The Great Death (7 page)

Blue licked her face when she was done and then ran off to play with Tundra along the river.

Millie roasted some of the meat on sticks; some she tossed into a pot of boiling water. She cooked the entire porcupine, giving the dogs a fair share. After all, it was they who had cornered it. There was enough cooked meat to last for several days, especially now that the weather was turning colder and the meat would not spoil quickly.

While Millie tended to the boiling soup, stirring it with a twig, Maura sat on a boulder, whittling bark from a stout stick, making herself a walking cane, which came up to her shoulders. Listening to the river, Maura thought of Mother and Father and of all the dead people back in their village. She couldn't forget their faces, the burned bodies, the scavenging dogs and bears, the smell. She tried to put the images out of her mind. It all seemed far away and unreal, even though they really hadn't traveled so far.

Since it was already late in the evening, the sun resting on the lip of hills, the sisters made camp. For the rest of the night, the four travelers sat around a warming fire, eating porcupine, drinking the rich meaty broth, and watching constellations move across the sky—the slow dance of the galaxy spinning around the North Star.

Ts
'
iłk
'
ey Kole

(Nine)

Raven flew down and landed on a tree.

“Why are you traveling all alone?” he asked the destitute woman. “Where are your people? Where is your husband?”

The woman was frightened. She had never seen a talking raven before.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, as the girls marched along the leaf-blanketed trail carrying their cumbersome packs—Maura singing one of her favorite songs to console herself—a cow moose and her calf sprang up without warning. The cow almost trampled the girls, who had surprised her sleeping in an alder thicket just off the path. The dogs, chasing sandpipers and seagulls along the riverbank, had not smelled the moose—the wind was blowing from the wrong direction.

The two moose trotted onto the gravel shoreline. The dogs saw them and abruptly burst after them, barking as they ran. To escape, the cow plunged into the choppy water and swam toward the other bank, as the treacherous current carried her far downriver. The dogs followed on the gravel bank, barking continually. But she was strong and heavy. She made it to the other side.

The little calf, unnoticed by the dogs, was left behind, uncertain of following her mother into the raging river. She called to her mother while stepping hesitantly into the water up to her belly. The current snatched her and dragged her downriver. She was too small and too young to fight the roiling waters, which tossed her about and rolled her head-over-hoof. She was drowning. Her feebleminded mother stood on the far shore watching.

“We have to save it!” Maura yelled to her sister, as she ran along the gravel bar, trying to catch up with the drowning moose calf. When she was just ahead of it at a spot that looked to be less swift and less deep, Maura dropped her pack of blankets on the gravel beach and crashed nearly up to her waist into the river.

Millie tried to catch up, but her heavy, bulky load slowed her.

“Stop, Maura!” she yelled. “You can't swim! You'll drown!”

Although Maura weighed less than the calf, she caught hold of it just long enough for it to regain a foothold and stand upright in the shallow water. When the half-drowned calf was standing safely on shore, Maura trudged back to her sister, smiling broadly, the soaking-wet dress and blanket-shawl clinging to her skinny body.

Tundra and Blue were still far down the gravel bar, barking at the cow moose standing on the opposite bank.

“Are you crazy?” Millie asked.

“I had to save it,” Maura replied, shivering from the icy water, her arms wrapped across her chest. “We scared it into the river. It would have been our fault if it had died. I couldn't save anyone in the village.… I
had
to save the moose. It was our fault, don't you see?”

Millie was looking intently in the opposite direction, at something over Maura's shoulder. The baby moose was approaching. Maura turned slowly and saw the calf. When it stopped, only a few steps from her, Maura held out her open hand. The calf jumped sideways, as if to turn and flee, but it did not run away. The two girls remained very still. Again the calf moved forward. It walked right up to Maura and sniffed her hand. Both girls barely breathed. And then the calf stepped closer and pressed its blond head against Maura's waist and held it there while Maura stroked its cheeks and long nose, speaking to it softly.

“
Kasuun deniigi.
Beautiful little moose,” she whispered.

The dumbstruck cow stood across the river, watching safely from her side of nature, blinking, unable to fathom the moment.

Millie also stood quietly. She had never seen or heard of anything like this. Her eyes filled with warm tears. She too touched the calf, ran her fingers gently through its soft mane and smelled the musty odor of its wet coat. And then the calf bolted lightly back to the water's edge.

The girls walked downriver to fetch the dogs, who were still barking at the cow moose on the other side of the water. Then they returned to the forest trail, holding the dogs to keep them from harassing the calf, watching from afar as the anxious cow finally swam back across the churning river, rejoined her calf, and vanished into the trees, the calf at her heels.

When they were far enough away, Millie built a large fire to warm and dry her sister. They ate roasted porcupine. Though Millie was angry that her sister had risked her life so foolishly, she was also proud of her. While she sat by the fire, poking a stick at the embers, she couldn't help but wonder what she would have done if Maura had drowned saving the calf.

Maura was all that she had in the world.

*   *   *

Later that same day, about two miles downriver from where Maura had saved the moose calf, the girls saw something curious in the water. Their trail was meandering along a hillside, perhaps a hundred feet from the shore and about ten feet in elevation above the river, so at first they didn't recognize what it was. They picked their way through the brush and down the slope, until they were close enough to see that it was a human body, as pale as ghosts in stories the sisters recalled the elders telling. The People believed that spirits of the dead roam the natural world, oblivious to the fact that they are dead. Even the spirits of animals walk the earth, doing the same things they had done in life, for the most part invisible to the living.

The torso was submerged just below the surface, caught on a log, bent over backward, the face staring at the sky. And though the corpse was swollen and discolored, translucent as the soft, white flesh of grayling or whitefish, the girls could tell that it was the man from the empty cabin upriver where they had found Tundra and Blue.

The old man's dogs now stood on the high bank beside the two sisters, sniffing the air uneasily, whining softly as they looked down at the pale and grotesque face of their dead owner.

Millie was the first to speak. “He must have come downriver just as we have.” They figured that the man wandered off in a fevered delirium caused by the red spots and fell into the river, his mottled body carried by the current, eventually lodging against this log.

“Should we bury him?” Maura asked without taking her eyes off the pale cadaver, one lazy arm floating up and down as if waving good-bye.

Millie agreed that it would be the right thing to do, but first they would have to retrieve his body.

The cut bank was deep, and swift water pressed the man against the log. Neither sister could see a way to wade out there. Finding a long stick, Millie tried to hook the ragged clothing still cloaking much of the corpse. They took turns, but were unable to catch anything. Millie decided what they needed was a longer pole and something more hooklike; so she affixed a sharply curved, foot-long piece of wood to the end of the stick with a length of rope.

She tried again, this time dropping the hooked end of the pole slightly upstream of the man, allowing the current to wash it downriver, snagging the waving arm.

“Pull,” grunted Millie, already tugging with all her weight.

Maura helped heave, and together they managed to free the body from the log. But the deadweight was too heavy in the strong current. It broke loose and floated away. Frustrated, the girls watched as the body was carried downriver, sinking slowly into the shadowy depths until there was nothing left to see except the river and the foaming boulders and the rising moon, perfectly nestled between two ridges in the darkening valley.

The sisters made camp on a sandbar, setting up the tarp like a tent over a long pole. They built a crackling fire outside the tent and sat beside it while the dogs licked and scratched themselves. Neither sister said a word, even when both crawled into their bedding, closed their eyes, and tried not to think about corpses adrift on blue water as they lay close by the fire, which eventually burned down to a heap of cold ashes, as cold and gray as the ash mounds in their abandoned village.

And while they waited for sleep, snow fell as lightly as ash, as silently as ash, unmelting. This would be the night of ashes.

Hwlazaan

(Ten)

“My husband died in a hunting accident,” she replied, her voice trembling in fear. “I have been outcast to wander the wilderness with my three small boys. We are cold and hungry and lost, and I fear that we will not survive long.”

T
HE TARP SAGGED
so low from the night's snowfall that Maura couldn't even sit upright without her head touching it. She pushed aside the door flap, which was no more than two ends of the tarp brought together and held in place by stones. Almost a foot of snow lay on the ground, dead-white and pillowed, the load bending double the thin willows and alders. The heavy snow muffled even the silence.

The low sun was as pale as a seagull egg or a river stone.

Maura sighed as she retreated to her sleeping place, her body searching for the warmth left there. She could see her breath, and her hands were already cold. Winter had come to stay. It would not leave again until spring, six months away. The rest of their journey would be hard going, slower, less certain. From now on there would be thin ice, overflow, snowdrifts and blizzards, and worst of all, occasional days of punishing cold.

Although neither girl had spoken and Millie had not moved, Maura knew that her sister was awake. “Millie, do we have enough clothes to keep us warm when the winter really sets in?”

Millie turned over, toward her sister. “I think so. At least we don't have to carry the mukluks and parkas. We can wear them. I'm sure we can stay warm during the day while we're walking. Nighttime will be the hard part.”

“We'll have to sleep in our parkas, won't we?” Maura was imagining how it would feel to sleep with no cabin, no roof, no protection but a tarp above them in the knife-edge cold of winter.

“And we'll have to keep a fire going,” Millie answered. “We'll have to be sure to tend the fire.” She wanted to sound confident for her little sister, but she, too, imagined the coming cold, the deeper snow, the freezing of the world.

As the morning sun struggled above the rim of the hills, Maura got up and built a small fire with the remaining pieces of dry spruce. While the inside of the drooping makeshift tent warmed, the girls ate what remained of the roasted porcupine, which wasn't much. A few small bites each. The dogs stared and drooled and begged, but there wasn't enough to share with them. The meager portions did not even lessen the girls' hunger.

Millie and Maura thought about food as they put on their winter clothing and packed camp, shaking snow from the tarp before folding it. They hoped to kill another porcupine soon. The dogs searched the nearby woods, perhaps similarly hoping to corner one again.

Although the northland was now buried in winter, the graveled edge of the river was exposed. Delicate sheets of paper-thin ice formed like spiderwebs along the water's edge. As winter temperatures drop, glaciers stop melting, and lakes and rivers and creeks dry up, retreating into their deepest beds to reveal ever-widening shorelines. In another week, a person would be able to walk across the river in most places.

As they trod slowly and carefully along the exposed-gravel shore, Millie was first to see a flock of grouse near a steep bank, searching for small round pebbles. Grouse are about the same size as chickens, which explains why many old-timers call them spruce chickens. They commonly come down to river and creek beds in the morning to swallow tiny stones. The stones go into a pouch called a gizzard and help the birds to grind leaves and berries and digest them.

“Sssshhh,” Millie whispered as she stopped walking and pointed at the flock.

The dogs, trailing behind, hadn't noticed the birds yet.

Then Maura, with her walking stick in hand, saw the oblivious grouse pecking at the gravel. The girls knew the birds were not the wariest or smartest of wild creatures. They had seen village boys kill them by throwing stones.

“You hold the dogs, and I'll try to kill one,” Millie whispered, slowly pulling the heavy tarp pack from her shoulders. She set the rifle aside, across the pack. The big gun was designed to kill moose or caribou or bear, and Millie knew that in the unlikely event that she actually hit a bird with a shot, nothing would be left to eat. She wished that they had not lost the other rifle, which was more suitable for small game.

But it lay uselessly rusting on the bottom of the river.

While Millie crept toward the birds, crouching, careful not to make any noise, Maura knelt and held the dogs, speaking to them softly, calming them. When Millie was close, she picked up two stones. She hurled the first one at the middle of the flock, just missing one bird, which hopped a little in surprise. But the rest only looked up from their pecking, saw nothing of importance, and went back to gathering pebbles.