The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [30]
John nodded. He didn’t know what to say. So he just smiled.
“It’s great flying, though. I get plenty of hours, and don’t have to worry about running into too many mountains.”
John spotted a cluster of plywood shack-like buildings at the river’s edge.
“Is that a village?” he asked, pointing at the decaying structures passing beneath them.
“Fish camps,” Randy said. “The folks here set up camps in the summer and prepare salmon. Those are smokehouses and camps. There’s one village, right there. Yours is a couple more down.”
He pointed to a settlement at the confluence of a small river and the huge greenish-brown swath of the Kuskokwim. The two rivers mixed together like a thin stream of creamer in coffee. “That’s Kwik-pak, as I like to call it. Had an old girlfriend from there. I can’t even pronounce its real name.”
The houses stretched in two rows away from the river. A small runway sat west of the village, and John guessed that the larger structures were the school buildings. The entire layout of the village seemed to be organized around the school. What surprised him most, at least from the air, was the starkness of it all. A few big satellite dishes, a few winding paths through the village, with a pickup or Suburban, boats along the river, but that was it. A few dozen homes packed together within a hundred yards of each other with no backyards, lawns, or individuality. From the air, the place looked half planned, like some strange form of Alaskan urban sprawl but without the garages, fences, or pools.
The village had hardly passed them and Randy pointed at the horizon. “There she is,” he said. “You’re twenty minutes by air, probably forty minutes by boat or snow machine from Kwik-pak. An hour or two to Bethel.”
John leaned back to Anna. He covered the microphone on his headset and yelled over the plane’s engine, “We’re almost there!”
The land travelled beneath them faster as they dropped. John tried to take in as much as he could. The giant river meandered off to the south, and the desolate-looking tundra reached out forever to the north. As they drew closer to the village, he could tell it had that same organized look, except at one edge, closest to the river, the houses looked older, more shack-like. The two rows of houses paralleled the river, and the runway sat just north of the village. Randy dipped a wing and banked in hard. John’s stomach lurched.
“Like to give ’er a once-over before I land, just in case some kids are playing on the runway or if there’s another plane,” he said.
Randy banked again at the far end of the village and dropped toward the strip of gravel. John was too enthralled to be scared as the ground raced up at them. This village looked smaller than the last. He could easily make out the school, and could see a red three-wheeler pulling a trailer bouncing its way toward the runway.
“Looks like someone knew you were coming,” Randy said, pointing, and then quickly pulling his hand back to steady the plane as they hit once, bounced, and touched down.
“Welcome to your new home, folks,” Randy said, pulling off his headset and spinning the plane around at the gravelled end of the strip. “Can’t say I could ever live anywhere like this. More power to you for trying it out.”
THE GIRL WONDERED OUT LOUD how the two of them survived a whole summer in the same village without running into each other. He didn’t tell her that he’d only left the school a couple of times, that for weeks he didn’t really even leave the comfort of Anna’s sleeping bag.
“Last summer, when it got real hot, I had a dream. Like maybe I was delirious from not enough food and water. In my dream I could see. I saw a different world. Not our village, but maybe an old village. Like the ancient Eskimo villages in the books at school. Or the ones the elders used to talk about. The houses were the old sod houses with tundra growing on top of them, like they were