The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [100]
“It’s okay. Who is to say this isn’t happening everywhere? This could have happened to us anywhere. No matter where we chose to live. Besides, where else could we live?”
“Do you really think it’s like this outside?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
“John?” she asked. “I want you to promise me something. You’ve got to promise me this one thing, okay?”
She pulled him close and whispered her impossible demand into his ear. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen, but it was too late.
“Promise me,” she cried. “Promise.”
“Promise,” he said, trying to forget what she’d asked him. “I promise.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her sick, frail frame against his, hoping that her coughing, the snot, the tears, her breath— anything—would find its way into his body as they slept so that in the morning he would wake with his own shivers and chills, sick.
39
At dark, they set up the tent Red had given them. The four-person shelter was made from a strange foam-like material and John didn’t like how bright the orange stood out against the snow, so they moved it back off the river into the willows.
Rayna didn’t ask him what happened when he went back to Red, but he expected she would, and when she didn’t that night, he wondered if she knew how scared he was or if she had sensed him looking over his shoulder all day—if somehow she could see into his head and watch the scene that kept playing and replaying in his mind. Over and over. Red lying at the steps of his bunker, a pistol in one hand, the AR15 at his feet in the blood-clumped snow. If she could see it the way he had, she would know Red did all that he could for them.
She cuddled close, but stayed in her own sleeping bag. He half wished she would climb in with him so that he could just hold her, but she didn’t. He wondered if it was because it was almost too warm with the miniature aluminum woodstove and narrow chimney pipe. Or if it was because she sensed him struggling for air. Or perhaps she could see in her mind’s eye Red lurch forward and then topple into the snow, the shadow of the hunter, of a wind turbine spinning over his body, blood trickling from Red’s nostrils, and his blue eyes trying to fix themselves on the Colt revolver’s barrel lodged in the snow near his face.
The old woman had said little except that she would have only waited one more day for them. And then she told them about a strange dream. “During one of those nights,” she said, “I made a shelter in the brushes, and was sleeping on a bed I made from willows and my caribou skin. I got real cold and started seeing a man and a woman walking across the tundra. They were the only two people left in the world, and they were so sad.”
John sat up and opened the shoebox-sized stove, slid in another piece of driftwood, closed the door and shut the damper down. It was dark, so he felt smoke wouldn’t give them away any more than the snow-machine tracks leading straight to their tent. If the hunter hadn’t caught them by now, then maybe he wasn’t going to bother following them. He checked the airways to make sure the tent could breathe, as Red had insisted. Then he stretched out on his back and stared at the peak of their warm new shelter.
The old woman coughed once and continued her story. “The man wanted to maybe turn into animals and quit living like people, but that woman, she wanted to have a family and start a new village. Then they met a thing, the thing was part wolf, part bear, and part human. That thing told them he was once human and life was too difficult so he wanted to become a wolf, and then when he was a wolf he was not happy and he wanted to be a bear. As a bear he was too lonely and wanted to become human again. That was how he became that horrible thing. He never was happy with what he had or where he was. The thing went away alone and that man started building a new house and the woman started collecting grass to weave their new bed.”
The old woman fell silent. John felt as if she’d been talking directly to him, but he didn’t know what she meant. He wanted to ask, but didn