The Raven's Gift

by Don Reardon

  5

  He’d been staring into the bowl of broth, a thin brownish liquid, just listening to the girl and the old woman speaking in their tongue. Hearing their quiet voices, the rhythm of the words he would never understand and didn’t need to, felt hypnotizing. He didn’t care what they said. He just wanted to sit, absorb the warmth of the stove, the heat from the bowl.

  “She wants to know why you won’t eat,” the girl said. “And she wants to know why you won’t let me have soup.”

  He stirred the broth with a plastic spoon and looked once again at the blackened pot sitting on the woodstove. The head of a duck peered out at him from the brown bubbling liquid.

  “I don’t think we should eat it,” he said.

  “Why? We need to eat something other than that canned fruit,” the girl said.

  He poured the contents of his bowl back into the pot. The soup and a few chunks of dark brown meat fell in with a plump. His stomach grumbled.

  “I’m not eating it, and neither should you,” he replied.

  She lifted her bowl to her nose and inhaled a single long, deep breath. She held it, as if she was savouring the smell and drawing strength from it.

  “But it smells so good,” she said. “It smells okay. She caught it this summer. Cooked it up just for us. We eat when someone offers food.

  It’s rude not to eat her soup.”

  The old woman responded to her concern. “Assirtuq.”

  “She says it’s good.”

  “Of course she does,” he said.

  “You think it might make us sick?” the girl asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s duck. Duck.”

  The old woman reached over and squeezed the girl’s arm. She spoke for a second in Yup’ik, and the girl raised her white eyes toward him.

  The girl said quietly, “She says you can’t let fear eat you like it did all the others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The old woman sat up from her place beside the woodstove and moved toward a stack of blankets in the far corner of the one-room house. He noticed the wooden panelling had all been stripped off. Probably burned for firewood. All that was left were the wooden supports, a thin stuffing of pink insulation, and the outside plywood covering. The inside of the house became the inside of whale’s stomach, the flimsy wooden house frame becoming giant rib bones with the walls closing on him. He took a deep breath and tried to relax.

  “Have you seen the hunter?” he asked.

  The old woman turned back and looked at him. She pulled the bundle of blankets to her chin. “You should listen to your hungry stomach,” she said.

  “I’ve got to eat it,” the girl said, moving her spoon in small slow circles. “I miss real foods, our Native foods. I’m starving for them. I don’t care if this is duck.”

  “Go ahead, then. Eat it.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine. Who is he, the hunter? The man on skis. Was he here?”

  The girl took a small spoonful and held it in her mouth. He swallowed hard, and turned away from her. The old woman threw a wool blanket toward them.

  “Here,” the old woman said to him, and then turned to the girl and asked something in Yup’ik.

  The girl shook her head and said, “Qang’a.”

  “What did she ask you?”

  “She wants to know if I sleep with you.”

  “With me, or near me?”

  “To her there is no difference,” the girl said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  The girl didn’t answer. She set her spoon on the floor where she sat and lifted the bowl to her lips.

  “She knows English, why doesn’t she just ask me these things?” he asked, and then turned to the old woman. “Why won’t you just talk to me?”

  The old woman pulled the blankets over herself and turned her back on them, her words floating across the room, quiet, barely audible, and to him, completely foreign.

  The girl finished licking the rim of her bowl clean and then ran two fingers around the inside and caught the last of the duck soup. She gave a long satisfied sigh, followed by a soft burp, and said, “She says, because you won’t listen anyway.”

  HE SAT IN THE BACK of the conference to avoid the crowd and pored over a heavy three-ring binder containing the school district’s new high school curriculum. Anna sat toward the front of the large room, chatting with other new teachers. She did the socializing for them, and he had no problems with that set-up.

  The next session was the one he looked forward to, a break from all the school district’s goals and priorities and all the new educational buzzwords. The schedule simply called the next in-service topic Camai! He knew this word worked as a simple greeting, pronounced juh-my, from the morning welcome from the district’s superintendent. The words Introduction to Yup’ik & Cup’ik Culture formed the session’s subtitle.

  Two Yup’ik women, dressed in brightly coloured hooded smocks took the stage. The speakers chirped with feedback as the younger of the two held the microphone to her mouth and smiled at the audience.

  “Camai.”

  “Juh-my!” the crowd responded, with far too much enthusiasm.

  “Quyana tailuci. Thank you all for coming. That first word, quyana, is the first word you should all learn. In Yup’ik it means thank you. Pronounced goy-yan-na. I’m Nita and this is Lucy. We work at the District Office in the Yup’ik Immersion Program. Today we want to take some time to tell you a little bit about our culture and share with you some teaching ideas to take with you when you go out to teach in the villages.”

  Anna turned back and gave him the thumbs-up, as Nita passed the microphone to Lucy and turned on the computer projector beside them.

  “As Nita’s getting our slide show ready, I thought I would tell you about the clothes we’re wearing. These are called qaspeqs. Mostly women wear them, but sometimes men, too, for special occasions. They are great in summer when you’re picking berries or cutting fish because the hood keeps the mosquitoes out and this big pocket on the front can hold all your snacks.”

  “And you can see Lucy packs plenty of strips in her pocket,” Nita said, as the lamp lit up the screen behind them, projecting a giant frowning face of a young boy holding a green can of soda pop.

  “That’s my grandson,” Lucy said. “He was mad I wouldn’t let him drink that pop.”

  John laughed with the crowd at the presenters’ subtle joking. He noticed that the locals and the teachers who had been around awhile were quick to understand and enjoy the humour, while he and the rest of the new teachers laughed with sincerity but also a slight awkwardness. The teachers didn’t want to offend during a lesson intended to help keep them from offending anyone.

  Nita pointed a remote and a new photo appeared. Onscreen a giant fish hung from what looked like driftwood racks, the wood weathered white and grey.

  “This is probably what you’re feeling like right now,” Lucy said, grinning. “Like a fish out of water?”

  The crowd laughed.

  “That looks like dinner to me,” Nita said.

  The crowd laughed again.

  The slide changed again, this one with a small boat brimming with freshly caught salmon, their scales glistening in the sun.

  “The kids most of you will be teaching come from a subsistence background. This means that their families live maybe seventy to ninety percent off the land. As you might have guessed from these photos, salmon and other fishes are a huge part of our diet.”

  “So when I teased Lucy about having strips in her pocket, I was talking about fish strips, or dried fish—fish we smoke or dry during the summer and eat year-round.”

  The next photo revealed rows and rows of fiery red salmon strips hanging from what looked like a series of clotheslines, stretching along a steep riverbank. The photo after that showed three young Native men, buzz cuts and camouflage, holding M16s and grinning ear to ear. “We have the highest percentage per capita of military
members in the country,” said Lucy. “Their deployment just started, too. Going to be really hard on us here, but we’re so sad for them over in that awful desert.”

  The next photo revealed two young boys, shotguns slung over their shoulders, walking at the river’s edge, each of them carrying large dead birds. He thought one looked like a Canada goose; the other was some sort of large black duck he’d never seen before.

  “I must be hungry,” Nita said. “These pictures are making my stomach rumble.”

  The crowd chuckled. She smiled back.

  “We hunt, fish, and gather pretty much all year round. The rest of the time we’re getting ready for the next season. Always getting ready, we say. Right now people are putting up silver salmon, and the men who aren’t overseas are already thinking about moose-hunting season.”

  “That’s in September,” Lucy added, “when many of your students will leave upriver with their fathers. Some of them will be gone for one to two weeks. They will travel hundreds of miles to get to the moose.”

  “Because sometimes,” Nita said as the slide changed to an old woman cutting a leg-sized salmon on a sheet of plywood, “sometimes we get tired of eating only birds and fish.”

  The teachers didn’t get the give-and-take of cultural exchange, the ins and outs of verbal and non-verbal communication. The two women delivered their view of their own culture, and just from their presentation alone, the humour, the subtle joking, John felt more at ease and sat back in his chair.

  Anna wheeled around and smiled a broad grin when a picture appeared of Lucy’s grandson straddling a dead seal. He wished for a moment he had sat beside her, so he could give her hand a squeeze.

  HE DISCOVERED THE BLIND GIRL and her bundle of dried grass the afternoon before he planned to start up the river by himself. Finding her set back that plan, bringing the worst part of winter closer. At first he just told himself he’d sit by and wait for her to die. At first. Then, when her thin, leathery brown face began to come alive, to smooth and slowly fill in the hollows beneath her eyes and in her cheeks, the plan had to change.

  That first night he almost shot her. He held the barrel of the black Glock inches from her skull with his finger just resting on the trigger guard. Blind. Starving. Dehydrated. She was already long past dead. He knew from her heavy breaths that she hadn’t slept soundly for a very long time. How long, he couldn’t guess. One month? Two? How long had she been alone? How did she manage on her own, blind and malnourished?

  He waited there beside her for hours on that first night. The pistol didn’t move. His finger didn’t move. He wanted to kill her for her own sake. For his own sake. She would be nothing but a burden. She would exhaust his supplies and require more energy than he could spare. She would drain him and the two of them would starve or freeze to death.

  As much as it made sense to just squeeze the trigger, he couldn’t do it. He told himself that he would wait one day. If nothing changed by the next night, he would spare her the agony. One day, he told himself, he would give her that, but really, he knew. He knew he didn’t have what it took. He knew that already.

  Even if the trip across the impossible expanse of snow, ice, and tundra would most likely kill them both, he couldn’t leave her to the cold, the empty cupboards, or the people she called the outcasts and their hunger.

  Each sunrise brought no warmth. Most nights the two of them would bundle up in their sleeping bags and burrow inside a tarp to escape the incessant and violent winds. Each breath of winter air bit and crystallized the moisture about his nostrils.

  The girl meant another human’s breathing to listen to at night. But mostly the girl provided a reason to go on, even if just for another day.

  Then there was that eerie thing about the day he found her. How he stopped, as if some invisible bony hand grabbed him by the throat and began pulling him toward the one house in the village he hadn’t checked. The house he’d seen the red fox avoid. He told himself he was looking for extra matches, canned goods, or rifle shells, but instead, in the last house, in the last bedroom he would check, beneath a stained mattress, wrapped in an old, heavy grey wool blanket, he found her.

  “It’s okay,” he told the small black spherical hole in the rifle barrel that sprang up when he pulled the mattress off her. He raised his hands, until he saw she couldn’t see him, the light reflected off her dull white eyes. He lowered his hands and she pointed the .22 at his skull.

  “Let me smell your mouth,” she cried.

  “What? I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay. My name is John. You’re going to be okay,” he said. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  He leaned toward her and she took three deep sniffs of his breath and lowered the rifle. A thin, colourless line of foam gathered at the edges of her cracked and blood-scabbed lips. Her white irises searched the space between his body and hers.

  “Please,” she whispered, “please help me.” She reached for him. “Kaigtua. I’m starving.”

  6

  He awoke in the morning to the crackling of twigs in the woodstove. The old woman stirred the remnants of the duck soup, and when she realized he was awake she quickly pulled up her long grey hair and refastened the blue and purple beaded hairnet she had been wearing the day before, a silent gesture to show her commitment to her dead husband.

  After pulling his boots on he stood and stretched. His back ached from the hard plywood floor. He probably could have found a sleeping pad or mattress in one of the other houses, but to find one that wasn’t soiled with death, one that the girl could sleep on, wouldn’t have been worth the effort. A stack of her grass sat in a pile beside her. He wondered when she’d removed the grass from the sled, and how he hadn’t heard her. The yellow strands were woven together tightly in a long, flat braid, but he couldn’t tell what she was trying to make.

  The stove creaked as the fire started to heat the metal sides. The old woman stirred. He held his hands out and warmed himself in front of the stove’s open door.

  The woman took out a small white enamel saucepan with a broken black plastic handle and set it on the stovetop. She poured water from an empty coffee can into the pan and set the coffee can aside. From a tan plastic grocery sack she took a handful of thin green sprigs like pine needles and dropped them into the water.

  He reached for the coffee can beside her and ran his fingers across the label: Rich. Dark. Satisfying.

  “A cup of joe would be the bee’s knees about now,” he said.

  She stirred the mixture in the small pan, using the same wooden spoon she’d used to mix the duck soup.

  “We’ll have tundra tea when this done cooking. Too bad, I got no coffee.”

  She caught him looking at the spoon.

  “This soup is not what make you sick,” she said. “People didn’t die from birds. The earth didn’t make this disease, you know. Yup’ik people been eating birds forever. Yup’ik people been seeing bad sicknesses since when kass’aqs come here. Not the ducks. Not the birds that did this to the people. I’ve seen these kind of diseases before. When I was little piipiq. Smallpox, measles, influenza—so bad mostly everyone all on the river and the tundra villages die. My sisters tell me that when my mom died from smallpox, at night in our sod house, they let me sleep by her so I stop crying. Even they try to have me aamaq on her breasts to make me stop crying during the darkness.”

  The water in the saucepan began to boil, a light green mixture, with the little needles floating and churning. She poked her spoon at it, filled the carved wooden depression, and brought the steaming liquid to her lips. She blew gently, and then sipped it.

  “Mmm. Almost ready,” she said. “You ever tried our Eskimo tea? Labrador tea to you, maybe.”

  “No.”

  “You first-year teacher, ah?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pointed the wooden spoon at his wedding band.

  “She teacher, too?”

  He nodded.

  “It will get easier. Not better. Just easi
er,” she said. “My first husband die young. He go through the ice, and I never remarry for a long time, until maybe I was twenty.”

  “How old were you when you first got married?” he asked.

  “Maybe twelve. They marry early back then. I hardly knew that man at first, but he was a good man. They never found his body, and I said I would wait for him to come back. He never did, and then someone else try marry me.”

  She took the saucepan and poured the contents into three green plastic coffee mugs. She handed one to him and called to the girl.

  He sniffed at the tea. The steaming liquid had the light scent of gin, or of a juniper berry, but when he sipped it, the warm fluid puckered his lips and numbed his tongue. He ran his tongue against his top teeth to scrape the taste off. He took another sip, this time prepared for the bitterness. It warmed his throat and slithered down into his hungry stomach.

  “Girl, have tea,” the old woman said. She pointed the spoon at his ring again, and said, “She not want you to walk heavy without her.”

  The girl sat up and took the warm mug from the old woman. She held her nose to the rim and inhaled deeply. She smiled. The first real one he’d seen from her.

  “Quyana,” she whispered.

  “Ii-i,” said the old woman. She plucked a branch out from the saucepan and sucked on it and dipped it into her cup. “I don’t know who that hunter is. But I seen him. He wears a mask and white clothings. He think he is invisible like a snowshoe hare. He was going downriver. He never stopped here, just waited for a bit across the river, watched this way for a while, like he maybe hunting something, and then went floating away on top of the ice.”

  “Why do you call him that?” the girl asked. “The hunter?”

  “That’s what he is,” she said. “He’s a hunter. He hunting for someone, maybe those bad people, maybe all human beings left. Even us. But he not a real hunter from here. We don’t think when we hunt. I don’t say, ‘I’m hunting caribou. I want caribou.’ I just go out and hope the earth will provide. A real hunter don’t think about what he hunts. Otherwise the hunted know he’s coming and they know what the hunter wants and they know how to get away.”