The Raven's Gift

by Don Reardon

  Anna gasped. She turned and squeezed John’s forearm.

  “Let him finish, Anna. Forgive her, she’s excited. We both are. We’ve been talking about moving to Alaska for years.”

  Gary laughed. “You’ll have to understand that you probably won’t have running water in your house or apartment, which means you’ll have to use what we call a honey bucket, which is—”

  “A bucket with a toilet seat. We read about those, the classic Alaskan toilet! We can live with that, Mr. Brelin.”

  “Gary, please,” he said with a smile. “As I was saying, Anna, you’ll need to realize that all of your food will have to be purchased here in Anchorage and then flown into the village. The stores in the villages, unfortunately, carry little more than junk food, really, so you’ll want to plan out your meals. This will be a different winter for us with those troops gone. I suspect we’ll be fine, but there will be some adjustments for villages and families, I’m sure. Speaking of government BS, there’s a wheelbarrow full of paperwork, of course, but I’d like you to really discuss whether or not you can handle a nine-month commitment like this. Teaching in the Bush has put the best of marriages to the test.”

  Anna and John stood up and they both shook Gary’s hand.

  “Anna, John, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and I look forward to offering you a contract by the end of the day. Here’s my number here at the hotel. I can pretty much guarantee this as a life-changing experience for you two. My wife and I started as teachers out there, with two young children. Raised them on the tundra. I can’t imagine living anywhere else, really, but then again, this sort of life isn’t for everyone. Thank God for that.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Brelin,” Anna said.

  “Anna, it’s Gary, please call me Gary. Last names don’t mean much in the Bush. Your students will call you Anna, just like they call the superintendent Billy. I’ll see you two this afternoon.”

  ALONE, WITH ONLY the light of a candle for company, John tried to study a detailed topographic map book of Alaska he’d found in the library. The scale was too great, but he could at least see what he thought might be the best route if no one came to help. He didn’t want to believe there would be no relief, but if no one came he was going to try to walk out. He’d trek up the Kuskokwim River to McGrath, then across the Iditarod Trail toward Anchorage. A thousand-mile trip, at least.

  His finger traced the route, following the wide river as it slowly narrowed, meandering hundreds of miles toward the little town of McGrath. He paused at Kalskag, noticing the Yukon River seemed to almost touch the Kuskokwim there. He was pondering the trip up that river, toward Fairbanks, when he heard the first shot.

  He closed the book and held still, flat on his back. His pistol and rifle within reach.

  Another shot. Then another. They sounded close. Then distant. He listened until his ears rang, waiting for the next. The shots continued through the night.

  After a while he slept, and in his dream a pale, baby-faced man with piercing blue eyes and an evil smile, wearing a black cowboy hat, a long black oilskin duster, and black leather boots, roamed the village killing survivors. He carried two silver-plated six-shooters with pearl handles that glinted in the moonlight.

  2

  The shattered windows of the house had been covered with cardboard and blue plastic tarps to keep in the heat. The smoke drifted west toward them, grey as the sky. He kept the sight of the rifle on the door and waited. The girl rested beside him, seeing nothing, but somehow keeping watch. They had crawled beneath the house with the hanging television, right at the edge of the riverbank, to keep from being spotted.

  “Maybe someone’s inside and will help us,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  When the word came from the girl’s mouth it sounded something like hope.

  “If we find someone else, someone who needs us. Will we help them?” she asked.

  “I only wish we could find someone like us,” he said.

  When he saw the door open he raised his glove to his mouth to tell her to be quiet. As if she would see the gesture. But she heard the hinges squeak and the footsteps on the stairs and she pressed herself down in an effort to sink into the frozen dirt and to never be seen. She took several quick stabs of breath. Her nose searched the air.

  He followed the man down the steps. The red bead on the metal sight at the end of his barrel slowly moved across the stained and tattered tan Carhartt jacket that covered the man’s chest. He knew this man was not the skier. The man paused at the bottom of the stairs, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and looked out at the village and then the river. He thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and began walking in their direction.

  “What’s he doing?” she whispered.

  “Coming this way.”

  “Don’t shoot yet. Wait,” she said.

  She took short, shallow breaths through her nose. He wondered how she could smell anything there, under that house, surrounded by the skeletons of old broken sleds, bike parts, and three half-flattened basketballs. His nose couldn’t get past his own smell. The stink of sweat and hunger. Of a body eating itself.

  She took another breath and held it. She reached over, grabbed his forearm and squeezed. John didn’t need to see her face, but he looked, and the sadness that pulled at her cheeks said enough.

  “Cover your ears,” he whispered.

  He waited until the man was only twenty yards from them. The tan jacket hung open, his brown chest a thin line of ribs, the stomach wasted and stretched drum tight. His black hair hung along his face in greasy strands, his brown eyes hiding somewhere in the shadows of his skull.

  The girl screamed with the concussion. The shot reverberated against the hollow shell of a house above them and the man crumpled into the snow. She held her hands over her ears and buried her face in her chest.

  He chambered another round as he swung the rifle back toward the house with the smoking chimney and waited.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  “But my ears hurt.”

  “I know. I know,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  THEIR UNSIGNED CONTRACTS and the other papers were spread out on the floor. Anna rested on her stomach, her naked body across the bed, with her feet dangling off. Her head and arms hung over the edge. She was enthralled at the contents before her.

  “It’s almost like they want to scare us away. That’s fascinating to me, don’t you think? All this fuss about no running water, the brutal weather, the National Guard deployed—who cares if the nearest Starbucks is over four hundred miles away? Isn’t that the point?”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “I’m sure they just don’t want to have some yahoos who think they’re going to be teaching in, what was the name of that stupid TV show? The one with the doctor in Alaska from New York?”

  “I can’t think of it. I know what show you’re talking about. Northern Exposure!”

  He nodded. “That show was ridiculous.”

  She sat up. “Are you staring at my crotch?”

  “That’s such a harsh word for something so divine. Plus, isn’t crotch staring a rare privilege of my role as husband?”

  She sat up and pulled a sheet over her body.

  “You can take the girl from the Catholics, but you can’t take the Catholic from the girl,” he joked.

  “Funny. I’m going to shower, and then we’ll call Gary and sign those babies. We’ll go eat somewhere nice, to celebrate our new jobs!”

  “I’ll join you,” he said. “We better start practising those short military showers. If the only water supply is at the school, this could be our last shower together for a while.” He paused, and then said, suddenly serious, “Anna?”

  She stopped halfway in the door to the bathroom. “Yeah?”

  “No more about me, okay? People don’t need to know everything,” he said.

  “If you’re part Eskimo then you’re part Eskimo, John. It’s okay to be a half-breed,” she said
in a weak attempt at humour.

  John looked down at one of the brochures; an old Yup’ik woman wearing a traditional fur parka stared back at him. “I just don’t want it broadcast to the world, okay?” He stood up and turned his butt toward her. “Besides, no Eskimo has an ass this white.”

  AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS he ventured outside the school for the first time. He’d spent days watching and listening for any sounds. Everyone in the village was either hiding out, had fled, or were, like so many others, dead.

  He didn’t go far. Just out to get his bearings, get some air, and see if things were as bad as they looked from his peephole above the village.

  They were worse.

  Before the sickness, the weathered plywood houses stood without paint. Beside the houses rested the rusted carcasses of boat motors and old red three-wheelers and four-wheelers with flat tires, white five gallon buckets, shredded blue tarps that covered sheds and flapped in the wind. Even then everything possessed a worn appearance, as if the hand of a god brushed and burnished each item in just the right spots so that outsiders would know the irrelevance of time in such an ancient land.

  That was before, and what was left was a nightmarish arctic wasteland. Many of the houses were looted and abandoned, or shot up. Windows broken. Snow machines and four-wheelers scorched or taken apart, the last vapours of gas from every tank in the entire village emptied, the tanks tossed on their sides and scattered about.

  His survey was quick. He crept along the edges of buildings, his rifle in hand, and the pistol in his right parka pocket. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, just mostly deciding how he would leave the village at night with his supplies to make sure no one spotted him. If there was anyone left to spot him.

  Nothing looked the same, which was an odd relief because, as he slipped from building to building, he didn’t want to think of Anna, of them together, their walks through the village. He wondered what had made people burn some of the houses. To stop the sickness or cremate the dead? He thought about checking inside the ones that weren’t burned, to see if he could find any more supplies. That would be risky, and he wasn’t ready for that yet.

  Something darted beneath one of the buildings and for a moment he was sure he’d spotted the bright red Bulls cap Alex always wore. He knelt to the ground, rifle ready, and peered around the edge of the building. Nothing moved. He wondered if he encountered one of them, one of his students, if he could do it, if he could pull the trigger.

  The movement caught his eye. Low and stealthy, something beneath a house thirty yards away. He lifted the rifle and waited. More red emerged, and then a slender white and black–tipped nose. A skinny fire-red tundra fox flitted away.

  He let out his breath and watched the fox dart from house to house. The rail-thin creature would lift its snout into the air and sniff, and then shoot over to a set of stairs and slowly creep up them. It avoided the burnt houses, and suddenly he realized the fox was looking for something in those houses too, and he took a mental note of which houses the fox avoided and which ones he tried to enter. Never staying long, but seeming to search each one in the row of the ten or so houses methodically. The fox feared nothing, as if he knew the village was now his; he would occasionally stop, lift a leg, and piss, staking his claim.

  At the last house, the fox climbed the steps, slowly put his head in the door, and stopped. He turned and bolted down the staircase and toward the river in a streak of red. That was the house John told himself he would avoid at all cost. The fox was telling him something.

  Countless months later he would enter that house and find the blind girl hiding beneath a mattress in a back bedroom.

  3

  The shot dropped the man mid-step. His body fell, splayed out on his side, his right foot in front of the left, his hand slipping from the side pocket of his jacket. Dirt and grease covered the exposed hand, and the black under his fingernails and around his lips had a look of either dried blood or gangrene. John wasn’t sure.

  “What’s he look like?” the girl asked.

  “Dead.”

  “No, describe his face to me.”

  “I’m not doing that,” he said, “not now. Someone might still be in there. We need to get inside and warm up.”

  He started to follow the man’s tracks that led to the house. He watched for ski tracks and pulled her in the toboggan behind. He doubted the dead man had been alone and he wondered why the man left the house unarmed in the first place. She put her mittens down against the ground, and when he felt her resistance, he stopped pulling. She turned toward the dead man, her blind eyes staring out at him.

  “Tell me just one thing.”

  He stopped, not wanting to completely leave his back exposed to the house. To make sure no one was coming, he scanned the thin grey line of horizon surrounding them and then back toward the river ice at the edge of the village that stretched over a mile wide and ran north and south as far as he could see like some giant frozen highway.

  “I want to know. I want to know if he’s my uncle,” she said.

  “He’s not. Come on.”

  “Does he have burns on his skin?” she asked. “Raised, thick? On his neck? Here?”

  She slid the brown beaver fur mitten to the left side of her face and down her own neck. He dropped the sled rope and walked around her to the dead man, nudged him over with his boot, and tilted his head so he could see the brown skin of the neck. A thin string of half-frozen blood ran from the side of the man’s mouth, down his collar, and into the snow where it pooled in icy red clumps.

  “Not him,” he said.

  “Would you lie? I don’t want you to lie to me. I don’t care if it’s him. He used to live in our village. Our village council kicked him out because of something he did and he had to move here. It’s okay if it’s him. I won’t cry. Is it?”

  “It’s not,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s not him.”

  “This man smells like him, though—like one of them, but like my uncle, too,” she said. “The outcasts smell different. Not a bad smell, just different. Wrong. Like a flower that’s rotting. Sweet, but not a smell you want around you,” she said and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “That smell comes through their skin, like stinky alcoholic drunks. They can’t hide what they’ve done. It’s in their pores.”

  He couldn’t smell the hunger, not like the girl could, but he imagined he would be able to see it in the lifeless holes they used as eyes. Their teeth wolf-sharp, their hungry mouths slowly taking over their faces.

  Or maybe it was what someone couldn’t see. He imagined a person lost some little part of their soul when they consumed another. But he hadn’t looked into a mirror, so he could only imagine what his own brown eyes looked like.

  THE JET FLIGHT from Anchorage, “from civilization,” Anna joked, revealed to both of them right away that the world they were headed to was different. They left from the farthest end of the terminal four hours after the scheduled departure, walked out on the tarmac with the other passengers, who were carrying boxes of diapers, bags of fruit, paper sacks of fast-food cheeseburgers and fries, video game consoles, stacks of DVDs, and cartons of eggs. The route to the aircraft consisted of a walk down the jetway, down a flight of stairs, and then out on the tarmac, around the wing of the jet, and then up a tall, narrow rolling staircase near the jet’s tail.

  “This is something, isn’t it?” Anna said. “You can take the window. Can’t say I’ve flown on a full-size jet with only a dozen rows of seats. You?”

  He pushed his backpack into the overhead compartment and pulled a pillow down.

  “Want one for your back?” he asked.

  “What do you think is up there?”

  He looked toward the bulkhead in front of their seat. A mutely coloured carpeted wall separated them from the cargo taking up three-quarters of the jet.

  “Our food, I hope.”

  He took the seat next to the window and she settled in
beside him.

  “This is going to be some adventure,” she whispered. “Strange being packed in like this. You going to be okay?”

  He nodded.

  “You excited?” she asked, and he nodded again. “I’m a little scared, myself.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “What if they don’t like us?”

  He stifled a laugh. “Not like us? Has anyone ever not liked you? The most lovable person on the planet.”

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. “You always know just what to say. Thanks.”

  A rotund woman, breathing heavily and sweating at her temples and on her neck, squeezed into the aisle seat next to them. She buckled herself in and gave a giant sigh.

  “Damn bush travel,” she said. “They can delay and delay our flights, but then when it’s time to go, you’d better be ready. I got sick of waiting and decided to go fabric shopping. They weren’t going to let me board.” She added, “I quilt.”

  Anna smiled.

  “You must be new teachers.”

  They both nodded.

  “I thought so—you have that new-teacher look.”

  “Like a new-car smell?” John said. “What look is that?”

  “Well, people new to the Bush have that half-terrified, half-excited look in their eye, but mostly it’s the shoes that give a rookie away. Look around. It’s fall out there. No one’s travelling in town shoes.”

  She pointed to Anna’s feet, white canvas slip-ons, and then her own white-toed rubber slip-on boots. “See? Mine are tundra boots. I’m Cathy, by the way. I’m a nurse in Bethel.”

  “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?”