The Great Death (10 page)

Millie and Maura had often wondered about the village during their journey, whispering about it at night around the campfire, as if they were afraid to speak of it aloud. They worried that if the man from this village had carried the red spots up to their village, then it stood to reason that the sickness could have killed everyone here too. They didn't know what they would find or if anyone would still be alive. They knew only that they couldn't stay home. They had to find other people. They couldn't survive for long on their own.

Finally, Millie began tramping down the ridge toward the houses. Maura followed in her tracks, having learned that it was easier to walk in her sister's broken trail. They stopped beside a salmon-drying rack just like the ones in their own village.

“No one here,” Millie repeated softly, to herself or to the air, the wind blowing her hair in her face.

Maura took her sister's hand. Blue sat between them.

“Where are all the people?” Maura asked, squeezing Millie's fingers.

As much as they had feared it, neither sister had actually expected to find the village as dead as their own. The sickness had been here first, but this was a larger village. They had hoped to find survivors like themselves.

“They're all dead,” Millie said. “The spotted plague has killed all of them, just as it did in our village.”

Maura began to shake a little. The bitter wind seemed to creep into her clothes, into her bones.

Not again,
she thought.
Not everyone.

Millie and Maura imagined the last days of life in this village. Had starving dogs consumed the dead? Had the bears come? Were there any survivors who left to go downriver in search of the white settlement? Was the deep, mounded snow concealing half-burned corpses?

“What do we do now?” Maura asked. “Is everyone dead everywhere?”

Millie thought about that for several moments before she answered.

“I don't know. I just know that we have to keep going. We have to look for others. We have to find the trading settlement where the rivers join. From the way Father described it, most of the people who live there are white.” The sisters remembered how the two white strangers were not sick when they left their village. “Surely there are people alive there—people kind enough to take us in, maybe even some of our own people who also survived the sickness.”

“How far away is that?” asked Maura, looking up at Millie the way she used to look at her mother when she needed to know something.

“A long ways, I guess. We may be only halfway there, maybe not even that close. But we have to keep going,” Millie replied, suddenly tired. She wanted to be the one to ask questions, to hear answers.

“Everything is so still,” Maura whispered.

Strangely, the buried cabins looked peaceful beneath the clean, trackless snow. The three trudged through the empty village, avoiding looking into each house, fearful of what they might find. They had seen enough of death.

“Do you think there are ghosts here?” asked Maura, staying close to her sister, remembering the timid spirit of the drowned man they had seen running across treetops.

“I don't know.”

“Do you think Mother and Father are ghosts?” she asked.

“I don't know.… Maybe,” replied Millie.

“Do you think they would remember us?” Maura asked, wiping away a streaming tear with a parka sleeve.

“I think so.”

“Do you think they miss us?”

“Yes,” Millie answered, mostly because
she
missed them so much.

The girls wondered if the spirits wandering the village were fearful for the safety of the two living girls. Millie wondered if the wind, rising to a howl, was made by the shouts of the dead warning them to run away before the red spots awakened. Maura wondered about her own abandoned village. Did it look like this one now, the blasting wind off the lake breathing darkly in long, hard breaths through open doors? Were the dead there buried beneath a peaceful blanket of snow?

Although the girls were too frightened to enter any of the deserted homes, which now belonged to the wind and the drifting snow, they peeked inside every cache, climbing the rickety ladders. In the back of one, they found a bundle of dried salmon, which looked as though ravens had pecked at it. But the meat was still good. They split the fish equally, tucking them securely inside their packs. Millie also took two pairs of snowshoes from the wall outside a cabin, figuring the spirits would not begrudge her. After all, it was a long way to the trading settlement far below, where the two rivers meet.

Winter would accompany them on their journey.

*   *   *

Less than a mile downriver, the trail came to a wide, snow-covered creek, which emptied into the river. The white surface lay undisturbed. It was the broadest creek they had encountered on their journey. Others had been little more than rills, near empty in winter, easy to traverse. This one was at least thirty feet across, maybe more. But it didn't look dangerous.

Besides, they couldn't go around it.

Halfway across, Millie and Maura sank up to their waists in overflow, one of the most dangerous natural phenomena in the far North. Sometimes water runs over the surface of ice on a creek or river or lake, hidden beneath deep and undisturbed snow, a sinister and secret trap.

The sisters struggled to get out of the slush. The snowshoes were too heavy to lift, and the girls had to lean down until the water nearly reached their shoulders to remove them, even as they stood in the ice-cold overflow. Blue struggled, too. Luckily, their packs did not get wet. When the girls reached the opposite side, they knew the danger they were in. Maura cried from the pain in her hands and feet. She was freezing, holding her arms across her chest and shivering. Millie made her crouch on the wind-protected side of a tree while she, with numbing fingers, fumbled to build a fire.

They both knew plenty of stories about the perils of overflow.

Their grandfather had lost all of his toes after his dogsled got stuck in overflow on a creek. He had been checking a trap line when the dogs and the sled sank into the slush. It was thirty degrees below zero—more than sixty degrees colder than freezing. For half an hour he struggled to pull the dogs and sled out of the overflow, scraping the freezing slush from the runners.

Then he made a mistake.

Instead of immediately building a fire to dry his clothes and the dogs' feet, he pushed for home, ten miles away. By the time he arrived, his leggings and boots were frozen solid. When his family pulled off his boots, his toes were black and dead. They had to be amputated. Two of the dogs had to be put down; their paws had frozen, too.

Overflow was a serious matter.

As soon as Millie had a fire going, she broke branches from beneath a spruce tree and fashioned a lean-to by using the tarp and a pole propped against the tree. For the rest of the night they huddled naked beneath blankets, feeding the fire, drying their clothes and mukluks.

Blue lay nearby, licking his wet fur and using his front teeth to pull chunks of ice from between his splayed paws.

Taa
'
i Uk
'
edi

(Thirteen)

Raven taught the woman how to use a bow and arrow to hunt game. He showed her how to snare rabbits. He even instructed her how to trap beaver and muskrat and how to fashion warm clothing from their pelts.

A
BLIZZARD ASSAILED
the valley by morning, the heavy snowflakes swirling on a hard wind that seemed to blow from every direction. The whiteout was so complete that Millie and Maura could barely see ahead, and the twisting and drifting snow quickly covered the light footprints of their snowshoes. The stinging flakes clung to eyebrows and froze eyelashes so that the girls had to rub ice from their eyes to see.

Several times they thought they had lost Blue, but the dog returned when Millie shouted or Maura whistled.

The sisters walked all day, without taking much notice of their surroundings, mindlessly putting one snowshoe in front of the other, deep in distracting thoughts and daydreams. They thought about the happy past before the sickness came to their village. They thought about the dead village behind them. And they wondered if they would ever reach the white settlement. They wondered what they would do if they found it abandoned, too. Where would they go from there? How would they live?

All day the snow kept falling, getting deeper, making the going difficult for Blue, who sank up to his belly. Their only bearing was the river. Wherever possible, they walked along its treeless bank or beneath trees at the forest's edge. They stopped only once to rest beneath a close stand of spruce trees, which offered some protection against the storm. Millie managed to make a fire, first kicking away the snow to expose the frozen ground, crouching over her little glass jar of matches, the striker, and strips of white, paper-thin bark, which she had peeled off a birch tree earlier in the day. As the flames grew, she carefully added dry pinecones and twigs, warily shielding the fire from the wind, which constantly threatened to extinguish the flames. She melted some snow in the pot, adding pieces of dried salmon to the boiling water, making a tasty fish broth. After the girls drank their fill, Blue licked what remained in the pot.

After the brief respite, the threesome journeyed on down the river and into the gathering dusk, looking for a place to camp for the night. As always, Maura straggled behind. She was, after all, younger than Millie, and her legs were shorter. Besides, the long and heavy snowshoes were meant for a much taller adult.

Without signaling Millie, Maura stopped to relieve her bladder. She would be quick about it. She squatted on the trail a hundred feet below a fork where the river trail intersected a well-used game trail. Unaware that Maura had stopped, Millie plodded on, vanishing in the storm. Blue stayed with Maura, his back covered with snow. He shook himself and sniffed the base of a swaying birch tree and then left his own scent on the trunk.

Millie had taken the trail that most appeared to follow the river, which she could not see through the trees and snow but knew was there, just out of sight to her left. The other trail curved abruptly at an angle away from the river, toward a flat valley between hills. She passed the fork without much consideration and without looking back, assuming that, as always, Maura and the dog were right behind her. The wind roared in the trees above, something between a whistle and a moan, and the snow continued unabated.

After Millie had walked for another half hour absorbed in her own thoughts, she stopped and looked back for the first time since passing the fork. Her sister was not there. She stood on the trail for a while, peering into the dark, expecting Maura and Blue to emerge from around the bend. As she waited, she pulled a strip of dried salmon from her parka and chewed on it slowly, enjoying the flavor of the oily red meat. She saved the silvery skin for Blue.

At last, Millie walked back around the bend and looked down a straight stretch. Snow was falling so heavily that she could see only halfway down the trail. Neither Maura nor the dog was visible. She walked down the stretch until she could see the trail's bend with the river. Still nothing.

Millie cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted her sister's name several times, holding her breath after each shout and listening for a reply. It was so quiet that she could hear snowflakes landing on her parka hood. She wiped her eyelashes and yelled again.

“M-a-u-r-a! M-a-u-r-a!”

She tried to whistle like her father and sister, but she had never learned that art. She made a kind of whistling noise, no louder than the rush of breath escaping around her tongue.

Suddenly, Millie felt sure that something had stolen her sister, perhaps wolves or a sleepless bear or angry spirits from the dead village. Perhaps the hairy-faced giant had survived the river after all and had taken his revenge on Maura and on Blue.

Millie shuddered, more from fear than from the cold.

But she had heard no sounds of struggle. Surely she would have heard Blue barking or Maura screaming.

Millie ran down the trail as fast as she could on the snowshoes, the bundled tarp bouncing against her back, the slung rifle sliding off her shoulder. She fell twice. When she had returned to the fork, there was no sign of her sister or the dog, no disturbance on the snow whatsoever to indicate their passing. Millie remembered the last time she had seen Maura was half a mile or more upriver from the trail junction, where they'd had to step around a large tree that had fallen across the trail.

Although it was already dark, she set off briskly upriver, in the wrong direction.

*   *   *

When Maura came to the fork, the wind was blowing so hard that she had to lean into it and turn her face away from its might, squinting hard; otherwise, the snow stung her eyes so badly that she could barely keep them open. Blue, smelling some scent, maybe of a moose or a wolf or another porcupine, took off down the trail to the right, the wrong direction, and Maura followed without question. She hadn't noticed the other trail at all, assuming that while the fury of the storm might impede her sight, it surely did not hinder the dog's keen sense of smell. Maura was certain that Blue was following Millie. And although she was exhausted from the long day's march, she quickened her pace to catch up, knowing that her sister was only a minute or two ahead, just around the next bend.

Within half an hour it was dark. The clouds were thick and angry, racing above the valley, hurling snow at the world.

Maura began calling Millie's name, her tumbling words deadened on the fierce wind. She was crying, afraid of being alone in the wilderness—now she understood how Millie must have felt when she wandered off to pick berries. The tears only made her cheeks cold and her eyelashes freeze faster. She couldn't imagine that her sister could be so far ahead of her. Maura had stopped only for a couple of minutes. And she had been hurrying ever since. She should have caught up well before now. What had happened?