Far North (10 page)

“Oh, like about Raven, how he made the world and then unmade it so it wasn't perfect anymore, how he made mosquitoes and made water to run downhill, how he'd play tricks on everybody. There's even a story about the flood like the one in the Bible. There's stories about animals back when they were human, stories about giants and supernatural beings, about heroes, about medicine men who could communicate with ravens and even take the shape of ravens…The elders have all sorts of stories.”

All the time Johnny kept building the snowshoes. My eyes kept going back to the finished pair standing in the corner. They were truly works of art with their graceful curves and intricate rawhide webbing.

On the fifth of December it snowed six inches of dry snow, then cleared off. The sun appeared over the bald mountain only ten minutes before it set again. Raymond and I kept felling trees in the twilight, hauling logs to the cabin, splitting wood, and checking our snares. Over the next week we caught three hares, white as snow and always frozen solid by the time we discovered them. We had to bring the rabbits inside the cabin
to warm them up enough to gut and skin them. Some years, Raymond said, the rabbits were everywhere you looked. There was even a legend about hares falling out of the sky like snow.

“Looks like we might have to live on rabbits,” I said to Raymond. “The moose meat and beans aren't going to last much longer.”

“There's no fat on rabbits,” he replied. “We're going to need to find something with some fat on it. They always say your body needs to burn fat when it gets real cold.”

I could see his face growing thinner, and I knew mine must be, too. I guessed I'd already lost fifteen pounds. The last of our moose meat was soon gone.

I was lucky enough to get a grouse with a well-thrown stick. It was a tasty little morsel, but it didn't take the edge off our hunger. Still no fresh sign of moose, and we hadn't heard wolves since we first arrived. Raymond was worried about not hearing the wolves anymore, and I asked him why. “No wolves means no moose,” he said. “The wolves follow the moose in the winter, hoping they can get one in deep snow.”

On the morning of the sixteenth of December we opened the cabin door and found Deadmen Valley transformed. Two feet of snow had fallen
in the night. All the forest was draped with snow and the high mountains all around had taken on the unreality of a painting. It was all so beautiful and so
clean,
the pure whiteness of it all.

Johnny walked over to the snowshoes in the corner. To my surprise, he was motioning to me. He wanted me to try them out. “Good deal!” I said to Raymond, and we all pulled on some clothes. Outside, Johnny helped me step into them and lace up the bindings, and then I took off like a horse out of the starting gate, I guess. I hadn't gone fifteen feet before I tripped and did a faceplant in the snow. I thrashed around, spitting snow out of my mouth and trying to get back up. But I was getting all entangled, making a spectacle of myself with my arms and legs and those five-foot snowshoes all windmilling around. Raymond and Johnny were laughing their heads off. “Hey, I thought this would be easy!” I called.

As soon as he could quit laughing, Raymond said, “Got to keep your tips up, Gabe, or they get caught in the snow. I think you better let Johnny use those now. It's a good day for him to track moose.”

Johnny was still chuckling ten minutes later when he stepped into the snowshoes and laced them on. Raymond handed him the rifle and said,
“Good luck, Johnny.” Just then we heard wings thrashing the cold air and looked up to see a raven directly above, calling,
“Ggaagga…ggaagga.”

Raymond whispered, “It's saying, ‘Animal…animal.'” It struck me that Raymond said this as a matter of fact. He went on to whisper that ravens were known to lead hunters to game, knowing that they would get their share from what the hunter couldn't use.

The old hunter was watching as the raven tucked its wing and rolled over in the sky before flying on. Johnny winked at Raymond and nodded with a smile. “My father says it's a good-luck sign when a raven does that,” Raymond explained. “It means the hunter will have good luck that day.”

An hour later we heard the rifle shot loud and clear, upriver, in the cold dry air. “Moose in the cooking pot,” I said, certain as if I'd seen it fall. We waited as the hours passed, and then, when Johnny hadn't returned by two we had misgivings and started after him, post-holing our way through the new snow without snowshoes.

We found where the trail of the man first intersected the trail of the moose, fresh with droppings and urine, and then we followed the trail of the man, which looped away from the moose's trail
and then came back to it every quarter mile or so. “Johnny was staying downwind,” Raymond explained.

We found the rifle cartridge in the snow showing where the old man had stood when he'd fired the shot. As the twilight deepened, we found the place where the moose had bolted and run. No blood in the snow, not a fleck. “I guess Johnny missed,” Raymond said. His words hung in the cold air like death.

A raven in a nearby tree caught our attention as it walked back and forth on a dead branch, squawking and squawking. “His belly's empty,” Raymond said. “He was counting on a moose dinner tonight. Gabe, I think I better get back to the cabin. My boots got a little wet.”

“So did mine,” I told him. “We better get back fast.”

Johnny was sitting by the stove in his bare feet. He glanced up at us coming in. We were throwing off our boots and our socks. I massaged my toes with my fingers. “They're okay,” I told Raymond, and he said, “Mine too.”

We could see in the old man's mournful eyes that he'd never caught up with the moose. He looked at Raymond and said something in Slavey.

“No medicine,” Raymond told me.

I wondered if they were talking about some medicine that had been prescribed back in the hospital. “Let's look in the first-aid kit,” I said.

“Dene medicine,” Raymond explained. “It's like power and good luck. Different people have medicine for all sorts of things. Hunters have good medicine for different animals. Johnny thinks his medicine for moose is all gone. It's because of how he left the moose above the falls. When you don't treat an animal respectfully, its spirit is offended, and then you won't have any more medicine with that animal. That's what happened.”

“Do you think that could be true? Do you believe it yourself?”

“I don't know,” Raymond said. “I've heard that kind of stuff all my life. It's not very scientific, I know. I guess I don't know what I think about it.”

“But at least we know there's still moose in Deadmen Valley. And he has two shells left.”

“That could've been the last moose,” Raymond said. To me, it sounded like he was just as convinced as the old man that we'd destroyed our luck.

A
HALF
-C
HINOOK SWEPT
briefly into the valley, raising the temperature above freezing and melting the snowpack down to six inches. Just as quickly the Chinook was gone, and the cold returned. This time the mercury plunged to forty below. The Nahanni had frozen solid except for one spot upstream that stayed open for some reason, forming an icy fog that hugged the valley floor along the river. The sun wasn't clearing the bald mountain at noon, so twilight was all we had now, even in the middle of the day.

For a couple of days Raymond and I tried to fish the open spot in the river, jigging the lures from crude poles. It was my idea—Raymond had said that the Nahanni had a reputation as a poor fishing river, something to do with all the silt in it from glaciers at its headwaters. “I think there's
some little graylings in here,” Raymond said, but if there were, we couldn't catch them. We never even had a bite.

Working long into the nights, Johnny completed Raymond's snowshoes and mine. They'd be ready when the next big snowfall came. I started wondering if it might be possible for us to hike out down the canyon of the Nahanni. I talked it over with Raymond, and we decided to ask Johnny what he thought. Johnny didn't even have to think about it. He pointed upriver to that smoking patch of open water, and then pointed downstream emphatically. “More,” he said in English.

Raymond said, “Johnny means it won't be all frozen solid down there like we think it will be.”

“But this patch will freeze over later, right? After a few more weeks of cold? There shouldn't be any open spots anywhere, after a while. We can walk out then. Didn't you say people drive cars over the Liard River on your winter road?”

“That's the Liard—it's slow and wide, and it's out in the open country. I've always heard people say the Nahanni is a tricky river, even in the winter. Maybe that's what they're talking about, that it won't freeze solid, just like Johnny's saying.”

We spent the days following the old hunter around Deadmen Valley, setting snares and hauling logs around to help make deadfall traps. We were always keeping an eye out for the few cranberries, currants, blueberries, and raspberries that remained. Rose hips were easier to find, and we were able to keep making tea.

Every time we had to use our bare fingers, we paid the price. Once cold, they took a long time to warm again. At least I had my oversize mittens to pull over my ski gloves. Raymond's wool mittens weren't large enough to accommodate his gloves inside. Johnny had only a pair of winter gloves.

One day Johnny stopped at a certain tree, some sort of pine, and started peeling back the little flakes of bark with the sheath knife. Behind every flake was a blueberry cached for the winter. “Camprobber,” the old man said, using their nickname for the gray jays. Raymond started prying out blueberries with his pocket knife, and I joined in, all three of us working on that tree like woodpeckers. It was a tough way to make a meal.

Raymond always wore the packsack, and I had my daypack, in the hope that we might find something to stuff in them and bring home. So far we were collecting just enough small animals
from the deadfalls and snares to keep us alive—a few snowshoe hares, a couple of red squirrels, a marten. Along with a few berries and rose hips, that was our diet now. Even in my sleep I was starving.

Sometimes we couldn't find any berries or rose hips. One day the old man made a tea of spruce tips. It tasted awful pitchy. Raymond said it tasted much better in the spring when the tips were new.

When we went out in the bush with Johnny Raven, we walked quiet as deer. Johnny led with the rifle, Raymond followed, carrying the ax, and I came last. Johnny would never wear the turquoise headband over his ears when he was hunting. I wondered how he could stand the cold and why he hadn't lost his ears to frostbite.

On the twenty-first of December we followed Johnny several miles south, toward the glowing orange horizon. It was my birthday, and it was also the shortest day of the year.

It was Raymond's birthday as well. When I wished him a happy birthday, he was surprised I knew. “It's mine, too,” I told him. “We both just turned sixteen. I found out we had the same birthday back at the boarding school, when I was getting my room assignment.”

“Who's older, I wonder?” Raymond said as we followed behind Johnny. “My mother said I was born at eight in the morning.”

“I was born at five in the afternoon.”

Raymond stopped walking and gave me a poke in the arm. “Happy birthday, little brother.”

I had to laugh. It felt good, him calling me that.

Johnny was disappearing ahead of us into the trees. We hustled to catch up and found him inspecting a clearing—a beaver pond, I realized, all frozen over. A huge mound of sticks and mud stuck out of the iron-hard ice, and beaver-chewed aspen stumps circled the pond. “I bet Johnny's wishing he had the stuff he needs for trapping beavers under the ice,” Raymond remarked.

“Is that possible?” I wondered aloud.

“My father used to do it back when he had his trapline. You have to be able to figure out where all the beavers' runways out of the main lodge are, where the runways go to the feed pile, and where they have their hideout houses—those are extra places besides the lodge where the beavers can get up and breathe air. You have to be able to read all different kinds of ice and keep a map of everything in your head. They use steel chisels and chain saws to get through the ice down to the runways so they can set the snares.”

The old hunter was out on the pond, studying the ice. We watched from the bank, stamped our feet in the cold, and waited while he looked closely at different spots all around the pond and its banks. “What could he be doing?” I asked Raymond.

Johnny marked a spot with a stick, eventually three more. Then he took the ax from Raymond and proceeded to chop away at one of the spots along the bank. At last he exposed a small hollow place with open water. “One of the hideout houses, I think,” Raymond said. The old man rested as the water in there froze over in a matter of minutes.

Raymond cut open the second hideout house, and I cut open the third, making the ice chips fly. Raymond said I should slow down. It was dangerous to work up a sweat in this cold and get your clothes wet. The two of us shared the fourth hideout den as Johnny Raven looked on approvingly. Then we began to cut open the main lodge from above. Raymond and I took turns. The sticks and the mud were frozen together like concrete. Finally Raymond broke through into free air. The roof of the lodge had been a little more than a foot thick.

Now we worked to enlarge the hole in the top
of the lodge, until we could look in, and then we saw the wide tail of a beaver as the animal splashed into the water from a platform above the waterline. Johnny pulled a long hefty stick free and set it aside. He had us keep working until we had chopped away a good part of the top of the lodge. We could see beavers in the water snatching a breath of air, then disappearing through their runways. After a minute they'd be back. I realized that they were finding their hideout spots frozen shut, then returning to the main lodge, which was the only place where they could breathe.

Johnny Raven began to act out a pantomime for Raymond, throwing in a few English words and a few in Slavey. I thought I knew what he was trying to describe, but it didn't seem possible. I wouldn't have thought Raymond could accept what the old man seemed to be suggesting. But when Raymond turned to me, his dark eyes were filled with determination. He said, “Johnny says the beavers are too big for him to lift. He wants me to get down in there and lift them out. Then you club them with that stick.”

I said, “Their teeth could take your fingers off!”

Raymond was trying to stay calm. “He says they'll give their lives to us if we do it right.”

I said, “Have you ever heard of this before?”

He shook his head. “Johnny says as long as I don't show any fear I'll be okay. I want to do this—I want to do something for him. He thinks I can do it.”

There was nothing I could say. We needed the meat.

Raymond turned away for a minute to collect his thoughts. Then he took off his gloves and climbed bare-handed into the lodge, kneeling on the beavers' platform, keeping still. I held my breath. After a few minutes the commotion in the water ceased. Five beavers were resting their chins on their platform as if they were waiting for Raymond to take them, just as the old man had said.

I stole a glance at Raymond's eyes, which were focused on the eyes of one of the animals. He had fully given himself over to believing this could be done. Then, with a smooth motion, he took the largest beaver by the front legs and lifted it past his chest and face, rising with it and lifting it out of the lodge. I clubbed it decisively on the skull, ending its life in an instant. I was surprised by its size and its weight as I lifted it out of the way—fifty pounds, I thought. Four times Raymond repeated this feat, and four more times I gave
them a quick death with no suffering.

Raymond didn't climb out of the lodge jubilant. He was stunned and shaken. The old man had a tear in his eye as he helped Raymond pull his gloves over his freezing fingers. “Per-fec,” Johnny said.

“I can't believe what I just saw,” I said.

“I know,” Raymond sputtered. “I've heard my father talk about things kind of like this. He always said that sometimes the animals give their lives willingly to the hunter. But I never really believed it before.”

Johnny Raven gutted the beavers right there and tossed their entrails into the water, each time saying the same few words in Slavey as they made a splash. Recovering from his shock, Raymond said, “My father told me what it means when they say that. It means, ‘Make more beaver.'”

That night Raymond gave the first of the beaver meat to his great-uncle, a big piece of the fatty tail. I could see the quiet pride in both their eyes, to be able to give and receive according to the old tradition.

As Raymond took a piece of the tail, Johnny encouraged me to try it, too, and I did. It was almost all fat and tasted a lot better than I thought it would, kind of like the greasy fat on
the baby back ribs I used to eat back in Texas. Raymond started giggling: the fat was running down our faces. To look at us, we didn't have a care in the world.

Now we were wealthy in meat, or at least it felt like we were. We knew better than to ever eat our fill—we didn't know how long it was going to have to last. But it sure felt good having all that beaver meat up in the cache.

In the middle of the night, I happened to waken. The fire had nearly gone out, and Johnny Raven was stoking it, as he did every few hours to keep it alive. I lay awake aching from the nightly ordeal of spending the endless hours on the ground. I kept picturing Raymond, the way his eyes and the eyes of the beaver were locked together. Then my thoughts drifted back as they often did to an image I kept seeing of my father, always looking down out of the window of an airplane.

I was within a moment of falling back asleep when, through my lashes, I saw the white patch of the old man's hair bobbing in the near darkness of the cabin. When I looked again, I saw the dark outline of his body with arms outspread. Johnny was flapping his arms like the wings of a bird. He was standing over Raymond and was taking little
hops, both feet at once, hopping and flapping his “wings.” He did this dance for several minutes, and then he lay back down in his blanket.

What did it mean, Johnny dancing over Raymond like that? A celebration for what Raymond had done that day? A kind of prayer? I fell back to sleep wondering, knowing I'd seen something Johnny hadn't even meant Raymond to see, much less me.

A foot of new snow fell while Johnny was out moose-hunting the next day. With the beaver meat, we were all eating well enough to get our strength back. Johnny had stretched the beaver pelts on hoops of willow and hung them along the walls. In the evenings he was tanning the pelts with a paste that he made from the brains. He was going to make a pair of oversized mitts for Raymond. With difficulty, he made a joke that the women better not come up to Deadmen Valley and see him doing the tanning. When his hands weren't busy making something, he tapped the drum and told the old stories in his own language. Raymond listened, and he started to try out the Slavey he remembered from school, and to ask for the meaning of other words. Johnny Raven was pleased in his quiet way.

On Christmas Day, Johnny Raven prepared as
usual for his hunt in the morning twilight. Raymond asked if we should go with him. The old man patted him fondly on the shoulder but indicated that he would go alone. We made the circuit of the snares and deadfalls but didn't find anything. We talked about Christmas, and how we didn't have anything to give each other. “Wishes?” I volunteered. “What else do we have?”

“You go first,” Raymond said.

I said, “I guess I wish you get home safe to your family and live a long life, big brother.”

Raymond smiled and said, “You can't beat that. I wish that you surprise your father by living through this.”

When we returned to the cabin just after dark, Johnny wasn't there. “He's always back before dark,” Raymond muttered. We set out on his trail, lit brilliantly by a half-moon reflecting off the snow. We found him no more than a mile from the cabin, pitched forward in an unnatural position in the snow. He was frozen stiff.

At first we could only stare, trying to comprehend what had happened. We knew in an instant what this meant for us, and at the same time could hardly begin to imagine the enormity of our loss.

It looked like he'd never even had time to try
to get up. “Heart attack?” I wondered aloud.

Raymond didn't answer. He just knelt in the snow beside Johnny, his eyes closed, and then he let out a wail that might have been heard in Nahanni Butte. The tears welled in my own eyes and froze as they ran down my face.