The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [15]
“Because sometimes,” Nita said as the slide changed to an old woman cutting a leg-sized salmon on a sheet of plywood, “sometimes we get tired of eating only birds and fish.”
The teachers didn’t get the give-and-take of cultural exchange, the ins and outs of verbal and non-verbal communication. The two women delivered their view of their own culture, and just from their presentation alone, the humour, the subtle joking, John felt more at ease and sat back in his chair.
Anna wheeled around and smiled a broad grin when a picture appeared of Lucy’s grandson straddling a dead seal. He wished for a moment he had sat beside her, so he could give her hand a squeeze.
HE DISCOVERED THE BLIND GIRL and her bundle of dried grass the afternoon before he planned to start up the river by himself. Finding her set back that plan, bringing the worst part of winter closer. At first he just told himself he’d sit by and wait for her to die. At first. Then, when her thin, leathery brown face began to come alive, to smooth and slowly fill in the hollows beneath her eyes and in her cheeks, the plan had to change.
That first night he almost shot her. He held the barrel of the black Glock inches from her skull with his finger just resting on the trigger guard. Blind. Starving. Dehydrated. She was already long past dead. He knew from her heavy breaths that she hadn’t slept soundly for a very long time. How long, he couldn’t guess. One month? Two? How long had she been alone? How did she manage on her own, blind and malnourished?
He waited there beside her for hours on that first night. The pistol didn’t move. His finger didn’t move. He wanted to kill her for her own sake. For his own sake. She would be nothing but a burden. She would exhaust his supplies and require more energy than he could spare. She would drain him and the two of them would starve or freeze to death.
As much as it made sense to just squeeze the trigger, he couldn’t do it. He told himself that he would wait one day. If nothing changed by the next night, he would spare her the agony. One day, he told himself, he would give her that, but really, he knew. He knew he didn’t have what it took. He knew that already.
Even if the trip across the impossible expanse of snow, ice, and tundra would most likely kill them both, he couldn’t leave her to the cold, the empty cupboards, or the people she called the outcasts and their hunger.
Each sunrise brought no warmth. Most nights the two of them would bundle up in their sleeping bags and burrow inside a tarp to escape the incessant and violent winds. Each breath of winter air bit and crystallized the moisture about his nostrils.
The girl meant another human’s breathing to listen to at night. But mostly the girl provided a reason to go on, even if just for another day.
Then there was that eerie thing about the day he found her. How he stopped, as if some invisible bony hand grabbed him by the throat and began pulling him toward the one house in the village he hadn’t checked. The house he’d seen the red fox avoid. He told himself he was looking for extra matches, canned goods, or rifle shells, but instead, in the last house, in the last bedroom he would check, beneath a stained mattress, wrapped in an old, heavy grey wool blanket, he found her.
“It’s okay,” he told the small black spherical hole in the rifle barrel that sprang up when he pulled the mattress off her. He raised his hands, until he saw she couldn’t see him, the light reflected off her dull white eyes. He lowered his hands and she pointed the .22 at his skull.
“Let me smell your mouth,” she cried.
“What? I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay. My name is John. You’re going to be okay,” he said. “What’s your name?” he asked.
He leaned toward her and she took three deep sniffs of his breath and lowered the rifle. A thin, colourless line of foam gathered at the edges of her cracked and blood-scabbed lips. Her white irises searched the space between his body and hers.
“Please,” she whispered,