The Raven's Gift Read Free Page B

brochures; an old Yup’ik woman wearing a traditional fur parka stared back at him. “I just don’t wantit 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 orcremate 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.

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    T he 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.