The Raven's Gift (8 page)

“It’s a mammoth tooth,” she said. “Look here, these sharp things are the roots, this smooth rounded part here the molar. Feel this chewing surface. Funny, isn’t it?”

John ran his hand over the bumpy surface. He leaned down close and tapped his fingernail against the rock-hard enamel. It was an enormous tooth. The biggest he’d ever seen.

“Here,” she said, “heft it. At first I thought it was just a piece of dirty driftwood, but then when I pulled it up from the mud, then I
knew it was a mammoth tooth. I’ve found a couple others, but this one is in the best condition yet. I can’t believe these roots, they’re like T. Rex teeth.” She handed John the tooth and he nearly dropped it.

“Whoa. I wasn’t expecting it to weigh so much!” John turned the tooth over and over in his hands. “This is amazing! You just found this along the river?”

“Down past all this erosion protection. I started looking where the river is cutting into the bank. People have been finding tusks and bones of mammoths and other ancient creatures there for years. Nights like these I like to imagine what it must have been like when those critters ruled this land. Mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-tooth tigers. These used to be their stomping grounds. Amazing eh?”

The woman took the tooth from him and wrapped the jacket back around it.

“That’s quite the going-away present,” John said.

“I’ll pass the torch of treasure hunting to you,” she said, starting up the grass slope. “If I could give you some advice about living here I’d say this. Don’t just teach and go home at night and hole up in front of the TV like most people do. Get out and learn about life here. This place will teach you more than you’ll ever teach your students.”

“Thanks,” John said, sitting down on one of the boulders. “Good luck getting that thing through security.”

The woman crested the slope and disappeared. John turned back to the river and sat for a while. He crawled over the rocks and found a spot where he could sit with his hand touching the cool surface. He splashed the water and wiped his wet fingers across his face, the rich soil from the mammoth tooth gritty and cold against his skin.

AS SOON AS THE GIRL was well enough, the questions started. She usually waited until night. Sometimes asking them while her fingers danced between the lengths of dried yellow grass she pulled from the thick bundle she carried, or when her fingers were too cold to weave
the grass strands together the questions would come from the depths of his wife’s old sleeping bag. He wondered if she spent the whole day holding them in her head, thinking of different things to ask, just so that they could talk about something at night when they tried to sleep.

Her questions passed the time, especially when their stomachs cried out, almost in response to the nightly howling of the few packs of sled dogs that had been turned loose or managed to escape and had so quickly remembered the instinct of their wolf cousins. Avoid man. The dogs avoided being seen just as he avoided most of her questions. But still, the questions lurked, especially the ones he ignored.

Some he would answer, the ones that didn’t burn. The ones that made sense. The ones that didn’t require a lie. Or a half-truth.

“Why didn’t we get sick, too?”

That was one of those questions that loped around his mind at night. He’d been asking himself. Until the question didn’t really matter any more. Any speculation, about his background, his life before moving to the village, any previous sickness or exposure, presented few possible answers. What traits or characteristics did he share with a blind Yup’ik girl? She was at least ten years younger and had never even travelled beyond the broad tundra plain of the Kuskokwim River Delta. Once he started asking himself her questions in his head, he would just shut her out completely. “That’s enough,” he’d say. “No more questions. We need to sleep.”

“Why didn’t anyone come for us? Did they want us all to die?” she asked, feeling for her bundle of grass and running her fingers through the stalks, searching by touch for the perfect dried blade.

Another question that brought only more questions. Her questions would kill him, slowly squeeze at his heart, until he could no longer breathe, engulfed by that suffocating feeling of the walls closing in, and of the world becoming too small.

Some nights after the muscles at the side of her jaw went slack, and her breathing steadied and they readied themselves for the nightmares
that would surely come, the questions would continue. They would hang in the air like campfire smoke on a cloudless night. Her endless questions would overlap in her soft voice, in her cries, and sometimes mingle with the voices of others. His mom. His grandpa. His students. A janitor. An old friend. Anna.

Where will we go? Can we make it walking? Why didn’t you float out during the summer? Why do I feel like someone else is out there? Maybe coming after us? How did you find me? What was it like in the Lower Forty-eight? Why did you find me? Why don’t you leave me behind? How many people do you think died? Was it everywhere? Did they want us to die? What made people act like the outcasts? Will you leave me? Do you miss her? Do you miss her? Do you miss her? You won’t let me starve to death again? Okay? Please? Do you miss her? Do? You? Miss? Her?

   8   

H
e stopped at the bottom of the steps that led to the old woman’s house and just listened. He had learned from the girl to quit relying solely on his eyes. He could hear the two talking softly inside, but beyond that, nothing. No birds. No dogs. Just the breeze rattling a piece of torn metal roofing on a half-burnt plywood shack that had probably been either a smokehouse for fish or a steam bath. He doubted anything useful would be found in the village, but still, he had to look.

He’d start with the school, the heart of every village: the sanctuary for kids, the public meeting place, the dance hall, the non-stop basketball court, and the community dining room. If he were to find anything of use, it would be there.

The school, a boxy green building, stood on skinny metal pilings with chain-link fence wrapped around the base to keep kids from playing under it, something he’d learned the villages started doing after losing more than one structure to bored kids playing with matches.

The unbroken windows and the small drift of snow building up at the front door didn’t make sense. He stopped and inspected the grated steel walkway that led into the building. The heavy door wasn’t open wide, broken, or pried—it was closed. He could see no sign of tracks. He listened until the silence made him uneasy. A quick glance at the wide river and at the open tundra behind the school was enough to tell him no one was coming. He looked again closer, for someone wearing all white and staring back at him.

He gave the door a tug, and it opened silently.

He stepped inside and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He looked for something to prop the door open for light and found a plastic garbage can. He shoved it into the doorway and turned back to the foyer.

He expected a ransacked, vandalized shell of a building. He expected something that looked the way he felt.

As his pupils expanded in the darkness, he put his hand into his pocket and rested it on the pistol.

The hallway was clean. No broken glass. No scattered papers or books. No signs of violence.

He took a deep breath as he read the sign on the entrance wall: WELCOME TO KUIGPAK ELITNAURVIK! HOME OF THE WOLVERINES.

He took another deep breath. The air in his nostrils didn’t smell like death. It smelled like a school.

THE ALASKA COMMERCIAL COMPANY STORE made up the town centre of Bethel, but he only guessed this by the twenty half-wrecked taxis and, oddly, one Hummer stretch limo idling in the pothole-laden parking lot. Anna went for a walk on the tundra with some other teachers, and so he figured he’d get ready for their morning flight into the village. On the advice of several seasoned village teachers, he popped into the city’s main grocery store to stock up on a few fresh vegetables and other necessities just in case it took a week or two for their boxes of canned goods to arrive in the mail.

“It’s always good to have too much food,” a balding, middle-aged principal said when Anna asked, during one of the in-service Q&A sessions, if there had ever been a food shortage. The two supply sources, by barge for only a few months in the summer and by air year-round weather permitting, seemed inadequate, so Anna’s question was fair.

Lucy, also on the panel, said that in Yup’ik history there had been several famines, and in bad fish years, when the salmon didn’t return,
bad things had happened and people took extreme measures to survive.

With the session’s dialogue replaying in his mind, he entered the store half expecting a warehouse-style market, a place for people from the surrounding villages to come and load up on bare necessities. Instead, he entered what appeared to be a modern one-stop shopping centre. At first glance, the place looked like a Wal-Mart of sorts, with everything from vegetables to full-size ATVs all stuffed into one building. The first major difference he noticed from any other store he’d ever been in was the prices.

$7.99 for a small bag of potato chips.

$8.99 for a gallon of milk.

$13.99 for a gallon of orange juice.

“Holy shit,” he whispered to himself as he stood in front of small display of semi-fresh fruits and vegetables.

Cucumbers $6.99—each.

He reached out and touched a watermelon as big as a volleyball. The red and white sign beside it read:

AC VALUE PRICES

WATERMELON $12.99 PER LB.

He found himself wondering how anyone could afford to eat.

After ten minutes of idle walking, he grabbed a grocery cart and started meandering through the aisles. He wasn’t shopping for specials. Just the basics. Just enough to get them by until their boxes arrived.

As he shopped he smiled at those who passed him. He couldn’t get over the diversity of the town. For lunch they’d dined at Demitri’s, and he ate one of the best gyros he’d ever eaten, the night before the tastiest Mongolian beef he’d ever had, and by the next night he was going to be one of three white men living in a Yup’ik village in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing other than canned or frozen food to eat.

He stopped at an extensive Asian section and just stood staring at the selection in amazement. The shelves carried cans and jars labelled in Japanese, Chinese, and Thai. Nothing about this place called Bethel made sense. He picked up a bottle of fish sauce and wondered what Yup’ik cuisine tasted like. If it was anything like Thai or Chinese or Indian or Vietnamese, he was going to love it.

“Excuse me. You’re a new teacher?”

He looked up from the bottle and realized he’d been oblivious to the old Yup’ik man standing beside him, the grocery cart nearly shoulder-height to the man. The man wore a green flannel shirt, aviator sunglasses, a faded blue baseball cap with ARCTIC AIR printed in white on it, and jeans tucked into black rubber boots.

“Yeah. I’m John. John Morgan.”

The old man took his hand and gave it a single quick shake.

“Charlie,” he said. “I was at the cultural centre today, same as you.”

“The in-service?” John asked.

The old man raised his eyebrows. A non-verbal, he’d just learned, used as an affirmative answer.

“That woman who asked about famine ever happening here—she your wife?”

“She is. She was just wondering how food gets to villages. She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just inquisitive.”

“Long time ago we had no food. Me, I was just barely old enough to walk, but I remember my stomach burning real bad. I remember we had only old dry berries and rotten old salmon with mould on it. The elders said it was punishment, that we were starving because we left the old ways behind.”

He waved his arm around at the store and then hefted the red plastic AC Value basket in his hand. In it, a blue box of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a can of hickory-smoked Spam, and a
Weekly World News
.

“Nowadays,” he continued, “maybe I’m almost an elder and maybe
I think this way’s leaving us behind. They teach you what the word
Yup’ik
used to means?”