The Raven's Gift (21 page)

After school, he would hurry to their house, grab his rain gear, and do his best not to run down the boardwalk to the house Carl lived in with a wife, six kids, mother, and grandmother. Once at the house he would climb the steps and take a deep breath before going through the arctic entry, where Carl had an old white drop-in freezer on one side loaded with birds and frozen fish, and coats and boots and other outdoor gear hung on the opposite side.

In the middle, in the path that led to the next door, which opened into the main living area of the small three-bedroom house, were various obstacles to avoid—all of them foul smelling. A full honey
bucket might be waiting to be dumped, or a pile of geese ready to be plucked, or a black garbage sack bulging with fish or bird guts. Always something new, and always something odorous awaited his arrival.

Once inside, he would exhale quietly and say his hellos to the usual crowd of people gathered around the television. Carl or his wife would say, “
Kuuvviara
. Have coffee.” And he would. He would pour himself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the pot sitting on the stove, and then pull out a metal folding chair and wait to see if Carl felt like hunting.

While he waited his eyes would roam the items covering the wood-panelled walls, the paper elementary school certificates and awards, the gold-framed paintings of the Virgin Mary, Russian saints, and several pro basketball posters. Most of the time he would watch Carl’s wife, Carrie, or his mother prepare the evening meal. Usually, one of the women would sit on the floor,
uluaq
in hand, cutting a bird or a fish. Once, it was a beaver Carl had shot the night before.

The last evening they took the boat out together, Carl stood in the kitchen, gazing out the window that faced the river. He slid a hand beneath his shirt, a thin white cotton tee with STOP PEBBLE written in large red letters. “Probably not much reason to go out tonight,” he said, “but if you want to, we can.”

He turned and smiled at John.

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Me neither,” Carl said. “River could freeze up any time. Maybe when we get back you could help me pull the motor on the boat. Get it ready for winter.”

“No problem. That’s the least I can do.”

Carrie looked up from the stainless mixing bowl in her lap, while her hand continued stirring the mixture of lard, sugar, and berries. “I’m making your favourite kind, John. Salmonberry
akutaq
,” she said. “Carl, we’re almost out of water, too. You’ll have to haul some when you get back. Have John help you if he wants my famous Eskimo ice cream.”

“Yours is the best a-goo-tuck I’ve had,” John said, attempting to say the word as well as he could. He looked at the plastic garbage barrel that they used for their drinking water, a green can sitting beside the stove with a round plywood cover.

“Do you think you’ll ever get running water in the houses?” he asked.

Carl finished his coffee and set the mug in the sink, a traditional white sink, except there was no faucet, just three holes where the fixture should have been. “Not in my lifetime,” he said. “If we had oil wells here, or if there were more
kass’aqs
, maybe then. Some company is putting a gold mine up the Kuskokwim. Maybe if they take a couple billion dollars of gold out they will think about helping us get running water, but I doubt it. No one in the Lower Forty-eights cares that we shit in buckets and have to haul our water. Nobody cares if they deploy three-quarters of our best men and women to the desert. No one cares if our kids have tuberculosis. Sorry, enough complaining. You ready to go?”

John nodded. He finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink. “Thank you,” he said to Carrie. She smiled and raised her eyebrows.

“We say
quyana
,” she said.

“I know. I’m working on learning some words,” he replied.

As they packed their rain gear and guns in the boat, John asked about the mine. He hadn’t heard about any gold mines nearby.

“It’s not that close,” Carl said. “Maybe two hundred miles up the Kuskokwim from here. Lots of old mines in the Kilbuck Mountains. There’s the old Nyac ghost town, a mine where the school district used to have a summer camp. Real nice up there. The kids love it. Maybe if they ever have it again, you and me can work there. There’s some active gold mines around there, too, but they’re pretty small. Mostly old family operations. This Donlin mine is going to be way bigger. They say it could really cause some problems for our fishing on the Kuskokwim.”

“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 mile or so before dark.

He looked back again and she was gone.

He stopped and turned, and then felt a tap on his shoulder. He spun around, half expecting to see someone holding her, a shiny blade to her throat, or a pistol to her head.

“Why are you stopping again?” she asked.

He swallowed and licked at his cracked lips. “I wanted to make sure no one was following us,” he said. “Help me pull this. I’m tired of pulling.”

He helped her take hold of the rope and together they began towing the toboggan. The girl was strangely quiet for too long, and after a while he began to feel guilty. He was about to say he was sorry when she said, “My grandpa first told me about the Big Mouth Baby when I was just a little girl, and maybe tonight, if you’re not so crabby, I’ll tell you the story.”

   22   

O
n the first night of camping with the old woman, they all curled up beneath the blue tarp and stared up at the dark cloud-covered sky. The old woman slept holding her shotgun on her caribou skin, wrapped in her blanket, on the side closest to the crackling fire, and the girl in the middle with him beside her, braiding her grass with the old woman watching closely, giving instructions in Yup’ik every so often.

“Will you tell us a story, in
kass’atun
, so John can understand?” the girl asked.

“It’s fine. I don’t need a bedtime story,” he said.

For a long while the old woman said nothing. Then she clicked her tongue, sighed, and began a story. “
Ak’a tamaani
, a long time ago, there was a shaman called Big Belly.”

“Big Belly—Big Mouth Baby—I’m seeing a pattern here,” John joked.

“Shh,” the girl whispered. “We don’t interrupt stories, John.”

“Sorry.”

The old woman continued. “He wasn’t always called Big Belly. I forgot what they call him before his belly got so giant, but he was a good shaman. He would travel under the ice and bring good luck to the hunters. The hunters wanted luck, so they cut a hole in the ice, but the shaman used his magic and could tell there was already another evil shaman travelling under the water, so he said he would
wait for that shaman to go back to his village. But the men didn’t listen and they forced him to go down under the ice. Just like he thought, he ran into the evil shaman flying beneath the ocean, and when one shaman met another they would use their magical powers and fight. When they encountered each other, they had a huge battle. The other shaman was evil and more powerful and he broke the good shaman’s back. When the fight was over the good shaman went home, but he was swollen from the seawater and his back was broken with a giant hump like a brown bear. Using his arms, he pulled himself into the village. He asked one of the strong young men to hit him in the back with a club. The young man clubbed him four times until his back was straightened. His back was fixed but he started to
miryaq
, throw up, salt water all over the man’s house. Everything smelled like the ocean. Even though he was real sick, and vomited all that water, his belly stayed big and bloated like a frog stomach until he died. He never went under the ice again, and from then on they called him Big Belly.”

“Cool. I’ve only ever heard scary stories about shaman,” the girl said.

“Shamans were important back then. We had good shamans and bad shamans. The shamans were our priests, our doctors, our counsellors. The people would go to them when they were sick, if they wanted a baby, or if they needed luck hunting. This was before we knew about hospitals and Jesus and heaven. Back then those shamans could travel to places and talk to animals, giants, and even the little people. Bad shamans would put spells on enemy villages and make people sick or crazy, but good shamans could heal the sick and change the weather and bring animals during times of starvation. Back in those days of the shaman, Yup’iks could become animals and animals could become Yup’iks. There was just a thin skin, like the surface of the water or young river ice, that separated the worlds.”

“Maybe the hunter is a bad shaman,” the girl said.

The old woman sighed. “I don’t think he got any powers,” she said.

“Did you ever see a shaman?” the girl asked.