The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [50]
Alex removed his baseball cap and set it on the edge of his desk. “I guess no one ever taught us that stuff about our ancestors neither, John,” Alex said. “That’s what’s pretty sad. It’s like they don’t want us to know the history of our own people.”
JOHN AND THE GIRL awoke to a light rain. The temperature felt as though it had risen twenty degrees overnight. The sky had lightened, but he worried the rain would continue and the ice would weaken and they would be unable to travel any farther.
He started a small fire with some driftwood and stretched his back. The warm air felt good, but odd, almost springlike. The air didn’t sting at his nose and his bare hands weren’t aching from constantly being cold.
The girl pulled back her sleeping bag and let a few drops of rain drip into her mouth from a hole in the tarp.
“A warm-up,” she said. “Chinook. That’s an Indian word, I think. I don’t know our word for it. I don’t know if we have a word for this kind of warm in winter.”
“I hope it doesn’t last. We’ll be in trouble.”
“Could last forever,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
The day before they had come across a fox with a fresh snowshoe hare kill, and he’d shot a round from his pistol in the air and scared the fox off. The girl called it the raven’s gift. She said that was the luck the raven gave them. He cut a small piece of the half-frozen meat from a back leg and roasted it over the fire. As the meat cooked, he wondered if it was the same fox he’d seen in the village.
“I heard the elders say that a long time ago it was warm here and that it could get warm again. King salmon would even spawn in winter when there was no ice,” she said.
“That’s impossible—the elders couldn’t know of a time like that. That would be tens of thousands of years ago. There’s no evidence in recorded history of a warm time like that.”
“So,” she said, pulling out a newly braided section of grass and sticking it in her bundle. She crawled out from her bag and pulled on her jacket. She began stuffing the sleeping bag into the backpack. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about how the rest of the world lives like the world is theirs. But when the world says that’s enough and when they get sick, and things aren’t working, like TV and computers, who is going to tell the story of your people? What could you tell your kids about you kass’aq people and how your people lived?”
He took a small bite of the charred leg. The outside was black, but the meat just below was still deep red, raw, and cold. “Who said I’m gus-suck? And who cares? I won’t be having kids,” he said.
“Even so, what could you tell them about how your people lived?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I could tell them nothing about my people.”
18
They stood outside the old woman’s house, and for the longest time no words passed between them. The old woman looked down toward the riverbank and then at the clouded white sky to the west. She looked back at them and then away again and squinted.
The girl kicked the snow crust around her black boots. He could tell she didn’t want to leave the old woman and that something else was bothering her.
“Another big storm coming soon,” the old woman said. “The bad month is coming, too. Maybe cold weather starts tomorrow night. If you travel like I told you, then you’ll be by Bethel when it storms. I don’t think you should go in that town. I told you that. I think the hunter came from that ways. He’ll be going back. Watch for him. Maybe wait for night and see if there’s any lights. Even before all this dying, on clear nights we could see the lights from Bethel and other villages in the sky. Not any more. The sky is always dark at night over that way now.”
She pointed toward the northeastern sky, and then said, “But if I seen lights in Bethel now, I think I would be scared.”
“Where are my cousins?” the girl asked, and then repeated something in Yup’ik in the same tone.
The old woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “If they are qimagalri, then they are out there somewhere. You know more than me about where they can hide. Maybe