by John Smelcer
Perhaps the last one alive was assigned the morbid task.
Seth calculated that the bodies must have lain here in the dank, grey darkness for almost seventy years.
The idea of dying alone on one of hundreds of uninhabited islands hit home with Seth. If it had taken so long for him to blindly stumble upon this cave, how long might it be until someone found his body—if ever? He hated the cave for what it represented—a secret mausoleum. He crept to the entrance and sat with his back against the moist wall, sprinkled by rain, petting Tucker, breathing in fresh air, bathed in dim light, waiting for the storm to pass.
There was no way he would spend the night inside the cave with its musty smell of death.
Sixteen – Qula Arwinlen
The young man screamed in pain, but the old man said the pain was part of the power. When the chief was finished, he left the Indian hanging for three days. On the third day he returned and sang a magic song for three more days. He did not rest, nor did he eat or sleep. After that, he left the young hunter alone.
Eventually, the storm passed, and the islands passed, day after day, week after week. But Seth’s mind was always on home, always on his father. By now, autumn had arrived in Alaska, and with it arrived the birds, countless millions of them heading south for the winter. The skies and bays were full of noisy birds.
Autumn dragged darkness in its wake.
The days grew shorter and colder, and stars filled the night sky. Autumn is so brief in the Far North that locals call it fell, because one day the leaves are on the trees and the next day they are not. But with the cold mornings and nights came some good news. The bothersome mosquitoes became active only during the warmest part of the day, and ripe berries were everywhere. Seth and Tucker gorged on blueberries, cranberries, wild raspberries, and even rosehips. Consuming so many berries was a great relief from raw fish and clams and mussels, but the new diet also caused the digestive systems of both boy and dog to ring alarm bells. Seth found himself squatting in the bushes as often as Tucker.
One morning, while walking along a beach in search of food and drinking water, Seth found a large piece of green canvas tangled in some bushes. He dragged it out, shook it, and laid it flat on the ground. It was in good shape. He used his pocketknife to cut a square about four feet or five across with a sizable hole in the middle for his head and two smaller holes for his arms. It looked like a poncho. He pulled it over his head, pushed his arms through their holes, and secured the canvas over his slicker with a length of rope tied around his waist. He slung the plastic soda bottle canteen over his shoulder. His appearance reminded him of a character in an action movie. By now, Seth had run out of holes on his leather belt, and he had punched three more holes to keep his jeans up.
He used what remained of the canvas as a blanket for himself and Tucker.
And although the canvas kept them a little warmer at night, Seth worried about the future. As winter approached and finally settled in, burying the islands of the Sound in deep, impenetrable snow, the canvas would not be enough to protect them. Without fire, he and Tucker wouldn’t last long. Besides, there would be little to eat in winter, and the sea would be far too cold for swimming.
But for now, winter was weeks away, and home was closer than ever. While Seth had no idea precisely how far away, he knew that he was near the place where the Exxon Valdez wrecked, spilling its cargo of crude oil. That meant he was closing in on justifiable hope. Besides, giant oil tankers, a thousand feet long, regularly navigated these channels. Someone aboard one of them was bound to see them.
It was only a matter of time.
A thick bank of fog rolled into the Sound, its long, grey fingers clutching mountain peaks and crags as if to hold itself from blowing away. The fog was so dense that Seth couldn’t see very far from shore. He had no idea of the direction or distance to the next island. He’d have to stay put until the weather cleared.
The fog brought on the memory of another story his grandmother had told him. In it, Raven decided to get married, so he married the beautiful daughter of Chief Fog-Over-the-Salmon after promising to treat her with respect. One day his new wife sat making a basket.
‘What are you making?’ Raven asked her.
‘You’ll see,’ she answered, intent on her work.
She built a large basket and filled it with seawater. Then she stirred the water with her hands. When she was done, a salmon was in the basket—the very first salmon! Raven was very happy. They cooked and ate the salmon. Thereafter, every morning she did the same thing, and they were never hungry again.
Life was good.
Eventually, though, Raven began to quarrel with his wife. It’s difficult for Raven to stay nice for very long. One day he slapped her with a salmon. Because he had broken his promise to the chief, his wife ran away. Raven chased her, but every time he reached out to grab her, his hands went right through her as though she were mist. She ran into the sea, followed by every salmon she had ever made. As she waded further out into the water, she turned into the first fog.
Seth always liked that story. It seemed to explain so much, its lesson so clear. Many myths teach about the origin of things: daylight, the northern lights, mountains, or the first seal or the first salmon. Other stories, such as this one, also taught how to behave properly, with kindness, compassion, selflessness, and gratitude.
After eating a handful of berries, Seth walked along the beach and saw something that caught his attention. There was a sheen on the gently moving surface of a low-tide eddy, colorful as a swirled rainbow. He dipped his finger into the pool and studied the discoloration on his skin. He rubbed the finger against his thumb. It was slippery. He smelled it.
It was oil.
Seth knew that the great oil spill had happened nearby, but that was decades earlier. The oil mega-company had hired thousands of people to clean the beaches. But everyone knew the problem was more than skin deep. The people whose lives had been affected, mostly commercial fisherman who had lost their livelihood, sued the oil company. They won. Courts ordered the oil company to pay billions. But the giant and powerful oil company didn’t pay. Instead, it kept the case in the courts for decades, always bartering down the settlement, buying time. In the ensuing years, many of the claimants—those fishermen who had lost their boats and their homes—died, and the oil company won.
The dead can’t claim anything.
Curious about where the sheen was coming from, Seth used his hands to scoop away pebbles and sand from the water’s edge. He dug a hole about a foot deep. His hands came up oily. The heaviest distillate of the crude oil had soaked into the soil and sands beneath the beach rocks.
It was still there.
It might always be there.
Although Seth wasn’t even alive when the accident happened, he had grown up seeing the oil response sheds along the coast, each one filled with floating booms and other equipment to contain oil in event of another spill. And he had heard stories, especially from his grandmother and others, that spoke about the effects of the spill. In his grandmother’s most dreadful account, the Alutiiq People who lived in the Sound were unable to hunt or fish, fearful of contamination. In fact, the government cautioned the Natives not to eat anything from land or sea.
The spill devastated the people who are of the land and of the sea.
Many of the best clam beds in the Sound were ruined. Before the spill, herring used to swarm into the bays and coves by the billions to mate. The sea would turn milky-white from the males fertilizing the females’ eggs. Afterwards, the Natives would gather the small, white egg clusters, a delicacy like beebles. But since the spill, the endless schools of herring hadn’t returned to the region.
The more he studied the dainty, swirling oil slick, the more surprising it seemed to Seth how little it takes to destroy a thing so large as a way of life. He was unable to look away from the sheen on the sea’s surf
ace, and he felt himself holding back tears—and anger. How could he or anyone wash away all that oil with all its shimmering stain? And then it seemed to Seth that the balance of nature is precarious, a house of cards built on a ship deck in a storm.
• • • • •
Two days later the sun evaporated the here-to-stay fog bank. As Seth awoke from a nap, he saw a ship on the horizon, it’s hull as black as an oil slick. It was a tanker probably bound for Valdez, the ice-free port at the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline, which transported the crude oil all the way from the Arctic coast, eight hundred miles to the north, a monument of engineering.
Judging from its speed, Seth estimated that he had enough time to swim out far enough to attract someone’s attention.
He grabbed his buoy floats and whistled to Tucker, who had been chasing seagulls down the beach. Without waiting, he plunged into the bay and swam toward the approaching ship. Tucker caught up with him, snorting from getting water in his nose. The two struck out toward the middle of the channel, passing two puffins, which quickly flew away, skimming on the surface of the water for a long time before they lifted off. Seth laughed as he watched, remembering their funny name in Alutiiq: ngaq’ngaq, which sounds like ‘knock-knock’ in a knock-knock joke.
When they were within the vessel’s path, Seth waved his arms and shouted. Several times the buoys slipped from beneath his armpits, momentarily causing him to sink beneath the waves.
But the giant ship, as long as three football fields, bore down on them, unswerving, its speed never slowing. The bow seemed like a skyscraper about to fall on them. When it was apparent that the ship would neither slow nor divert its path, Seth started swimming away, back toward the island, frantically calling over his shoulder for his dog, who didn’t follow but barked at the approaching menace.
‘Tucker!’ Seth shouted over and over, trying to catch the dog’s attention.
But the sound of the tanker, now bearing down on them, was too loud. Seth started to swim back to Tucker, but he stopped after only a few strokes. There wasn’t enough time to grab the dog and make it safely out of the way. They would both die in the attempt.
Reluctantly, fearing for his own life, Seth swam away.
When he was a safe distance, he turned to watch the end of his beloved and faithful friend. He watched, helplessly, as the slicing and bulbous bow of the tanker hit Tucker almost head-on. From where he was, treading in the cold sea, Seth saw the tiny speck that was his dog get heaved up into the white, frothing bow wake. Then he watched him pressed against the side of the hull for a thousand feet, sometimes going under for what seemed like too long. Seth held his breath during those times, straining to see if his dog would come up again further down the length of ship. He could only imagine what Tucker was going through: the fear, the desperation to stay afloat, to struggle to breathe as he was turned every which way, the loud hum of the passing vessel amplified whenever he went beneath the waves.
It was the stern of the tanker that most worried Seth. He had seen the propellers of tankers before, and he knew that they were as tall as a house. Tucker might survive the tumultuous dashing against the hull, but he wouldn’t survive the whirling blades.
He would be chopped to pieces.
As Seth bobbed safely on the great waves of the passing ship, he watched as Tucker slid along the black hull and disappeared into the stirring aft wake.
Tucker was gone.
• • • • •
For a long time, Seth couldn’t see anything but the foaming, bubbling white trail behind the propellers. But then something caught his eye several hundred yards behind the stern.
It was Tucker.
He was still alive, desperately and wearily trying to stay afloat. Seth swam toward him as fast as he could, but his progress was agonizingly slow. Twice, the dog slid below the surface, but twice he bobbed up again, like a sea otter rolling in the waves. Just before Tucker went under again, Seth reached him, wrapped both arms around his orange neck, and held his head above the water, letting the exhausted dog catch his breath, the pink buoys easily supporting them.
‘Relax, boy,’ he kept saying in a comforting voice. ‘I’ve got you. You’re safe now.’
Seth held Tucker for a long time, calming him, feeling his body for wounds. He seemed no worse for wear, just shaken up and slightly trembling. Eventually, the dog stopped struggling and relaxed, letting himself rest in the arms of his friend and savior. The water was colder than it had been in midsummer, and Seth was feeling its chilling effects on his muscles. While he still had enough strength, he used one arm to paddle toward shore.
He never let go of his dog with the other.
Shivering uncontrollably, Seth dragged himself and Tucker up on the beach and lay for a long time in the sun. He had learned another hard lesson.
Like the Sound, he wouldn’t be saved by an oil tanker.
Seventeen – Qula Maquungwin
One day, the two brothers of the young man were out hunting when they came across the carcass of their brother who had been lost for six days. He was hanging in a tree just as they had hung the squirrel furs at their house. They cut him down and took his body back to the village.
Along with darkness, autumn dragged constellations and winter in its wake. The northern lights trailed behind.
At first the snows were heavy and slushy, as much rain as ice, melting shortly after falling. But eventually, as the nights grew colder and longer, the slush turned to snow and the whiteness stuck, like an unwelcome visitor come to stay too long.
Now that Seth and Tucker were on the easternmost shores of the Sound, well over a hundred miles from where they had begun their journey, few islands remained, the distance between them too far to swim in the rapidly cooling conditions. Instead, they traveled on the mainland, the going along the coast made slow by the many meandering bays and sheer mountains that dove straight into the sea, offering uneasy passage.
But they had no choice.
One morning, before setting out for the day, Seth simply left the pink buoys on a beach. They were no longer of any use. The water was too cold to swim, they offered no shelter or warmth, and they weren’t edible.
More than ever before, Seth worried about his survival.
The rubber slicker and canvas poncho were insufficient to keep them warm. Only their grueling hiking warmed them. But the nights grew more and more difficult. Even while sleeping on a thick bed of spruce boughs with the little canvas blanket covering them, Seth and Tucker shook all night long. Without fire, Seth knew that one night they would freeze to death.
Seth’s tennis shoes were coming apart at the seams, and the rubber soles of both shoes were worn and loose, flapping like tongues when he walked. Seth cut two pieces of canvas from their blanket to cover his shoes, securing them around his ankles with rope. That way, he kept his feet a little drier. But the shoes weren’t going to last much longer. Seth wondered how he would continue his journey without shoes, especially once the snow became impassable. The tremendous amount of approaching snowfall worried him. Back home, Seth had seen entire buildings buried under snow.
And two more things concerned him.
With little to eat, he and Tucker were losing weight much faster than before. The loss was aggravated by the fact that their bodies burned more calories simply to stay warm. Secondly, now that the silver season had ended, few boats would be plying the Sound. The chances of someone finding him fell as fast and as assuredly as the snow.
Repeatedly, with trembling hands, Seth tried to start a fire. Not once did a single spark arise from the carefully piled tinder. Without fire, it was unlikely that he and Tucker would last beyond the next couple of weeks.
It bothered Seth that he and Tucker had come so far, suffered so much, only to lose when they were so near to home. It seemed unfair. An effort such as theirs deserved reward.
But Natur
e doesn’t think like that. To her, life is unfair and death is unfair.
As he trudged around a cove during low tide, the blanket of new-fallen snow stopping at the high tide line, Seth saw three deer foraging at the water’s edge. He remembered how he and his father and Lucky sometimes went deer hunting during this time of year. They would cruise close to the beaches aboard his father’s fishing boat, only a little faster than at idle, keeping a sharp eye out for deer or black bears. Upon seeing one, his father or Lucky would shut off the engine, the boat would bob in the waves, drawing no more attention than a log, and then a rifle shot would ring out across the water, its sharp report echoing in the cove. The hunters would use a dinghy or a raft to retrieve the fallen game.
Seth wished he were hunting with them now, though at the time he always resented that his father had dragged him along, tearing him away from the television, the telephone, his music, and his video games.
But he had learned something new about himself over the course of his travails, something about his sense of the world and his place in it, even though the lesson came at a high price. Like so many others, he had become disconnected from nature. He had turned his back on other people, the community of man, and even on his own heritage. He had not kept his promise to his grandmother.
As he stood on the exposed beach, looking for something to eat, he thought about his father. He wished things had been different between them. He wished he hadn’t alienated himself or blamed his father after his mother’s death.
If only he had taken steps to make things better. If only he had a second chance to span the sea that was forming between them. But fathers and sons rarely get such opportunities, and when they do, pride sometimes stands in the way. Pride and failed expectations: part of the history of all men.
A deep sense of regret almost blotted out his hunger.
Later that day, a violent wind arose, and the going was blocked by a steep cliff. Waves slammed against the rocky base. The water was much too dangerous and much too cold for the two of them to swim around the cliff. Instead, they would have to climb over it. After struggling to the top, Seth looked over the edge, the wind blowing his hair and beard. It was a long way down. He could see the white waves crashing against the jagged rocks below.