by Stan Jones
“So you should keep me in sight all the time, no matter what. If I speed up, you speed up. If I stop, you stop.”
Another nod from Active.
“And you gotta look around every couple minutes, make sure you can see the other fellas behind you. You don’t see them, you stop right there and wait. If they don’t come up, you wait till I come back to you, then we will go back down the trail and find them, OK?”
Active nodded once more, with considerably more confidence than he felt, and they started off.
The temperature dropped as the north wind pushed air up the pass. The miniature thermometer on the Yamaha’s key chain had read five above when Active pulled into camp with Natchiq and Robert Kelly; now it read five below.
Their only break was that the wind was behind them, not in their faces. For the first hour or so, they about matched speed with it, roaring along in an eerie bell of calm-seeming air, snowflakes whirling through it as the storm built up.
After that, the wind was faster than they were, hurling ever denser clouds of snow past them, the flakes dancing in the beams of their headlights. As the air thickened with snow, it became harder and harder to see the other machines, even with their lights on, and eventually they were no more than five yards apart. Whyborn cut their speed to ten miles an hour as he groped his way through the snow.
A little after six, Whyborn’s taillight suddenly stopped bouncing and Active had to veer to the right to avoid hitting the leader’s sled as the Ladies’ Model coasted to a halt. They left their machines running, lights on, while they waited in the woolly twilight for Alan and Calvin. When they pulled up, everyone shut down and gathered beside Whyborn’s machine. Active arrived in time to hear Whyborn say, “I think maybe we’re off the trail.”
Active peered around in the blizzard. The air was like milk now and with the machines stopped he could feel the full force of the wind. Forty miles an hour, maybe fifty. Temperature minus twelve by the key-chain thermometer. Chill factor? Better not to estimate. But how could Whyborn tell if they were on the trail or not? No feature of the landscape was visible.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Calvin said. “Seem like we veer off to the right back there, start cutting across them snowdrifts at a different angle, all right.”
There was a wordless moment that stretched on and on, no sound anywhere except the wind blowing past their parka hoods, the streamers of snow hissing over the crust.
“I guess I could take the lead,” Calvin said.
Active almost protested, but stifled it in time. Whyborn lifted his eyebrows, and that was that. Maiyumerak, as usual, had been riding with just his snowmachine suit, a pair of leather work gloves, and a headband for protection, though he had replaced his high-tops with a pair of ancient Sorels. Now he went back to his sled and dug a parka and fur mittens from one of his boxes. He saw them watching, and his face split in his gap-toothed grin as he pulled on the extra gear. “Little bit colder today, all right.”
He took the lead and they started off again. Maiyumerak veered left from the direction they had been taking before Whyborn stopped. Then, a few minutes later, he veered right.
Active couldn’t tell for sure that anything was different, but now it did seem they were bouncing over the sastrugas at the same angle as before. At any rate, their speed picked up again.
They crested the pass a little after seven in gathering dusk. Active realized it was the crest only because Maiyumerak stopped the convoy and told them so, and said they would reach the gorge in another couple of miles.
Active checked his thermometer. Minus twenty now, the wind at least fifty and apparently still building. The cold was burning through his parka and Refrigiwear overalls, trying to get at his bones.
“When we get there, I’ll stop again till you guys come up,” Maiyumerak shouted over the wind. “Then I could drive through the bad part and walk back and take Nathan’s machine through. Then Alan and Whyborn could come through, OK?”
They started down the south slope of the pass. It did seem that the weather eased slightly, as Whyborn had predicted. Less snow in the air, not quite as cold, visibility up to maybe a half-mile now, permitting occasional glimpses of the sea of cloud raging overhead. If he could see the clouds, Active realized, that meant little if any new snow was falling. The snow boiling around them must be an Arctic ground blizzard, picked up by the wind still building at their backs. It had to be pushing sixty miles an hour, he thought.
Below the summit, the pass narrowed toward the gorge, the sides pinching in and steepening until the trail was just a narrow bench along the brow of a hill. They rounded the hill and the gorge opened below them, vertical sides covered with snow and ice as far down as they could see in the murk.
Maiyumerak’s taillight stopped bouncing. Active cut the Yamaha’s engine and coasted to a stop beside him. Maiyumerak dismounted and walked over to Active, putting the snorkel of his hood against Active’s to be heard over the wind. “That’s the hard part up ahead,” Maiyumerak shouted, pointing to a stretch where the bench narrowed even further. “I’ll take my snowgo over, then come back and get yours and you can walk over. See them bushes sticking out of the snow there? You can grab them if you need something to hold on to.”
Active peered into the murk and nodded. It didn’t look as bad as he’d hoped. The bench did narrow a little more, but not so much that a snowmachine couldn’t navigate it in reasonable safety, perhaps even a snowmachine with a one-armed driver. Another Arctic legend magnified in the retelling, no doubt.
Maiyumerak walked back to his Ski-Doo and Active watched as he raced toward the hard part. As the bench narrowed, Maiyumerak hit a small snowdrift that crossed the trail and his sled swung slightly downhill behind the Ski-Doo. Active’s spirits lifted slightly at this. Maiyumerak gunned his engine and finished the crossing with the sled in a diagonal slide, snow spraying from under the cleated drive track, until he reached safer terrain where the bench widened again.
Active could just see him through the blowing snow as he parked the Ski-Doo and started back toward them on foot, grabbing the dwarf willows in the snow to make it over the worst part of the trail.
Soon he was back, and straddling the Ladies’ Model. “I’ll take it over, then come back and walk across with you, Nathan.”
Active looked down into the gorge, then glanced back at Alan and Whyborn, waiting a few yards back on their snowmachines, then decided. He turned to Maiyumerak and winked.
Maiyumerak pointed questioningly into the frozen depths of the gorge.
Active nodded.
Maiyumerak still wasn’t certain. “Your snowgo, too?”
Active lifted his eyebrows and grinned.
Maiyumerak grinned back, started the Yamaha, and gunned it along the trail. He was halfway across when the sled hit the drift and swung downhill, as before. But this time the weight of the sled and its cargo seemed to be too much for the snowmachine. It churned to a halt, snow spewing from the drive track, and Maiyumerak flung himself off and grabbed a clump of dwarf willows. The Ladies’ Model and the sled accelerated backward down the steepening curve of the hill, bounced into the gorge, broke into pieces, and vanished with Robert Kelly and his grandfather.
Maiyumerak picked his way back to where Active was standing, still staring into the gorge. Maiyumerak raised his hands and shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, Nathan, I just couldn’t hold it.”
Whyborn and Alan came charging up through the snow. Alan looked at Maiyumerak with a mixture of astonishment and outrage. “You ruined my burglary case,” he said. “We’ll never get Uncle Frosty out of there now and breakup will wash everything away.”
“Them Yamahas never did have the traction of a Ski-Doo,” Whyborn offered.
Maiyumerak said, “It sure was a pretty color of purple, though.”
Active shrugged. “It died in the line of duty. The troopers will reimburse me.” Then he asked Maiyumerak, “Think I could catch a ride up there on your sled with Kobuk?”
; FIVE DAYS later, Active unlocked the bachelor cabin and stepped inside. It was warm, so the heat hadn’t gone off while he waited out the storm in the camp Maiyumerak had found in a canyon on the south side of Shaman Pass. And the cabin smelled normal, meaning either that he hadn’t left anything too gross in the garbage, or that Lucy had taken care of it while he was gone.
He slipped off his boots at the door, like everyone did in Chukchi, eased out of his parka and dropped it on the sofa. Then he dialed 9-1-1.
As he’d hoped, Lucy was at the dispatcher’s station and took the call. “What do you want?” she said in her grumpiest voice. Cowboy had radioed in on the way back that everyone had safely weathered the blow in the pass, and Carnaby would have passed the news to Lucy that Active was on his way home. And her Dispatch console would have told her who was calling.
“There’s an emergency at the bachelor cabin,” he said. “I need some muktuk right away.”
“Well, stop tying up this line and call Nelda Qivits.”
“She told me only yours would do.”
“My what?”
“Muktuk.”
There was a pause. Then, with the slightest undertone of surprise and delight, “Arii, that Nelda! She said that?”
“Yep. She said I should try out my harpoon on your muktuk.”
Lucy gave a little cry that was half giggle and half yelp. “Is this an obscene call? This line is recorded, you know.”
“Maybe you should come over and arrest me.”
“All right, I will!”
EPILOGUE
NELDA QIVITS WAS WATCHING the World’s Funniest Animal Videos when she heard the outer door of her kunnichuk open and slam, then a knock on the inner door.
“Come in!” she yelled, not getting out of her chair in front of the TV.
The inner door opened and there was that pretty Nathan Active, the naluaqmiiyaaq boy with winter in his eyes. This time he was carrying some caribou—a hindquarter and a backstrap, it looked like. He had never brought her caribou before, just money.
“Arigaa, Nathan, good to see you,” she said as she hobbled over to take the backstrap. The tender meat along the spine was the best part of a caribou, in her opinion. Her stomach rumbled a little in anticipation. But she would have to wait, she saw. The meat was frozen hard. With a sigh, she laid it on her drain board to thaw.
“You could put that hindquarter in my freezer out there, ah? Then you sit down and I’ll make us some sourdock tea.”
Nathan put away the meat, stepped into the cabin, and shut the inner door. Then he sat at her little dining table, his eyes wandering between her tea making and a video about a wild crow that had adopted a kitten in some naluaqmiut town Outside.
“I hear on Kay-Chuck, you find that Robert Kelly, then you’re trapped up in Shaman Pass in our blizzard last week, ah?”
“Yes, we were stormbound five days,” he said. “I was with Calvin Maiyumerak and Whyborn Sivula and Alan Long. We had a good tent and a stove, so it wasn’t too bad.”
“Is that where you get the caribou, Shaman Pass?” She sat down across from him and sipped from one of the mugs.
“I didn’t get it, Alan and Whyborn did, just before the storm hit. So we had plenty to eat, and there was still lots left when it was over. Alan gave me some.”
“What you guys do up there in your tent all that time?”
“Ate and slept a lot, played cribbage. Alan and Whyborn told some old stories. Calvin showed us a lot of string tricks with his hands. And he sang a lot.”
“Calvin sang?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows in the Eskimo yes, which she liked. He was trying.
“What he sing? You mean gospel?”
“No, songs that he made up. He sang about how we found Natchiq and Robert Kelly, and he sang about how we lost them and my snowmachine in Angatquq Gorge. He made it all funny, somehow.”
She shook her head in wonder. She had not known any of this about Calvin Maiyumerak. “He sound like a real old-time Eskimo, that guy.”
“I guess,” Nathan said.
“It was fun for you?”
Nathan paused like he needed to think this over, then looked at her with a surprised expression. “Yes, it was fun,” he said.
“No problem with quiyuk now?”
He shook his head and his smile got bigger.
That knot over his brows was gone, she saw now. Not like the other times, when he came in to tell her about the bullet dream.
“Arigaa! Then you had good dreams up there?”
He smiled. “No bullet dream. But I dreamed I was a ptarmigan flying through Shaman Pass. Was that a good dream?”
“Were you happy?”
Nathan’s face opened up in a huge, relaxed smile. “Very happy.”
“Then it was a good dream.”
He took a sip of the sourdock tea and stood up. “I should go now. Lucy and I have to tell my grandfather a story.”
“Your ataata Jacob?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows.
“Arigaa,” she said. “He’ll like that.”
AFTERWORD
The Real Natchiq
THE CHARACTER NATCHIQ IN this story is based on a real Eskimo prophet and social reformer who lived in Northwest Alaska in the nineteenth century.
His name was Maniilaq and Natchiq’s life is drawn from his, the greatest difference being that Maniilaq was not murdered in the Brooks Range. Instead, he reached Canada, as far as can be determined, and his descendants reportedly live there today.
Natchiq’s teachings and prophecies, as related in this story, are borrowed from the teachings and prophecies of Maniilaq, as set down in oral histories recorded by Eskimo elders who, as children, saw Maniilaq in the flesh. Maniilaq opposed the angatquqs, advocated better treatment of women, and tried to prepare the Inupiat for the waves of change about to wash over them.
Where he got his ideas and his information, no one knows, though it is possible he came into contact with Westerners— whalers or traders—in his travels through various coastal villages, and transformed what he saw and heard into the things he told the Inupiat of his day. As with Natchiq in this story, however, Maniilaq never explained the origin of his ideas, other than to say they came from his source of intelligence in the sky.
Relatively little has been written about this mysterious and fascinating figure, and much of what there is tends to exist in the shadow world of “gray literature”—material either out of print or never published, available only to the specialist or the determined or lucky generalist. However, at least two books that deal with Maniilaq in greater or lesser detail are in print, according to an Internet search at the time of this writing:
Maniilaq, Prophet From The Edge of Nowhere, Onjinjinkta Publishing
The Kotzebue Basin, Alaska Geographic Society
In addition, a useful chapter on Maniilaq can be found in Tomorrow Is Growing Old, an excellent history of the Quakers in Alaska (Barclay Press). That book, regrettably, is out of print and so falls into the category of gray literature. But it may be available in libraries or used bookstores.
In addition, an Internet search for the word “Maniilaq” may turn up useful information as more gray literature makes its way into the light.
Maniilaq’s legacy of concern for the well-being of his people lives on today in the form of the Maniilaq Association, an Inupiat-controlled nonprofit corporation set up in the 1970s to provide human services in Northwest Alaska.
And Shaman Pass? There is indeed a real place in the Brooks Range where the wind is said to blow so hard it kills caribou. That place is called Howard Pass.
—Stan Jones
Anchorage
June 2002
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