by John Smelcer
By late morning, Deneena emerged from the little log cabin with smoke billowing from its chimney. The hungry dogs all stood up and began to bark for their breakfast. Denny stood on the porch looking out over the white valley surrounded by mountains, the wind blowing her hair into her blue eyes, with one hand resting on the shoulders of the black wolf standing at her side.
12
Unen tah
On the Face of Things
With the race just weeks away, Deneena had to train Taz quickly. She did this in between school and homework, earning money, and running her team on the trail. Sometimes, she skipped school to give herself more time, calling in sick. The teachers knew what she was doing, but they said nothing because Denny was an excellent student with excellent marks. Besides, they were proud of her. Missing a day or two here and there wasn’t going to affect her grades. They understood that things would return to normal after the race.
“Gee!” Denny would say clearly, using little bits of meat to teach the wolf that the word meant to go right.
“Haw!” she would say to teach him to go left.
After Taz mastered the basic commands, Denny added two more commands to his repertoire: “Come gee” and “Come haw,” showing him to turn completely around right or left.
Little by little, Denny replaced the meat rewards with praise and petting. Taz was extremely intelligent, and he learned quickly. Sometimes, Denny swore she could see in his expression that he was trying to figure things out in his mind. The hardest part was harnessing him to the sled. Tazlina didn’t like being manhandled or tied up. He hated his collar. At first he resisted so furiously—trying to wriggle free, especially when she would try to connect him to the tow line—that his behavior frightened her a little. But the wolf never once snapped at her or at the other dogs, all of whom seemed to accept him as one of them.
Sometimes, after school or on the weekends, Silas watched the training, standing at a safe distance, marveling at the extraordinary relationship between wolf and Denny. While Taz accepted Denny, allowing her to hug him and drag him into position on the line, he wasn’t so trusting or friendly with other humans.
More than once, Taz growled when Silas came too near. At such times, Silas would back away while Denny chastised the wolf.
“Taz! No! Be nice.”
Day after day, Denny taught Tazlina every command he needed to know as a lead dog. Most importantly, she taught him the word to go and the word to stop. She taught him that “Line out!” meant to pull just hard enough so that the dogs behind him could be hooked or unhooked from the main line. She even taught him that the word “Trail!” meant to move the rest of the team off the trail to allow another team to pass.
The process was neither easy nor even.
Once, while on the trail, Taz tore out after a moose he saw, leading the team off the main trail and entangling lines and dogs in the woods. It took Denny half an hour to straighten out the mess.
Some habits are hard to break, she thought.
With only days to spare before the Great Race, Denny allowed herself to hope that Tazlina had learned what he needed to know to lead the team. With his added strength and endurance, Denny could feel that the sled was faster than ever. Taz was the match, if maybe more, of Kilana. Perhaps, if she had had Taz as lead dog during the race before Christmas, she might have won first place instead of third. When she stopped for a break on the river, Denny wondered what her grandfather would think. Would he be happy that she had entered the race? Would he approve of her continued training and the new addition to her team?
She decided he’d be proud of her.
While sitting around campfires, Denny also thought about the wolf, wondering why he was alone. Her grandfather had told her that wolves always run in packs.
“Strength in numbers,” he had said. “That the only way to kill a moose or caribou.”
Her grandpa had said that only outcasts wandered alone and generally only until they found another pack to join. After much contemplation, Denny decided that Tazlina must have been kicked out of a pack for some reason.
Perhaps, she thought, he had challenged the alpha male and lost.
Denny didn’t like to think that Tazlina might have been part of the pack that had killed the school teacher in the neighboring village, but the thought had crossed her mind. Judging from the way the wolf allowed her to become part of his life, Denny decided that he couldn’t have hurt anyone. But there were moments when she questioned what she was doing, questioned her own safety.
Once, after taking a lunch break on the trail, Denny was collecting the empty dog dishes. She didn’t notice that there was still a tiny bit of food left at the bottom of Taz’s bowl. When she reached to take it, the wolf turned on her viciously, baring his fangs with his ears held flat against his head. Denny saw a terrible fierceness in his eyes, primal and untamable, like wildfire. She dropped the dish and backed away with one hand on her knife sheath, her whole body tense with fear, her mouth as dry as a sandbar. Taz licked the bowl clean and then sat down and waited, the savageness once again suppressed. But it took a while before Denny could muster enough courage to approach him and take the dish.
She would later write in her journal, “Sometimes I’m terrified of him . . . of what he could do to me if I forget what he is even for a minute.”
That night after supper, Denny walked over to Agnes Isaac’s house. At 80 years old, Agnes lived alone in her small cabin ever since her husband died six years earlier. She was the only woman in the village who still practiced the ancient traditional custom of facial tattooing. In all of Alaska, very few Native women had facial tattoos, mostly the very old. Denny’s own grandmother did not have one. In fact, aside from Agnes, no other woman within three villages up or down the river had one.
“I want uyida’ neltats’,” announced Denny in Indian when the old woman opened the door. “I can pay.”
The old woman motioned for her to come inside the cabin.
“Close the door hard,” she said. “Otherwise the cold creeps in.”
While the old woman poured herself a cup of tea made from a local plant called Labrador tea, she asked, “So, you want a chin tattoo, eh? It not like getting one in the city nowadays, you know. I do it the old way.”
Denny had never heard anyone describe the tattooing process used by the old women.
“How do you do it?”
Agnes sat down at her rickety table and sipped her hot tea.
“I gonna coat bear grease all over a piece of thread. Then I gonna put charcoal all over that thread and stitch your skin with it.”
“Is it going to hurt?” Denny asked.
The old woman smiled. She was missing several teeth.
“It make even a tough man cry.”
Denny cringed at the thought of the old woman shoving a sewing needle through her skin.
“What do you want?” asked Agnes.
“I already told you,” said Denny. “I want it on my uyida’, on my chin, just like yours.”
The old woman looked into the eyes of the 16-year-old girl, searching for something, a sign of strength, perhaps . . . or doubt.
“Okay. I think you ready. Bring me that box,” she said, pointing at a cigar box on a bookshelf.
Denny fetched the colorful box.
Inside were thread, needles, a small vial of grayish bear grease, and another vial containing charcoal made from a special kind of wood. Denny watched nervously as Agnes coated a long piece of thread with grease and then worked the thread into a small mound of charcoal, making sure that the thread was thoroughly coated. Then she held a needle over a candle. When it had cooled, she asked Denny to help her thread the eye of the needle.
For the next fifteen minutes, Denny gripped the base of her wooden chair and grimaced as Agnes stitched three vertical lines into her chin, each about an inch long and evenl
y spaced close together. When each line had been sewn properly, the old woman cut the thread near the skin and began the next one, stopping only long enough to dab away blood with a clean rag.
“Leave those in for a week,” said Agnes, putting away her tools when she was finished. “They gonna turn your skin black on the inside. It gonna itch like crazy, but don’t scratch. I take them out when you come back.”
Denny looked at her face in a mirror, bending close to the glass and touching her chin with a finger, feeling the thread beneath the raised skin.
She smiled.
“How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching into a pocket for money.
“Nothing,” replied Agnes. “You the only young person ever ask me to do this. It important part of who we are as women. Maybe someday you do it for another woman and keep it alive. I teach you how.”
Denny promised she would learn.
When she returned home, her mother and grandmother were already asleep. Denny was glad for that. She knew that her mother would be mad about the tattoo, and she wanted to avoid an argument, at least for the time being.
That night, undoubtedly influenced by all her recent hard work training Tazlina, Denny had a vivid dream in which she was a wolf running with a pack of wolves. The dream seemed so real and it seemed to last for a long time. Entire seasons came and went. When she woke up in the middle of the night, disappointed that the dream was over, she wrote a poem about it in her journal, giving it a title only after completing it, fully aware that she was borrowing it from a far greater writer than she.
The Call of the Wild
Once, I was a wolf living among wolves
on the stunted backbone of tundra and forests
where we hunted moose and caribou all winter
in deep, drifted snow, without escape—
where only the deep silence of the north
listened as we howled at the moon
and ran the glacial earth until I awoke.
On some still nights I hear them waiting
above the rim of this valley,
calling to me from shadows
like a visitor who comes to my home
and knocks on the door with both fists.
“What the hell did you do to your face?” Delia screeched when she saw the tattoo in the morning.
For half an hour, Denny’s mother, livid, berated her daughter, saying things like, “You’ve ruined your life! No one will ever take you seriously! You’ll never get a job looking like that!” and, several times over, “What were you thinking?”
Denny’s only defense was, “It’s my life” and “You don’t understand me at all,” the universal hymn of misunderstood teens everywhere, to which her mother shouted the universal parental response.
“You look ridiculous!”
Finally, Denny’s grandmother put down her sewing.
“What would you say to me?” she asked, defiantly.
“What?” Delia snapped, turning to look at her.
“If I had a tattoo like that on my face . . . would you say those things about me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mom,” replied Delia, crossing her arms in defiance and tightening her jaw. “You wouldn’t be caught dead with something so stupid on your face.”
“I wanted one just like that when I was her age.”
On hearing these words, Denny sat down on the sofa beside her grandmother and held her hand.
“What do you mean, Grandma?”
“Back when I was a little girl, all Indian women had a tattoo on their face. Some had many. It was a proud mark of beauty, a way of telling the world we had reached adulthood. My mother had one, as did my grandmother and all my aunts. I grew up waiting for the day I would get one, too.”
Delia had never before heard any of this from her mother.
“You wanted a tattoo like that?” she asked, uncrossing her arms and loosening her jaw. “You never told me anything about that. Why didn’t you get one?”
“When I was only ten, I was sent away to a school where they taught us Indian children that things like that, even our language and the potlatch, are silly and superstitious. They said our language was nonsense and babbling. Some teachers said it sounded like a dog barking. I remember the principal called it gobbledygook, whatever that means. I was locked up in the basement many times for speaking our language. Because I was at that school, I never got my face tattooed. None of us girls who went there ever got one. We all felt ashamed. I regret it all my life.”
The old woman looked into her granddaughter’s blue eyes and caressed her cheek with a wrinkled hand.
“I’m proud of you,” she said.
They both began to weep.
“Thank you, Grandma,” Denny said, hugging her grandmother, smelling wood smoke in her long, gray hair.
Delia stood watching the embrace from afar, the way people watch stars from billions and billions of miles away.
Ten minutes before she had to leave for school, Denny sat down at the table to write in her diary, while her mother was in the back room washing up.
Dear Nellie:
I got a tattoo last night. Agnes Isaac did it the old way. I knew Mother would have a cow, that’s why I didn’t ask her first. I was right. She always puts down everything about our heritage, like being Indian is something to be ashamed of. But Grandma stood up for me, which really surprised me. We’ve lost so much of our past; I just want to hold on to whatever’s left. I wish Mom could see that. When the last of our old ways is gone, what will we be then? Who will we be? Doesn’t anyone care? Change of subject. The race is in a few days. My team is ready. I have enough money for the flight and the food . . . but barely. I don’t know how this is all going to end. I don’t know how I’m going to get home. I don’t even know where I’m going to stay the night before the race. Sometimes you have to follow your heart and believe in yourself and in your dreams. When you risk nothing, you risk losing even more. Everyone thinks I’m so strong, but I’m not. I’m scared. Let’s keep that a secret between us.
Denny
When she finished writing, Denny laid the notebook on her bed, meaning to hide it in its secret place before she left for school. But in her hurry to get ready, searching madly for her gloves, Denny forgot, and the journal sat propped against a pillow like a heart laid open for the whole world to read.
When Denny came home from school that afternoon, she found a white envelope stuck to the front door with a piece of gray duct tape, binder of the world. Her name was scrawled on the outside of the envelope. She pulled it from the door and opened it. Inside was one hundred dollars in cash with a handwritten note that read:
For hotel. Good luck!
There was nothing to indicate who had left the money.
Denny went inside the house, still pondering who it could have been. No one was home. On her bed was a new pair of mukluks and sealskin gloves. She picked them up, marveling at the craftsmanship. Both were very well made, with heavy, tight stitches and excellent pieces of fur. Denny recognized the stitching pattern as her mother’s and grandmother’s. She tried them on. The mukluks—made of black bear, caribou, and white rabbit fur—would fit perfectly over a couple pairs of thick, warm socks. The short-haired fur on the outside of the sealskin gloves was silvery-gray with black rings. The gloves were insulated on the inside, with a long leather strap connecting them so they couldn’t be lost.
Then Denny noticed that she had left her diary on her pillow.
13
Nadosi kayax ce’e
City of Ants
Two days later, in the cold and cloudy weather around noon, Denny’s mother drove her and her team up to the tiny airfield. The truck and trailer were loaded with dogs, sled, food, rigging, and a large duffel bag full of Denny’s clothes and survival gear. Silas drove up on a snowmobile minutes before
the plane landed.
“Heh,” he said after turning off the engine.
“Heh back,” replied Denny.
“I heard you was leaving.”
“Yep. The race starts tomorrow.”
“I got something for you.”
Silas removed a glove and dug his hand into a pocket. He pulled out an object and handed it to her.
“It’s a rock,” said Denny, disappointed.
“Ah, but it’s a special rock,” replied Silas. “I got it from down by the river. Had to dig it out from the snow. This is to remind you of where you come from.”
Denny rolled the small stone in her hand. It was worn smooth from eons of tumbling on the bottom of the silty river.
“Thanks,” she said as she stuffed it into a small pocket on her parka.
Just then the plane arrived. After the pilot turned off the prop, Silas and her mother helped her load the plane while the pilot crouched in the cargo area acting as loadmaster, trying to determine how the weight should be distributed to keep the craft balanced and airworthy.
“Let’s slide those bags of dog food a little forward,” he said. “Strap down that sled so it won’t shift in turbulence,” he commanded a little later.
Getting Taz and the dogs into the plane was another story. There wasn’t a lot of space for them, and they kept trying to jump out. But at last they were all in.
Eventually, satisfied with the payload, the pilot closed the cargo door and told Denny it was time to go. While he climbed into the pilot’s seat, Denny turned to her mother.
“Thanks for helping me out, Mom. And thanks for the mukluks and gloves. They’re beautiful.”