The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [2]
He stopped short of shaking his head and half slid down the hard frozen embankment, holding the rifle on his lap.
“I’m going to check it out,” he replied. “Maybe stay for a few nights and rest. Let the ice firm up. Find shelter. Hopefully something to eat.”
She pointed her brown fur mitten upstream. “The riverbank is not so steep a little ways up. You can pull me up there. By the school,” she said, and then asked, “Are there any more tracks?”
He surveyed the light blanket of white covering the river, searching for the two strange snakelike lines he’d encountered at the river’s edge three days earlier. “No,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “I don’t like those tracks.”
“Me either.”
He reached down, wrapped the yellow rope around his waist and began pulling her up the river of ice. His feet were numb with cold. He slipped with each step, the fresh snow making the going slick and dangerous. He knew better than to be walking on the river ice so early, but they had to keep travelling. They had to beat the colder weather on the way, and he didn’t feel safe if they weren’t moving.
“Do you see the graves yet?” she asked.
He did. High up on the river’s bank a cluster of leaning and listing white wooden crosses poked out from the long straw-coloured grass that the snow hadn’t completely covered.
“That’s where you can pull me up,” she whispered, “between the graveyard and the school.” She turned her head away from the village, as if she could see the sweeping flat expanse of white nothing. “You know, I never liked coming to Kuigpak, for basketball games, or for anything, really. Even now, I don’t like it.”
The cut in the high dirt wall of riverbank was right where she said it would be. He strained to pull her up the embankment, imagining what life had once been for her, the sounds of a basketball game, sitting at the edge of the court with her legs crossed, her head following the hollow twang of a bouncing ball against the gym floor, a player dribbling, driving toward a hoop, silence as the ball floated up, the swish of the nylon netting against the leather, the small gym choked with cheering, with life. He wondered why, of all villages, this one she openly disliked.
“You smell that?” she asked.
He stopped halfway up the fifteen-foot-high bank. He crouched and turned back toward her. She lifted her chin; her small nostrils quivered and her milky eyes seemed to search the grey sky.
“Not like that evil smoke,” she whispered. “This is just wood, driftwood smoke. I think there’s someone good here, John! Someone safe.”
He pulled the rifle off his shoulder and bear-crawled, with the sled in tow, toward the top. Just before he reached the crest he dropped down and pressed his body into the hard frozen mud, the rifle in his right hand, the toboggan line in his left. Her weight, what little there was, tightened the thin rope wrapped around his glove.
“It’s coming from over that way,” she mouthed, pointing to her left.
He chambered a round while his eyes scanned the few remaining chimneys of the houses on the north side of the trail that cut the lifeless village in two. The carnage was the same as in the other villages. The shack houses had been burned or pilfered and what remained made little sense. Out of the broken window of one house dangled a large black television, its cord running up and into the darkness beyond the window frame, as if somehow holding on.
THE JOB INTERVIEW took all of twenty minutes, with the questions geared more toward whether they were serious about teaching in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska, than whether they were competent educators. Gary Brelin, the personnel director, a handsome, fit runner type in his late forties, looked the two of them over, tugged at his earlobe for a moment, and scanned their résumés one final time.
“Impressive,” he said. “Your reference letter from your mentor teacher nearly brought a tear to my eye, Anna. ‘The kind of spirit all teachers should have.’ For first-year teachers, you both have striking résumés. You know, we get three types who apply to teach on the tundra.