by John Smelcer
Silas waved at Denny when she passed.
“You go, girl!” he yelled.
After finishing the first loop, Denny had moved up to fifth place. On the wide-open stretch along the frozen river, she pulled ahead of another team and was in fourth. By the time she emerged from the slough a half mile before the finish line, she was in third place, with no team close enough behind to seriously challenge her. Denny was gaining on the team in second. With a little more distance to the finish line, she might have passed it. Out of a dozen teams in the race, all led by men, 16-year-old-rookie Deneena Yazzie finished in third place. She smiled proudly when officials announced her name on the loudspeaker, handing her a small trophy and a check for $400.
“I told you that you ready. Didn’t I tell you?” said Sampson in a voice hoarse from cheering. “You a real racer now. I’m proud of you.”
Denny hugged her grandfather, with her trophy in one hand and the prize check in the other. She wondered what her mother would say when she told her the good news.
Afterward, Denny and Silas bumped fists to celebrate.
“You were real good out there,” he said, looking at the snow-covered ground.
“Thanks,” replied Denny.
They stood in an awkward silence for a moment, neither really looking at the other.
“I gotta get going,” said Denny. “We’re having supper at my second cousin’s house.”
“Yeah, I gotta get home myself. See you back in the village.”
The next morning, hours before sun-up, Denny and her grandfather set off for home beneath a star-raddled sky with the northern lights streaking overhead. The thermometer outside Joseph’s cabin had read -10. Somewhere along the thirty-mile ride back to their village, Sampson got his snowmobile stuck in overflow, where water from beneath the ice rises and mixes with the deep snow on the surface of the ice to create slush. He had been playing around, speeding far ahead of Denny and her dog team, and making his own trail in deep snow off the packed, main trail, when he found himself knee-deep in the heavy slush. Concealed as it was by snow and darkness, he had not seen the ensnaring trap until it was too late.
At first, his momentum helped him to slog through the overflow, but the engine quickly bogged down, and the machine wouldn’t budge no matter how much he gunned the throttle. A snowmobile on a firm trail is already a heavy thing to lift or move. Stuck as it was in deep overflow, the machine was far too heavy for a single man to move, no matter how strong. But if he left the stranded machine in the slush for too long, it could freeze solid where it sat, and then he’d have a much bigger problem.
Knowing this, Sampson yanked and pulled and tugged at the front skis and at the black handle at the rear. With all his might, he tried to manhandle the machine out from the quicksand-like mix of snow and water, until his heart was pounding like a potlatch drum. His gloves were soaked from reaching into the icy water. His pants were soaked clear up past his knees. He couldn’t feel his frozen fingers or toes.
Suddenly, he felt a stabbing pain in his left arm, like an ice pick in the crook of his elbow. A cold sweat drenched his body, and he felt dizzy and nauseous, twice almost vomiting. He steadied himself with one hand on the black snowmobile seat, the other held against his chest, as if he could somehow control his heart’s erratic beating.
In the distance, he could see his granddaughter coming around the river bend.
Just then, Sampson collapsed, his world turning as dark as a wintry night.
From faraway, Denny saw her grandfather fall to the snow. She shouted to the dogs to go faster. When she was close, Denny stopped the sled near the stranded snowmobile, but still on the packed trail. She quickly set the snow brake and ran to the crumpled old man.
Sampson was regaining consciousness, trying to get up from his knees. Denny helped him to his unsteady feet.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Sampson’s face was white and drenched in sweat. He didn’t answer.
“Grandpa?” she said again, “Are you alright?”
Sampson turned to his granddaughter, speaking so softly she barely heard him.
“Take me home,” he whispered.
Denny helped her grandfather into the belly of the sled and covered him with her own parka to keep him warm. In a panic, she pulled the snow hook and shouted the command to go. The dogs yanked so hard that Denny almost lost her grip, nearly falling off the back of the sled. But she held on, yelling through the darkness to go faster.
“Mush!” she yelled over and over again.
The dogs ran as fast as their legs could move, their pink tongues flapping from their slobbering mouths as they pushed their muscles and lungs to their limits.
Denny looked down at her grandfather whenever she could take her eyes off the trail.
“Hang in there, Grandpa! Just a little further,” she reassured him, though they were still far from the village and her voice was not as certain her words.
“Mush!” she yelled. “Faster!”
Sampson looked up at his granddaughter’s worried face, blinking at the sharp-pointed stars and trees tilting over the river when the trail passed close to a steep bank. Soaking wet as he was, he could no longer feel his body.
Denny shivered without her parka, protected from the wind and cold only by a sweater, her teeth chattering.
Out of the corner of her eye, against the whiteness of snow occasionally brightened by the night sky, she saw something running through the scraggily trees parallel to the trail. She strained to make out the shadowy figure in the darkness. It was the black wolf with one gray ear, the one she had seen at the cabin. She was certain that it was the same wolf. He was running with them, following alongside, loping easily through the deep snow.
Denny marveled at his strength.
“Mush!” she yelled to the dogs.
“Faster!” she pleaded through tears, turning her eyelashes to ice.
But somewhere along the wide and frozen river, beneath the Big Dipper and the northern lights dancing on the rim of the world, beneath the watchful eye of the moon, her grandfather’s spirit left him and rose from the belly of the sled he had built with his own two hands, flew above his worried granddaughter, above the racing dogs, above treetops lining the river, above the hills, toward beckoning white mountains towering in the distance.
The spirit of Sampson Yazzie soared above the world like a raven.
7
Hwtiitł
Potlatch
Two days after Sampson died the small village church was packed for his memorial service. Delia and all four of her siblings, a brother and three sisters, were there, seated in the first pew. It was the first time in years that they had all come together. Death is like that, tearing lives apart while at the same time bringing lives together. It seemed as if everyone who ever knew Sampson was in attendance. Even Sampson’s cousin Joseph came on his snowmobile. Denny’s father was also there, though he never said a word to his daughter, or even looked at her, for that matter.
After the congregation sang several songs from a black hymn book, Denny scribbled a poem on the back of the funeral program.
Hymn Singer
At grandfather’s funeral
I watch my father
mouth words to “Amazing Grace”
Tsin’aen ne’k’eltaeni
Tsin’aen ne’k’eltaeni
and I am a stranger
dressed in something black.
When she was done, Denny neatly folded the paper and shoved it into her coat pocket, planning to rewrite the poem into her diary when she got home.
At home that evening after the long church service, Denny’s grandmother spoke without looking up from her sewing.
“U’eł txast’aas.”
Delia looked at her daughter for translation.
“She says she w
ants to give Grandpa a potlatch.”
“Okay, Mom,” said Delia in English. “We’ll give Dad a potlatch. I’ll make some phone calls in the morning.”
Although living things huddled or moved slowly during winter, word of Sampson’s potlatch traveled quickly. Three days after he died, the whole village held a potlatch in the community hall. It was -35 degrees that afternoon. Everyone from the village was there, as well as over a hundred people from other villages who braved the cold to be part of the celebration. It’s an important thing when an elder dies. Two men who were related to Sampson went out and shot a cow moose, as was customary to feed all the potlatch guests, which are called dzoogaey. Although it was not hunting season, the government allowed a moose or caribou to be harvested for a potlatch—perhaps the single most important cultural tradition still remaining in the villages.
It was the duty of kin to prepare for the potlatch.
Women spent the day before cooking enough food for all the dzoogaey and filling boxes with dry goods and gathering blankets to be given away at the potlatch. The more respected the deceased, the more blankets.
Men took turns hacking a grave in the frozen earth. Because the earth was frozen many feet below the surface, they built a series of fires—one atop the other—each of them allowed the diggers to pierce the concrete-hard earth a few more inches. They repeated the painstaking process until the hole was deep enough to bury the dead. It was as much an honor to dig the grave as it was to be a pall bearer at the funeral. Families also pulled brand new rifles from their closets, still in boxes. Potlatch rifles were rarely used for hunting. Instead, they were a measure of wealth to be shared. If the men felt they didn’t have enough rifles, they went out and bought more from other men or from the local store, which always kept a good supply on hand for such events. It was customary to bring high-powered hunting rifles, especially lever-actions, like in the old westerns. As with the blankets, the more respected the departed, the more the number of rifles.
Denny also wanted to honor her grandfather with a rifle. But because she was too young to buy one from the store legally, she gave her mother $300 from her winnings to buy a gun for her grandfather.
Younger people, teenagers mostly, helped to sweep the community hall, shovel snow from around the doors, and set up all the folding chairs and tables. They also helped carry in all the food and blankets and guns when it was time. Everyone seemed to have a role to play.
As Sampson’s widow, it fell to Denny’s grandmother to perform the role of host of the potlatch. Naturally, Denny and her mother helped to make all the necessary arrangements, as did others in the village, though everyone understood his or her role. Denny and her mother also helped cook pots and pots of food, which they placed outside on the cabin porch until it was time.
“Denny,” said her grandmother, “go out to the shed and load all the potlatch blankets into the truck.” Only she used the Indian word for the blankets, which is hwtiitł ts’ede’.
Denny put on her parka and hat and gloves and went outside. Thinking it was time to go for a run, the dogs started jumping and barking and howling.
“Not today!” she yelled above the din. “Settle down! Settle!”
The dogs quieted, most whining as they paced excitedly on their short chains.
Denny walked up to Kilana, and knelt to pet him.
“Grandpa’s gone,” she said, wrapping her arms around the dog’s shaggy head and hugging him. She began to cry on hearing the words spoken aloud.
The dog licked her face.
After standing and wiping her eyes, Denny opened the shed door and stared at the stacks of colorful blankets, all still in their clear plastic bags.
There must be a hundred blankets here, she thought.
Carrying five or six at a time, she made almost twenty trips from the shed to load them all into the back of the pick-up truck. The dogs watched her from inside their little straw-filled houses, hopeful that she might go to the sled at any moment, though even they knew it was far too cold for running the trail.
That afternoon, after loading all the pots of food between the blankets so that they wouldn’t tip over, and after stacking nine rifles behind the driver’s seat, all that her mother and grandmother could find in the house, Denny and her mother drove to the community hall and unloaded all the gifts and food.
Silas Charley and his older sister, Valerie, had come early to help set up the folding chairs and tables. Valerie had graduated high school three years earlier and was a cashier at the only store in the village. She was even more shy and withdrawn than her brother. When Silas had finished setting up the chairs, he helped Denny carry in the food for the potlatch.
“Do you want me to bring in the blankets now, Ms. Yazzie?” he asked Delia when all the boxes had been brought into the kitchen.
“Not until after we eat,” Denny’s mother replied with a thankful smile. “It’s not going to hurt them to stay outside until then.”
By five o’clock, all the food had been delivered and all the guests had arrived. Many had come from neighboring villages up and down the river. Hundreds of people sat in two rows of metal chairs—one row along the wall facing toward the middle of the room and one row facing them, with several feet in between, leaving space for later events. Two girls carrying a large roll of white paper walked down the middle of the rows, pulling a long sheet of paper from the roll and setting it on the floor like a giant placemat. Elders smiled at the girls. The entire room was filled with conversations. A few of the oldest elders spoke among themselves in their native language.
The rest spoke in English.
When it was time, younger people began to carry the food down the rows, the guests filling their plates with traditional foods like moose soup and salmon-head soup and smoked salmon, among many others. Denny carried two pots by their handles, one in each hand.
“Beaver or porcupine?” she said to most of the guests, asking which one they wanted.
To the elders, she asked in the old language.
“Tsa’ ‘eł nuuni?”
The word for porcupine always made her smile. It rhymed with the word for mouse.
Silas carried a big tray with chunks of boiled moose meat.
“This one tough old deyaazi,” he overheard one elderly woman say after taking a bite. “It hard to chew.”
Silas turned to Denny and asked what deyaazi meant.
“It means a cow moose,” she said, knowing that her grandfather would have been proud that of all her generation no other young person knew the language the way she did.
Aside from the traditional foods, there were also pots of spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, baked beans, biscuits and rolls and fry bread, as well as dozens of cakes and pies and trays full of cookies. Through a special school program when she was in junior high school, Denny had been invited to participate at a potlatch in an Eskimo village up north. Added to the menu was whale blubber, walrus, seal, and Eskimo ice cream, a delicacy made of rendered whale fat with berries and sugar. At that potlatch, close family members wore the clothes of the dead as a way of temporarily reconnecting to their lost loved one.
Denny saw her schoolmates leaning against a back wall, listening to music through headphones, tuning out everything around them, while two eighth-graders walked around with kettles of hot tea.
“Tsaey?” they had been instructed to ask in Indian, though the word was actually Russian, from a bygone era when Russia had owned the land. Maybe a hundred words in their language came from that time, mostly the names of dry goods.
When the community meal was over, all the paper plates and plasticware were thrown away, the giant paper floor mat removed, and the floor swept or mopped where there was a mess or spilled tea. Only after the great hall was cleaned did Denny’s grandmother give the signal to begin the potlatch. All the chairs on the outside—those facing the wall—were turned a
round so that everyone could look into the middle of the room. Silas Charley helped two boys to spread out large blue tarps across the floor.
For the next half hour, dozens of people carried in the potlatch gifts from cars parked outside and stacked them on the tarps. They brought in blankets, boxes of food or clothing, rifles, and envelopes containing cash, which they handed to Denny’s grandmother. The pile grew larger and larger, a sure sign that Sampson had been well-respected. Everything was ice-cold from sitting in parked vehicles outside during the long supper. At -38, the metal on the guns could burn exposed hands and fingers. Once inside, the black metal of the rifles turned gray with frost. As the gifts were brought in, each family gave Denny’s grandmother an accounting of the number of items they brought. It was Denny’s job to catalog everything and add up all the numbers. Unbeknownst to her mother, Denny had brought her journal in which to write the figures as a keepsake.
When the last gift was set atop the mountainous pile, Denny’s grandmother stepped forward to say the hwtiitł kołdogh, the potlatch speech. As was custom, she began by reading the list of all the gifts.
“One thousand six hundred and twelve blankets, seventy-two boxes of food, fourteen pairs of beaded moccasins, four pairs of sealskin gloves, two snowmobile helmets, two handmade parkas with wolf fur . . .” she read.
The audience listened, waiting to hear the number of rifles, always a measure of respect.
“. . . two sets of pots and pans, one box of dishes . . .”
A little girl ran out across the floor, followed by her embarrassed mother, trying to catch her.
“. . . two thousand one hundred and fifteen dollars cash . . .”
Everyone strained to hear the final number.