The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [65]
He pulled his bag up around his shoulders and then took off his wool hat and stuck his pistol in it near his head, where he could grab it quickly if he needed to.
“There’s people there,” the old woman said after a long silence. “Too many for them to all die. But some of them might be not the good kind, too. Bethel scared me even before this bad thing happened. Never much liked going there. I don’t know why you wants to go to Bethel. We should keep going upriver. We should just go right past that place. Nothing for us downriver, and nothing there, not in that town. Nothing.”
“What do you think, John?” the girl asked as the old woman tried to muffle another cough.
“I think if she knows something, she should tell us.”
“I know they aren’t there,” the old woman said.
“But you don’t know where they are, either. Right?” He sighed and turned away from them.
“You know,” the old woman said to the girl.
“I don’t. No. I don’t,” the girl said.
“You do,” said the woman. “If they are still alive, you can find them.”
He dug a small handful of snow out from the wall of their dark little cave and put it into his mouth. They should have chipped and melted some ice or chopped a hole in the river. He was thirsty and his lower lip had started to bleed from the hunk of chapped skin he’d bitten off.
“I think I’m going to see if there’s anyone there who can help us,” John said. “See if anyone that knows what’s going on. I’m not going to pass up the biggest town in hundreds of miles. If someone is alive there, they should be able to tell us something. I want to know what happened.”
“When I was a young girl like you,” the old woman said, “I remember in the spring, before breakup, we would take our dog teams and go across the tundra to the mountains. All around we saw caribou, snowshoe hares, and porcupines. The men hunted and trapped, and us kids, we had so much fun. Lots of trees up near the mountains, and so many good firewoods. We always had a big warm fire with meat roasting on alder sticks, and we could sit at our camp and listen to the winds whispering through them branches. Then, when the long days came and the ice went out, the men would build boats and load up the dogs and kids and everyone and float down to the tundra just in time to start king salmon fishing.”
“What did you see?” the girl asked John, as if ignoring the old woman’s story.
“I told you what I saw. Nothing.”
The old woman continued her story. “Big lakes up in those mountains too. Real big. Deep lakes with giant trout. They say one lake, Heart Lake, had a palraiyuk. Long, skinny monster, like one of those kinds that Crocodile man wrestled on TV. Yup’iks used to draw that creature on our kayaks. Real big long, narrow mouth with lotsa teeths, and little pokies sticking out all down its back to its tail. But there was a story about someone who killed the last big monster up there. The man’s wife was getting water and that creature jumped up out of the water and snapped its mouth down on her and slid back into the water with her. The man tried to shoot it, but his arrows just bounced off its armour. So he went and killed a caribou and used it like bait. When palraiyuk came back to eat the caribou he took his last arrow and shot it in the heart. He cut the monster open and saved his wife. My grandpa used to say they would climb through the backbone hole of the skeleton on the beach of that last monster the hero killed. But some people say those lakes might still have palraiyuk.”
“Scary,” the girl said.
“Lots of scary stuff out there. Sometimes there is only a real thin layer separating our world and the spirit world,” the woman said. “When I was maybe your age there was a young boy, Gabe Fox. You heard stories about him?”
The girl nodded, and said, “We always talked about him when we were out camping. Tell John.”
“He was real. A real boy. He was orphan, living at that place we call Children’s Home. That was up the Kwethluk River where they keeped orphans from the last epidemic. Gabe Fox didn’t like