hooded jacket that seemed as if it was made of a mosquito net, the type he’d used on the trip in the Yucatán. She sat down on one of the rocks and gently rested a bundle beside her. Whatever she’d wrapped in the blue denim jacket, she felt it was precious enough to hide or protect.

  “Not if you’re going to tell on me, or arrest me,” she said half-jokingly. “I’m too old to get arrested.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” John said. “I’m just a teacher.”

  “Me, too. Retired last spring. We’re leaving town in the morning. I had to go treasure hunting one last time.” She zipped open her hood and wiped the sweat from her face. “My last night on the river and look at the beauty I found.”

  John approached as she unwrapped the jacket to reveal what looked to him like a gnarly piece of black driftwood attached to a rock.

  “It’s a mammoth tooth,” she said. “Look here, these sharp things are the roots, this smooth rounded part here the molar. Feel this chewing surface. Funny, isn’t it?”

  John ran his hand over the bumpy surface. He leaned down close and tapped his fingernail against the rock-hard enamel. It was an enormous tooth. The biggest he’d ever seen.

  “Here,” she said, “heft it. At first I thought it was just a piece of dirty driftwood, but then when I pulled it up from the mud, then I knew it was a mammoth tooth. I’ve found a couple others, but this one is in the best condition yet. I can’t believe these roots, they’re like T. Rex teeth.” She handed John the tooth and he nearly dropped it.

  “Whoa. I wasn’t expecting it to weigh so much!” John turned the tooth over and over in his hands. “This is amazing! You just found this along the river?”

  “Down past all this erosion protection. I started looking where the river is cutting into the bank. People have been finding tusks and bones of mammoths and other ancient creatures there for years. Nights like these I like to imagine what it must have been like when those critters ruled this land. Mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-tooth tigers. These used to be their stomping grounds. Amazing eh?”

  The woman took the tooth from him and wrapped the jacket back around it.

  “That’s quite the going-away present,” John said.

  “I’ll pass the torch of treasure hunting to you,” she said, starting up the grass slope. “If I could give you some advice about living here I’d say this. Don’t just teach and go home at night and hole up in front of the TV like most people do. Get out and learn about life here. This place will teach you more than you’ll ever teach your students.”

  “Thanks,” John said, sitting down on one of the boulders. “Good luck getting that thing through security.”

  The woman crested the slope and disappeared. John turned back to the river and sat for a while. He crawled over the rocks and found a spot where he could sit with his hand touching the cool surface. He splashed the water and wiped his wet fingers across his face, the rich soil from the mammoth tooth gritty and cold against his skin.

  AS SOON AS THE GIRL was well enough, the questions started. She usually waited until night. Sometimes asking them while her fingers danced between the lengths of dried yellow grass she pulled from the thick bundle she carried, or when her fingers were too cold to weave the grass strands together the questions would come from the depths of his wife’s old sleeping bag. He wondered if she spent the whole day holding them in her head, thinking of different things to ask, just so that they could talk about something at night when they tried to sleep.

  Her questions passed the time, especially when their stomachs cried out, almost in response to the nightly howling of the few packs of sled dogs that had been turned loose or managed to escape and had so quickly remembered the instinct of their wolf cousins. Avoid man. The dogs avoided being seen just as he avoided most of her questions. But still, the questions lurked, especially the ones he ignored.

  Some he would answer, the ones that didn’t burn. The ones that made sense. The ones that didn’t require a lie. Or a half-truth.

  “Why didn’t we get sick, too?”

  That was one of those questions that loped around his mind at night. He’d been asking himself. Until the question didn’t really matter any more. Any speculation, about his backgroun
d, his life before moving to the village, any previous sickness or exposure, presented few possible answers. What traits or characteristics did he share with a blind Yup’ik girl? She was at least ten years younger and had never even travelled beyond the broad tundra plain of the Kuskokwim River Delta. Once he started asking himself her questions in his head, he would just shut her out completely. “That’s enough,” he’d say. “No more questions. We need to sleep.”

  “Why didn’t anyone come for us? Did they want us all to die?” she asked, feeling for her bundle of grass and running her fingers through the stalks, searching by touch for the perfect dried blade.

  Another question that brought only more questions. Her questions would kill him, slowly squeeze at his heart, until he could no longer breathe, engulfed by that suffocating feeling of the walls closing in, and of the world becoming too small.

  Some nights after the muscles at the side of her jaw went slack, and her breathing steadied and they readied themselves for the nightmares that would surely come, the questions would continue. They would hang in the air like campfire smoke on a cloudless night. Her endless questions would overlap in her soft voice, in her cries, and sometimes mingle with the voices of others. His mom. His grandpa. His students. A janitor. An old friend. Anna.

  Where will we go? Can we make it walking? Why didn’t you float out during the summer? Why do I feel like someone else is out there? Maybe coming after us? How did you find me? What was it like in the Lower Forty-eight? Why did you find me? Why don’t you leave me behind? How many people do you think died? Was it everywhere? Did they want us to die? What made people act like the outcasts? Will you leave me? Do you miss her? Do you miss her? Do you miss her? You won’t let me starve to death again? Okay? Please? Do you miss her? Do? You? Miss? Her?

  8

  He stopped at the bottom of the steps that led to the old woman’s house and just listened. He had learned from the girl to quit relying solely on his eyes. He could hear the two talking softly inside, but beyond that, nothing. No birds. No dogs. Just the breeze rattling a piece of torn metal roofing on a half-burnt plywood shack that had probably been either a smokehouse for fish or a steam bath. He doubted anything useful would be found in the village, but still, he had to look.