Alaskan

by John Smelcer

  The sound of brittle snow beneath snowshoes measured the white miles.

  Halfway to his family’s cabin in the valley far below, he again thought he saw something moving, a flashing among the trees, only for a second. He stopped and squinted hard, taking in every little thing—the almost imperceptible sway of treetops, a flock of tiny birds alighting on a willow, a raven in the distance flying into the low sun. Although he saw nothing that concerned him, the young Indian removed a glove, reached into a pocket on the front of his parka, and pulled out what few bullets remained. There were only four. He had used the rest to shoot the half dozen rabbits that filled his old canvas pack. After rolling the small brass cartridges across his palm, he slid them back into the deep pocket.

  He had hunted in these hills for much of his life. At thirteen, he was already learning the laws of the untamed land. He knew the trails that wound from the valley into the hills, and further still, toward the mountains. Grizzly country. Occasionally, small bands of caribou migrated into the hills, milling about all winter in search of food and escape from deep snow and hungry wolves. In all his years he had never seen a wolf, but he had, from time to time, come across their tracks. Once, he even stumbled on a kill. Little remained of the animal—mostly hair, the head with its glazed-over eyes still open, some bones—at the center of the red trampled snow all around the clearing.

  Noah pulled the thick glove over his hand and took a hard look across the wintered forest before continuing his shuffling descent from the hills, one hand gripping the swaying leather sling of his rifle. He loved the vastness of the land, its great silence and beauty. He loved the time he spent on it. It was a quiet time, time to think and daydream. Here, among the trees and wind and flitting birds, he was home. He did not belong in the world of man. Nature is harsh—even brutal—but she is honest. A person knows where he stands. Though still a boy, Noah knew these things, and the truth made him happy and sad all at once. As a half-breed—only partially Indian—he was already an outcast of sorts, not fitting in fully anywhere. Other people, his own parents and friends included, did not understand him. They did not understand his need for the wild or why he sat for hours, sometimes listening to ravens or the sounds of wind and river.

  Noah found peace where many found nothing.

  More than anyone else, his own mother did not understand him. She was not Indian, and she did not understand things the way Indians do. Sometimes, Noah would come home from a day alone in the forest all excited about an experience.

  “Mother!” he would yell, as he closed the door to the small cabin.

  “What is it, Noah?” she would ask, putting down the dish she was washing or leaning the broom against a wall, knowing that her young son would ramble on about something in which she had no interest or, worse, would tell another of his tales about taking chances in the wilderness.

  While taking off his parka and boots, the boy would happily relate his story.

  “I was sitting by my campfire eating my lunch, when a fox came and stood not a dozen steps away. I started speaking to him real soft, asking him to stay and visit. When he came closer, I could see he was nervous, but I kept speaking soft and smiling at him. When he was only a couple steps away, I held out my hand and he came up to it and smelled my palm!”

  As she listened, his mother’s boredom turned to concern. Her white face showed more and more a grim intensity as she listened.

  The boy continued his incredible story.

  “Then I slowly raised my hand and stroked the fur on his head, rubbing behind his long ears. He didn’t seem to mind. I think he liked it, so I started petting his head with both hands. Then he came in even closer and pressed his body against mine. I wrapped my arms around him and held him close, petting his back and belly while whispering to him, telling him what a pretty fox he was.”

  His mother’s expression now was of troubled worry tinged with anger.

  “After a while he just pulled away and trotted back into the forest. You should have seen him, Mom. He was such a nice fox. I think we’re friends now. Maybe I’ll shoot a rabbit for him next time I see him.”

  That wasn’t the only time Noah had had such encounters. In fact, nearly every week or so he had another story to tell, like the time a newborn moose calf teetered clumsily out of a willow patch, walked right up to him, pressed its head against his hip, curled up on the ground, and took a nap with its little blonde moose head snuggled on the boy’s lap. They sat like that for hours, the boy gently caressing the top of the calf’s head and its long, stiff mane, the moose sleeping, warmed by the high summer sun.

  After hearing such stories his mother would kneel down before her young son, grab him by the shoulders, and tell him to stay away from those dirty animals, saying how they might bite him, how they might have rabies. To his mother, the idea that humans and animals dwell on the same land, that their lives are intertwined, related, that they are somehow brothers and sisters, is an idea that at best is troubling and at worst disgusting, even horrible. To her, the land was fraught only with menace.

  Noah adjusted the biting leather rifle sling as he continued his lonely descent from the snow-clad hills. A raven flying overhead landed on a tree branch and watched the shuffling figure. When the figure was close, it cawed out to the boy who cawed back. Pleased with the news, the black bird flew away, its sharp eyes searching the earth for something to eat.

  A half hour later, Noah saw them clearly for the first time, hiding behind trees and deadfalls on either side of the trail. From where he stood he counted six or seven, but there may have been more. They were still far away, watching him and turning to look at one another, waiting for a signal. They were gray-coated, and they easily vanished in the gray-white landscape.

  The boy knew they had been following him for a long time. He had sensed them earlier up in the hills. He increased his pace, looking left and right of the trail at all times. The wolves were working their way closer. They knew they had lost the element of surprise, but they had sheer numbers in their favor. There were seven of them against one skinny boy.

  Within minutes they were close enough that Noah could hear the sound of panting. He stopped, slid the rifle from his shoulder with one hand and the pack from his back with the other. With the rucksack on the ground beside him, he worked the bolt of his single shot rifle—a boy’s rifle—and reached into the pocket for the extra shells. He was afraid, but he would stand his ground.

  For an instant, and only for an instant, Noah wondered in that way men sometimes wonder about the absurdity of their circumstances. At a time when most homes, including his, had a television, when the very first satellite raced across the night sky, here was a boy standing in a far white field in the middle of nowhere, facing a pack of encircling wolves—snarling and biting and snapping their teeth.

  Though the wolves were still too distant to shoot at with his small rifle, the boy fired one shot into the air to scare them away. But the sound of a twenty-two in vast and open country is hardly enough to frighten even a small bird. The wolves stopped for a moment, their ears perked, and their shaggy heads cocked sideways, but they were unafraid. They resumed their methodical attack almost immediately. They moved nervously around the boy who turned to meet them, loading another round into the breech. He couldn’t spare another bullet; each one would have to count.

  Then two of the wolves, leaders of the pack, stopped and held their heads high to smell the crisp winter air, their noses black and wet. He had noticed others of the pack doing the same, at some distance, but this time the behavior caught his eye. It was then that Noah realized they weren’t after him.

  “They smell the rabbits,” he thought. “They want my rabbits.”

  Slowly, his eyes on the wolves, he stooped and felt for the top of the pack. With one hand he loosened the strings, which cinched it closed, and pulled out a rabbit like a magic trick. The wolves stopped. Now their keen eyes pr
oved what their noses had told them. This was what they wanted all along. Noah stood up and tossed the stiff rabbit over their heads. Two turned and ran after it. One at a time, he flung all the dead rabbits as far as he could, and one after another, the wolves broke off, each finding its own easy meal. While they were busy, Noah grabbed the empty bag and ran, nervously looking over his shoulder, his rifle at the ready. But bend after bend, only his lean shadow followed him down the frozen trail as he ran toward home and his waiting mother, who would never believe what had happened.

  And she would never understand.

  The Walrus Hunters

  With a final heave, Sampson Oogruk pushed the heavy boat, which slid from the ice, splashed into the frigid water, and slowly began to drift away, rocking side to side until it settled evenly. His two grandsons pulled a long rope tied to the bow, bringing the craft back to where they stood on the ice beside the old man looking across the partially frozen sea through binoculars. The spring day sparkled. Icebergs floated gently beneath a cloudless, blue sky. The wind paused and the sea stilled—content to be free of its long winter sleep.

  This was the first walrus hunt of the year.

  The three hunters had dragged the boat full of gear six miles by snowmobile from their tiny village huddled at the jagged edge of the still-frozen sea. This early in the year, most of the bay was still locked beneath a roof of ice, but here it was open, and the first seagulls were returning, several hovering above the boat. Within weeks, ducks and geese would return to breed on the snowless tundra, and mosquitoes would hatch from stagnant ponds, forming giant, buzzing clouds so large and so hungry that ten thousand caribou would run until exhausted to escape. But there was no escape in distance, only in freezing water or high winds, when the tormenting swarms clung to blades of tundra grass until the winds passed, counting wasted minutes of their short-lived lives.

  Much older and slower than his grandsons, Sampson faced the open water holding a small amulet in the shape of a walrus, a slight wind blowing his black hair into his eyes. It was a hunter’s talisman carved from the ivory of a walrus by his grandfather long ago—passed down to his father and then to him. It was faded yellow and smooth from generations of handling. Both tiny tusks had been lost from the amulet for many years, and only tiny holes marked where they had once been. The old man held the figure above his head and sang to the sea in his native language. It was an ancient hunter’s song asking the sea to provide a safe and successful hunt.

  The Land and Sea had always provided for the People, and the People in turn respected the Land and Sea. It had been that way since the beginning.

  When he was done singing, the old man placed the amulet inside his deep parka pocket and climbed into the back of the boat and pulled the frayed rope on the motor. It sputtered and died. Again and again he pulled, but the motor did not start. At his age the work tired him quickly. He squeezed the fuel line bulb and pulled the choke all the way out. On the next pull the motor started, coughing and belching smoke. Sampson pushed the choke in until the motor settled, running even and smooth. After it idled for a few minutes, the younger of the two boys, Willie, climbed in and sat down mid-boat while his brother, Jimmy, pushed the boat away from the ice pack and jumped onto the bow, coiling the bowline on the floor beside an extra tank of mixed gas and a wooden paddle.

  As their grandfather twisted the throttle wide open, the boat sped forward and climbed onto the smooth surface—a long, white wake trailing behind. Before it lay the flat horizon with nothing to distinguish the far edge of the sea except the low sun skirting the curve of the world. Somewhere in the distance—too far to be seen—a polar bear smelled the faint scent of a seal pup and turned his hunger-driven step in that direction.

  For hours the hunters searched for walrus among blue-white icebergs and on the open sea, but they found none. Sometimes they stopped the motor to listen for the faraway sound of walrus bellowing their low, throaty rumbling, but heard nothing. Around midday, they stopped to eat their lunch of dried salmon strips dipped in rendered seal oil and to swap fuel tanks. There were thick, cubed slices of pickled muktuk, white and gray, a fatty treat of whale blubber and skin. The boys played cards on the bow while they ate. With his teeth, Sampson pulled the nearly translucent red flesh from the distasteful skin and slowly chewed his oily fish, washing it down with a cold orange soda.

  When he finished eating, the old man took out an ivory pipe from inside his parka, dropped a pinch of dried leaves into the fire-cured bowl, and packed it with a finger. The pipe was ornately carved with a traditional scene of hunters in an umiak spearing a whale. When he was a young boy, men in his village hunted seal and walrus and whales from umiaks, long boats made of sealskin stretched over a driftwood frame. Back then no one in the village had a motor. Sampson remembered his first hunt on the sea. It was over fifty years ago. His father, two uncles, and a cousin were in the same boat. On the third day out, camping each night on great sheets of ice, they killed a great whale. It took days to haul it back. When the hunters finally returned to the village, the People rejoiced. Everyone came out to participate, including women and children and even the very old. The men pulled and pulled until the whale slid upon the ice. Then, as was tradition, they cut off its great head so that its spirit could return to the sea to tell other beasts how well they had been treated. Then they butchered it, sharing the meat and fat among all.

  That’s the way things had always been.

  The Land, the Sea, and the People were the same.

  Sampson lit the pipe with a match and stood in the boat, holding one hand against his forehead to block the sun as he looked out across the sea. That was one of the ways of the hunter: patience. A good hunter would stand motionless for a long time taking in the landscape, seeing everything, every imperceptible change, until becoming part of the landscape—nothing more than a tall shadow or snowdrift. The giant flat sheets of ice floating on the indigo sea moved slowly, but it was important to know where they were moving. A boat or a man could be destroyed between the collisions of two large bodies of ice. It had happened many times in the past, and there were many tragic stories told in villages up and down the frozen coast.

  Sometimes, a polar bear or arctic fox would appear suddenly on the horizon, almost magically as if out of myth, unseen before because they blend so well with the whiteness. A close encounter with a hungry polar bear could be a bad thing.

  Two spotted ring seals climbed onto a thin sheet of ice floating nearby and lay basking in the sunshine. For much of winter, the sun never came up above the horizon and the Arctic lay buried in dark and ice. But, now the days were long, and every living thing welcomed the return of warmth and light. Everything this far north, every feature of nature’s great cycle, depended on the return of the sun to thaw the glacial world.

  Sampson sat down and began to tell the story of the first seals. He told it the way all elders told such stories—slowly with pauses of silence.

  “Long time ago, there was a small village where there lived a girl of marrying age. She lived alone in her own kazghie, a small house dug into the ground with a sodden roof and smoke hole.”

  It was a common story, one the two boys had heard many times, but they stopped what they were doing and listened out of respect.

  “One night, while she was sleeping, a man crept into her home and raped her. It was so dark inside that she could not see who it was. It happened that way for several nights until she had a thought. She would wait until the man returned and scratch his face to mark him. The next morning the young woman walked about her village looking at the faces of men. She was horrified when she saw the scratches on her own brother’s face. In her great shame, she ran to the edge of the village and threw herself off the steep cliff, plunging into the white-capped sea. The brother, seeing what he had done to his sister, also jumped off the cliff.”

  Sampson stopped talking while he tapped his pipe on the side of the boat, s
pilling its burned-down contents into the sea. His grandsons waited in silence for the end they knew would come.

  “But instead of dying from the fall, they floated to the surface as seals—the very first seals—and swam away together.”

  Just then, a sound faintly pierced the distance. The hunters sat still and listened, the only sound the soft lapping of waves against the side of the aluminum boat. Then it came again, faint and far away.

  It was the unmistakable sound of a herd of walrus.

  From the hard-won experiences of a lifetime of hunting, Sampson quickly determined the bearing of the sound, pulled the starter rope, twisted the throttle wide open, and turned the bow in the direction of the sound, while Willie Tuluk stood on the coiled rope in the front of the boat looking out across the flat water through binoculars. When he saw them far ahead, laying on a sheet of ice—fat and reddish-brown—he turned around, pointing and smiling, his broad white teeth contrasting against his brown face and long, black hair. He held up four fingers indicating how many bulls there were with tusks.

  Like their fathers and their fathers before them for a thousand years, the Sea would again provide for the People.

  When the speeding boat was close, the two brothers stood up, lifted a hatch on the seat and pulled out automatic rifles with long, black magazines protruding from the bottom. As the alarmed herd began a panicked shuffle toward the edge of the ice, the old man slowed the boat while the two young hunters fired randomly into the awkward and terrified mass, striking bulls and cows alike, even killing a number of walrus pups trying to keep up with their mothers. They emptied their rifles, the loud reports shattering the silence the way the ice pack sometimes cracked suddenly, so sharp it could be heard for miles.