by John Smelcer
Elijah looked at Johnny, staring into the fire, a tear rolling down his face. He didn’t understand why he should be crying.
“I remember I turned around and started back for the cabin when it dawned on me that there were only my tracks in the fresh snow. I walked all around looking for that moose’s tracks. I looked for so long that the sun went away and I was left alone in the darkness. I never found a single track, only mine. I didn’t know what to make of it. I’ve never told anyone about it until now.”
As the low, red sun set over the far white mountains and darkness settled upon the land as soft as falling snow, casting long shadows in the quiet forest, two young Indians sat beside the dying embers of a fire smiling in amazement as stars began to shine and the indifferent spirits of animals began to walk around them, beside them, and through them. Later, asleep in the cold night, they would sleep and dream of summer.
The Death of Charley Secondchief
The raven, which had been sitting nearby on a spindly spruce tree, suddenly lifted into the air, his black body rising into the night sky. He cawed loudly to the world, then, as mysteriously as he appeared, he vanished into the slice of light which curved like a yolk into a horizon as thin as the edge of a knife.
Philip Highmountain walked alone this forest of his youth, the only sound that of soft snow beneath his boots and a raven’s wings beating towards a purple sundown. The tall Indian carried a single shot twenty-two caliber rifle cradled gently under his right arm. It was an old and battered thing. The bolt always came out if he pulled back too hard, and the front sight had been lost years earlier. When he was a boy, his father had welded a cut nail onto the barrel’s end as a sight, and it had a length of yellow nylon rope as a sling. But it was accurate. He used it to hunt birds and rabbits. Once, he remembered, he had even shot a fox from about fifty yards.
Many years before, he and his uncle had hunted this place in the winter sunshine, the brilliant snow blinding them when they looked out across the wide river. One afternoon, he recalled, they had shot maybe a dozen rabbits and four or five grouse. They never died right away. To save bullets he would take the small animals, their eyes wide in fear and pain, and twist their necks sharply until their tiny feet stopped clawing at his wrists. When the animals were still, he tossed them into a canvas bag on their sled and they turned homeward, following their winding tracks into sunset.
Soon, Highmountain came upon a small creek. He recognized the place, and he knew it would be too dangerous to cross the thin ice. If he fell through, the current might pull him beneath the ice like it had done his cousin, Charley Secondchief. Philip was thirteen when it happened. Charley was twelve. They had gone away from the village on snowmobiles to play for the day. It was early spring and the snow was almost gone. It was a beautiful day when they came upon this small stream only about a dozen feet across. The ice was so clear that they could see to the bottom. Both boys knew that it was deep and that it ran between two small lakes. It was as much as seven to ten feet deep in places. They came here with their families in the fall to hunt moose and pick berries, and they knew the place well.
Philip was the first to cross. He made a wide circle, turned the machine towards the icy surface and gunned the throttle. He must have hit the creek at forty miles an hour. Where he crossed the ice fractured, its pattern a spider web shining in sunlight. When he was on the other side, Philip turned and waited for his uncle’s son. They had grown up together in their small village. Everyone was somehow related to everyone else. That’s the way things were back then. There was only a few white people around, and most of them were teachers.
Philip waved at Charley, motioning him to try it himself.
“It’s ok!” he yelled across to his cousin.
Charley pulled the starter rope, sat up high on the machine to better see through the cracked and duct-taped windshield, and gunned the throttle. But instead of gliding over the creek as Philip had done, his machine plunged through the ice, both boy and machine disappearing in a splash and the sound of ice shattering. When Charley’s head appeared, Highmountain laughed.
“Hell, boy! Don’t you know better than to cross thin ice? Damn, that’s got to hurt like hell,” he yelled as he walked up to the edge of the creek, looking for a stick to use to pull his cousin from the freezing water.
Charley tried to hold his place but the current was stronger than it looked. It pushed him against the thin sheet of river ice.
“Help me, Phil!” Charley screamed to his taller cousin, feeling the current yanking at his legs, trying to pull him under.
Highmountain kept laughing and looking on the ground for a stick.
“Your dad’s gonna kill you and your momma’s gonna tan your ass when you get home,” Philip said, still looking around for something to use.
When he finally broke a spruce bough off a tree, he turned and saw his cousin go under. He ran as close as he could, but Charley didn’t come up.
“Charley!” he yelled.
Highmountain looked around until he saw his cousin being pulled downriver beneath the ice. He was alive and pounding at the ice above him frantically. His eyes were wide and they followed Philip’s movements in terror as he ran along the edge. All the while Charley pounded at the ice, clear as a window.
Philip took a chance, running out onto the ice, just above his cousin. He kicked at the surface with his boot. He kicked as hard as he could and he smacked the stick against the ice which was thicker here. Try as he could, though, he could not fracture the surface. Highmountain ran above his cousin for more than a minute around a bend until he saw Charley gulp for air. Then his body stopped flailing, his eyes closed, and his limp body floated downstream only inches away beneath a polished mirror of ice.
As his cousin’s body disappeared around a bend, Highmountain stood in the middle of the creek alone, his eyes full of tears, his hands and legs trembling. He looked around for help, but there was no one around for miles. Nothing moved except a dried leaf blown across the snow, and a small boy’s body flowing under clear ice downriver where it would sink beneath a small lake where his family would find what remained of him in the late spring more than a month later.
In the twenty or so years since that day Philip had never forgotten the way his cousin looked at him. It haunted his dreams. There were nights when Philip woke up screaming for his cousin who drowned that spring in childhood. Highmountain’s own drowning would be much slower, lasting many years.
A wind picked up and blew snow hard against his face. The ice crystals were stiff and they felt like tiny needles driven into his eyes. Philip squinted and put the thought of Charley out of his mind. The Indian turned towards home and walked out across the glacial earth, his heart pounding and his ears and legs numb. His pant legs were frozen, and his toes felt like someone was smashing them with a hammer.
Five miles down the trail, the river of his youth flowed slowly past his village, gathering shadows from the starry night as it followed its long and ancient course, sometimes beneath thick and brittle ice.
A Stroke Before Midnight
Moses Frank was happiest on the trail. He knew of nothing like it, just his quiet breathing, his untroubled thoughts, and the stillness of the land. His grandfather had worked the same trap line, as had his father. Of course, back when they ran the line, no one used snowmobiles. In their day, they hitched teams of lean, energetic huskies to sleds and journeyed quietly across the solitary, frozen land, the only sound the panting of dogs and the muffled padding of their broad paws on snow. To their kind—the People of the North—winter was a good time, when the marshes and rivers and lakes were frozen over, when travel between villages was easy.
Best of all to the People, winter is a season without the tormenting clouds of blood-thirsty mosquitoes, unbearable in the early summer after the wiggling larvae first hatch, hungry and instinct-driven in their part of the cycle of things. Each generat
ion lives briefly, only long enough to feed and lay eggs.
Summer provides no escape from the gray-black, buzzing clouds. They fly into eyes, mouths, ears, inside shirts, up sleeves and cuffs, relentless and unceasing.
When gold miners first came to the Far North searching the rivers and streams and valleys for gold, they overcame many hardships, but the tormenting mosquitoes were sometimes too much for them. Many are the stories of gold-seekers who took their own lives to escape the torture of constant feeding.
But now it was winter and the landscape was blanketed in snow and ice, and the larvae were frozen until spring.
Moses had trapped in this country ever since he was a boy. Now, at almost fifty, running the trap line was part of him, like a limb. He had a warm cabin back in the village, but the wilderness was his home. He knew the trails, the streams, every river bend, and every oxbow lake. To him, there was no moment greater than sitting beneath a broad spruce tree beside a small fire with hot water boiling in his old, black kettle—his rifle leaning against the trunk as stars first appeared, announcing the coming of the long, Arctic night.
He loved the loneliness out here. No one and nothing bothered him when he was on the trail. Nothing else mattered. Time here wasn’t the same as elsewhere. Life in the backcountry was uncomplicated. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he was tired. Clocks held no power over him, over the animals, the creaking trees, or the sliding stars. The rule of the land was simple.
Live or die.
He was near the ten-mile marker, halfway home, when he saw a rabbit at the edge of a stand of willow. He pressed the kill switch of the snowmobile’s engine, pulled his rifle from its makeshift scabbard, and fired one shot. That was all he needed. The rabbit hopped once, violently, as the bullet struck it in the side, and then fell motionless. Moses trudged over to collect it, lifting it by its hind feet. It was swinging as the man carried it back to the machine, blood trickling from its tiny mouth, spilling a thin, red line in the snow.
Live or die. The rabbit died so the man might live.
Using a jackknife, Moses deftly gutted the small animal and tossed its steaming innards far from the trail. It was to be his dinner, boiled with potatoes and onion, heavily peppered to his taste.
When he had stowed the rabbit inside a canvas pack, he pulled his gloves over his cold hands, pulled the rope to start the machine, and set off again down the bumpy trail. The low sun was already setting. It would be dark soon, and he wanted to be home by nightfall.
Moses calculated that another half hour was all he needed to cover the distance, less than ten miles, to his cabin, which would still be warm inside from the fire he left burning in the belly of the wood stove when he left in the morning. He had cranked down the damper so that the fire barely breathed, smoldering all through the short winter day.
Less than a mile down the hard-packed trail, Moses noticed his rifle falling out of its scabbard. Without slowing down, he tried to grab it as it fell beneath the machine. Instantly, the spinning, rubber track seized his hand, yanking him abruptly from the seat. Unmanned, the throttle sprang back to the idle position, and the weight of the dragging body quickly slowed the machine to a stop, the engine still idling, the yellowish headlight still aiming down the darkening trail, lined with scraggly spruce trees on either side.
Moses’ wrist hurt excruciatingly, and his palm, wedged between two bogey wheels and the track, was facing downward, toward the ground, the wrong direction for proper alignment with his arm. Moses could see that the turning mechanisms had entirely broken the bone. He got up on his knees, reached up with his good hand and pressed the kill button on the steering handlebars. The engine and the headlight died instantly.
A sudden quiet descended on the frozen world. It seemed to Moses to grow from an ever-widening circle around him, up from the tangled roots of trees, through their rigid trunks, diffusing from swaying branches into the darkening sky. Only for another twenty minutes or so would a diminishing light allow for useful sight beneath a near-moonless sky.
Moses tried to pull his trapped hand free, but excruciating pain shot through his forearm, through his shoulders, wracking his entire upper body and preventing further effort. In spite of the ten-below temperature, the searing pain was so intense that he began to sweat. He waited a few minutes before trying again. When he did, the same intolerable pain swept through him.
On the very edge of unconsciousness, Moses understood that he would lose consciousness if he tried that again too quickly. He would have to rest.
With his head against the cold, black, vinyl seat cushion, Moses sat trying to fight back tears and waiting for the pain to settle back to a dull throbbing. He wouldn’t try that again, at least not for a long time.
While he sat, the deepening light turned black as the orange sun, riding westward, briefly straddled the horizon before sinking until dawn.
Frustrated and growing more and more anxious, Moses tried again and again to free himself during the next several hours, each time his effort collapsing in the same result. Twice he almost passed out. The trapping bogey wheels and the track steadfastly gripped his wrenched hand, and the insufferable pain burned more intensely—if such a thing was possible—with each failed attempt.
The Indian began to take stock of his circumstances. In his life among the elements of the beautiful and pitiless natural world, he had been in many dangerous situations. This time was but one of many. He forced himself to admit, with a mounting concern—still less panic than worry—that almost no one from his village traveled his trap line. It was common knowledge that the trail was his livelihood, that it had been blazed and used by his family for generations. The people respected his right to hunt it, and they left it alone so as not to scare away animals.
With this knowledge filling his thoughts, Moses realized that no one would be traveling this trail—not tonight, not tomorrow, not the next day after that. Perhaps after a week someone may come to look for him, but the forecast called for even colder temperatures. By morning, temperatures were expected to drop to thirty below. He could see confirmation in the clear, cloudless sky and in the bright net of gathering stars above. Without a cloak of air-warming clouds, he would surely freeze to death by morning if he could not free himself.
Moses sat quietly chewing dried moose jerky, which he had kept in a pocket of his parka. The tight-stretched air honed sharper and sharper as the night rolled on against the earth. He knew that he couldn’t survive for long just sitting on the ground. Without fire or a sleeping bag, survival for more than another few hours seemed unlikely. But because he had only planned to spend the day checking his trapline, he had not brought tent or sleeping bag. He had matches in his pocket, but he certainly could not drag the heavy snowmobile to the trail’s edge where he might gather sticks to build a fire.
With renewed determination, Moses tried to free his hand from the machine, but it was wedged so tightly—so completely—that it didn’t give an inch. It was as if his hand were part of the machine, a fusion of flesh and steel and rubber.
A curious raven landed on the low branch of a small tree nearby and sat staring, its black eyes unflinching. Moses knew of many old stories of how Raven used to trick people so that he could kill and eat them. Once, so his grandmother told him when he was still a boy, Raven told a band of hunters that another band of hunters who wanted to kill them and enslave their wives and children was approaching. Raven told them to go make camp beneath a great cliff. He told them the other hunters would pass by there and they could ambush them. But no sooner had they set up camp than the trickster flew to the top of the cliff where a great overhang of snow perched precariously. Raven jumped up and down until a great avalanche fell, killing all the hunters. For the rest of the year, Raven feasted on their flesh, savoring their soft eyeballs the most.
“Go away, Brother!” Moses yelled to the black bird, which did not budge.
He made a s
nowball with his free hand and threw it at the bird.
“Go away!” he yelled again, the snowball just missing. “There’s nothing for you here!”
Grudgingly, the ever-hungry bird flew off, cawing loudly a curse upon the man, who sat in the stillness for a long time, the cold creeping deeper into his body, the winter silence swallowing him.
Moses knew that he had to make a decision soon. If his body became too cold, his mind would slow, become clouded, and he would not be able to think clearly. From that point, death would approach stealthily, the way a lynx stalks a rabbit, then more and more quickly, finally sweeping down and closing over him. He had to act quickly, while his limbs and fingers could still respond to commands of the will.
In the freezing dark of a lonely night with only a fingernail of moon on the edge of far mountains, the Indian pushed up the thick sleeve of his parka, rolled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt, and began to rub handfuls of snow on his exposed, swollen wrist. At first, it stung and burned, but after a while he could not feel the biting snow. To be certain, he kept rubbing snow on the wrist until it was as numb as a snowdrift. When he thought it ready, Moses reached for a pack on the back of his snowmobile and pulled out a small hatchet. He ran his thumb along the edge. It was sharp. It was always sharp. A dull ax would be useless in the wilderness. He took a deep breath and whispered a small prayer as he raised the hatchet above his head.
The White Hills of Denali
Noah Boyscout stood quietly on the packed trail, watching the tree line, holding his breath, and listening for something that did not come. He thought he had seen movement from the corner of his eye—sudden and fleeting. The day was cold, bright, the sky deep blue, the distant mountains glowing almost pink in the angled light of midwinter. There was no breeze. A squirrel scampered about the top of a nearby spruce tree, deftly tossing tiny cones to the ground. After a while, the boy adjusted the rucksack on his back and slung the rifle over his shoulder, raised his parka hood, and resumed his homeward trek.