The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [105]
John pulled on Alex’s snow pants, his own jacket, and then crawled into the sled first with the rifle and the pistol. Rayna sat down on his lap and Alex rolled up the grass mat and stuffed it behind John’s back. Then he tucked the hide around the front of them to keep out the cold.
Alex lined out the six dogs and yelled, “Haw! Haw! Let’s go home, pups. Hike!” The leader started pulling left, and the team turned and followed him. Alex hopped on and off the sled runners and John could feel him pushing and running, jumping on and off the two thin rails jutting out the back of the sled.
The dogs moved silently, effortlessly, toward the low, rolling snow-covered mountains looming ahead of them. The plastic sled runners beneath them made a soft hiss and they picked up speed.
“I was just going out hunting. Lucky I found you guys,” Alex said.
“We would have found you anyways,” Rayna said.
“How many of you?” John asked.
Alex patted John on the shoulder. “Two groups. One at Nyac with twenty-two. They didn’t want us to know where the other group was going. Somewhere on the coast, I bet.”
“How did you guys get away?” Rayna asked.
“The village met in the gym and decided who would take the kids and hide in the mountains. Three dog teams and four sno-gos. The rest had to stay behind. I guess I was one of the lucky ones,” Alex said.
“We all were the lucky ones,” Rayna said. “Right, John?”
John wrapped his arms around her and held her close. He put his head on her shoulder and she turned her warm cheek and rubbed it against his. She pressed her lips against his ear and whispered, “I’m sorry if I made you break your promise to her.”
“You helped me keep my promise, Rayna.”
He tilted his head and looked up into the sky. Anna’s sky. He closed his eyes and could see her face, healthy, vibrant, her green eyes full of life, her smile bright and wide.
He kept his eyes closed as the sled raced forward. With the cold wind in his face, he soared with Rayna, into the air, becoming a raven again.
Far below he could see the snow-camouflaged hunter searching the herd, and in front of him raced two sleek wolves, one black and one grey, galloping shoulder to shoulder at the edge of a brown and white surging sea of thousands of caribou.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In July of 1881, the Corwin set anchor off the coast of St. Lawrence Island in southwestern Alaska to investigate “reports of massive deaths.” What Edward Nelson, the Smithsonian Institution’s premier field naturalist, discovered and documented was horrific. In The Eskimo About Bering Strait he estimated that over a thousand Yup’ik people on that island alone were dead from disease and famine. Nelson describes corpses “stacked like cordwood” in one village and in another, “bodies of the people were found everywhere in the village and scattered along in a line toward the graveyard for half a mile inland.”
I was haunted and angered by what I read. I grew up in southwestern Alaska. As a student of the amazing Yup’ik culture around me, I had heard the elders’ stories of famine and sickness, but I’d never learned of the magnitude of the death and destruction. I was in my early twenties when I first read Nelson’s book. Armed with this knowledge, I dove into the important works of Ann Fienup-Riordan, a local anthropologist. Ann’s work included historical information that wasn’t taught in our schools, and she also worked diligently to record the stories and wisdom of the remaining elders. Years later I encountered Yup’ik writer Harold Napoleon’s Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being. Napoleon’s book argues that the epidemics and famine led to generational post-traumatic