The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [53]
He led the way, pulling the sled with their supplies and food.
“I’m sorry I was mad. Will you tell me about where you came from today? I want to know about how you grew up. Please. Just talk today. Talk for me. Will you?”
He widened his stride and set a course down the edge of the river toward a large bend where he planned to cross to the other side to get out of the icy breeze, which was beginning to pick up, drying his eyes and nipping the end of his nose.
Off to the west, across the tundra, he could see the wind lifting ghostly wisps of snow. He didn’t want to be walking with a gale cutting through them all day. It would be best to walk beneath the riverbank so that the cold wind would sail right over the top of them for at least a few miles until the river made another oxbow and headed straight into the line of fire.
“I just need something else to think of, that’s all. Something other than my jerk uncle back there. Other than the scary man on skis. Other than my cousins, who I know need me. That’s why. Please?”
The girl picked up her pace and trotted to be at his side. The river in front of them spread out flat and smooth, and the girl walked with confidence, as if she knew this, as if she could see out in front of them, the broad expanse of nothing spreading before them into the horizon in a fine white line.
“If you don’t talk, I’m going to think about him. I’m going to think about what he did to me before I burned him, and I’m going to keep wondering if I should have pushed harder. Crushed his throat until he was dead like the others, dead like he should be. And I would be no better than him. That’s all. And I’m going to think about the hunter and how he’s going to come after us when he finds our trail. And then he’s going to go after the kids and then there will be no Yup’ik people left in the world.”
They walked for a while in silence.
“You could tell me about when you were little and I could just listen. I don’t want to keep thinking what my uncle could still do to some other little girl he finds, or what the hunter could do to the old woman back there all by herself.”
He adjusted the rifle strap digging into his shoulder and stopped to check the sled. He remembered the pack of cinnamon gum he’d found in the school office and tried not to think of the haunting note sitting on the desk as he opened a piece, took a small bite, and gave her the rest. The wind burned his fingers and he quickly stuffed them back into his gloves. He thought of the chocolate chips at the school and regretted not taking them. His childhood and his grandfather’s wild stories about Alaska seemed so distant it couldn’t even matter. He thought of the chocolate chips again.
“I used to stack firewood all around the porch of my grandpa’s house. He’d pay me in candy or gum,” he said.
“Tell me what his house was like,” she said.
“It was a log house in the woods. Small, one room and a loft, with a woodstove for heating and cooking. I slept in the loft when I stayed with him, and he would keep the fire going constantly. It would get so hot up there in the loft I’d sweat right through the old wool blankets and down sleeping bag. He always had a big cast-iron Dutch oven sitting on the top with a chunk of deer or elk roasting with some onions and potatoes. He’d cook it until the meat just fell off the bone. That meat would cook until it was so tender and juicy. And he would sit by the stove on a thick larch stump and hum old country songs and sharpen his hunting knife and tell me that he never should have left the north. Then he’d get up and dig in his ratty old leather hunting pack and pull out a Hershey bar and tell me to go split and stack more wood if I wanted the chocolate.”
“You’re making me hungry,” she said. “Please, tell me more. Did he tell you stories?”
“Not really, but he used to joke, ‘I’ll trade you back to the Eskimos for an old Winchester rifle and some chocolate,’” he said,