by Seth Kantner
Inside, when it softened enough to cut, we dipped the frozen fermented fish in seal oil and ate it before it melted. Abe heated water for tea with bread and jam. “Aarigaa taikuu,” Abe said and leaned back from the food. Twilight darkened into the early evening, and I rummaged in my bag, got out the bottle of One-Five I’d been saving.
Franklin went for his mug on the shelf. We sipped by candlelight while coals glowed through cracks in the stove. Franklin fiddled with the shortwave, and Radio Moscow came faint and crisp into the cabin.
“They’ve been dumping nuclear waste in the Arctic Ocean,” he interrupted the announcer. “Our trout sometimes winter across in Siberian rivers. Who knows what we’re eating. Look what it did to my hair!”
I lay on the bearskin couch with my feet hanging over. Frostbite tingled and itched my face. The men argued now, about global spin pushing pollution to the poles—smog from the Ruhr Valley and the East Coast—about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the pipeline pumping a million barrels a day out the crotch of Alaska. They were informed about the news, the radio no longer something perfidious and vain.
“How come you quit smoking, Abe?”
He untied a cloth sack of dried apricots. “Didn’t taste good anymore.” He chewed an apricot, fighting the hard fruit. Grin wrinkles curved from his eyes into his beard. “Did you think, air pollution?”
“Maybe.”
I was getting melancholy, pressed by the heavy miles of dark outside, acutely aware of the fact that the last thing that had slept with me was a sack of six onions. An idea cooked in my head. I’d fix up our old family sod igloo. I’d use the money from the mammoth tusk to buy Dawna something expensive and beautiful. The dream from there faded into little floating ice pans of reality. What would I buy?
“Think I’ll head down to Takunak to get my gear and visit Iris. Take me four or five days to break trail, especially if I pick up that tusk. Maybe a couple to get back to the old house.”
The dried fruit gritted in my teeth.
“Organic Hunza apricots,” Abe said. “Complete with gravel and camel dung. Aren’t they sweet?” Under the flame I saw sand stuck to the hard fruit, larvae casings, and a coarse black hair. I held the hair up.
“Pakistani.” Abe grinned.
“Yeah? I hope the dung was the camel’s.”
Franklin clicked to AM. Johnny Horton sang, “When it’s springtiiime in Alaska, it’s forty beloooow . . .” Abe toed his overpants in front of the door to keep the cold from smoking underneath. “Alappaa. You be careful on the river ice,” he said. Shadows flickered and leaned and leered in the cabin. Outside stretched the Darkness. I reached over and rummaged in my parka pocket, slipped out the packet of pansy seeds and tacked them to a log, with a tack that held the postcard of the city of New York.
TWENTY-THREE
REX REMENBERED THE TRAIL from Abe’s cabin. An icy wind lifted snow. It matted the dogs’ fur, whipped their tails and ears sideways, froze to their faces and buttholes. The trail behind blew away, no longer existed. Takunak didn’t exist, nor airports and stewardesses and cordless telephones. Only the frozen river, the snow, and the gray tarp of twilight. The storm, and winter itself, were giants, powerful, beyond anything humans could control. Their strength made me well up glad inside. I sensed animals as I never had before. Ptarmigan puffed into the wind—and I already knew they were there. Something pulled my eyes across the river: deep in the willows the long face of a moose watched our passing.
I found the cutbank, and my tripod of willows marking the tusk, and lashed it onto the loaded sled. I smiled again at my luck. The dogs heaved, and looked back, irritated with the drag. I broke ice off my face, melted my eyelashes open, and jogged behind the runners. Miles later, I looked back suddenly. Low to the ground and hurrying, a wolverine was crossing our drifting trail. I yanked off my beaver hat to listen upwind. My ears froze, white and hard as frozen fish sperm sacks. A raven’s wings panted above. I stared around but couldn’t find him in the sky. Was I carrying a mammoth’s spirit again? I felt wild, unafraid; my father was behind me, and home out of sight down the trail. In the lungs of the storm, I felt free, unconcerned with any tomorrows, any price in scars I might pay.
When it grew dark and the sky and snow fell into one gray frenzy, I tied the dogs to willows, chopped whitefish for them, and stomped and dug a snow cave. I crawled in out of the wind and leaned a block against the entrance. It was quiet out of the wind. Snow sifted around my head. I ate part of one of the raw frozen whitefish with chunks of bear fat and slept on my qaatchiaq with my ears hot and throbbing.
The next morning, the storm had worsened, and I crawled out, dug out the dogs, and we went on with the wind at our backs. By dusk the gusts fell away and a few fresh stars twinkled. Moonlight came from behind a bank of retreating clouds. We halted in the old dog yard, and the dogs rolled and pawed ice off their faces. Trees threw arms and fingers of faint shadow on the snow. The igloo was buried under a huge drift. Off the mouth of Jesus Creek, a black slit of open water ran, the feathery edge ice lying on a current of cold black good-bye. I fed the dogs, ate, and rolled up in a tarp but awoke and strangely couldn’t go back to sleep. The moon was out now. I got up and snowshoed over to Abe’s old cache. He’d left our childhood snowshoes, small and broken, a bent tuuq and a piece of a shovel, trap springs, rusted-through enamel roaster pans, a Hills Bros can with corroded .30-06 brass in the bottom. I felt around until I found a bent nail in the cache post and pried it out with the shovel.
The ice whomped and boomed, settling under the new snow. I circled far around the open water. The air froze inside my nose. Across, near the south shore, I chipped a hole and scooped the slush out barehanded. Tiktaaliq were my favorite fish, camouflaged, long, dark, and prehistoric. I remembered they carried all their fat in their livers, and the feel of sticky fingers after eating their white flaky meat, and that foxes couldn’t resist traps baited with their intestines.
Janet would like a fish.
Back on the north shore, Figment whined in my memories and dragged his chain around in a circle, keeping the cold metal off his frozen testicles. The water in the hole sucked up and down. Maybe a wind was coming. I lowered my bent nail, knotted on a piece of twine, baited with a strip of whitefish, and lay on my back, jigging with a willow limb. The wind had ceased. The night was black glass, huge and silent. “Mother Earth,” I murmured, “how about giving me a fish?”
Ice thickened my line, cold grew in my bones, and current throb came up from the depths. The snow stretched unfocused black-gray, the water hole a blacker hole. If I had my nights right, it was November 20. The earth had been rotating me along for nearly twenty-four years. Tat’s not much even, Enuk said. I grinned in the dark, remembering his story about iññuqun, a white wolf, and losing his fry pan through the ice. The stick tugged and turned heavy. I pulled in string and a fish writhed up and out onto the powdery snow. It flapped and rolled, half again as long as my arm, thick around the body and head, mottled dark green.
“Thank you, tiktaaliq!”
I clubbed it. The huge mouth opened, the sandpaper teeth pointing back toward its esophagus—a professional hunter—ready to guide young fish to eternity. The nail had scarcely hooked, and I rebaited it and lowered my line.
An hour passed with no further bites. Enuk knew a legend concerning all the different bones in a tiktaaliq head, exactly the way he knew every slough, every lake, every pass through the mountains. I couldn’t remember the story; it was all mixed up in my head with ailerons, Chief Joseph, and Dodge three-speed transmission tooth counts. The temperature fell. Off in the east, aurora whipped and wavered, green and pink smoky strokes. Rex barked, and then the dogs howled; faint in the distance a wolf answered the dogs. Closer, another wolf howled, and another. When all were silent again, I howled. With no people to laugh, I let longing pour as perfectly as possible into the night. Howls floated over the trees—the wolves were coming closer. Hair lifted on my skin. Janet’s .30-30 was back in the sc
abbard on the sled. I was glad I hadn’t gutted the fish—letting that tantalizing smell escape into the air. I grabbed the tuuq. Would they eat me? Shit me out on the land? White shit, in windblown places where animals knew secret trails and smells and whispers from the earth. I grinned fleetingly; in a Hollywood version of this life, my Indian name could be Whiteshit.
I listened. Maybe the wolves had heard more in the sound I made than I knew how to hear in theirs. It made sense; every day they trusted their very lives to their senses. I stood and looked down at the fish on the snow, and then further, down into myself, where truth was all messed and mixed up with uncertainty, shame, and the progression of paper history pretending or lying or forgetting to tell what was obvious. These genetic miles between me, the tiktaaliq, and the wolves did not mean that I was all alone here. Maybe a billion years back in evolution my great grandma jellyfish had run off with a reptile. The things out in the dark were my cousins.
My hands gripped the tuuq and the jig stick. The wolves passed on the ice. Feet softly padding snow. A click of teeth. Dark figures pacing, pausing, spreading in the dark. They faded downstream and the river ice boomed and echoed, the aurora pulsed, and I jigged my line, begging another tiktaaliq down below in his world, me on top of the ice, looking up now, counting satellites roving among the old stars.
WOLF TRACKS CROSSED the snowdrift over the roof, running north. The tracks were inverted white molds standing on spires scoured out by ice grains riding the wind, the ball of each toe rounded up where the pad had once pressed down. Anyone might read them as months old. I stood on the drift, inhaling twenty-below air, gratified that a north blizzard had rearranged the snow and made the wolf sign look ancient in the week since I passed here.
I’d visited friends in Takunak, spent Thanksgiving with Iris and the Wolfgloves, and this morning left the dogs in front of Iris’s house and returned here quickly with Treason on snowgos. It had been impossible to resist his offer to travel with company, to travel in an hour what had recently taken me two days.
I glanced north again, across frozen Outnorth Lake to tundra and mountains. It had been easier, in a way, up at Abe’s; here, now, I had to wonder, had I grown up under this snow? Who would believe that? Not me.
Posts spiked out of the drifts: wind-grayed cache poles, falling fish racks, and Plato’s dog stake with the chewed top, where she’d hung by her teeth like a rabid animal on days when I made her stay home. Memories licked my face. My past felt fragile. The land might love me, but not more than one brown bear, one mosquito, one flake of snow. I could starve, get swatted, or melt.
Down in the hole Treason and I had dug were the remains of the glass window in our door—Iris’s present to Abe and me—shot out. I knifed a lead pellet out of the weathered ridgepole. Number 2 shot.
Treason leaned on his shovel. He had taken off his beaver hat and Chicago Bulls jacket; his hair and sweatshirt were frosty. We were chest-deep in the hole, peering at the top of the door and the gnawed caribou-skin weather stripping. “Kids,” he said. “Now’days they shoot anything.” Treason wasn’t as big as my memory. He talked about hunting, what he’d shot, what he hoped to shoot. He was twenty-nine and, like many village men under fifty, still partied when there was a jug, didn’t concern himself with his various progeny, treated jail time as inevitable. Probably he knew who the vandals were. Secrets and gossip always leaked out.
The green nylon rope tying our door shut was knotted in four places, the fibers splintery with age. Somebody had taken the time to tie the door. I stabbed the shovel through the rotted rope, and the door racked but didn’t want to open. Too much snow inside. “Things sure got old,” Treason said. His cheeks had the fresh black frost scabs of a hunter, his teeth white in his handsome face. Somebody had busted his bottom lip, left him a fingernail-moon souvenir. I looked at my skin, dry in the moisture-robbed air, my hands an embarrassing red. My old bolt-action rifle ten yards away, hanging in a tree. Treason shrugged impassively. “Could be you better start over.”
“I wish!” I crawled down and kicked my legs through the window. The snow squeaked and sawed under me. I dropped inside onto the floorboards. The igloo was dark and hushed, and a rank smell made me peer nervously into the dark.
“Hand me your lighter, Treas.” His hand reached in out of the cold sunlight. The lighter was pink plastic, not his old stainless steel Zippo. How many lighters had he had and lost since I left? Everything went away so quickly now. How many snowgos? Guns? Women? Dawna? Janet had said Dawna went to church these days and worked at Prudhoe Bay. Maybe she would ask my religion. My mind joked, My ten commandments start with be a nice person and end with don’t work for an oil company. I spun the flint, traveling back to Newt’s cabin, wishing to start over, just holding her hand.
The igloo was black and eerie, the air musty with a familiar smell I couldn’t place. The ceiling poles bowed from the weight of winter drifts; they hung with frost, a thousand ice moths. Something rustled. The air inside was forty degrees warmer than outside, just below freezing, and a chill brushed my neck.
“Watch for iññuqun,” Treason teased, though a hint in his tone was serious. He believed in them. Falling frost slivered light. Fingernails scraped on a board. Teeth rattled, something shivering. It moaned. I cupped the flame. On Iris’s bed an eye glinted.
Treason jammed his AK-47 assault rifle along my shoulder. “Cover your ears. Qilamik!”
The flame went out, and I clicked the lighter, but it wouldn’t catch. I warmed it in my fist. The flame flared and went out. “Don’t shoot. I think—”
Boom. Boom. Orange blasts buffeted my face. Hot cartridges seared my neck. In shattered darkness the winter’s diamond coat tinkled down, and I heard that second-oldest sound on earth, the slow sigh of death.
ʺTASTES BETTER IN SUMMER.ʺ Treason sucked broth off a shoulder blade and lay it on the table. The table rocked, three-legged now.
Around the room, posts were gnawed, the arms of chairs, and the floorboards under the slop bucket where as little kids we’d missed the bucket occasionally and piss had splashed on the floor. Porcupine loved salt, as did rabbits; we always pissed in the trail near our rabbit snares, for bait.
I had swept the ceiling, shoveled out the door, and checked that the roof moss wasn’t touching the stovepipe, then got a fire roaring while Treason skinned and gutted the porcupine. Light and cold poured in the window holes. In the back, under our beds, colored construction paper from the all-of-ours box was plastered under moldy mounds of turds. A kerosene storm lantern hung from the ridgepole. A jug of kerosene sat dusty in the corner, beside a mason jar of rancid caribou fat. I pictured Iris slicing itchaurat and back fat, rendering it, and then whipping in berries and sugar and flaked fish to make akutuq.
Treason glanced around. “Guys mostly steal gas, booze, guns. Even CDs. Anything to have or sell. Sure aaqqaa in here, huh?”
I poked in the blackened coffee can and knifed a piece of back out of the soup. The broth smelled sharp and pitchy. I shook salt on the tender meat. Abe had left salt and sketches and stiff coils of homemade babiche hanging on nails, tobacco tins of bent spikes, charcoal stubs, matches. On the warped boards above the kitchen counter he had left pepper, a Ziploc of dried chives, a half inch of Worcestershire in a brown bottle. The vanilla bottle lay on the floor, empty, the cap flung away by thirsty intruders. Abe—trusting and curious—liked to leave chunks of memories hanging behind. He often said that was the reason some Eskimos left trash on the country—for the memories, and not to feel lonesome. You couldn’t understand, he said, until you had been lost for days on the country without seeing a single sign of a human; then trash could look pretty darn good.
“Melt gave a baby porcupine to Jerry when he was a kid,” I commented.
“Melt? He give somebody something?”
We chuckled, not looking up from chewing.
“That porcupine ate my mom’s guitar. Now I guess we’re eating its great-grandson.” Something about it was too funny f
or us, and we dropped the bones and laughed until our foreheads touched the table. We couldn’t look at each other without choking and had to sit shielding our faces from each other.
The stove crackled, heat spread slowly, and grainy snow on the floor didn’t melt. We had thrown the porcupine hide into the fire, to burn the quills, to save foxes from slow deaths.
“Guitar soup. And here I sure was thought bear.” Treason glanced around. Every movement he made was precise. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants under his black nylon ski pants. He leaned back and pulled a toothpick out of his pocket. “I’d camp in wall tent.” He grinned. “For this winter. If you stay here, you better not go town. Everybody gonna laugh how you smell. Them girls wear perfumes, Cutuk. Takunak is nothing but new everything now’days.”
“Like in that commercial—that woman says you better smell good or ‘it’s a turn-off’? You been to Anchorage, right?”
“Oh yeah. Lotta times. Three times. Always can’t do nothing, only follow the road. Real nice to drink beer, though.” He dipped his fingers into the can and pulled out the heart. He bit it in half. “Want some?” Warm soupy air came across the table. I took the heart from his fingers. The meat was black and pasty.
He peered out at the river. Out by the shovel, a pair of gray jays pecked feverish mouthfuls off the porcupine gut pile. Treason slid a .22 Magnum out of his jacket and rested it on the door frame and fired. The bird slumped out of sight behind a block of snow; its mate flew off. Treason breathed deep. Downy gray wisps of feather floated on the air. “Nice out. How much gas in your snowgo? Let’s go home through tundra. Maybe find wolf tracks.”