by Seth Kantner
The phone rang. I picked up another dried fish and bit off a strip. Melt scooped coffee grounds. Tony sweated against the shouting electric ninja. I looked at the TV. The screen was slanted, the volume low. The recorded-earlier Oprah looked slanted, but I could see her looking serious about something. Some new problem down in the States. Something about sex, for sure. Teenage girls who have sex with their moms’ boyfriends’ dogs’ therapists?
“Cutuk! That lady going down to water, guuq.” Janet hung up. She smiled her big happy smile. “Maybe you’ll let her pe your girlfriend, huh?”
The oil smelled sharp and fishy on my hands. Janet didn’t know the world this woman lived in. Or maybe she did. Janet was a gatherer from a long way back. Janet knew everything.
WOODROW AND TESSIE WASHINGTON stood beside a washtub of whitefish, pike, suckers, and grayling. They were old and bowlegged. One of the pike flopped. The writer, Alice, stepped nimbly over the aluminum gunnel of Mr. Standle’s boat and dug in her backpack for her camera. She wore crisp long-legged Levi’s and a white shirt. “Wait! I want a picture of you with the traditional fishers, with those fish racks in the background.” Alice was twenty-seven and had a load of curly brown hair that she had tossed back and forth during her four days in town. Every child in Takunak knew her name, every man was smitten, every woman suspicious.
She knelt and snapped pictures. I smiled apologetically at Aana Tessie. Alice got back in the boat. She wore a three-pronged piece of caribou antler on a leather thong around her neck and it nestled in her unbuttoned collar. In the emancipated mood I was in, I wanted to throw it in the river and kiss her.
“Catalog girl, huh?” Woodrow glanced over the river, his old eyes bloodshot and opaque with cataracts. “Long time ago, Tommy order tat kind. Jus’ clothes come in ta box. COD. Ha! Ha!”
Aana Tessie shook her head. “Arii! Cutuk, you should let her take tat caribou horn off. Before it bunch hole in her milluk.”
I shrugged, grinned at Woodrow, shoved the boat into the current.
It was a beautiful sunny night on the water. Alice was ecstatic about the wilderness she had discovered and the Eskimo culture, intertwined in peaceful harmony with the seasons and the mountains and the wind, and all the magazine stories she could write. Warm air blew by our faces. Occasionally we motored through pockets of cold air near shaded cutbanks. Cottonwood cotton floated on the water. The land was dry and wild rhubarb was already beginning to go to seed along the shore, and that meant the wild onions would soon be past, too, and the bull caribou would have dark velvety horns, and the bulls would be getting fat but would still taste like summer meat from eating greens; and salmon would be flooding upstream to spawn, and trout would follow, silver-blue and heavy with oil; and it all was truly wonderful, but something irked me about the way this pretty woman—who might never see the land we called winter—could swoop in and harvest our world with her camera and words and spoon it back as if only she understood its profundity.
Dawna had always loved pictures. My thoughts hummed with the motor. A camera! I would buy Dawna a camera! The twenty-six-hundred-dollar kind. I would fix up the old house the way I wanted it, and at least show her my roots. Maybe in her hands a camera could tell stories waiting to be told. It would be one way to start caring about this place, instead of acting—as people did—as if the white people were going to take it tomorrow.
WHEN WE MOTORED UP, Crazy Joe was kneeling on the rock bar in front of his canvas tent, filleting a salmon. He turned and stared. Alder smoke leaked out of his plywood smoker. Crazy Joe was small and stocky and had a fierce black and gray beard and black curls around the rim of his tanned skull. He’d come from Idaho, four decades ago, and never gone back. His pants were tied on. The crotch was ripped out and his testicles hung out. The material was all slimy and bloody there from him knocking mosquitoes off. He flung salmon strips in a brine bucket and ran toward us.
“You brought a woman!” He swung his bloody fillet knife. I handed him the sack of apples, and smelled the cloud of his notorious cologne. He sniffed the fruit. “Go eat, Hawcly. We got early salmon, the last two days running. Salmon heads all boiled, in the kettle. Give me an’ the lady room.” Alice smiled nervously. He towed her away, showing her his salmon smoking operation, whispering about the coffee can of gold dust he had hidden up a slough—the goddamn natives were after it, the goddamn gulls wanted his fish, the goddamn mosquitoes . . .
“. . . waste your breath asking the young fella anything. Abe Hawcly raised those kids with their heads in the Stone Age.”
Alice turned and fluttered her fingers.
I sat on the rocks and ate a boiled salmon head. It was bright and peaceful here past midnight and I threw fish scraps to grayling that poked circles in the current.
I’d have to call Jerry, ask what kind of camera to order. Maybe Alice could help, too. “Joe!” I sloshed my fingers clean in the river. “I need that can of gold!”
“Boy, don’t josh me around a woman. That’s my winter rendezvous.”
I strolled along the rock bar. Here and there were Bic lighters and Yamaha oil jugs and the blue spaghetti of rotten poly tarps, detritus that two decades ago practically would have been sign of aliens.
Later, as they walked back, Crazy Joe was still talking, telling her about a helicopter. “. . . a pod hanging below the struts . . . subsurface. Probably our shit-for-brains governor, with a new plan now that someone’s informed him he can’t mine outer space.”
I wiped my hands on my pants, moved noiselessly across the rocks toward them. “What do you think the helicopters are looking for?”
Joe swiveled. He pondered, bathing in attention from two directions. “I’m not certain,” he admitted. “Something valuable, and poison. Uranium obviously comes to mind, these days.” He straightened. “Probably zinc or lead is what it is.”
He knelt at his campfire and blew on the ashes. I felt hollowness tunnel down my arteries and wondered why this was never enough—a man and his campfire. Didn’t anyone want “economic development” to have an edge you could walk to and look at what the earth had so perfectly developed? Didn’t people look at America and catch their breath, thinking, “Gosh, it must have been such amazing country!” Coals glowed, and he stacked twigs on and turned and filled a kettle from the river. “Make you folks a shot of coffee. I forgot my manners.”
Alice’s tablet was out. “Wouldn’t mining on a large scale change the flavor of this valley?”
“The flavor?” Still kneeling, the old man put his chin in his hand and sighed. “You’re a writer . . . that’s right. The flavor of the water? The flavor of the fish?” Joe turned to me. “Hawcly knew. He built above Jesus Creek. He might act unconcerned, but he wasn’t going to drink tainted water.”
“Tainted water?” I uttered.
Alice’s glance strayed to the river and back to the kettle. Joe flicked a peek at her backside. He straightened. “The Dog Die Mountains—you think that’s just a name, no history there? You never think maybe something back there doesn’t have a history of being healthy for canines? Dogs eat some minerals, they’ll foam at the mouth. Guard hairs fall out. Come on, Hawcly, you know what a gray wolf looks like underneath the guard hairs. White. Pull your goddamn head out of the sand.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Alice said.
“When a batch of butt-sniffing senators are back there putting the golden shovel in some open pit mine, then everybody’s going to say Joe knew it all along.”
I smiled weakly at Alice.
She put her pen in a pocket and pointed her expensive camera at the far shore. In the late evening sunlight, along the horizon like iris petals, the Shield Mountains were velvet blue.
TWENTY-SEVEN
UNDER THE BRIGHT LEAVES of fall, I swept out the igloo, burned gnawed chairs and tables, and Cloroxed mold off the slab walls. The moss insulating the roof needed to be added to, and the slumped spots and marten and mouse tunnels patched. The sagging beams needed spruce post supports
. Windows needed to be fabricated out of Visqueen, put in, and chinked.
The fall days were warm and the air smelled of highbush cranberries and leaves and the pitch of freshly peeled logs. My net along the shore caught salmon and pike, whitefish, suckers, grayling and trout. Occasionally a huge sheefish tangled in the small mesh by its square lips. On shore I lashed poles together to build racks to dry the fish. The chained dogs yawned and stretched and watched me cut fish, and cook dog pot out of the fish heads and guts, and lay trout and sheefish in the grass to get “stink” for quaq. They slept and awoke to bark, alerting herds of caribou that moved across the tundra. The animals were dark in their late-summer coats. I shot a few for meat and parka hides. When they went down in the dwarf birch they were hard to locate, smooth in their short hair and dark velvet antlers.
The fall days shortened and the nights cooled, and quickly the caribou grew white manes and their giant antlers peeled bloody and red and darkened like burnished hardwood.
In the afternoons, when the sun was warm, there were blueberries to pick, and after the first heavy frosts the cranberries ripened, and I filled wooden barrels with the plump red berries. Picking berries, I missed Iris and Jerry. Jerry had carried the World War I Enfield .30-06. Iris always had an unripe berry under her tongue to keep her from eating berries, and she carried the laughter.
I dug a new outhouse hole, filled in the old. Behind the house—where the bank sloped down to Outnorth Lake—I dug a pit and built a new siġḷuaq out of logs in the ground to store kegs of berries, jars of fat, butter, a bucket of quaġaq from Janet, seal oil, and a keg of salted salmon bellies.
Every morning I jumped off my qaatchiaq, made coffee and oatmeal, and heated leftover meat. I stretched the ache out of my hands and hurried outside to work. The sky was windy blue and scudded with cat-scratch clouds. The air was clean and the leaves smelled good. The animals and birds were busy preparing for winter. I kept a journal and wrote down what the land and creatures were doing. I told myself I needed to learn if I claimed to care and planned to help. I wondered if that was true or just sounded good.
Boats passed occasionally. Stevie had boated up to visit and bring my mail and the camera order. Another time, an aluminium boat banged into rocks out in front of the dog yard. “WHERE’S THE CHANNEL?” The men looked cold and eager. They motored closer. “Much caribou around?”
“Should be better back down four bends.”
“How about moose? We haven’t got our moose.”
The driver rested his elbow on a powerful spotlight. They were drifting away, idling into the current. Friendly Crotch Spit men, dying to kill their moose, their caribou, their bear, their wolves.
ONES DAY A National Guard Black Hawk helicopter chopped over the valley. For a minute I questioned whether it was one of Crazy Joe’s alleged helicopters, mapping subsurface minerals. The moose I’d watched all summer tucked in the willows at the mouth of Jesus Creek had grown huge antlers, and the flash of those antlers caught the helicopter pilot’s eye. The thundering war machine slowed, turned, and swirled yellow leaves into the sky. It hovered over the willows of the creek.
In my binoculars I saw a man at the controls, peering down, then peering at dashboard buttons, marking this bend in the Kuguruk or entering the moose on a GPS. Maybe Billy was with him, or Nippy, or Dollie—half of Takunak was in the Guard. The helicopter racheted back toward Crotch Spit. My dogs howled. Thoughtfully, I hung the binocs on a limb in front of the igloo. A varied thrush raked leaves. He got me smiling, thinking birds must fake finding worms in this permafrost soil, pretending all that success in the rattling leaves.
A minute later the dot of an airplane appeared in the fall sky.
What is this? It must be Labor Day! Why don’t they just call it Take-Break-And-Kill-Animals Day?
The plane circled. It didn’t acknowledge my igloo, my smoke, my line of bright drying clothes. It circled the moose. The Super Cub banked and touched down on the bar below Jesus Creek. At the lower end the sand was soft and quick. The plane lurched suddenly onto its nose.
I rubbed my forehead, grinning, mulling mean versus generous thoughts, then put the qayaq in and paddled down. The water was glassy calm.
“We’ve got a problem!” the pilot shouted.
The man was big, a dentist from Anchorage, he said. “Get me to a phone and I’ll give you a free root canal!” He ran in anxious circles under the towering tail. It was a photograph for Dawna: Dentist with airplane. Perfect Alaskana. We heaved the tail down until the plane rested on three wheels. The prop was bent, but no other damage was apparent. I smelled the hot four-stroke oil and lusted to mechanic on the powerful engine. The man wore camouflage pants and a camouflage long-underwear shirt. I thought of the polar bear in glass at the Anchorage airport. Shot by an orthodontist.
“Biggest rack from here to Talketna!” He gloated. “Easily seventy inches. Buddy, it’s right back in those willows.”
IT TOOK ME all evening and the next morning to qayaq down to Takunak. Caribou swam the river. The sky spoke of wind, with lenticular clouds, and the willows and birches and tundra were crimson and gold beside the water, and the grass was yellow and bent, and mallards and widgeons nosed along the shores; it was all as haunting and beautiful as it had been ten thousand years before the evolution of sport hunters.
In Takunak a rush was in the air. Tommy Feathers was backing off shore, his boat listing and stacked with building materials to haul down to his native allotment. Three Washington brothers were climbing into a boat, carrying thermoses, SKS rifles, and a pair of Russian night-vision goggles. Two boys sat on a teeter-totter, watching me beach. They looked like street thugs, baggy clothes and shaved heads. “You a floater?” they asked listlessly. A “floater,” along the Kuguruk River, was one of two things: a pale rotten spawned-out salmon floating downriver, or a fluorescent nylon-clad Outsider come to float the river.
I hoped I wasn’t either. I was embarrassed to be white and therefore in need of a category, and wrinkled my nose, no.
They didn’t hear. “You got cocaine?” I shook my head. The older boy spat. “You’re so lucky. This town is the boringest place on earth. No roads. No good chicks here. Everything is native. So embarrassing. We’re jus’ waiting for the old people to die so we can go.”
“Go where?”
“Where you’re from. States. France—unless they build a refineries. Cheap gas would be good, alright.”
A plastic Power Ranger lay half buried in the mud on his hands and knees, musclebound and begging. I stepped on the small of his back and stomped into Janet’s, confused, the way she knew me best.
From Janet’s phone, I called the troopers and the pilot’s friend. Both phone numbers were busy. “Maybe rush hour season down there,” Janet said. She wore rubber boots, sweatpants, and an atikłuk. “Arii. Now George Push sure wanna fight Saddam Hussein.” She shook her head. “I don’t want you boys to try go help.” The air smelled like strawberries. With his stump hand, Melt proudly pointed out a scented Plug-In. “Cutuk, ’lectric strawberry!”
Janet put boiled ribs and seal oil, bread and boysenberry jam, blueberries and sugar on the table. There were new pictures of Lumpy beside her Bible on top of the TV. “Lumpy have five kids,” she said proudly. “In Uktu.” She pushed back her gray hair. “Cutuk! Dawna’s in Uktu! Flossie’s daughter been have baby girl and they give it Dawna’s Eskimo name. Maybe she gonna never go home now.”
The Super Cub on the sandbar flashed in my head. Whitney-Houston sat quiet, one hand on my leg, the other poking quilted buttons in the couch like linty navels. I put my arm around her shoulders and wiggled two fingers like rabbit ears. I pictured the cardboard box at home, with the black new camera and lenses lying in Styrofoam popcorn. I pictured Dawna a decade back, peering longingly at the brown parcels being tossed out of the Twin Otter’s belly. Airplane words hissed through my head: “Prop wash,” “Retarded right mag,” “Grease those mains in!”
MY QAYAQ AND I rode h
ome in a flotilla of three boats and seven men. The men were jubilant at the prospects: hunting animals, burning Search & Rescue gas, saving a stupid white guy. We roared up to the sandbar.
The prop was off the red and white airplane, a dome tent pitched, the moose’s huge head and antlers upside down drying on the sand. I panted with sadness. This bull moose had hung around last winter, for company in the lonely winter, the way moose often did. During the summer I’d said hello whenever we passed along the shore of Outnorth Lake. Now a harem waited back in the willows, cow moose in love with this stud. Shooting him would have been as challenging and sporting as shooting a sofa. I lifted my qayaq out of Tommy Feathers’s boat and walked to the skull. The skinned-out eyes and teeth scowled. Only the flap of head skin hung from the antlers, no thousand pounds of meat in sight. And I stood on the sand and wished, I just wished this fucking dentist could feel the other 364 days a year the moose had fought to live. How it felt to survive birth in the willows while brown bears waited; winter stands beside his mother against the wolves; survive years alone in wading deep snows, the willows buried, the tundra howling wind; survive the spring crust that dropped moose to their ribs while it supported big hungry bears; and the summer insanity of mosquitoes driving him to his eyeballs into water. All for the cool sweet fall and the chance of mating. While this dentist slept on flannel, mated whenever he felt a faint itch, bought bags of food at Safeway, and lived with a 99 percent assurance that his children would never be eaten. And planned his next adventure to kill an animal.