The Raven's Gift (4 page)

“I’m Anna, and this is my husband, John.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cathy said. “I didn’t mean nothing by picking on your shoes, it’s just that it’s August and that means fall’s just a day or two away. It’s our rainy season, usually. Lately though, with all this crazy global warming stuff, it’s been different. Even warm. Who knows? Might be seventy and sunny tomorrow. Don’t count on it, though. Might be forty and blowing rain sideways so hard you can’t stand on your feet. Then snow tomorrow! What village are you headed to? Or are you teaching in Bethel?”

“New-nah-jew-ak,” Anna said. John could tell she was trying to pronounce the name the way Gary had taught them. He loved how hard she tried to get everything right.

“Oh, that’s a nice little village,” Cathy said.

The jet taxied down the runway and lifted off. John watched out the window as the Anchorage skyline dropped away beneath them. They banked left over the inlet with a rapid ascent skyward. Soon the plane levelled out as they approached what appeared to be an endless mountainous void. No roads. No lights. Just mountains and glaciers stretching off forever in every direction. Their new nurse friend’s mouth kept running.

“I work at the hospital in Bethel. It’s the hub, really, serves all the medical needs of an area about the size of Oregon. And we get it all. This summer, I was in the ER when we had a case of botulism poisoning. Here’s some trivia for you. In all of America, there are two places with the antidote for botulism on hand. At the CDC, that’s the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Hot-lanna, as my sister calls it, and in beautiful downtown Bethel. Ain’t that something? We’re like a CDC hot zone practically, all kinds of exciting diseases, new and old. We’ve always got government scientists and know-it-all doctors up in our business with their half-baked studies and new protocols.”

She leaned in toward Anna and lowered her voice. “See, the Natives like to eat this fermented concoction of rotten fish heads. They bury salted fish heads in the ground and let them get just rotten as can be and then eat the heads! It’s like a delicacy to some of them, the elders now mostly. I would avoid it if someone offers it to you. I’ve seen what botulism poisoning looks like, and I can tell you that sickness is something awful.”

She paused and asked the flight attendant for a diet cola.

“Yup, you’re headed somewhere special,” she continued after opening the can and taking a long sip. “I’m not a huge fan of the Native foods, as you can tell. But these people, they’re the best sort of patients from a nurse’s perspective. Sure there are problems, you’ll hear plenty about that, but you’ll never meet kinder folks. How long have you two been married?”

“Two years.”

“That’s great. Do you have a layover in Bethel?”

“We’ve got an in-service there, before we go to the village. We’ll be there two days,” Anna said.

“That’s super. Do you want to grab lunch one of those days? I’d love to take you around, show you the town, and grab some Chinese food.”

Anna laughed. “Chinese food? I thought we were going to the tundra!”

“Girl, Bethel has cuisine from all over the world. We might be the so-called armpit of Alaska, but we have some of the best restaurants you’ll find anywhere. Look at me! Would a chunk like this lie about food? We’ve also got cab drivers from Albania, Korea, Yugoslavia— you name it.”

“Taxi cabs?” Anna asked.

“Honey, you haven’t lived until you’ve ridden in a Bethel cab, that and get a bingo game or two under your belt. I’ll give you the full scoop on all the must-do things in the thriving metropolis of Bethel at lunch.”

“Thanks for the offer,” John replied, “but I’m sure they’ll have food for the in-service. We’ll be pretty busy.”

Anna elbowed him.

“What John means to say is that we’d love to sneak out of in-service and go with you. We’re in this for the adventure.”

“Just so long as it doesn’t involve botulism,” he added.

She elbowed him again. He turned away from their conversation and stared back out his window.

Jagged peak after peak passed beneath them. He wondered if any of the summits below were named, and whether anyone had travelled that impossibly rough and desolate terrain. It wasn’t just miles that would be separating them from their old life; it was an ocean of impassable ice-covered mountain ranges.

He stared down at the land below him and soon the mountains
began to shrink. The jagged peaks and glaciers melted into the earth and a watery moonscape replaced the mountains. Rust-coloured lakes with thin winding rivers speckled the foreign world racing beneath them.

HE WATCHED FROM ABOVE as three young men entered the principal’s house carrying weapons. When they didn’t come out, he waited for shots. He watched all afternoon and into the night for the young men to leave. He hadn’t heard or seen the principal since the village called the curfew.

He was worried about someone coming back into the school and thought about returning to his hiding spot, but he had to wait to see. So many times Anna had begged him to go to the principal’s house and demand that the balding man find a way to get them out safely, but he didn’t. He knew better. She was already getting sick by then, and he couldn’t risk breaking the quarantine and getting the principal and his family sick, or get shot in the process. He imagined the men inside the house, ransacking it, looking for food, supplies, or worse.

The classroom window had a light glaze of frost. With his fingernail, he scratched her name. ANNA. Then he licked the ice beneath his nail. He was thirsty and hungry. He hadn’t cracked into any of the school food hidden in the attic, and he had moved all that he could from their house before the fire. So long as someone didn’t burn the school down, he would be okay. Enough food, if rationed carefully, to last him at least six or eight months, maybe longer.

The letters faded and he scratched them again. Motion caught his eye. The three young men walked slowly. They were empty-handed. They moved down the stairs to the boardwalk, and then out onto the moonlit snow in front of the principal’s house and knelt down on the ground. He heard a gunshot, and one of the men fell forward. Another flash and shot came from inside the doorway. A second man fell. The third got up to run, and made it halfway across the wooden play deck
when the shot hit him in the shoulder and spun his body. Another shot and the man slumped to the play deck. He crawled half a dozen feet, dragging his legs through the snow, leaving a long dark gash of black in the snow before he collapsed, dead.

John pulled back from the window, suddenly aware that the shooter might see him. He hoped his motion hadn’t been too sudden.

Using his headlamp, he made his way quietly through the piles of overturned desks to the hallway. He crept down the hall and into the gym. In the dark gym only a slice of moonlight cut through an opening high at the far end. He made his way across the gym to the ladder. He climbed the ladder to the small door, eased himself in, and pulled the ladder up.

He knelt down on the wrestling mat and thought of the way the first man had dropped to the snow and the hollow shots. Pop. Pop. Pop.

   4   

H
e waited until almost no smoke could be seen coming from the chimney before they approached the steps. His toes had gone completely numb with cold and his index finger, the one he’d held on the trigger, felt as if the skin had frozen solid. He couldn’t stop wondering where the man he shot had been headed. But the possibility of warmth and a house to sleep in, even for the night, made the risk of entering akin to the risk of travelling on the river when the young ice wasn’t quite thick enough. The other houses would have already been ransacked, and if the man was the only living person left in the village, then what was worth salvaging would be inside.

“I’m going now. You sit there,” he said.

“You think I’ll run away?”

She laughed once and slapped her mittens against her withering legs. The echo of that strange sound, the chuckle and the slap, hung in the air of the village like a half clang of a church bell.

He walked up the front steps, through the weathered plywood-covered porch, and kicked the door open. At the same time he threw himself against the doorframe, fully expecting the blast of a shotgun or the high-pitched pop of a small-calibre rifle. When nothing happened he swung the rifle at hip level and stepped through the door.

An old Yup’ik woman sat in front of an open woodstove, poking the small flame with a broken broom handle. A soft blue light came in
through the weathered blue tarps that covered the windows. He didn’t shoot, but he didn’t take his finger from the trigger either.

“You going to kill me, like that man you just shooted?” she asked.

“Should I?”

“What’s wrong with that girl out there? She got those sicknesses? Why she blind?”

He raised his rifle slightly and watched her thin, brown wrinkled hands.

“You shouldn’t a kilt that man,” she said. “He was trying to do goot.”

“He was one of them,” he said.

She pushed a few more small twigs into the stove and shut the door halfway. She turned and knelt down on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her. She wore wide round glasses with thick lenses and black electrician’s tape on part of the frame.

“We’re all people just trying to live. Now, tell that girl to come inside. Cold out there. She is safe here. The hunter gone for a while. No bad ones allowed in my house,” she said.

“What hunter?” he asked.

She stared at him for a moment and then removed her glasses and cleaned the thick lenses with a thin green scarf protruding from the pocket of her jacket. He wasn’t sure whether she understood him or was ignoring him.

“What about him?” he said, gesturing in the direction of the man he’d just shot.

“He’s not the hunter, and that one out there is dead, if you’re any kind of goot shooter.”

“Where was he going?” John asked.

She sucked at her lips, and said after a short silence, “That girl should come inside now. Cold out there, you know? Unless maybe you want her to freeze so you don’t have to take care of her?”

“Where? Tell me where he was going, or I’ll shoot you, too.” He
raised the rifle again, to prove he was capable, but she wasn’t even looking. He lowered the barrel to the floor.

“You only shoot the bad ones,” she said. “I know. Get more woods for tonight’s fire. Bring that girl inside. You go get woods down by the river for us. That’s where that man you killed was going, to find driftwoods for an old woman’s fire.”

He started out the door and the old woman called after him. He stopped. “The hunter?” she said. “I don’t know nothing more about him than you.”

“WHAT SORT OF PLACE IS THIS?” Anna asked as their taxi, a ramshackle green Suburban with cardboard covering the holes in the seats and one door wired shut, bobbed its way down the roller coaster of a road, a narrow paved stretch with ridiculous undulating heaves.

“It’s so … so wide open. The sky seems so huge. And it’s flatter than I imagined,” she said, peering out at the land surrounding them, and then turning her face up to see the sky.

“Except for the road,” he said. “This is crazy. Hold on.”

The vehicle flew down another dip, up the other side, and bounced hard enough for him to hit his baseball cap on the roof. He winced and rubbed his scalp.

The cab driver, a white older man with his yellow hair slicked straight back, and one gold tooth, peered at them in the rear-view mirror. The man obviously wasn’t Korean, but the black lettering on the Suburban’s door read KOREAN CAB.

The radio beeped. He pushed a button and took the receiver. “Twenty-four.”

The radio speaker squawked and a sultry woman’s voice said, “Twenty-four? Post office, Swanny, airport.”

“Roger,” their driver said. “You sound sexy today, Rose.”

“Screw you, Del.”

The tundra gave way to houses and buildings, seemingly placed at
random intervals, with long silver aluminum pipes connecting them like metal feeding tubes.

The cab swerved across the other lane and pulled into the parking lot of the post office. He hit the horn with two short blasts.

“Sorry about that,” the driver said. “New-teacher time of year, ah? Where you cats from?”