The Great Death

by John Smelcer

  When they were ready, the sisters set off for the fork in the trail, where they would continue downriver to the trading settlement they had never seen. As they had been at the very beginning of their journey, Millie and Maura were again alone.

  Denc'i Uk'edi

  (Fourteen)

  Because of Raven’s kindness, the woman was able to feed her children. Many years later, when the three boys had become strong young men, they returned to their old village during a time of famine. The people were starving.

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED quickly after the storm. By the afternoon of the second day, it was already twenty degrees below zero, maybe colder, dangerous conditions for moving about.

  As usual, Millie was leading the way, breaking trail in the deep snow. She was sweating from the labor, the perspiration making her clothes wet against her skin. And although the exertion warmed her at the moment, the wetness quickly robbed her clothing of the ability to insulate her whenever she stopped moving.

  If she had known better, Millie would have opened the front of her parka to cool down or removed it altogether, the way her father did when he cut or split firewood in the front yard. But she was too inexperienced in the wilderness to realize the danger of wetness in below-zero weather. Her father knew it. Her uncles knew it. Anyone who labored in the north in winter understood the danger. The sisters understood cold. For most of the year, the cold was their world. But they hadn’t yet faced this particular danger themselves. Whenever they’d broken into a sweat outdoors—playing or helping Mother or Father with a chore—they’d been in their village, just steps away from a warm home where their clothes could dry out.

  As Millie walked ahead of her sister on the frozen river, shivering whenever she stopped to rest even for a few minutes, she began to see caribou tracks, hundreds of them. A great herd had moved through the area, crossing the river. Because it had snowed only two days before, she knew that the tracks were fresh. She also knew that the herds, some of thousands of migrating animals, take days to pass through a region. Stragglers often wander around for weeks after the main herd has moved on, easy pickings for wolves. Millie slid the rifle from her shoulder as she walked, eagerly scanning the forest ahead.

  “Maybe we’ll get a caribou,” she said.

  Millie tried to sound confident to help keep Maura’s, and her own, spirits as high as possible. But she was beginning to lose hope. They had found no survivors in the village behind them, and she had no idea how far it was to the white settlement. What if it was too far? She worried that winter would only become colder and colder every day. What if it reached sixty below, which wasn’t uncommon for this time of year? Could they survive the cold? She was tired of walking, and Maura—little as she was—must be even more exhausted.

  “Let’s keep a sharp eye,” she said.

  Maura liked the idea. Caribou meat tastes different from moose meat. People usually prefer one over the other, and caribou was Maura’s favorite. When the girls walked around the bend, sure enough, they saw a small band of caribou milling around on the frozen river.

  “Stop,” Millie whispered, holding up a hand.

  Eight caribou, mostly cows, scuffed the snow away from the river’s ice coat with their small antlers, looking for grass or moss. Bulls lose their antlers each year after the mating season in late fall, but cows keep theirs to scrape snow from the ground in search of food and to protect their young. Two young bulls were walking amid the cows.

  The girls eased a little closer—Maura stooped immediately behind her bigger sister, placing her feet exactly in Millie’s tracks—so that Millie had a better chance of sneaking up on them. They moved slowly, keeping out of sight by staying in line with a brushy deadfall by the river’s frozen edge. Several times they stopped, thinking a caribou was looking their way. When they were crouched behind the deadfall, Millie pulled off her right glove with her teeth and slowly worked the rifle’s lever, which was stiff from the cold. Though she was shivering, she aimed carefully and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. She pulled back the hammer, aimed again, and squeezed the trigger.

  It was so cold that the firing pin would not slide freely. In such cold weather, experienced hunters know to wipe excess grease and oil from all moving parts. At twenty below, even oily lubricants freeze. But Millie, as a girl, was not an experienced hunter. In fact, as a girl, she had never been allowed to hunt with her father.

  The caribou were slowly making their way across the river. In another moment, they would reach the tree line on the other side and she would miss her chance. Just then, one of the bulls stopped and stood sideways to the girls, an easy target.

  “Hurry, Millie,” Maura whispered excitedly.

  “I’m trying,” replied Millie, working the lever again, ejecting the unfired bullet into the snow and manually feeding another one into the chamber. Millie didn’t realize it, but the motion of the hammer twice striking the firing pin loosened the frozen oil, allowing it to move freely.

  She aimed at the broad side of the caribou, held her breath, and pulled the trigger. This time the rifle went off in a cloud of smoke and jerked hard against her shoulder. The small bull caribou jumped away, ran a few steps, and stumbled. It fell over, kicked for several seconds, and then lay still. The rest of the band had bolted into the forest.

  “You did it, Millie! You did it!” Maura shouted and clapped her hands. “What a great shot! You’re a real hunter.”

  She was more excited than Millie, who stood smiling, the slight wind blowing her hair across her face.

  The girls ran out on the frozen river and stood over the dead caribou. It was Millie’s first big-game kill—the first time she had successfully hunted with a gun. In happier times, if she had been a boy, the village would have celebrated such an occasion. But on the wintered river, the sisters celebrated in their own way, skinning back the hide to expose the meat on a hindquarter. The rump showed a good deal of fat, the sign of a healthy animal that has eaten well to prepare for winter.

  Millie butchered the caribou while Maura gathered firewood and built a fire on the riverbank, carefully using the matches and tinder the way Millie had taught her, the way their father had taught Millie. Because they had no way of carrying all the meat, Millie cut several thick pieces from the rump and stuffed them inside the folded tarp. While she worked with the knife, her shivering increased. The skin parka was trapping the moisture, and her wet clothes were beginning to freeze. If she had known better, Millie would have removed her parka and dried her damp clothing over the fire, but she thought that maybe she was coming down with a fever and so she stayed bundled up.

  When the butchering was finished, the girls cooked some of the meat on short willow sticks.

  “Blue and Tundra would have liked this,” Maura said before biting off a piece of meat that was cooked on the outside. The inside was still red.

  A raven flew down and landed on the ground nearby. It hopped closer to the fire and cocked its black head, looking at the girls.

  “Here, Raven,” Millie said, tossing a piece of meat to the bird, which hopped sideways but did not fly off.

  Perhaps their good fortune was the bird’s doing. After all, Millie recalled being told stories, albeit few, in which Raven helped people in need. In one, a young woman and her children are lost in the wilderness, close to death. Raven takes pity on the woman and teaches her how to hunt and fish and how to build a shelter for her family. It was one of the few Raven stories Millie could remember with a happy ending.

  Millie wondered if Raven had helped her and Maura escape the wolves and the giant, hairy man. Did Raven entice the small bull caribou to turn sideways just when he could have escaped into the forest?

  The raven snatched the bit of meat, stared at the girls, blinked, and then flew away and landed on a nearby tree. Millie cut several small pieces, which she tossed to the bird each time it flew down from the tree.

  As the already low sun began sinking below the distant horizon, the girl
s could tell from the clear sky that the night was going to be very cold. They thought about camping where they were, which seemed to be as good a place as any, but Maura pointed out that the caribou carcass might attract wolves. Millie agreed. They decided to walk downriver some distance and then make camp.

  Millie was getting deep-down cold, bone cold, from her wet clothes. But they soon found a perfect spot. The wind had long ago uprooted a large, dead spruce tree. Because spruce tree roots do not go deep, they frequently rip out of the ground fully attached to their trunk when a tree falls, forming a semicircular wall of shallow roots entangled in thick soil, sometimes as tall as seven or eight feet. The branches of the tree were dry and brittle, a convenient supply both of firewood and, when trimmed a little with the hatchet, of shelter poles.

  Millie and Maura built a shelter against the earthen wall using a row of equally spaced poles over which they spread the tarp, covering it with a foot or more of snow. In very cold weather, snow acts as insulation against wind and cold. While the wind may howl and drive temperatures to fifty degrees below zero outside an Arctic igloo, the inside can stay eighty degrees warmer from the simple use of oil lamps for light and heat. Then the sisters gathered green boughs from neighboring spruce trees and piled them on the floor of their home to raise their bodies off the frozen ground. When they were satisfied with their shelter, the best they had ever built, the girls stacked a supply of firewood by gathering up all the small branches they had trimmed from the poles.

  From a distance, the snow-covered shelter was indiscernible from the wintered surroundings, a snowdrift against a fallen tree.

  The girls sat beside a little fire within their makeshift shelter, melting snow for drinking water and caribou soup. They had to keep the fire small to avoid burning a hole through the tarp. There was enough draft to allow smoke to escape. It was so cold outside that the fire could only warm the interior to around freezing, which, though uncomfortable, was far better than twenty or thirty below. The girls had to wear their parkas and mukluks and gloves. They went outside only to gather more wood or to relieve themselves.

  The frantic northern lights and innumerable stars filled the sky.

  The sisters could hear the sharp sound of trees popping. At very low temperatures, the moisture inside trees freezes and bursts the wood’s sinews; the exploding sound is like that of a rifle fired in the distance. It was far too cold to travel.

  With little else to do inside their shelter, and knowing that cold spells sometimes lasted for many days, weeks even, the girls talked and retold stories they had heard all their lives, ancient stories about when animals spoke and acted like people before there were people. Every tale offered something to be learned. Millie recalled the stories easily, and Maura enjoyed seeing bits and pieces of wisdom in them, things her mother had pointed to from time to time. Maura smiled thinly, remembering how sometimes Mother would end a tale saying, “When you are as clever as Fox, you can make your own way. Until then, you must listen to me.”

  Maura didn’t just want to listen to her sister now, though. She also wanted to talk with her.

  “Is Raven a real god, or are these just stories?” she asked.

  Millie was slow to answer. She was feeling cold and clammy, in spite of the fire.

  “Stories can be real,” she replied. “They teach us things, like how to behave and how things came to be the way they are. Someday people may tell tales about how we survived the plague and winter. It will be a story about strength and courage.”

  They took turns telling other tales, occasionally correcting each other on minor points. Because stories are revered, it is important to tell them right.

  “Do you think we will make it?” Maura asked after telling a story about how Raven once tricked Porcupine.

  Millie thought about how far they had traveled, how they were already well beyond the downriver village, which, she thought, was possibly halfway to the trading settlement.

  “Maybe,” she answered, and then sipped some warm water from the pot.

  “What if we don’t make it?”

  “Then we don’t.”

  Millie’s frankness was not comforting, and Maura became quiet for a long time. Finally, she broke the silence.

  “What if we are alone for the rest of our lives, just the two of us in the whole world? What will become of us? Who will we marry?”

  Millie responded to the question, although Maura already knew the answer.

  “Then we shall never marry, and we shall never have children.”

  Maura started to cry. Certainly she was too young to worry about things like marriage, but she wanted to be like the other women in their village. She wanted a chin tattoo when she became of marrying age. She remembered touching her mother’s tattoo on her deathbed. The notion that she might never marry—might never be like her mother—was too much. She lay down and pulled the blankets over her head and tried not to think about it.

  Millie stared into the flames, adding handfuls of twigs while her sister slept. She had to stay awake. Someone had to tend to the fire. For both of them to sleep at the same time would be very dangerous.

  But an hour later, the wetness on her back was a soggy burden, pulling out her body’s heat, pushing her toward exhaustion. Cold and short of breath, she lay down, pulled the blankets close, and curled into a ball to conserve heat. Her body trembled, and she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering. She should wake Maura, but she didn’t have the energy to speak or reach over to her. She didn’t even have the energy to open her eyes.

  As she fell asleep, an owl hooted outside. Millie wondered if it was speaking to her.

  * * *

  Maura awoke early in the morning to the feeling of something shaking against her. Millie was shivering uncontrollably. Maura sat up and tried to wake her sister. But no matter how much she called out or shook her, Millie did not respond. Her lips were blue-white, her quivering body as rigid as a corpse.

  The fire was dead. No one had fed it.

  Maura spread her own blankets over her sister and quickly built a small pile of twigs on the gray ashes of the campfire. She found the jar of matches and lit the pile, adding larger pieces as the flames grew steadily. More than half an hour passed before the fire warmed the interior so that Maura no longer saw her breath.

  But despite the warmth, Millie was still shaking. Maura rubbed her sister vigorously, trying to warm her. Her mother had taught her how the friction of rubbing warms the muscles. She felt the wet clothing beneath the parka. With great effort, Maura undressed her sister and hung the wet clothes on a short root so they could dry. After rubbing Millie’s arms, shoulders, and chest, she turned her over to rub her back and the backs of her legs, keeping a vigilant eye on the fire. The shaking slowed a little each time she made a pass up and down her sister’s body. After an hour or two, Millie was no longer trembling.

  After covering her sister with her own blanket, Maura went outside to break off more branches from the felled spruce tree. She gathered several armfuls, piling them within easy reach of the flap door. When she had collected enough to last the day, Maura crawled back inside the shelter and fed the fire, which had almost died completely again.

  For the rest of the morning and afternoon, Maura tended the fire and lay beside Millie, nestling close, sharing her body heat and occasionally rubbing her sister’s arms and legs to warm them. Sometimes Millie would open her eyes and stare quietly at Maura before drifting off again. At last, late in the day, she seemed for the first time to be completely awake. She turned her head away from Maura and looked all around the shelter, before turning back and croaking, “Where am I? What happened?”

  Maura had spent the whole day desperately trying not to let herself think that her sister could be dying. She didn’t want to imagine surviving without Millie. At that moment, Maura knew, finally, that Millie would live. She wanted to jump up and dance. She wanted to run outside and fling snow into the air. She wanted to kiss Millie softly on the forehead,
the way Mother would have if she had been there.

  Instead, she whispered, “You’re all right now,” then reheated the pot of caribou soup. Maura helped Millie to sit upright and drink the hot broth, which warmed her inside.

  By evening, Millie’s clothes were dry, and both girls were again telling stories. In the middle of a tale about Wolf and Fox, Millie stopped talking, her face turned serious.

  “I almost ruined everything. If I had died, you would have been left alone,” she said, the rims of her eyes beginning to turn red. “Thank you.”

  Maura took her hand and squeezed it gently. “We’re sisters,” she said, smiling.

  Millie nodded in agreement, wiping away a tear. “Yes, sisters.”

  Maura started to say something, but Millie held up a hand, hushing her.

  “A long time ago, I scolded you for fearing the waters of the creek. I scolded you for being small and frightened. I told you that even though the badger is small, he frightens bears. You frighten me, sister. You must frighten bears. How strong you are. How wise and kind you are. I was wrong to think you weak and afraid.”

  The temperature stayed low for almost a week. Each tedious day seemed to last forever. The girls took turns sleeping and tending the fire, gathering firewood, and melting snow for drinking water and for making caribou soup. They talked when they were both awake. Eventually, as always before, the cold spell passed. Clouds arrived, the temperature rose, and the girls set off once again down the trail, glad to be moving, glad to be out of their shelter. As they trudged alongside the silent river, Maura led the way.

  ‘Alts'eni Uk'edi

  (Fifteen)

  Because the mother had taught her sons all that Raven had taught her, they were great hunters. The three young men saved the village. Because of their courage and their compassion to help the old and weak, all three became great chiefs.

  Xay kuduldiye. Let the winter be short.

  Saan kuduset. Let the summer be long.