by John Smelcer
When the guns were finally quiet and the grayish smoke had drifted away, nearly a dozen walrus lay dead or dying. The white surface was splattered in blood soaking into snow. One wounded cow managed to drag herself off the ice and escape.
Sampson idled up to the edge so that Willie and Jimmy could jump off and pull the boat up far enough onto the ice pack that it would not float away. While several wounded walrus lay on their sides laboring to breathe, blood streaming down the stiff whiskers on their long fleshy noses, Willie cut off their ivory tusks with a chainsaw while his brother stacked them gently in the belly of the boat, careful not to damage them. The collected tusks were worth a great deal of money. When the hunters finished their savage work, they cast off, turning the bow homeward.
With the low sun behind them, resting on the very rim of the world, the men sat in the boat drinking beer, smiling, laughing, and talking about the success of the hunt above the din of the outboard motor.
Far off, as the moon began to drag across the sky, a polar bear stopped in its tracks, raised its great yellow-white head, flared its black nostrils, and slid into the icy sea, following a distant yet familiar scent.
The Abduction of Lucy Secondchief
Almost four years had passed since Lucy Secondchief’s father died. She could scarcely remember what he looked like anymore. To a ten-year-old, four years is a long time—almost half a lifetime.
On the day of the funeral, people kept stopping by their little, tilted cabin on the frozen tundra, telling the grieving wife how sad they were for her loss. Others stopped by to bring food for the community supper after the service. There were boxes of fry bread and biscuits, spaghetti noodles and canned spaghetti sauce, cardboard boxes of frozen moose and caribou meat, and two brown bags full of dried salmon strips. There was coffee and tea, paper plates and bowls, napkins, everything necessary to feed an entire village. It seemed to Lucy as if everyone who visited brought some kind of food.
Some people, mostly old friends of her father’s that Lucy hadn’t seen in a long time, came to say how much money her father owed them. He must have owed a great deal because by the end of the day, Lucy’s mother had given away all of her father’s tools, two rifles, and a large stack of plywood, which he was going to use to add on to the small, sagging cabin. One man was owed so much—so he said—that Lucy’s mother let him take the entire sled dog team, all seven huskies, and the sled.
Lucy spent the whole day sitting on a small chair beside the crackling wood stove, listening quietly to all the conversations that came and left the house each time the door opened or closed. She sat that way all day just listening and holding tight to the cheap, ragged doll her father had brought her when he came back from the city. It was her only toy. Her grandmother used to try to take it away from her during winter. She said that children weren’t allowed to play with toys of any kind because if the winter knew that children were enjoying the slow winter months, it would stay around even longer.
On the night of his funeral, the sky was filled with northern lights. It was the most intense display anyone had ever seen. Lucy knew that the lights, the aurora, were a bad omen, a malevolent force that comes down to carry people away. That’s why parents tell their children it’s important to stay quiet on such nights, so the lights won’t see or hear them. She had once seen some Indian boys challenge the lights, standing nervously outside calling to them and whistling. But eventually they all ran back inside their cabins out of fear.
But on the night of her father’s funeral, when the lights were at their very brightest in history, Lucy walked right out into the middle of a great field, stood beneath the shimmering stars and the dancing aurora, and yelled to the lights, demanding them to take her away. Her mother came out of her titling cabin, calling to her. The lights heard Lucy’s defiance and dropped down from the star-raddled sky, encircling the young girl within shimmering red and green waves. The whole village watched in disbelief from behind frosted windows as the girl just stood there. Sled dogs, sitting atop their little straw-filled houses, began to howl.
No one had ever seen anything like it.
Instead of running, little Lucy Secondchief just stood where she was, right in the middle of a great spruce-edged field, until she began to laugh. She laughed so loud that her echo returned all the way from the far, white mountains thirty miles distant across the wide river.
After that, she never cried for her dead father again.
Her mother still wept every night, though, not so much from loneliness, not simply because she missed her husband, but because the life of a widow in a village is a sad one. Without a husband, she was an outcast. As the daughter of a dead man, Lucy was an outcast, too.
All through the intolerable winter, her mother worked a trap line every morning. She’d get up early, drink a cup of weak tea made from the dry leaves of a local plant called Labrador tea, put on her parka, winter boots, gloves, and hat, and strike out into the wintered hills on snowshoes. She’d stay out there all morning, alone in the whiteness, checking rabbit snares and resetting them as needed. She’d go out even when the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. She had to. On a good day, she’d bring home at least one scrawny rabbit for their pot. The name for rabbit in their language is ggax. They were once so plentiful that the village was named Ggax Kuna’, which means Rabbit River.
But most days were not good, and Lucy’s mother would bring home only sadness and hunger in the empty rucksack. On those days, they would sit in the small, dark room that was their cabin, lit by a single, flickering candle, and sip hot broth made from boiled leftover bones from the day before.
Occasionally, another Indian family, or even a white family, would bring them something extra: hard bread, an old blanket, potatoes, or dried salmon strips. But that rarely happened. Customs change slowly, like glaciers—steadfastly resistant to sudden change. Here, the custom was to abandon the women of a dead man. Women were the property of husbands; daughters, the property of fathers. They had no value of their own. No voice. No role in the village other than as daughter or wife or mother.
In every measurable way, all they had was each other.
For the most part, though, the villagers saw Lucy and her mother as ghosts. They were no longer part of the village. Whether they would live or die was up to Great Raven. Stories had been handed down from the first white explorers that tell of how they would come upon those abandoned women starving in the forests. They described them in their journals as pitiable, wandering wild creatures, not as humans.
But Lucy and her mother had survived, were surviving. In the spring they set fish traps beneath small, swollen creeks to catch suckers and whitefish. In the summer they sometimes caught salmon stranded in the shallow gravel channels of the great river. In the fall they gathered berries. During the second winter after her husband died, Lucy’s mother shot a cow moose that came close to the cabin. It was illegal to shoot a female moose like that, out of season and without a license, but their cabin was far enough away from the rest of the village that no one heard—no one came to investigate—especially not the game warden. If he had caught them, he would have taken away the woman’s rifle.
Although their bellies were empty and aching much of the time, their nights were filled with love and happiness. Every night, Lucy’s mother would fire up the small sauna behind the cabin, and the two would sit in the dark—sweating, talking, singing, telling stories, gently lashing each other with swatches of spruce, the scent of the boughs permeating the cedar-planked room. When it was too hot, they would step out into the cold night air and rub handfuls of snow on their brown skin to cool down. After the sauna, they would sit inside the warm cabin—their tiny wood stove rattling—combing and braiding each other’s long, black hair. Before bed, they told traditional creation stories, drank weak tea, and prayed for more rabbits.
One night, toward the end of the short-lived summer, just before leaves began
to turn and bears began to search for winter dens, as Lucy lay in bed beside her mother while the moon lay on the edge of the windowsill, she told of a dream she remembered from a few nights earlier.
“I dreamt that I was in a strange house and there was a table full of food. There were all kinds of breads and meats and cheese,” she whispered, with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling. “There was even a basket full of apples.”
“It sounds like a good dream, Lucy,” her mother whispered through the darkness.
The young girl was quiet for a long time before she spoke again.
“There was all this food, enough for many people. Then I saw you outside, and I tried to let you in, but the doors and windows would not open. You were alone and starving, your eyes were dark and hollow, and your hair was white. I yelled to you, but you did not answer. I tried to break the glass with a chair, but it would not break. Then you walked away. I screamed for you to come back, but you did not hear me. When you were too far away to see, I turned around and there were other Indian children sitting at the table eating all the food. But then they didn’t look like Indians any more. I stood by the door crying until there was nothing left for me.”
The tired woman turned on her side, raised herself on one elbow, and kissed her daughter on the forehead.
“It was only a dream, child,” she said as she rolled back into the warm spot her body had made in the thin mattress and pulled the heavy blankets up to her chin.
The next day, Lucy was outside carrying a stack of firewood when a big, tall-roofed black car pulled into the drive. It was an unusually cold and windy day for early fall. Lucy’s mother came out from inside the house, wearing the tattered, old shawl she wore when she was inside the house.
Two men stepped from the car and walked up to Lucy’s mother. From where she stood, Lucy could see the taller man hand her a piece of paper, a warrant. Her mother looked at the paper, but she could not read it. She had never learned to read. But she knew what the paper said. They gave the same thing to Indian families all across this country. That paper was the end to families. The law gave the government the authority to take Indian children away from their families and send them far from their homes and villages. They sent them to Kansas, Oregon, the Dakotas, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania—anywhere far enough away so that they would forget what it means to be Indian.
“It is in the child’s best interest,” the government men would tell the grieving families.
The men walked toward Lucy, still standing with her two little arms full of firewood. When they were close, she dropped the pile and tried to run to her mother. But they grabbed her and dragged her to the car, pushed her into the back seat, and closed the door. There were no handles on the inside. Lucy was trapped. She screamed and kicked. Then the low, powerful engine started again, and the car turned around.
Lucy stood on the back seat with her tiny feet pressed into the cushions of the black seat and looked out the slender back window as the car drove down the long, rutted driveway. She cried out for her mother and beat her tiny fists against the window.
Just then a great wind arose, shaking the last orange and yellow and brown leaves from trees, raking them up from the ground, the brittle and rotting leaves swirling and twisting across the driveway. A large branch broke off from a tree and fell across the road ahead, almost blocking the car.
Lucy watched through tears as her mother ran behind the black car, her tattered shawl fluttering in the wind like a ragged bird, saw her slip and fall in the muddy ruts, her thin, brown arms reaching out as she cried for her daughter.
Lucy would never see her again.
White Moon on Black Water
All of the pews on the groom’s side were full of his relatives—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, and all of their collected families.
The bride’s side was empty.
But she was beautiful in her long, white gown. She had dark brown hair, almost black eyes, and she was slender. Sleek even. No one knew much about her. She had no family and no job. The groom’s father had to give her away. But what she lacked in history, she made up for in love. She loved the young man standing before her, softly holding her hands, and he loved her with all his heart.
“I do,” the groom said, loud enough to be heard in the back row.
Within minutes the wedding was over, the handfuls of rice tossed, and the pews emptied.
“How much do you love me?” the new wife asked as they drove away to their honeymoon two counties over.
“Honey, you know I love you more than anything,” the man replied, leaning over to kiss her.
“Would you give up your job to be with me?” she asked anxiously.
“Baby, that’s crazy,” the man said with a smile. “We gotta live.”
The young wife didn’t speak for a while.
Sensing her hurt, the husband tried to make amends. “Sure, Honey. I’d do anything to be with you. Hell, we can live on love.”
“Do you promise?” she asked, smiling, her dark eyes gorgeous in the sunset. “Oh, do you promise to love me no matter what?”
She reached over, took his free hand and held it tight.
“Sure,” he replied. “No matter what.”
Several miles later she spoke again.
“Turn left there,” she said, pointing to a dirt road ahead.
“But Baby, we have reservations.”
“Please,” the woman pleaded, on the verge of crying. “Oh, please. I want to show you my home.”
The newlywed husband was curious. He had never been invited to meet her parents. All he knew was that she was an only child.
“All right,” he said, looking at his watch.
Two miles down the backcountry road, they came upon a small lake. A loon was swimming on the far side, and the sun was just above the treetops. It would be dark soon. The man recognized it as the place where they had first met. He had been fishing when she stepped wet and naked from the forest, explaining that she had been skinny-dipping and something had carried off her clothes.
The woman stepped from the car. She stood before her husband, still in his tuxedo, and slipped the long, white dress from her brown body. She walked to the edge of the lake and turned around, motioning for the man to follow. Then, she dived into the cold, dark water. When she emerged, she was an otter. She was an otter woman, the very last one. She had left the lake to find a mate.
She floated close—effortless, watching, waiting.
The man stood on the shore until it was dark, until stars began to shine and the moon floated on the black surface of the lake like a white lily pad, until everything he knew became like the night and he stepped, naked, into the uncertain water.
A Walk in the Wind
Seth Kulusuk trudged through darkness toward the hill above his village. It was quiet except for the sound of the relentless wind blowing across a barren landscape and the crunch of snow beneath the boy’s feet as he crossed a packed snowdrift. Behind him, flickering lights from oil lamps lit small windows in the huddled homes, and light from a low moon stretched his shadow across the tundra.
Life in the Arctic village at the far edge of the known world was as hard as the pack ice that locked the frozen sea clear across to Siberia.
At the edge of the village, a polar bear rummaged through garbage while anxious sled dogs looked on, barking and howling and straining at their short chains. They were nervous from instinct and from experience. Sometimes, when food was scarce, the bears killed and ate sled dogs. Polar bears are stealthy hunters. They have to be. It is near impossible to sneak up on a seal out on the sea ice. They make no sound until it is too late. Sometimes they lose their fear of men and snatch them from inside their warm, yellow-lighted homes, smashing through doors or frost-glazed windows to drag them screaming into the night where ravens—little black-robed priests—wat
ch quietly and without pity from rooftops.
How many villagers over the centuries had gone outside in the dark for a simple chore, never to return?
Three months before the boy was born, his parents were walking at the far edge of the village. His mother—then young and beautiful—was six months pregnant when a great, white bear, weighing over a thousand pounds, began to stalk them. Although they tried to run to the village, the hungry bear was faster. When it came upon them, his young father told his wife to run for safety while he stayed behind so that she and their unborn son might live. By the time she reached the first house, the man was already dead.
The next day, men from the village tracked the bear to kill it. But they never found it. The trail vanished at the edge of the sea. It was a story no one in the village would ever forget.
The village was so far from the rest of the world that even the sun forgot about it. For whole months at a time, it does not rise above the horizon, and the People of the North exist in darkness until, near springtime, the sun returns to cast its angled light across the white, frozen world, and the ice pack begins to groan and creak in its slow breaking.
Seth had lived here all of his young life. Like his father and his father’s fathers for a thousand years before him, he had been born here. The name of the People came from the name of the Land. They were inseparable the way polar bears, fixed to snow and ice, could live nowhere else.
But the harshness of this place was not only a product of the climate, but a product of the heart. Wicked men lived here. Who can say for certain whether they came here that way or whether their wickedness bore into them with the everlasting wind and cold and darkness?
In the past year, a police officer had raped and murdered a village girl and hid her body where he thought no one would find it. But they did. So far from the watchful eyes of the world, he had made his own laws—as violent as the laws of the land—and lived by them, the way a polar bear smells a newborn seal pup many miles away, tracks the scent to its source, and finds its den buried in deep snow. Then, with all his immense weight, he pounces with both paws, breaks through the crusted ceiling of the chamber to kill and eat the struggling meal.