Far North

by Will Hobbs

  For a while we stood and watched the sparks joining the aurora and the stars. Then we went back inside the cabin and started a fire in the stove. No white-haired Johnny sitting on that third stool and making something with his hands. No Johnny Raven drumming quietly, telling the old stories. The sound of his voice, his language—gone. There was nothing to be said. Both of us were lost in our own thoughts of the dark path that lay ahead.

  I remembered the envelope I had taken from Johnny’s shirt pocket. I gave it to Raymond, who opened it and took out a neatly typed document. I lit the last candle, already half-gone. Raymond read to himself a bit, then he looked up and said, “It’s by the nurse at the hospital. But really it’s from him.”

  “Read it,” I said.

  14

  “‘MY NAME IS Mary Canadien,’” Raymond read aloud. “‘I am a nurse at the hospital here in Yellowknife, N.W.T. I am a Dene from Fort Providence. My patient, Johnny Raven, has asked me to write down his testament for him in English as he tells it to me in Slavey. I regret that the English words that follow will only be an approximation of his thoughts in Slavey.’”

  Johnny Raven is my name. My last name comes from my original Dene name, which meant Raven’s Eye. I was born not far below the great falls of the Nahanni. I was born of the mountain people who lived on the Yukon side of the mountains in the winter and built long boats out of moose skins to come down the Keele River or the Ross or the Nahanni in the spring to trade at the forts. At the end of the summer we would pack our dogs and return on foot to the mountains, where we made our fall hunt, mostly sheep back then.

  We made as much dry meat as we could for the winter. We were never many, and the new diseases that were coming into the country took many lives, including my mother’s. After that we had to stay in the low country. My father took me to the mission, but I didn’t stay there very long. He came back for my little brother and me and we lived in the bush. Sometimes I wish I had stayed longer at the mission, only because I would have learned English there.

  As it is, today, I cannot speak with my grandchildren and the other young people, and that is the worst thing. If they understood Slavey, I could tell them the stories and what we learned. Sometimes when I think about their future, I am overwhelmed with sadness. Is it true that what the elders know, the young people no longer need to know? I am leaving my thoughts in hopes that some young person will read them and maybe think about them. I will not live much longer. So this is my message to you.

  When we lived in the bush, the land was beautiful and felt just like it was new. We always had to be working to try to survive. We lived in lean-tos and stick teepees covered with branches or hides. Most times there was enough to eat, and there was joking and laughter and dances. We wore rabbit skins, beaver or caribou jackets if we were lucky. But sometimes there was no game, not even rabbits. When I was eleven, my father starved to death.

  In 1928 that’s when all the people came together to get the treaty payments. They were all in one place when the steamboat came down the Deh Cho and the influenza arrived with it. Many of the elders died, and many of the young, including my first wife, my baby son, and baby daughter.

  More and more white men came into the country. They built houses for us if we would stay in the villages instead of living out in the bush. It was necessary, they said, so that the children could go to school. So we accepted our payments and the houses that they built for us so that we would live like them, and our children went to school so they would talk like them and think like them.

  I have lived in the village for many years now. I am not cold unless I go camping out on the land. I don’t ever have to be hungry. I see everyone sitting and watching TV all the time. Some of the best hunters these days have gotten so good at loading up their VCRs they’ve forgotten how to load their rifles. There are so many useless pursuits now that can’t make anyone happy. My mind always goes back to living in the bush and watching the ways of the animals, the sun and the moon and the rivers, and I think that the life we lived on the land was much more interesting.

  Outside the village the land is changing. It is not so beautiful as it was. Fewer and fewer animals can live on it. First it was gold and then it was oil, then it was uranium and gold again, then the forests themselves, now it is diamonds. Only a few people benefit, almost never the Dene.

  The Dene have never been a greedy people. Just as the bear shares its den with the porcupine, we have shared with others who have come. Now our young people will have to say, “Enough is enough,” but unless they know the land they won’t fight for it. Unless they think like real Dene people, they won’t even have the land to go to anymore when they need it.

  There is so much unhappiness among the young people now. Anger…drinking…fighting…They say they are bored, and I believe they are. If I didn’t stay busy, always making something, I would be bored, too. We Dene used to roam over the land; there was always something new. The land is all around us, the land has the answers, but many of us don’t even go there anymore.

  The young people now have it much harder than we ever did. Because who would want to go back to a time when you could starve to death? Yet if they stay in the village and do nothing, they will die inside. They have to go away and get a school education, but away from home they don’t have any idea who they are. So they come back to the village, and then they are angrier than before.

  They have it much harder. They need education to get good jobs, like this nurse at the hospital. They need to become the carpenters and the mechanics and the teachers. But I believe this, too: they also need a bush education. Otherwise, they won’t be happy even if they are successful. They need to get both educations just like they need to learn both languages.

  In the old times, when the elders passed on what they had learned to the next generation, it wasn’t so we could go back to the past. It was to ensure that the people would know what they needed to continue to survive. That’s the way the elders still feel today. We want to help our young people face the future. If they lose their knowledge of the land and the knowledge of their own language, the real Dene will disappear forever.

  I hope the old stories will not die. They are beautiful. They help us to pass the wisdom down from all the elders who are gone. The elders had strong medicine that was gained from the land and the spirits of the land, and it could be passed down. Myself, I have always had strong raven medicine. I wish I had someone to give it to.

  The nurse asks how it’s been in the hospital. I say, I miss the taste of moose tongue and beaver tail. I don’t know if I will ever taste them again. The doctor wants me to stay here, but as I told him, it’s time to go back to Nahanni now.

  And so I say to you: take care of the land, take care of yourself, take care of each other.

  Johnny Raven

  15

  WE STAYED INSIDE the cabin the next day. I was stoking the fire and Raymond was in a trance, holding Johnny’s little hand drum and focusing on nothing at all. Outside, the wind down from the arctic was blowing a gale as it almost always did in Deadmen Valley, bending the tall spruces as if they were saplings. The gusts blasted down the frozen river, driving the stinging snow and compressing it into drifts.

  In the afternoon Raymond took the letter out and read it over to himself, then folded it back up and stuck it in his pocket. The letter didn’t seem to give him any peace. I took the file and sharpened the ax just to have something to do. Raymond never noticed me.

  I went down to the creek with the ax to break open the spot where we always collected our water. The entire area was covered with a slowly moving sheet of overflow water that had the consistency of oozing gelatin. The overflow was coming from just upstream, where a strong head of water was bubbling up through the ice like an artesian well. As Raymond had explained to me, when the creeks freeze deep, the water moving under the ice has to find somewhere to go, so it splits the ice at a weak point and forces its way to the surface, where it fans out in a slushy mass before fr
eezing solid.

  Above the source of the overflow I found a new collection spot and accidentally splashed water all over myself trying to chop the new hole. The water froze instantly to my clothes; I barely noticed. I was in a sort of trance myself. I hauled the water back to the cabin. I made what we were calling beaver stew, with no other ingredients but shredded beaver meat and water. All the while my mind was racing. I had only one thought: escape down the frozen Nahanni while we still had food and strength. There had never been another airplane. We’d quietly given up on the signal fire at least ten days ago. We had to do something. The two brothers this valley was named after—the prospectors back in 1908—didn’t get out in time.

  I handed Raymond a plate of beaver stew. He looked at me as if he’d never been away, and he said, “We have to get out of here.”

  “Amen to that,” I agreed. “And before it snows again—a lot of snow would make it a whole lot harder. Hike out down the river, is that what you’re thinking, too?”

  With a nod, he said, “There’s no other way. We only have two bullets left. We don’t have any reason to think the moose are still around, and even if they were, I can’t hunt like Johnny. Let’s go while we still have the beaver meat.”

  “If we come to open water, we’ll just walk around it. How far is it down to Nahanni Butte, do you think?”

  “Too far to carry the meat and everything on our backs. It could be a hundred miles, and who knows how long it would take us. We need to make a toboggan.”

  “Is it canyon all the way?”

  “The last forty miles or so is all different. It’s called the Splits—that’s where I got my moose. The river winds all over the place. It’s got lots of islands, lots of different channels. All open country, real flat.”

  We found two perfectly straight young birches on a ridge three or four hundred feet above the floor of the valley. We prepared the logs just as Johnny had, stripping long slats for the toboggan the same way he’d stripped material for the snowshoe frames. Then we went to work with my pocketknife and Raymond’s sheath knife, whittling our narrow boards down to roughly uniform thickness.

  Raymond slowly worked the bend into the slats at one end, shaping them over his knee. We lashed them together with babiche and tied the curved front end back to the toboggan to keep the proper bend in place while the wood was drying out. The toboggan took us three days to build. As we were finishing it, I scooped up a handful of shavings and was about to toss them in the stove. Raymond said, “Maybe we shouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The elders always take the scraps outside and spread them out in the woods. They say otherwise you won’t find a good birch when you need one.”

  I thought about it and said, “There might be something to that.”

  “I guess it’s showing respect for a tree. They always say even the trees have spirits. Sounds crazy, I guess.”

  I said, “If I’d never been to the North, maybe it would sound crazy to me. But I’m getting the idea. It’s like ‘Make more beaver.’”

  When I said that he added, “They say that living things don’t die right away when they’re killed or cut down. The spirit can stay around for days or months or even longer.”

  “Same as our old friend,” I pointed out.

  We used the bowline I’d salvaged from the raft as the pull-rope for the toboggan. It was all we had left of the parachute cord. We attached it at both ends on the front. One of us would pull the toboggan by walking inside the rope.

  On the last day of the year we precooked all the beaver meat for our hike out. It was Raymond’s idea. The easy part was the quick-freezing: set your plates of stew outside the door, wait ten minutes, then chuck the rations into the army box. The meat filled one box and half of the second one.

  Sometime during our last night in the cabin, a bird started croaking, not very far away. “Did you hear that?” Raymond whispered.

  “Raven?”

  “Ravens aren’t supposed to talk at night…. That’s not a good sign.”

  In the morning twilight we decided on what was absolutely essential. Everything else we’d leave behind. We’d take along Johnny’s moccasins and his blanket. We’d leave most of the pots and pans, Raymond’s gym shoes, the camp shovel, Johnny’s parka, the beautiful beaver pelts he had tanned. Raymond looked a long time at Johnny’s hand drum, then said, “I’ll come back for this next summer.”

  We lashed everything down on the toboggan, including all three pairs of snowshoes. We rigged the ax where we could get at it. Raymond shouldered the packsack, latched the door, and picked up the rifle. I started out pulling the toboggan and had the daypack on my back. It was New Year’s Day and forty degrees below zero. That’s seventy-two degrees below freezing, I thought. I took a glance back at the cabin and saw the blue smoke drifting out of the chimney and spreading out along the ground. I remembered the night Johnny had led us to this cabin, under the northern lights, and I thought about all that had happened there. Raymond, I realized, was also looking back.

  The surface of the Nahanni was mostly glare ice. The toboggan was sliding along behind me of its own accord. The walking was so easy we soon rounded an island, passed a second, and found ourselves about where our log raft had piled against the ice a month before. Not far ahead loomed the tall gate of the lower canyon. A short while later we entered the gate and passed inside.

  A couple of miles and around a bend, we encountered an icy fog hugging the bottom of the canyon. It had to be coming from open water. Raymond and I looked at each other and said nothing. Forty below zero, yet open water, just as we had feared.

  When we got down to the riffles, our fears eased. It was only a narrow strip of running water, with a cliff on the left but plenty of room to get around on the right.

  Every mile or two we encountered another stretch of open water. I couldn’t understand it. Right beside the exposed water, the ice would be a full two feet thick. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why isn’t the ice two feet thick all across the river? What causes these open spots? It’s January!”

  “It beats me,” Raymond said. “Maybe tricky currents can rile up the water and keep it from freezing.”

  “That might explain it.”

  “Maybe there’s even hot springs right under the bed of the river. I know about some farther down—I’ve been there, right where the canyon ends and the Splits begins.”

  We pushed on between the blue-gray walls of the canyon. The rim of the canyon thousands of feet above glowed pink, signaling day’s end coming soon, and we thought better of continuing. On an island we cut down a pair of dead spruces and tried to start a fire with the butane lighter, but it wouldn’t function at these temperatures. We were out of kitchen matches, so it was going to be Raymond’s fire starter from now on. It worked like a charm. By the light of the fire we slashed dead limbs from live trees and dragged in driftwood until we knew we had enough to take us through the night.

  A quick supper, two plates apiece; then we got into our sleeping bags and began the torturous wait for those five hours of daylight to return. We sat up into the night stoking the fire, trying to stay as warm as possible. Raymond said, “I wish we could’ve been at Nahanni Butte for Christmas—you wouldn’t believe the food.”

  “Try me.”

  Raymond’s face glowed. “After church, there’s a great big potlatch—a feast. Everybody comes. It’s in the community hall.”

  “How many people is that?”

  “Oh, about eighty-five, I guess.”

  “You’re kidding! I was picturing it more like three or four hundred.”

  He tossed a big branch on the fire. “That’s the good thing about Nahanni—everybody knows you. Everybody looks out for everybody else.”

  “Tell me about the feast,” I said. “That’s the part I want to know about.”

  “Well, there’s everything you could think of—modern food and traditional. People always save bear meat for potlatches—black bear—
with great big straps of fat. That’s my favorite.”

  “When will the next potlatch come along?”

  “There’ll be one for Johnny, a real big one. People will come from all over. They’ll tell about the things he did in his life, and they’ll feed his spirit by putting some food in the fire.”

  “I can picture you doing that in person,” I said. “You’ll be there. We’re going to make it.”

  “I could tell about what he did in the very last part of his life.”

  We slept as best we could, on the blue tarp spread over four inches of branches. Every few hours we’d start shaking, and one of us would get up and heap another round of fuel on the glowing mass of coals.

  The next day the wind quit blowing down the canyon, the sky turned a dark gray, and the temperature rose to ten below. The walls of the canyon climbed sheer from the river in some places; in others they rose from slopes of shattered rock. The walls were composed of horizontal bands of limestone from river to sky, like the bluffs along the Guadalupe River back in the Texas hill country but on a grand scale, with dwarf evergreens clinging to impossible locations and frozen waterfalls attached to sheer rock faces and glowing pale blue.

  Every time we encountered open water we found a way around one side or the other. Our hopes were soaring. “We’ll be taking a bath in those hot springs soon,” Raymond said.

  “Instead of a sponge bath without a sponge.”

  Late in the day we passed an island with the typical massive driftpile on its upstream end. We talked about camping there, but islands and driftpiles were plentiful and an hour of twilight remained. We decided to press on. Raymond was pulling the toboggan, and I had the packsack on my back.

  Just below the island, where the canyon narrowed, open water rushed out from under the ice and sped toward a cliff on the left side, leaving no ice to walk on over there. From the cliff, the strip of open water angled gradually back across the entire width of the river, passing briefly under a big ice bridge before splashing against another sheer cliff a short distance down on the right side of the canyon. “Bad luck,” I said. “Open water from cliff to cliff.”