Lone Wolves

by John Smelcer

  Sampson didn’t reply. He, too, had learned it was better to say nothing. He picked up his empty bowl and handed it to his wife.

  “Taas utaniłtl’iit, ts’inst’e’e,” he said, in a tone that sounded like an order.

  Denny understood that he was asking for more soup.

  Her grandmother filled the bowl and handed it back.

  “Gah, da’atnae,” she grumbled. “Here, Old Man.”

  The grandparents smiled at each other. It was a game they played. Truth be told, they were very happy together. They had been married for fifty-one years. At forty, Delia was the youngest of their five children. The oldest was almost fifty.

  When supper was finished, Delia turned to her daughter.

  “Tomorrow’s Monday. Did you finish all your homework?”

  “I need to finish a paper for history,” replied Denny, setting her empty bowl in the sink.

  “Get working on it and then take a bath before bed,” said Delia in a motherly fashion.

  Denny marched over and plopped onto a chair beside the wood stove. It was the warmest place in the house. For almost an hour she read from a book and wrote in a notebook. While she worked, a large pot of water was heating on the stove. When the water was warm, Denny carried the pot behind a curtain in the back of the cabin and set it down beside a large, galvanized wash tub, just large enough for a person to kneel or crouch in. She took off her clothes and stepped into the tub. Using a tin cup, she poured warm water over her head, washed her long hair and body, and then used the rest of the water to rinse. With no plumbing, the house had no bathtub or toilet. Water was hauled from the river in five-gallon buckets, each weighing forty pounds. In winter, they kept open a hole in the ice, covering it with a Styrofoam board and snow to keep it from freezing over.

  Everyone used an outhouse, called tsa hwnax in Indian, a dozen yards or so behind the cabin, even when it was 60 degrees below zero. At such extreme temperatures, solid waste froze almost immediately, each successive go landing atop the last and freezing solid until—after months of winter use—from the bottom of the outhouse hole arose a brown, frozen stalagmite reaching upward almost to the seat-hole, posing risk of impalement to any unwary user. In early summer, it would finally melt, tumble over like a stack of blocks, and ooze into a putrid, brown, semi-liquid. Scoops of lye would help it dissolve further.

  Also behind the cabin was a small sweathouse, called sezel, which the family used regularly to take steam baths. In their language, the words for Saturday and Sunday were related to use of the sweathouse. Denny loved to sit in the sauna, sweat dripping off her body, while reading a book by candlelight, stepping out every so often to cool down.

  The cabin itself consisted of one large room with the small kitchen, the dining table, and a small sitting area facing the wood stove. A narrow bed was pushed against a wall for Denny. An addition had been built at the back of the house, which was one large room with a rickety wall separating the area where Denny’s mother and grandparents slept. All in all, it was a cozy home, especially when the temperature outside plummeted.

  Once in bed, Denny took out her diary, which she hid behind a row of books on a single shelf beside her small bed. She thumbed through it until she found the first blank page. Then she began to write:

  Mother doesn’t understand me at all. How can we be so different? Why does she want me to be someone I’m not? What’s wrong with the way I am? Other girls in the village drink all the time and get pregnant before they even graduate high school, like Mary Paniaq. Almost everybody at school drinks and smokes pot. She should be glad I don’t do any of that stuff. Today, Grandpa talked about how the land is his home. He loves it out there. I thought I’d write a poem about him. I’m afraid it’s not a very good one. I think I spelled the Indian words right.

  Home

  Standing on a frozen bank of the river,

  snowy mountains in the distance.

  Waiting for the river to replace his blood.

  Waiting for the earth to replace his bones.

  Ghak’ae

  Yihwnighi’aa sdaghaay dlii ‘Atna’,

  ghelaay nadaexi zaadi.

  De baa ‘Atna’ tuu naat’aan del.

  De baa nen’ naat’aan ts’en.

  2

  Nen’ tae dlii

  Land of Ice

  When Denny stepped out the front door early the next morning on her way to school, the dogs began barking and jumping. Some howled from atop their little houses.

  “Settle down,” she said in a stern voice. “Grandpa will feed you soon.”

  One by one, the raucous dogs quieted.

  As she passed other small houses along the way, dogs tied up in front yards barked and growled at her. There were more dogs in the village than people.

  The main road through the village ran alongside the wide river. Denny passed a small wooden cross about waist high adorned with plastic flowers, their bright colors faded from years of sunlight.

  It was a reminder of the life and death of Maggie Yazzie.

  Maggie was Denny’s cousin, and although Maggie was several years older, they had grown up together. Each was the closest the other had to a sister. All through junior high and high school, Maggie had earned straight As. Everyone in the village bragged about how smart she was. Maggie wanted to earn a degree in nursing and come back to the village to help her people. On the day that she flew off to go to college in the big city, the whole community turned out at the little airstrip to see her off and to wave goodbye.

  Once at the college, though, Maggie was tested so that she could be placed in the right classes. Even though she had taken senior-level English and math and science, one test showed that she could barely read at an eighth or ninth grade level, while another showed that her command of math was that of a seventh or eighth grader. She was told that she would have to take a year of remedial classes just to prepare her for the required college-level courses. Because of her low scores, she was not accepted into the highly competitive nursing program.

  The news really hurt Maggie. But it was more than wounded pride; it was a melting of dreams. Denny remembered a conversation they had when Maggie came home for Christmas.

  “I think teachers lie to us,” Maggie said, as they walked through the village, snow crunching beneath their boots.

  Denny could tell that Maggie’s despair was as suffocating as a packed snowdrift.

  “What do you mean?”

  Maggie didn’t reply at first, as if she was thinking, choosing her words carefully.

  “I think some teachers believe that Native children will never grow up to be anything or do anything important, so they give us good grades to make us feel good about ourselves, to make the community feel good.”

  “That’s not right,” said Denny, wondering about her own good grades. “That can’t be right. We have plans and futures just like all them kids in the cities.”

  Maggie nodded and frowned.

  “They think that because there’s so much alcoholism and depression and suicide that they have to lie to us,” said Maggie. “But you can’t prepare a person for the future by lying. It’s not right.”

  For the rest of the walk, the two girls talked about how ill-prepared they all were for the world beyond their village. Denny was saddened by her cousin’s sadness, but she felt strengthened by their talking. She felt like a little sister learning from a big sister.

  Then Maggie said something Denny didn’t expect.

  “Nothing matters anymore,” she half-whispered in a voice as sad and stripped of life as a bear-killed moose carcass partially buried in the earth.

  Denny didn’t know what to say at the time, but in the following years, she replayed that moment a thousand times in her mind, offering the consoling words she never said.

  Maggie returned to college after the vacation and spent
the semester taking more remedial classes. She struggled, not only with school, but also with her loneliness and disappointment, until one day she returned to the village during spring break-up, when the frozen river shakes itself loose of the banks and begins to flow again, jumbled sheets of ice and icebergs grinding their way to the sea.

  Birdie Kawagley, who lived in the small log cabin on the other side of the dirt road, said she saw Maggie standing on the riverbank for a long time, just watching the flowing ice and listening to the grinding river. She said she paid no mind at first. But then she saw Maggie jump onto a passing sheet of ice and stand in the middle as the river carried her downriver.

  “She just stood there, as calm as can be,” Birdie told the state trooper who flew into the village to investigate her death.

  Maggie’s body was never found.

  That account was not as unusual as one might think. Denny knew that Alaska Natives, especially young men, committed suicide at a rate a dozen times higher than that of the rest of America. One out of five young men kills himself by the age of twenty-five. Village cemeteries were full of the corpses of failed and dead dreams. Denny had even heard of a 12-year-old boy in a village up north who simply walked off across the frozen arctic tundra at 60 below zero, into the teeth of the wind.

  Denny stopped for a minute and stared at the cross.

  “I’m sorry,” she said aloud.

  She wiped a tear from her cheek, hard, almost with anger, and then walked away.

  The sun-dulled flowers waved in the slight wind.

  Denny’s school was like any other school in the bush. It was the most modern building in the village, with a furnace, running water and toilets, telephones, a fax machine, and the Internet. It even had a gymnasium, which was often used for community functions. In many ways, the school was the heart of any village. In the old days, village children were often relocated to larger communities to attend school from fall to spring. But for a generation, schools had been built in almost every village that had children. More recently, however, for reasons largely economic, an exodus had drained the villages of families, which move to the larger cities where traditions and cultural values and languages gave way to modernity, to malls and cineplexes, to megastores with endless parking lots, to coffeehouses and bistros, and to boulevards lined with fast-food and convenience stores. In the unfamiliar and unfriendly environment, children from small villages were intimidated or lost in the sea of hundreds, even thousands, of students at the city schools.

  Denny’s school had only a few classrooms and only a few teachers, who had to be qualified to teach a number of subjects and to serve in various administrative capacities. In the entire school, there were only nine high-school-aged students, Denny among them. Several grades were lumped together, the teachers doing the best they could in such an environment, where students might be two or three grades apart from one another. Denny often wondered about the challenges of teaching math or reading to such groups, the culture-shock to a teacher unfamiliar with village life.

  When she was in seventh grade, Denny accidentally overheard a conversation between two teachers after school.

  “I can’t take anymore,” said the new teacher from California. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “But you have a contract,” replied the other, seasoned teacher.

  “I don’t care. I wasn’t prepared to live like this. No one can. I’m going home.”

  Within a week that teacher was flying south like a goose in the fall.

  During second period, while the teacher was busy writing on the board, a note was passed around class. When it reached Deneena, she unfolded it beneath the desktop to read.

  “Party at Mary’s house tonight. Parents out of town. BYOB! Pass it on.”

  Mary’s parents were always gone, leaving their 16-year-old daughter to fend for herself. The few occasions they were home, they were always drunk and abusive.

  Deneena quietly folded the note, and, when the teacher was looking away, she tossed it to Johnny Shaginoff. At lunch, almost all of the high school students huddled behind the school where no one would see them. Half of them wore no jacket, even though the temperature was around zero. Johnny, a junior, lit a joint, took a hit, and passed it to his left. Each student took a hit, including Mary Paniaq, who was beginning to show beneath her parka. Most people in the village just thought she was putting on some weight, which was common during the long, dark, boring months.

  When the joint came to Denny, she passed it directly to Silas Charley, without taking a puff. Silas held it to his pursed lips for a moment before passing it to the next person. Silas was the same age as Denny. He rarely spoke, even in class. When teachers called on him during class, they’d chastise him for mumbling at the floor when he spoke. Denny liked Silas, but she didn’t like that he drank and did drugs like everyone else.

  “Hey, Denny,” said Johnny, “how come you never do nothin’ fun? Why you always such a stick in the mud?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Norman Fury, a senior who was the school’s best basketball player. “It’s probably because she ain’t got no father.”

  “I don’t know,” replied a hurt Denny, not looking anyone in the eye. She hated when people reminded her that her father didn’t want anything to do with her. “I just don’t want to, I guess.”

  “You never wanna do anything,” said Mary. “Maybe you have some of this instead,” she added, pulling out a small silver flask from inside her parka.

  “What’s in it, Mary?” asked Johnny.

  “My friend Jim . . . Beam.”

  Everyone laughed and took short sips from the flask, except for Denny, who passed it the way she had passed the joint.

  Just then a squirrel climbed out to the end of a spruce bough and chattered at the group. Johnny made a snowball and threw it at the squirrel, missing it, but the frightened animal fled nonetheless, jumping from bough to bough until it was safely several trees away.

  “Hey, Denny,” said Johnny. “What’s the Indian word for squirrel?”

  “Dligi,” she replied, proudly.

  Johnny repeated the word.

  “What a stupid word,” he said. “Why you waste your time with that old-fashioned crap?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Norman. “That stuff is lame. I can’t wait to get outta this stupid village and move to a city.”

  “I don’t know. Just seems important somehow,” said Denny as she watched Mary take a swig from the flask. “You know that’s bad for the baby?”

  “Hell, everything’s bad for this baby. Life’s gonna be bad for it. Might as well start gettin’ use to it now.” Mary gave a little snicker before taking another swig.

  And there was a kind of sad truth in her words. Only Deneena and the other students standing in the cold behind the school knew what had happened to Mary. She had told them in confidence. Her own cousin, Willy Paniaq, seven years older, had raped her when they were both drunk and got her pregnant. In small, remote villages, where there were few unrelated girls or women, men often raped their own relatives. And no one did anything about it. The victims had no recourse, no one to talk to. Their own mothers, many having endured the same thing, warned them not to tell anyone.

  “That’s your cousin,” mothers scolded their daughters. “What’s wrong with you? You want your cousin to go to jail?”

  Whether from shame or from a strong sense of community or from something else, something deep and hard and as frozen as a dead animal, villages protected the rapist, not the victim. The way her stomach was growing, Mary wouldn’t be able to hide her secret for much longer. Everyone in the village would know soon enough.

  ‘Hell, it’s time to go back in,” said Norman, looking at his watch. “Damn, it’s cold out here!”

  As they shuffled around the building, Denny stopped for a moment and marveled at the wide, frozen river, beckoning to her, a friendly high
way leading into the mountains. Silas Charley stopped and waited for her, rubbing his hands together to warm them.

  “I think the word for squirrel is pretty cool,” he said, in his quiet way.

  Less than an hour later, during math, Ms. Stevens, who taught English and history, staggered into the classroom and stood in the doorway, her eyes red and swollen from crying, a wad of tissue clutched in one hand.

  “I . . . I have some bad news,” she half whispered.

  The nine students stopped what they were doing.

  “Elie Holbert died yesterday.”

  Everyone gasped. Ms. Holbert taught English and social studies at the village thirty miles upriver. The two small schools often partnered on projects and sports, especially basketball and volleyball. Everyone liked her.

  “What happened?” two students asked at the same time.

  “She was . . .” Ms. Stevens tried to choke back her emotions. She had been close friends with Elie, who was about her age. “She was out jogging alone when a pack of wolves attacked her about two miles from the village.”

  Denny put a hand to her mouth.

  Several students burst into tears.

  Everyone knew that Ms. Holbert was a runner. She was barely five feet tall and as skinny as an icicle. She had an endearing Southern accent that was strange to hear in a village so far north.

  “They say the wolves were still on her when someone came along on a snowmobile and frightened them away. I just got a phone call from the school.”

  No one wanted to believe the news. Elie Holbert was a good person. But everyone in the grieving classroom knew that wolves could be dangerous, contrary to the popular opinion by city folks who have never seen one in the wild. An empty belly on a vast and frozen land can be a dangerous thing.