by Don Reardon
“I think I’m going to see if there’s anyone there who can help us,” John said. “See if anyone that knows what’s going on. I’m not going to pass up the biggest town in hundreds of miles. If someone is alive there, they should be able to tell us something. I want to know what happened.”
“When I was a young girl like you,” the old woman said, “I remember in the spring, before breakup, we would take our dog teams and go across the tundra to the mountains. All around we saw caribou, snowshoe hares, and porcupines. The men hunted and trapped, and us kids, we had so much fun. Lots of trees up near the mountains, and so many good firewoods. We always had a big warm fire with meat roasting on alder sticks, and we could sit at our camp and listen to the winds whispering through them branches. Then, when the long days came and the ice went out, the men would build boats and load up the dogs and kids and everyone and float down to the tundra just in time to start king salmon fishing.”
“What did you see?” the girl asked John, as if ignoring the old woman’s story.
“I told you what I saw. Nothing.”
The old woman continued her story. “Big lakes up in those mountains too. Real big. Deep lakes with giant trout. They say one lake, Heart Lake, had a palraiyuk. Long, skinny monster, like one of those kinds that Crocodile man wrestled on TV. Yup’iks used to draw that creature on our kayaks. Real big long, narrow mouth with lotsa teeths, and little pokies sticking out all down its back to its tail. But there was a story about someone who killed the last big monster up there. The man’s wife was getting water and that creature jumped up out of the water and snapped its mouth down on her and slid back into the water with her. The man tried to shoot it, but his arrows just bounced off its armour. So he went and killed a caribou and used it like bait. When palraiyuk came back to eat the caribou he took his last arrow and shot it in the heart. He cut the monster open and saved his wife. My grandpa used to say they would climb through the backbone hole of the skeleton on the beach of that last monster the hero killed. But some people say those lakes might still have palraiyuk.”
“Scary,” the girl said.
“Lots of scary stuff out there. Sometimes there is only a real thin layer separating our world and the spirit world,” the woman said. “When I was maybe your age there was a young boy, Gabe Fox. You heard stories about him?”
The girl nodded, and said, “We always talked about him when we were out camping. Tell John.”
“He was real. A real boy. He was orphan, living at that place we call Children’s Home. That was up the Kwethluk River where they keeped orphans from the last epidemic. Gabe Fox didn’t like that place, maybe the priests treat him bad or maybe he was in trouble, so he ran away. He qimakalleq, run away and become nervous and scare easy like a fox. People seen him all the time, but he either hiding in the wilds or he not wanna get catched.”
“What makes you think the kids did like Gabe Fox and qimakalleq?” the girl asked.
“Because they wasn’t in the gym,” the old woman said. “They run away to somewhere. Somewhere safe. But we need to find them before they cillam quella.”
“I don’t know that word,” the girl said.
“Maybe it means before they are made cold by the universe,” the old woman said. “Cillam quella.”
He turned his back to them and sucked the moisture from the handful of snow until all that remained in his mouth was a small ball of ice.
CARL AND HIS WIFE, Carrie, sat across the dinner table. They were their first dinner guests, in a village where sharing food and meals was nothing new, but formal dinners, complete with tablecloth, napkins, and the spoon-fork-knife set-up were unheard of.
“So fancy,” Carrie said, pointing to the display of silverware. “You guys always eat like this?”
“No, just for special guests.”
“I should have dressed up! I could have worn my town shoes!” Carrie said.
They laughed. John caught a glance between Carl and Carrie and suddenly felt very uncomfortable for them. Anna had overdone the table setting. The low lights. The candles. The separate serving dishes. It was overboard. Too much of a show for their guests.
Carl tried to make small talk. “Got a letter from my brother in Kuwait. Hundred and twenty degrees there, he said. He said he dreams of snow and ice. He knows pretty soon the river will freeze up and you and me can start hunting ptarmigan. Maybe I’ll show you how to trap marten and otters.”
“That would be nice. I’d like that. Hundred and twenty. Ouch. Is he doing okay there?”
Carl shrugged. “Best he can be for an Eskimo in the oven.”
“Sorry we don’t have sour cream,” Anna said, setting a plate of baked potatoes on the table. John shot her a look, but she was too absorbed in delivery of the dinner to catch his telepathic messages. Had their kitchen been in a separate room from their dinner table he might have had a chance to whisper in her ear to quit with the fanfare, but he couldn’t, and he felt the damage was already done. He’d worked so hard to fit in with Carl, to just be a hunting partner and not an outsider, and dinner seemed like a good way to let Anna in on the fun.
Now, as Anna opened a sixty-four-ounce can of grape juice and poured it into wine glasses, he could only hope to ever be invited out hunting again.
As Anna poured the juice she said, “I sure wish we had a little white wine to go with the chicken, but since the village is dry, this grape juice will have to do.”
Carl and Carrie laughed. John eased up a bit.
“You could sit that juice next to the furnace with some yeast and make homebrew,” Carrie joked. “That’s what some people do around here. Too bad bootleggers don’t sell wine. Otherwise Carl could get a bottle from his no-good brother in Bethel.”
“You have a brother in the National Guard and a brother who bootlegs?”
“Anna!”
Carrie turned to John. “It’s okay. His brother there is a bum. Doesn’t work and only sells weed and vodka. Poisons his own people for sixty dollars a bottle.”
Carl shrugged. “He’ll get caught someday.”
Anna dished out the chicken and then passed her homemade gravy across to Carrie. John realized Carl and Carrie were waiting, hesitating almost to serve themselves, so he dug in, leading the way. He took a spoonful of green beans and lumped them on his plate. He forked two large chunks of chicken beside the beans, stuck a potato with a fork, dropped it beside the chicken, and then smashed through the skin and made a decent trough for the gravy.
Soon they were all eating and chatting, the tension overcome with food and friendship. John squeezed Anna’s leg beneath the table and then lifted his wine glass full of grape juice in a toast.
“To our new friends. And to good duck hunting in the spring. Cheers.”
Their glasses clinked and they each took a sip.
“Next time,” Carrie said, “I’ll have you guys over for seal soup.”
HE STAYED IN HIS SLEEPING BAG well past sunrise. He thought the girl would think he was just sleeping, resting from the long day of walking. He wasn’t. Dawn came and went. The sun never broke through the clouds, leaving the sky above them a sullen white that blended with the horizon.
He had his back turned to her, to their snowed-in tracks. The man on skis could have followed them, and readied to attack, and he wouldn’t have seen it coming. Instead, he just remained frozen, on his side, and stared blankly at the white expanse in front of him, an endless emptiness that stretched out and almost seemed to curve with the earth, no trees, no brush, nothing but white upon white.
She was quiet for the longest time; perhaps she didn’t want to wake him, or she was scared something was wrong. The wind had died with the sunrise. The entire world fell silent, dead.
“It’s hard for you to breathe today,” she said. He could hear her working the grasses, braiding, twisting, her mouth opening and wetting them.
He said nothing. He had nothing to say.
“I can tell by how you take a breath and then hold it, f
or too long. I used to do that lots. Not just because I couldn’t see, but from other things. Other things in my life that made it hard, you know. Hard to want to take one more breath. I know how it feels.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel any warmth from it through the sleeping bag, but he could feel the weight of it, where she left it resting on his arm, and then she patted him gently, as if he were a sick puppy.
“There’s going to be days like this when we don’t want to live no more. I had plenty of days like that, so many days in that house by myself, you know. So many nights, when everyone was sick, all that sickness and dying. Crying at night. Screams. Then quiet. Just black nothingness. And those smells. I didn’t want to live with that quiet and those smells. I wanted to know why I was being punished again. I never did anything wrong and God was punishing me by letting me live.”
She took her hand away, maybe to brush at her tears, but he couldn’t be sure.
“I thought about walking out on the tundra or into the river. The .22 wasn’t powerful enough, you know, for that. And I couldn’t get my legs to take me outside. I was too scared of what might be outside. Sometimes I worried that I would go out there and I would see again. I would see everything that had been ruined.”
For a long while she fell silent. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine her world for a moment. Perpetual darkness, a world of only sounds and smells—but then she had something else, that sense of hers, some ethereal understanding of the world around her. He wondered if this was common to blind people, or just the girl, and the strange circumstances that allowed her to still be there, alive.
“I wanted to die, but I was too scared. I didn’t want to die alone. Now I know at least I’m not going to die alone, and I’m not scared. We find reasons to want to live.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. The cloud of warm vapour from his lungs hung in the air around his face and slowly disappeared. He unzipped his bag and sat up.
“Let’s get moving,” he said. “Can’t mope around all day and feel sorry for ourselves, can we?”
She smiled and began packing her grass weaving bundle and her sleeping bag. He scanned the horizon in all directions to make sure they were alone and then stood up and stretched. He watched her bundle the sleeping bags and the grass inside the tarp and place them on the toboggan.
“You’re not going to die,” he said to her, and they started off across the snowy tundra, travelling east toward the river.
24
Instead of going to the town they turned and headed west a half mile toward what looked like a giant black drive-in theatre screen. The morning was calm, clear, and a slow gathering of light began to form to the east. He remembered his first flight out of town and the pilot mentioning something about White Alice, the tall Cold War relic, part of a radar shield to warn of incoming Russkies.
The storm during the night had created new drifts, and the girl and old woman struggled until they reached the crest of a small hill, where the wind had blown the surface clear, leaving hard-packed frozen tundra. The old woman kept watching behind them, searching continually, he suspected, for the hunter. They made better time, and before long, the giant black shield loomed over them.
“What are you going to do?” the girl asked when they reached the base of the tower.
“I’m going up. See if I can spot anything,” he said.
He handed his rifle to the old woman, went inside, and grabbed the first rung on the ladder that led to the top, some seventy feet above them in the darkness. He began to climb. His arms and legs barely seemed to have the strength to lift him, but slowly he managed to pull himself up.
At the top, he hoisted himself up and over the edge. He rested for a moment, on his stomach, as he tried to catch his breath.
“You okay?”
He leaned over the edge and held his finger to his lips, and remembered she couldn’t see this. “Quiet!” he said. They were a mile from town, but he didn’t want to take any risks.
He crawled on his hands and knees to the far edge and scanned the horizon. An orange haze began to appear in the distance with the rising sun. From the top of the tower he could see the town, the wide, sweeping river, and the rolling mountains in the distance. Before surveying the town he looked back at their tracks and followed them toward their last camp beneath the bluff. If someone was following them, he didn’t see any movement.
The town looked as lifeless as the white wasteland surrounding it. The single red light he had seen the night before, perched high on a radio tower, was still lit, but that was the only sign of life. No smoke. No movement. No sounds.
Parts of Bethel bore the familiar snow-covered blackness of ruin, just on a much larger scale. The monstrous white fuel tanks that once bordered the river at the centre of town were gone, replaced with twisted, blackened metal craters. The half-charred ruins of the town stretched out before him like a commune for the undead. The vision of a burnt and frozen town reminded him of a Robert Frost poem, something about the world ending in either ice or fire. Bethel appeared to have died twice.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING Anna and John awoke to snow. A soft, light blanket covered the ground overnight, and the worn and dirty village appeared renewed, refreshed, and the two of them could feel a strange sort of excitement bristling through the community. Men dragged their snow machines out from beneath their houses or removed the tarps that covered them. Young boys tried to stockpile snowballs as more snow began to fall.
John sat on his steps watching what he thought was probably the last outside basketball game of the season. Four boys played in their T-shirts and rubber boots on the wooden play deck. The chill in the air bit at his ears, but apparently had no effect on the boys, or their game.
Anna came out and sat on the steps beside him, wearing the same as he did, her new winter boots, wool hat, and Gore-Tex parka. She was ready for the change in seasons. They both were. Frozen lakes, rivers, and tundra meant they could get out for walks somewhere other than laps around the school gym or through the hallways or down the icy boardwalks.
“How soon until the river freezes?” Anna asked.
“Carl said it will all be frozen by next week. Safe to walk on in another couple of weeks, maybe, and then safe for snow-machine travel by the end of the month. If it stays cold.”
“If?” she said, picking at a frozen chunk of mud on the bottom step.
“He said it warms up often now, sometimes twice a winter, and makes the ice rotten—treacherous. Climate change, worse here in the Subarctic.”
John stood and stretched. He’d been playing open gym with the men the last few weeks, trying to get back into shape, and had pulled something in his back going up for a rebound.
“You think we should order some cross-country skis or something?”
“What did Carl say?” she joked.
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. He’s just your answer to everything now. I thought you would have asked him.”
“He said once in a while every few years a teacher will try skiing. No one else skis.”
“So you did ask him?” she asked with a laugh.
“It seems like something we could do to get out and get some air, you know? That or buy a snow machine. Which we can’t afford.”
“Think they can ship skis out here?”
“If they can ship out snow machines and four-wheelers I think they can ship out some skis.”
“Are they expensive?”
“Who cares? If they let us get out and see some country, they’ll be worth it. Skis would make all the difference trying to get around.”
She pointed to the flat landscape. “I can see all the country I’m going to see from here. Maybe next year we get them. We should save our money for now.”
One of the boys undercut another going up for a shot. The shooter’s legs came out from beneath him and he crashed to the hard wood deck and cried out in pain.
“Ouch. That hurt,” John sa
id.
“It looks like he might have busted up his arm. Think we should check on him? What do they do if someone gets hurt like that?”
“Carl said … Just kidding. They send a medevac flight out from the Bethel hospital. I’m going to go see if he’s okay.”
“What if they can’t fly and can’t travel by river?” Anna asked, holding her hand out to catch some of the snowflakes. “What happens then?”
“They shoot ’em, I guess. That or wait.”
THE GIRL ASKED HIM how it felt to shoot one of them. She didn’t ask him if he had. Just how it felt. “Did you feel bad?” she asked.
That morning the air burned cold deep inside his lungs. The breeze cut through his clothing and felt like lit cigarettes pressed against his cheeks and face. Even his teeth were cold. He pretended that he couldn’t hear her behind him in the sled over the sound of the ice and snow scratching beneath the plastic toboggan.
“I don’t think I would feel bad,” she said. “I was sure I would have to kill them, but they never found me. You shouldn’t feel bad. They would have killed you and ate you. I know it. Especially since you’re kass’aq. They would take your guns and your stuff and think nothing of it since kass’aqs started this sickness.”
“What if I told you I’m not gus-suck?” he asked.
“Are you black?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Indian?”
The weight of the girl and the gear in the sled became too great. He stopped, took a breath, and tried to pull again. He couldn’t move her. The snow conditions were changing, creating resistance against the bottom of the toboggan. Or he had run out of juice.
“My cousin once asked me if I would kill someone to have my eyes back. I said I couldn’t, but now I think I could. If they were bad, I could do it. Why would some people choose to stay and help and those others leave? How come people are so different? Do you think it takes something like this to show people’s true side? Like you can see their soul?”
