by John Smelcer
“I’m sorry, Den,” she said, crumpling the note and tossing it into the garbage. “They’re wrong. My brother said you done real good in that race. He said you almost came in second. I wish I could be more like you—fearless, ya’ know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I was brave enough to follow my dreams. Look at me. Look at this place,” Valerie turned, gesturing at the cramped, near-empty shelves. “What future is there for me here? Am I supposed to be a cashier in this crummy store forever? I wanted to be a nurse, but I was too afraid to leave for college. I didn’t do nothing after high school but stay right here and watch my dreams go downriver like ice during break-up. I’m terrified of failing.”
Denny looked away when Val’s eyes welled with tears. She offered some words of encouragement.
“My grandfather always told me that if you’re always looking down because you’re afraid of falling, you’ll never see all the amazing opportunities in front of you. He also said that courage can be found at any time in life, at any age.”
Valerie wiped her tears with the palms of her hands.
“Thanks.”
Denny carefully scooped the coins into her hand and left the store to check the other coffee cans she had placed around the village. The can at the church was empty, the clear plastic lid lying on the floor. After checking the contents of the other cans, Denny had raised only $10.23. It hurt her that no one was helping, that no one cared.
Walking home in darkness, wondering what everyone must think of her and her dream, Denny passed a moose standing in a yard eating a willow. The moose looked at her with its big black eyes, still chewing.
Denny hurried past, walking on the other side of the road.
After doing her homework and taking a bath, Denny dove into bed and went to sleep without a second thought about her diary. But later, during the deep night, she awoke from a nightmare, gasping for air and drenched in sweat. In the dream she fell into the rushing river, the snatching current pulling her downstream. As she was swept along, choking and screaming for help, she saw everyone in the village standing along the shore, watching her, even her mother and father. She called to them, holding out her hand as she passed within easy reach. But no one extended a saving hand. Her father turned away. Finally, she was dragged beneath the surface where she saw Alexie Senungutuk wedged against a logjam, all decayed, with small fish nibbling at his putrid, white flesh. Suddenly, Alexie opened his one glazed eye and frantically worked his tongueless mouth, gulping like a fish suffocating on dry land.
Even underwater Denny could make out his garbled words.
“You ain’t nothin’!”
Denny shoveled driveways and snow from the roofs of houses after school and on the weekends, convincing homeowners that the heavy midwinter snow might collapse their roofs if the weight wasn’t removed. She even hauled firewood and helped to cut and split it. She didn’t say a word to anyone about the reason why she was trying to earn money, having learned that few people in the village would support a girl trying to enter the most famous dog race in the world.
Denny worked tirelessly, until her back and arms were so sore that she could barely move. On average, she shoveled two roofs a day during the school week, three or four on Saturdays and Sundays, taking whatever people paid her. Some gave her fifteen or twenty dollars. Some gave her less or more. She was so exhausted each night that she rarely wrote in her diary, and she was so tired the next morning that she sometimes dozed off during class.
Silas helped her shovel three roofs one Saturday at the end of the month. Denny had promised to split the money with him. Silas said he needed the money to order a new pair of sneakers from the Sears catalog.
“You should see them,” he said. “They’re sweet! They’re black and white high-tops that look like downhill ski boots. They’re real futuristic-looking.”
For half an hour the two shoveled waist-high snow from the roof. The work was more difficult the further they were from the edge, where they could easily push it over the side.
“This is hard work,” Silas said, stopping to unzip his jacket and to admire Denny’s strength. “Damn, this snow is heavy! How many of these have you done?”
Denny stopped shoveling. From the rooftop, she looked out across the village.
“Pretty much every roof in town,” she said, admiring all the snowless roofs.
“How much money you made?”
“I have $963.18,” she said without even needing a moment to think about it. “I need a little more.”
“You know the exact amount? That’s funny!”
Denny told Silas how more than just winning the race, she wanted to make her grandfather proud of her and that she wanted to be like him.
“I miss him,” she said sadly, leaning against her shovel for a respite. “But when I’m out on the trail I feel like he’s with me. You know what I mean?”
Silas nodded as if he understood the way she felt.
After that, the two friends went back to shoveling. At the end of the long, tiring day, Denny counted the money they had been paid and split it into two piles, holding out Silas’ half for him to take.
“Now you can get those shoes you want.”
Silas put both his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders.
“You keep it. They don’t have my size anyhow,” he said, and he turned and started walking home.
9
Tezdlen Na’
Swift River
Although Denny worked hard to raise money for the race all through January and February, she also had to keep training the team, now without a strong leader. Three days a week, sometimes four, she ran the dogs. Between school and feeding the dogs, doing odd jobs, running the dogs, and doing her homework, Denny had no free time. But she remembered what her grandfather had told her.
Only things that are earned from hard work and sweat mean anything.
On a cloudy Sunday, with the temperature slightly above zero, Denny took the team out for a long day on the trail. She knew that racers sometimes cover as many as a seventy miles in a single day during the Great Race. She had to push her dogs further to prepare them for the hardship ahead, increasing their endurance. But she also knew that she had to keep up on her school work. She wanted to go to college one day. So she took The Old Man and the Sea with her, as well as her notebook. Ms. Stevens had assigned students an essay about the awesome power of nature, in preparation for discussing the novel.
Denny had asked if she could write a poem instead.
Twenty-eight miles down the trail, Denny stopped while there was still enough sunlight to read her book. She built a campfire beside a fallen log to warm water for the dogs’ food, as well as to boil coffee and to keep herself warm. The ravenous dogs were utterly focused on their dishes when Denny saw a wolf peering at her from beneath the sweeping boughs of a large spruce tree not more than a dozen yards away.
The breeze was light, but the wolf was downwind and the dogs hadn’t picked up his scent.
Anxiously, she looked for a weapon in the pile of wood beside the fire. She saw a club-sized stick about four feet long. She stood up slowly, shuffled close, and bent over to grab it without taking her eyes off the wolf. When she stood up with the stick in her hand, the curious wolf cocked its head and pricked its black and gray ears. With her free hand she tossed a few pieces of wood onto the flames and sat back down on the log with the stout stick lying across her lap.
The wolf also sat down, his black coat a stark contrast to the white of winter. He opened his long mouth in a yawn.
After a while, feeling that the wolf wasn’t a threat, Denny spoke to it in a disarming, sing-song voice.
“What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
The wolf cocked its head again, even more than before.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” s
he said. “Outside my cabin and on the trail the day my grandfather died. That was you, wasn’t it?”
The wolf sniffed the air.
“You smell the smoked salmon, don’t you?”
Denny reached into the food pack and pulled out a whole fillet of dried salmon. Without standing, she flung the salmon toward the wolf. It landed about five feet in front of the tree.
At first, the wolf didn’t move. He sniffed the air again, raising his shaggy, black head high.
“Go on,” encouraged Denny. “It’s food. Eat.”
The wolf stood up, stretched, and slunk out from beneath the concealing tree limbs. He smelled the fish, then carefully took it in his mouth and backed up into a depression around the tree’s trunk. From where she sat on the log, Denny could see that the wolf’s eyes were blue. From her grandfather, she had learned that all wolf pups are born with deep, murky blue eyes, but the eyes change to a golden color while they are still adolescents. Only rarely does an adult wolf retain its blue eyes.
“You have blue eyes just like me,” she said. “Is that why you’re alone, ’cause you don’t fit in with a pack? I know how you feel.”
With immense satisfaction, Denny watched as he ate the salmon.
A soft, quiet snow began to fall.
“Wasn’t that good?” she said, when the wolf looked up after eating the last morsel, his keen eyes staring at her and then at the pack on the snow beside her, as if to say, Another one, please.
“Alright, one more, but that’s all,” she said, and she dug one more piece of fish from the pack and tossed it to the wolf, who, this time without any hesitation, gobbled it up.
Suddenly, one of the dogs saw the wolf and started barking, and then all seven were barking.
The wolf ran away.
After the dogs settled, Denny threw more wood onto the fire and took out her notebook from her pack. From her memory, she sketched the wolf peering out from beneath the tree. She struggled with his piercing blue eyes, but was more successful with his grayish-white ear. When she was done, Denny wrote a single word beneath the image and underlined it.
Tazlina.
It was the name of a nearby river, meaning swift.
While the dogs rested, and the low sun slid over the edge of the world, a few stars began to shine and Denny wrote the poem she had to turn in to the teacher the next day, the one about nature. She had been thinking about it all day. She held the notebook close to the fire to see. She figured that the other students would write about how dreadfully cruel nature can be, how powerful and terrifying. But Denny wrote her poem from a different angle, showing that nature can be beautiful and comforting.
“This Side of Midnight”
It is snowing again,
and the stars are silver as
candlesticks. It is like being
in a temple on some Far Eastern
mountain. In the rocking wind
and unshackled darkness
where wild rivers run,
this sunset is the color of salmon
breaching. Stirring the campfire
with a stick, I lack nothing.
A little later thereafter the temperature fell below zero, and snow began to fall harder, swirling on the wind. Denny was again standing at the back of the sled, squinting through the tightly drawn hood of her parka, the seven dogs pulling her homeward through darkness along the frozen river, a hook of pale moon at their back. Denny’s headlamp illuminated the trail ahead.
Denny always thought that is was strange the way a headlight illuminates only a tiny, comforting circle in the vast darkness, as if the world ends beyond the circle, the world of a circle in which she was the perpetual center no matter how far she traveled, feeling as though nothing else existed in the whole world, ever.
It was a lonely, lonely feeling.
When she turned to look, the black wolf was following behind about half the length of a football field, his gait long and easy. He stayed there all the way, for twenty-eight miles, until he vanished into the forest when the small, yellowish lights of the village appeared around a bend.
That night, after eating leftovers from supper and taking a hot bath, Denny sat in the chair beside the wood stove reading The Old Man and the Sea. It was barely one hundred pages long, and she should have finished reading sooner, but she lingered on every page, imaging her grandfather as Santiago. She imagined Santiago with a granddaughter, teaching her the ways of the sea and of seafarers the way her grandfather had taught her the ways of the land. Was the sea Santiago’s adversary or his friend? Giver or Taker? And did the old fisherman consider himself to be at home when he was on the sea the way her grandfather felt at home when he was in the wilderness?
In her mind, Denny decided that he did.
She also wondered if Santiago would have been content had he died out there on the horizonless sea. Wrenching a living from the sea seemed to give meaning to his life. In his heart, the old man knew who he was when he was out there alone in a small boat atop the great, rolling deep. The low sweeping clouds and the unfisting waves spoke to Santiago, the way the river and the wind spoke to Denny’s grandfather.
It was the ancient language of the world.
After dog-earing a page to mark her place, Denny took out her notebook, worked on her sketch of the wolf for a few minutes, trying to get it just right, and then turned to a blank page to write a new diary entry before going to bed.
Dear Nellie,
I saw the wolf again today. He just seemed to magically appear at our campsite. I don’t know how he ended up there. Perhaps he followed me. He certainly followed me all the way home! I don’t know how to say this, but I get the feeling he’s lonely. I think he was part of the pack that killed Ms. Holbert while she was out running. But I don’t think he had anything to do with it. I think he was kicked out. Maybe that’s why he follows me. I guess everyone wants a friend, even a wolf. I can understand that. I didn’t tell Mother about him. She wouldn’t understand. She’d just tell me that he’s dangerous and warn me to stay away. I think Grandpa would have been totally amazed at how I just sat there talking to the wolf. I named him Tazlina; Taz for short. I hope I see him again.
Yours always,
Denny
Letter
Wolf
10
Gistaani na’aaye’
February
That Friday night there was a party at Mary’s house. Of course, her parents were away, visiting relatives in another village. All the high school kids were there, even a couple from junior high. By eleven o’clock, only Denny, Mary, Norman, Johnny, and Silas remained. Like always, Mary was drinking, which was really making Denny angry. Silas was sitting on the couch watching a movie.
When Norman and Johnny stepped outside, Denny snatched the beer bottle from Mary’s hand.
“Seriously! You have to stop drinking!” she snapped.
“What do you care?” asked Mary, reaching for the bottle.
“Because it’s a human being. It deserves better than to have you screw up its life.”
“I don’t care about none of that. I don’t want this baby.”
Denny tried to swallow her anger. She knelt on the plywood floor and gently took Mary’s head in her hands.
“Listen to me,” she said, forcing Mary to look her in the eyes. “You can’t change the way things are. I know how you got pregnant. I know who did it to you. Everyone knows. I know how frightened and alone you must feel. But this baby didn’t do anything to anybody. It’s not responsible. It just is. Drinking may make you forget how bad things are for a while, but it’s destroying this baby. Every drink you take is erasing its future.”
“Her,” said Mary softly.
“What?” asked Denny.
“The baby,” said Mary, running a hand over her belly. “She’s a girl.”
Mary started crying.
“I don’t know what to do,” she sobbed. “This baby is ruining my life.”
Denny held Mary, who resisted at first.
“Your life isn’t ruined,” Denny whispered. “It’s just beginning. I know you got a raw deal. Life isn’t always easy, especially here in the village. Things don’t always work out the way we want them to. But you can help this little girl to have a better life. You can give her all the love that you never got and teach her to make better choices in her life. She depends on you. She needs you. Don’t ruin her life. This is a chance for both of you. If you . . .”
Just then, Norman Fury burst through the door in a panic.
“I think Johnny’s dead!” he yelled. “You gotta do something!”
Denny and Silas ran outside.
Johnny was lying in the snow beside a knocked over garbage can and with a rag clutched in his fist. A red one-gallon gas can with the cap off was nearby. Johnny was still and his lips were blue. Denny unzipped his jacket and listened for a heartbeat and breathing.
“He’s not breathing! Go get help!” she shouted at Norman, who was just standing there. “Go! Hurry!”
Norman ran off down the street, dogs barking at him, the tops of trees swaying in the wind coming off the river.
Denny began CPR. She had taken a short course at school one summer, and she remembered the basics. She squeezed Johnny’s nostrils shut while breathing into his mouth in long, drawn breaths.
“Get down here and help me,” she said to Silas.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Put one hand on his chest, right here,” she said quickly pointing at the place, “and then put your other hand on top of it and push kind of sharp and hard every four or five seconds.”
For several minutes Denny and Silas worked together in the tight illuminated sphere of the porch light, until the village EMT arrived to take over.