M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
Father Mullen is never fooled.
Th
e trick is to always be two moves ahead of your opponent.
Th
at’s what Father Mullen says, punching at his shadow.
Th
at’s why when Sister Mary Kate said I had to show them how to cut a moose, I never said I don’t know how. Guess they think us boys up North are born with knives in our hands.
Guess it’s okay to let them think that.
Th
e trick is to always keep them guessing about what you know and what you don’t know.
“But Luke,” Bunna says again, “we don’t know nothing about cleaning a moose.”
Th
e bathroom is still steamy from the showers, and the mirrors are all fogged up, so when you try to see yourself, it’s like looking through smoke.
“Sure we do,” I say, running my fi nger across the steamy mirror, watching Bunna’s eyes pop out. “We watched Uncle Joe before, lotta times.”
“Yeah, but that’s caribou.”
“So? Moose got four legs just like caribou. Cut them into pieces. Same way.”
“Yeah, but how you get the skin off ?”
“You pull, remember? Th
e skin always pulls right off , like
gloves.”
“Yeah, but . . . you ever done it before?”
I sign my name on the mirror, taking time to make it neat.
“No, but you know how Mom always says it, right? We’re Eskimo, and . . .”
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“. . . Eskimos know how to survive, ” Bunna chants.
I nod my head. “And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”
L—u—k—e, I write. I make the tail of the “e” long and straight and draw a harpoon on the end, a hunter’s harpoon.
We’re gonna survive.
Father Flanagan drives us out to fi nd the dead moose. He drives the old Sacred Heart bus—military trash, Amiq calls it, because it was the bus the base was going to throw away but gave to us instead.
Th
e birch trees shiver their skinny black branches against the sky, a straggling of yellow leaves clinging to them. Chickie and Donna sit in front of me, Donna by the window, her face pressed against the glass. I tap my foot on the fl oor, part nervous and part excited. Bunna looks at my foot, and when he sees the way I’m tapping, he starts acting nervous, too.
I quit tapping and shove my foot under the seat.
Th
at’s when I feel it—something under the seat, some-
thing soft and lumpy like a dead body. I bend down to see what it is, and Bunna bends down, too. Bunna sees it before I do: Father Mullen’s mail bag. It looks smaller under there, like a little brown animal. Before I can stop him, Bunna slides it out and pulls it open. When we see what’s in there, there’s no stopping either one of us. Right on top is a letter that has my name on it: Luke Aaluk, handwritten in big, square letters.
And it’s already been opened, too. Somebody with a razor-sharp knife has slit that letter all the way open, right along the top edge, side to side.
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Suddenly the bus lurches, and everyone is standing up, trying to see out the window. Nobody sees me slide that letter into my pocket, easy as sliding a knife into its sheath. Nobody sees me kick that mail bag back under the seat. Everybody’s too busy looking at something else.
“Up there. Right there!” somebody cries.
It’s the moose, lying alongside the road, looking more like a brown gunnysack full of meat than something that used to run around. It’s not as big as I thought, just long, spindly legs and a ribbed body.
“Why, it’s just a baby!” one of the teachers cries.
“Man, they sure smashed it up,” Bunna says.
But you can see it’s mostly just the head that’s smashed.
Th
e meat part looks okay. I take a deep breath as Father pulls off the road and wonder how I’m going to do this thing I never done before.
When we step down off the bus, the sun is shining cold, and the air smells cold, too, with little fl ecks of snow in it. Th e
last of the leaves on the trees are yellow and browning, fl oating down from the branches like fur shedding, which is what trees do in the winter, I guess.
I’m glad to feel that wind, all right. We’re higher up in the valley than the school, way up by the mountains. Up here you can feel the wind and see farther, too. You can even hear the sound of ravens, cawing way off in the distance, which makes me think of home. Tulugaq, that’s what we call ravens.
Bunna and I stand together on the side of the road, looking down at the moose. Everybody is watching. Waiting. I shift 92
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from one foot to another, staring down at the dusty moose, wishing it had instructions stamped on its skin.
“All right, Luke, you’re in charge,” Father says.
I look up, eyeing a little patch of tundra on the other side of the road.
“First we better drag it over there, where we can work on it,” I say, nodding at the spot of high tundra, just like Uncle Joe would. Cleaner than the dirt road.
Father takes one of the front legs and I take the other.
Sister Mary Kate steps forward with a determined little smile and grabs a back leg, looking over at the volunteer teachers, who stand off to the side of the road with pale faces. Some of them look like they might get sick.
“Come on, girls,” Sister calls. “Let’s not shun Providence.”
I’m not exactly sure what she means by that, but before any of the teachers can worry about shunning Providence, Donna steps up and grabs a leg, which really surprises me.
Donna doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who would want to get her hands dirty with a dead moose.
Together we pull that moose up onto the tundra. Th
en
everyone stands back, waiting. I swallow a little lump of fear, running my fi nger along the blade of the knife Father gave me. Th
en I lean down and slit that moose open right up the belly, end to end, easy as unzipping a jacket. I breathe deep and smile.
Th
e teachers all step backward with one movement. But the kids all step closer.
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“My,” says one of the teachers in a whispery voice.
Bunna moves in right next to me, squatting down with a grin.
See? I tell him with my eyes. Th
en I reach up inside the
belly like I seen Uncle Joe do with caribou. But you have to reach a lot farther in to get inside a moose than you do with a caribou, even a baby moose. I’m in up to my shoulder before my hand fi nds the top edge of the guts. I pull hard, and the insides come sliding out just like water. One of the teachers behind me gasps.
“All right then, here’s the heart,” Father says, stepping forward and nodding down at my hand. I look at my hand and realize that I’m clutching that baby moose heart like it might save my life.
“Where’s that sack, Sister?” Father calls.
Sister grabs one of the burlap sacks they brought, and Bunna reaches into the mess of guts and pulls out the taqtuk like he’s done it a hundred times. Amiq winks at him.
“Here’s the taqtuk, ” Bunna says. Taqtuk is Bunna’s favor-ite. “What do Catholics call taqtuk, Luke?” Bunna whispers.
I don’t know what Catholics call taqtuk, so I pre
tend I’m too busy to talk.
“Taqtuk is kidneys,” Amiq says, tipping his head at Sister with a smile.
I know I’m supposed to take the skin off next, and I’m pulling with one hand and punching with the other, trying to separate the skin from the meat like I seen Joe do before with 94
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caribou, seen Mom do with fox, but the skin won’t separate.
It’s stuck hard, like it’s frozen onto the meat.
“You can’t pull the skin off like it’s a parka,” Sonny says, laughing sharply, like the sound a tulugaq makes. He even looks like a raven. Bunna glares at him.
“I seen them pull the skins off caribous,” Bunna mutters.
“Lots of times.”
“Th
at look like a caribou to you?” Sonny says.
Amiq moves over and squats down next to us.
“Naw,” he says, watching Sonny with a sharp eye. “Th at
ain’t no caribou. Stinks like a wet dog.”
Sonny glares at Amiq like he’s just insulted his mother.
Th
is makes me laugh, which makes Sonny glare even
harder.
“Of course it’s diff erent with moose,” I say smoothly.
“With moose you got to cut it up into pieces fi rst, then take the skin off .”
Sonny gets a funny look on his face like he thinks maybe I’m bluffi
ng but isn’t quite sure. Th
at’s when I realize that
Sonny don’t know any more about cleaning a moose than we do. Heck, Sonny probably don’t even know we don’t got moose in our village. How could he? He’s never been that far north, I bet.
Even when it’s cut up into pieces, taking the skin off a moose isn’t easy. You have to use a knife all the way through, separat-ing the skin from the meat very carefully. By the time I reach the last piece, I got it down cold, and everybody is looking at 95
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me like I’m the expert. Heck, maybe I am. I’m the new expert moose skinner of Sacred Heart School.
In the cafeteria that night, we eat fried moose meat with gravy, proud of ourselves. It’s not caribou, all right, but it tastes okay. Good, almost. Th
en Father Mullen comes strid-
ing through the cafeteria, whistling. Swinging that mail bag of his. He likes to act like he’s just walking through the room for fun, but the whole room explodes with the sound of kids calling out, “Who’s got a letter?” “Whose package?” Th at letter I pulled out of the mail bag without asking is getting very heavy, and I haven’t even been able to read it yet.
“Hey, look what I got,” Amiq hollers.
It’s a newspaper clipping. Amiq unfolds it and lays it out on the table for everyone to see. Th
ere’s a picture of a bunch of
Iñupiaq guys in a line. It’s not our village, but me and Bunna recognize some of them. Th
e guy at the front of the line is
signing an offi
cial-looking paper. Off to the side, closer, is a
guy with a big smile holding a duck. I’d recognize that smile anywhere.
“Hey! Th
at’s my uncle Joe!” I shout.
Bunna leans over, and we read the headline together:
“Eskimos in Game Law Revolt,” it says.
“What’s that mean?” Bunna asks.
Amiq laughs. “It means your uncle is a good man,
Bunna.”
Kids are crowding around to read the story about the Eskimo revolt, but not me. I’ve gone back to thinking about my letter, the one sitting in my pocket with my name on it, 96
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unread. Th
e one I’m afraid to take out of my pocket. But right now that letter is the only story I’m interested in reading.
We have to wait a long time to read it, though, me and Bunna. We wait until after dinner, when we’re all alone in our room, after all them other guys are in the showers.
When we realize it’s a letter from our little brother Isaac, we hardly dare breathe for fear somebody’s gonna catch us before we get a chance to fi nish it.
DEAR BROTHER,
MY NEW HOUSE HAS A TREE. I KNOW
HOW TO CLIMB MY TREE. DAD IS
GOING TO BUILD A TREE HOUSE. IT
IS HOT HERE AND WE GO SWIMMING.
SINCERELY,
ISAAC
PS HOW COME YOU NEVER ANSWER MY
LETTERS?
Th
ose last words make me clench my fi sts up tight.
Th
e letter has no return address, and I never got no other letters, so how could I answer them? But there’s a postmark on it. I study it close, trying to fi gure out what it means. It’s a circle with a date in the center—AUG 15, 1961—and the word TEX at the bottom. Th
at means Texas, I’m sure. Th
ere a
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city name on the top, but I can’t read it because it’s smudged.
Part of it says DA.
When I slip that letter back into its envelope, the sight of that knife-cut edge along the top makes me boxing mad .
“Your opponent will always have a weak spot,” Father Mullen says. “Don’t ever forget that.”
When I think about Isaac swimming in some hot place, I feel cold and my chest gets tight, because swimming is like a weak spot for us. Us Eskimos are not swimmers. If we fall into the ocean back home, we don’t swim. We get pulled out quick before the cold kills us.
At least Isaac is okay, though. You could tell he’s okay by the way he makes his letters, real neat, forming the words as smooth as leaves falling.
How’d Isaac learn how to climb a tree, anyhow?
“What are we going to do with the letter?” Bunna whispers.
For some reason, I think of Abraham getting ready to burn his son Isaac.
“We gotta burn it,” I say, imagining what Father Mullen would do if he found out we took it.
“How come?”
“Never mind,” I whisper.
Father Mullen is teaching us boys to be boxers all right, and that’s okay by us, too. We will always stay two moves ahead of our opponent, and we will always look for his weak spot. And we will not throw any punches until we have a clear shot, no matter how long it takes. Father didn’t 98
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have to teach us that one; we already knew because we’re hunters.
“But how we gonna burn that letter when we don’t even got matches?” Bunna says.
Never mind. We’ll fi nd a way. We will always fi nd a way.
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Military Trash
MARCH 1962
CHICKIE
—
It’s snowing outside, making everything in the whole world seem bright and quiet, and I have a new diary. Swede sent it to me, and I’m trying to write in it, trying to record things, which is just about impossible, bouncing down this frozen road in our beat-up old bus. We are returning from a trip to Fairbanks, where our basketball team beat the team at the Catholic school there. We won because Sonny is tough and Amiq is fast and Michael O’Shay, that new boy, is just plain tall.
“Dear Diary,” I write, but the “a” and “i” get turned around and it says, “Dear Dairy.” Which makes me mad because
I’ve written it in ink, and there is no turning back. I’m writing to a dairy instead of a diary. Dumb!
I look out at the falling snow, glittering in the late afternoon, and I feel warm and protected somehow. It’s getting close to dinner, and the boys are talking about food, and even though the snow outside muffl
es us, they are managing to
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M I L I T A R Y T R A S H / C h i c k i e make more noise than a herd of elephants, which is typical of boys.
“Man, I sure wish Sister knew how to make caribou soup like Mom,” Bunna says.
“Or dry fi sh like my grandpa,” Leo Pete says. Leo Pete lives right by the school, and his grandpa catches salmon in the river. Leo’s grandpa is the one Luke and Bunna are afraid of, even though they don’t ever say it.
Amiq snorts.
“Why don’t you pups worry ’bout something more
likely, like maybe Sister Sarah’s gonna turn into an astro-naut?”
Luke and Sonny start to laugh at this one until they suddenly realize they are both laughing at the same thing, which makes them start to frown instead. I swear, those two. Always bristling like dogs over the same bone. And Amiq’s holding the bone. As usual.
“Who you calling a pup?” Leo asks, narrowing his eyes.
Amiq nudges Junior, sitting in the seat right next to him, his nose stuck in a book. As usual.
“Hey, Junior, you hear some yapping?”
Junior looks up, pushing his glasses up on his nose all dreamy-eyed.
“Mapping?” he says, and everybody laughs, even Sonny and Luke together.
Th
at’s the thing about Junior. He’s kind of on everybody’s team. I mean he’s so spacey, it’s like he’s in a totally diff erent universe. He never takes one side or the other. Like a referee 101
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without a whistle, he just kind of drifts around on the edge of the game.
“I am traveling in an old bus with a bunch of wild
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