The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [58]
A head shot, to preserve as much meat as possible, was risky, and missing meant no food. A solid body shot meant fresh meat, gunshot or not. He held steady. Then he thought about the trajectory of the bullet, and how he might wait until the birds lined up, and then shoot.
He waited. At one point he had two, then three, almost in a line. He paused for a fourth. He rested his finger against the icy metal of the trigger, waiting. Waiting.
Just as he started to squeeze a round off, the lead bird lifted its head, and they started running, their little legs scurrying, their heads leaning forward. He followed them with the gunsight. They picked up speed and lifted off into the air before he could get a shot.
“No! No!” he screamed at the birds as they set their wings and glided to safety several hundred yards away. An impossible distance with no cover or chance to sneak up on them.
He slumped to the ground, clutching the rifle to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the girl, remembering something she once told him about thoughts and the animals you hunted being able to hear those thoughts. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and the weight of his mistake began to press him into the frozen moss and snow beneath.
21
He reached the girl before she started up the riverbank. She sensed him coming and turned to wait. He wondered how she envisioned him behind her white eyes, just how she saw him, or if she saw him at all. Maybe he was just a voice, a presence that made sure she ate and drank.
“I knew you’d bring my grass back to me,” she said.
“I just came back for more canned peaches,” he said.
“You lie!”
“Wait here,” he said, climbing up the bank as he pulled his rifle off his shoulder. The strange sense of déjà vu grew as he peeked the rifle over the edge of the bank and scanned the village for movement. A black rubber boot stepped on the end of his barrel.
He pulled back on the stock and swung the barrel skyward, just as the old woman’s laugh cracked the cold silence.
“How you live this long being so dumb?” she asked.
He took a breath and tried to ease his pounding heart.
“Jesus, woman. I could have shot you.”
“I would have shot you first,” she said, and she lifted into the air an old 20-gauge pockmarked with rust, the cracked and weathered wood stock wrapped in black electrician’s tape.
“This was my husband’s. Got a half box of shells left, too.”
She pointed to a blue-grey plastic fifty-gallon garbage can lid, upside down, with a blanket tied to it. A rope extended to her waist.
“I got the foods you gave me in here, most of it, my knife, and a caribou hide.”
He helped her down the bank to the river ice and the girl. They hugged, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. The old woman put her bare hands on the girl’s face.
“You knew we would come back for you?” the girl asked.
“No. But when you left I thought I could hear their voices.”
“Scary,” the girl said.
“Not those ones in there,” the old woman said, pointing first to the school and then up the river. “The kids.”
CARL, THE SCHOOL’S CUSTODIAN and maintenance man, quickly became his new best friend in the village. They would have coffee in the morning, while the kids shuffled into the gym half-awake to stand in line for plastic bowls of government-issue cereal or thin, dry pancakes or instant scrambled eggs. The two of them would eat together at lunch most days, sitting with the students on the folding cafeteria tables in the gym, and then have another cup of coffee afterwards, watching the students clean up and put the tables away before the kids began their pickup basketball games until the next class