The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [52]
“If it gets really cold,” she said, “we’re going to need a shelter, not just this tarp. You know, if your feet get cold you can put grass in your boots like I got. You need some?”
He shook his head. “Do you think it’s going to get colder? This is cold enough,” he said.
“I don’t know when, but it will get cold. Real cold.”
“I’ll figure something out when it does,” he said.
“I know.”
He took a bite of the hare leg, and then took his knife and cut off half for her. The dark red meat, charred black on the outside and deep red on the inside, tasted wild and rich. His body screamed to him to cook up the rest and devour it all.
She ate silently, and when she finished he asked if she wanted the leg bone. She did. He watched as she chewed the end off with her teeth and then sucked at the marrow. She turned the bone around, bit through the other end, and handed it to back him.
“Here,” she said, “this will give you more energy.”
He took the bone and followed her example. The marrow tasted like he’d bitten his own tongue, bloody and raw.
“Do you think the rest of the world is having to do this?”
“Eating hare?” he said, trying to joke, not wanting to contemplate a real answer.
“I mean survive like us. What’s the rest of the world doing right now? Don’t you wonder that? Are they starving too, or are we the only ones who’ve been forgotten?”
He handed the bone back to her and placed a few more sticks on the fire. He didn’t have an answer for her. He rarely did. Instead, he just let the silence hang over them like the smoke that rose from the embers and drifted through the willows along the riverbank like a parade of spirits.
19
He stopped at the riverbank and looked back. “Is she watching us? Is the hunter going to follow our tracks?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
And he didn’t. Instead, his thoughts were on the school, the food in the school, and the missing kids. The sled was loaded with all he could pull. Any more would be wasting his energy. The two of them had food now and that was all that mattered. That and moving on up the river. They had already stayed too long. The cold was coming. He could feel it in the wind. He wondered if he shouldn’t go back and burn it before someone else, the hunter, discovered the gym full of bodies and put the pieces together.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pulled the rope tight around his waist. He’d retrieved the ice pick from the school, and one quick glance inside the gym confirmed it—there were only a handful of kids. Four or five. There should have been at least thirty or forty. He hoped they had escaped the sickness, the outcasts, and the hunter, if there really was such a person. Ski tracks and an old woman’s ramblings were all he had to go on. He couldn’t let a mystery man continue to haunt him.
He tapped the point of the pick into a frozen chunk of dirt at the top of the riverbank.
“Let’s get moving,” he said.
“Will you talk while we’re travelling today? I just want to listen to you talk. Talk about anything,” she said.
“We’ve got a ways to go today. Shouldn’t be wasting time talking about nothing. She said we’ve got about ten miles to Bethel.”
“Why we going to the town? Will we look for them there?”
“I want to see it. Maybe at night, from a distance, like she suggested. And no more talk about the kids. What makes you think they are alive any more than the kids in the other villages?”
“Because she knows something,” she said, pointing back toward the old woman’s house. “I think she knows. She keeps saying they might be qimakalleq, I think that means runaway and becoming wild or something. She knows they are alive, too. I don’t know why you don’t open your goddamn eyes. She knows.”
They dropped down the riverbank slowly until they got to the ice. He let the sled slide down in front of him, holding on to it to keep it from flipping over. Once they reached the river ice, he slammed the pick down. The steel bar gave a dull thunk, and a grapefruit-sized chunk of ice erupted from the surface. The ice was much thicker than when they had