The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [62]
“Did you ever see a shaman?” the girl asked.
“No. They were gone already, I think. Or they were afraid of the missionaries and didn’t let people know they had the magic. My grandmother used to tell me about a shaman she knew. One of the last medicine men she saw. He had only one arm and he carried a spirit wand. She said that wand had a carved ivory head with sharp teeth and eyes that were always watching you. I used to have bad dreams about that little stick with a head on it, even I never seen that shaman or his cane.”
“What other kinds of magic did the shamans have?” the girl asked.
He was glad to have the old woman there to answer the girl’s nightly routine of endless questions. The chatter filled the void of silence and kept him from having to think about anything other than what the old woman was talking about, even if most of what she said made little sense.
“They used bird feathers like wings and would soar up into the sky like ravens and see the world below. They could fly to the moon in times of hunger, where there were many animals, and bring one back to refill the earth. They could pull a wolf skin over their head and become a wolf. Others would go beneath the ice and go where the seal spirits were and ask them to return to feed the people. In hard times we always relied on the shaman. They even say some of them could go into the future and come back and tell about what they seen there. I heard of one shaman who told the village to burn his body and then the next day he came back cold and wet, but alive. I remember stories of one shaman who went down under the ice and when he returned he had eyes like snow, a white-eye shaman, with beautiful snow-coloured eyes like you.”
“Like me?” the girl asked. “He was blind?”
“No one is blind,” the old woman said.
The fire popped in the silence as the girl imagined the possibility. She turned away from him and coughed into her sleeping bag.
“If I was a shaman, what could I do?” she asked.
“Maybe if you had those kind of shaman magic the world wouldn’t be this way. You could transform us all into whatever we needed to be. Maybe you turn this guy into a bird so he can fly wherever he thinks he needs to go. Me? I want you to turn me into an old bear. Always warm. Always fat,” the old woman said, and laughed.
“If I had those powers I would … I don’t know what I would do,” the girl said.
“Time for rest, girl,” the old woman said.
The two stopped talking for several minutes. The old woman’s breathing slowed and he could tell she was about to fall asleep. From the tone of their voices when they spoke, and their easy, relaxed breathing, the two were on some sort of happy campout. He was cold, but comfortable, maybe too comfortable just listening to them and not thinking about anything else.
“Were they born as shaman or did they have to learn how to use the magic?” she asked.
“Naam,” said the old woman, one of the few Yup’ik words he’d learned from his students, which simply meant I don’t know.
“If I was a shaman, I would fly above the tundra and find my cousins,” the girl said.
AN HOUR BEFORE CLASS one morning, Alex came in, sat down at a desk, removed his cap, and put his head in his hands. His long black hair fell, covering both his hands and his face.
“What’s wrong, Alex?”
John moved to the desk beside the boy.
“You okay?” he asked.
The boy said nothing, and John could see his legs trembling under the desk. John sat for a while, silent, giving the boy time.
After a while John just started to talk, mostly because the silence was making him uncomfortable.
“The other night I went hunting with Carl. He was telling me about the gold mines that might be developed up the Kuskokwim River and the big one near Bristol Bay. He says those mines could really hurt the river and the culture. He doesn’t think anyone will care about the effect this will have on people in the villages downstream. I was thinking that students like you could make a difference. If you wrote, like you do in your online journal, so the rest of the