The Raven's Gift Read Online Free PDF Page A

onto the moonlit snow in front of the principal’s house and knelt down on the ground. He heard a gunshot, and one of the men fell forward. Another flash and shot came from inside the doorway. A second man fell. The third got up to run, and made it halfway across the wooden play deckwhen the shot hit him in the shoulder and spun his body. Another shot and the man slumped to the play deck. He crawled half a dozen feet, dragging his legs through the snow, leaving a long dark gash of black in the snow before he collapsed, dead.
    John pulled back from the window, suddenly aware that the shooter might see him. He hoped his motion hadn’t been too sudden.
    Using his headlamp, he made his way quietly through the piles of overturned desks to the hallway. He crept down the hall and into the gym. In the dark gym only a slice of moonlight cut through an opening high at the far end. He made his way across the gym to the ladder. He climbed the ladder to the small door, eased himself in, and pulled the ladder up.
    He knelt down on the wrestling mat and thought of the way the first man had dropped to the snow and the hollow shots. Pop. Pop. Pop.

   4   
    H e waited until almost no smoke could be seen coming from the chimney before they approached the steps. His toes had gone completely numb with cold and his index finger, the one he’d held on the trigger, felt as if the skin had frozen solid. He couldn’t stop wondering where the man he shot had been headed. But the possibility of warmth and a house to sleep in, even for the night, made the risk of entering akin to the risk of travelling on the river when the young ice wasn’t quite thick enough. The other houses would have already been ransacked, and if the man was the only living person left in the village, then what was worth salvaging would be inside.
    “I’m going now. You sit there,” he said.
    “You think I’ll run away?”
    She laughed once and slapped her mittens against her withering legs. The echo of that strange sound, the chuckle and the slap, hung in the air of the village like a half clang of a church bell.
    He walked up the front steps, through the weathered plywood-covered porch, and kicked the door open. At the same time he threw himself against the doorframe, fully expecting the blast of a shotgun or the high-pitched pop of a small-calibre rifle. When nothing happened he swung the rifle at hip level and stepped through the door.
    An old Yup’ik woman sat in front of an open woodstove, poking the small flame with a broken broom handle. A soft blue light came inthrough the weathered blue tarps that covered the windows. He didn’t shoot, but he didn’t take his finger from the trigger either.
    “You going to kill me, like that man you just shooted?” she asked.
    “Should I?”
    “What’s wrong with that girl out there? She got those sicknesses? Why she blind?”
    He raised his rifle slightly and watched her thin, brown wrinkled hands.
    “You shouldn’t a kilt that man,” she said. “He was trying to do goot.”
    “He was one of them,” he said.
    She pushed a few more small twigs into the stove and shut the door halfway. She turned and knelt down on the floor, her legs tucked beneath her. She wore wide round glasses with thick lenses and black electrician’s tape on part of the frame.
    “We’re all people just trying to live. Now, tell that girl to come inside. Cold out there. She is safe here. The hunter gone for a while. No bad ones allowed in my house,” she said.
    “What hunter?” he asked.
    She stared at him for a moment and then removed her glasses and cleaned the thick lenses with a thin green scarf protruding from the pocket of her jacket. He wasn’t sure whether she understood him or was ignoring him.
    “What about him?” he said, gesturing in the direction of the man he’d just shot.
    “He’s not the hunter, and that one out there is dead, if you’re any kind of goot shooter.”
    “Where was he going?” John asked.
    She