The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [60]
“Mining isn’t known for ever saving any fish,” John said.
“People round here need work so bad, though. I don’t see anyone stopping that mine. Climate change is killing all our salmon. Commercial fishing is all but dead here on the Kuskokwim. Not doing well on the Yukon either. Not like Bristol Bay. They still got good fishing there. Now the Pebble mine could be a fight. Fishermen and environmentalists and Natives and politicians and a giant mining company. Might get dirty.”
“What’s going on in Bristol Bay?” John asked.
“You never heard of Pebble?”
John shook his head.
“Just a little pebble. They say it’s going to be one of the largest open-pit mines in the world. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of gold at the headwaters of the world’s last great wild salmon run. How do you like that? Five hundred billion, with a b. How can people like us, with nothing, have a voice against money like that?”
They stopped on the boardwalk, just above Carl’s boat. The tide was down again and they would have to climb down the bank and push the boat several feet to get it floating.
“Five hundred billion? You sure?”
Carl raised his brows again and said, “Those Natives there over the ridge, I think some people will help them try to fight the mine, but only because of the salmon industry. Not here, not on the Y-K river deltas, man. Who cares much about what happens around here, to us? They never did. Never will. We’re the invisible people. But sometimes, maybe I think that’s okay, you know. Real people can’t live off oil and gold forever. Yup’iks used to know how to live without these things. Maybe if all of this goes to shit, maybe some of us could still survive like we used to.”
John stepped aside as a young boy raced past them on a bike, a yellow five-gallon bucket in one hand. A group of sled dogs stood up from the dirt mounds they were staked to and started yelping and howling. The sound echoed across the village. Feeding time.
JOHN AND THE GIRL had been trudging through the knee-deep powder for hours. He stopped and looked back and thought he could still see their camp from the night before, a small bank of snow just at the bare horizon like a miniature white haystack. He doubted they had travelled over a mile, and sunset was just another hour away.
“Did my story about the Big Mouth Baby scare you last night?” she asked.
“You didn’t really tell me any story. Just said some baby with a big mouth was out there, and no. It didn’t scare me,” he said as he gave the sled a sharp tug to get it moving again.
“I thought maybe what I said gave you bad dreams, because last night you asked me if the baby was coming. Do you remember that?”
He stopped walking and turned to her. “No. I don’t. And let’s quit wasting our breath talking for a while, okay? Can you do that? I don’t want to hear about some toddler with wolf teeth or about the outcasts or what your grandpa taught you about living off the land. Okay? We haven’t made it anywhere today. Nowhere, you get it? We won’t survive if we can’t make it more than a mile or two a day. At this rate it would take us ten years to get anywhere.”
“It’s not a toddler, it’s a baby,” she said.
He yanked hard on the sled, but as if in response to his anger, it didn’t budge. He groaned and pulled again and started forward. He glanced back over his shoulder and she was still standing where they had stopped.
“Come on!” he yelled. He didn’t want to stop again. The sled was moving and for the time being he had forward momentum. If they could just make it another half