The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [19]
“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