by John Smelcer
“Johnny,” she said without looking up from her work, “did you get the water like I asked?”
“Yes, Grandma,” the young man said while lifting the lid to a large pot on the propane cooking stove.
The soup was boiling too high, so he turned it down as he had done to the fire. The soup stopped rolling, and he stirred it with a long metal spoon.
“What are we having, Grandma?” he asked without turning.
“Caribou soup. I put an onion and some carrots and potatoes in it. It should be done.” She was still sewing the colorful pattern onto the soft tongue of the moccasin.
The young man stood by the fire for a minute and then went outside to the snowmobile and pulled two blue five-gallon plastic jugs from a metal sled. With one in each hand, each weighing some forty pounds, he carried them into the cabin and set them on the kitchen floor. Then he placed one on top of the counter, and the other he set in the corner to the left of the stove on which the hot pot of simmering soup sat.
“Thank you, Johnny,” the old woman said as she set her needlework aside and got up to check the soup and take bowls and spoons from the cupboard. She moved slowly, the way people who have lived for a very long time always move, as if every muscle was stiff and ached. She had long gray hair, though in fact it was more silver than gray.
Johnny Least-Weasel helped his grandmother. He always had. That was his father’s way and the way his grandfather had taught his father. That was the way of his people, of all Indian people. Here, the old were respected for many reasons, not just because they knew about the old ways. They were respected as much for having survived in a world so hostile that the phrase in their language for greeting someone meant “So, you’re still alive.”
“Respect the elders,” they had always said. “Help them out.”
When he caught a great many salmon in his fish trap, Johnny always gave the biggest and best fish to the elders who no longer fished or hunted for themselves. And when he was lucky and shot a moose or caribou, he offered them whichever parts they wanted. They always asked for the liver and the heart. When he shot a moose, they asked for the nose to make moose-nose soup.
They also made soup from king-salmon heads. After cutting the head off just before the gills, they slit the head longways, from the nose holes straight back, so that the head lies in two perfect wedges. While exposed, the two halves of the brain, small as grains of sand, are clearly visible.
There is a story that, in the beginning, salmon could not swim down to the river bottom because they had air in their heads that made them float back to the surface, where they were easy prey for eagles and bears. The chief of the Salmon People complained to Raven, who opened their heads and put two small rocks inside so that they could sink to the safety of the depths. Since that time, all salmon can swim deep, and when you cut their heads in half, you can still see the two tiny rocks Raven put there.
Back when the old woman was young, Indians would wait one day after catching salmon before they would cut them up so that the salmon’s spirits could have time to leave their bodies. Nowadays, when Indians caught salmon, they didn’t wait so long, but they still tossed the skeletons back into the river so that the spirits could return to that place where all Salmon People live. In this northland, the connection to nature was not yet fully broken.
Recently the old woman had become more and more forgetful, less aware, increasingly dependent on the familiarity of the small tilted cabin. During the previous fall, she had asked her grandson to take her berry picking. On the way, Johnny had seen a herd of caribou swimming across a small lake—their antlered heads just above the waterline. He crept down to the edge, hiding behind a stand of willow. There were four of them coming directly at him, and they would soon stand on the shore. Kneeling, he raised his rifle, aimed at the closest animal, and waited. Just as he was about to pull the trigger, his grandmother walked up beside him, standing where the surprised caribou could see her clearly.
“What are you doing, Johnny?” she asked.
Seeing her, the small herd turned and swam away toward the far side of the lake, and quickly vanished into the forest.
The old woman shuffled around the kitchen while her grandson set the table. He tossed the empty and half-empty cans of soda into the garbage and wiped the tabletop in tight circles with a rag. Before they sat down, he turned the old black-and-white television set so that they could see it from the table while they ate.
The house boasted a main room, which included a kitchen area, a dining table with only two chairs that did not match, and a little additional space for sitting. Two kerosene lamps lit the space in a soft, warm light. A door at the back led to the tiny bedroom. There was no bathroom. No one in the village had a real bathroom. Instead, they had outhouses and honey pots for when the need came late at night, when it was too dark or too cold to go outside.
Framed pictures and a stretched black bearskin rug hung on the wall, and a cross hung above the couch. The wood floor was bare and rubbed smooth in places. The entire cabin was slightly tilted from settling. Every year, the permafrost heaved and shifted the house up or down, this way or that way. But it was a comfortable house. Not a particularly good house, but it had stood in this place for more than fifty years, and it was always warm inside, and the smell of coffee always greeted visitors at the door.
The young man could tell that the woodstove was barely breathing, so he opened the damper a tiny bit, just enough until he could hear the fire catch again, the flames coming back from their hiding place deep inside the logs. The Indian knew the secret of wood. He knew that all trees held fire deep in their hearts, somewhere near the core. Great Raven had put it there in the time of long ago to give Indians warmth. And any single tree had only so much heat to give. That was the law of things. Let it burn too quickly and it would be gone quickly. The trick was to bring out the flames slowly, at just the right height, so that the heat could last for hours. In this country, where fire means life, it took skill and years of experience with wood and the ax to bring out the flames and to make them last through the long nights of winter.
Warmth was so precious in the far north that men went to great lengths to trap it. All log cabins, even the very-best-made ones, suffered from crevices and cracks where the hewn logs did not fit perfectly. Into such spaces people pushed moss to keep heat from escaping. They called this chinking. It took hours to heat up even a small log cabin, but once done, once the logs themselves had absorbed the warmth throughout their entire length, to the core, they would stay warm for half a day after the fire had died and embers had turned to ash.
Without fire, no one would survive January or February, when it is so cold that nothing moves. When even the propane that feeds the lights and the cooking stove wants to remain motionless, waiting until the sun warms the metal skin of the tank.
Outside the cabin, all along an entire wall, ran a stack of firewood as tall as the old woman and two sticks deep, except for a gap in the first several yards of the line. The wood had already been hauled inside, tossed into its crate, and later fed to the hungry woodstove that never slept and always rattled while it was burning. Although it never went outside, the stove knew that the wood was there, waiting.
Johnny and his grandmother talked very little while they ate. Now and then, the gas lights flickered and a piece of firewood in the stove popped.
Peering out the large window in the front wall of the cabin, Johnny watched a raven sitting on a tree. It sat on a limb, its keen black eyes searching for food on the ground. Finding nothing, it flew away, low over the treetops, until Johnny could no longer see it. The bird reminded him of the many stories his grandparents had told him about Raven. His favorites were the ones about how Raven made the world and about the time he stole the stars, the moon, and the sun from an old chief so that there would be light in the world.
“Grandma,” the young man said, still looking out the window.
The old woman looked up from her soup, wiped her mout
h, gazed at her grandson but said nothing.
There was a commercial for new Cadillacs on the television.
“When will Grandpa be back from his trapline?” he asked.
“Hmm,” she said in more of a grunt than a word. “I don’t know for sure. When we were young and I was skinny and pretty, he stayed for only a few days. But after so many years, he stays longer sometimes. If the hunting is good and he catches lots of wolves and fox or shoots a moose or caribou, he stays longer. If the weather is good, he maybe stay for a few more days. It depends on the weather, I guess.”
When the old woman was first married, she had accompanied her husband and his friends on a moose hunt. It was late fall and the forest was leafless and gray. The crisp air smelled of rotting leaves and berries. One morning, after an early breakfast, the men left to search upriver for moose. Morrie stayed behind in the warm cabin.
“Hunting,” her husband had told her as he shoved the long green boat from the sandy shore, “is the work of men.”
But shortly after they left—the faraway sound of the outboard still echoing in the hills—a large bull moose stepped out from the naked forest surrounding the cabin and stood beside the woodpile. Morrie took her rifle, left for her protection in the event of bears, and killed it with her first shot. She spent the rest of the day cleaning the old cabin, sweeping the floor, splitting firewood and kindling, and slow-cooking a pot of stew made with fresh meat from a hindquarter of the moose.
When the men returned after dark—hungry, tired, cold, and empty-handed—they were surprised to see that the woman had done what they had not. They were shamed. At first they were silent, but they couldn’t hold back their tongues. Halfway through their supper of moose stew, each man in turn began to praise the woman hunter. Morrie was embarrassed and said nothing for a while. But as the men continued to praise her, she eventually began to laugh. Soon, everyone was laughing and joking about the day. Someone even said she would make a “good man.”
They still talked about it.
She looked out the window, saw the sun already going to the other side of the world for the night, and then she turned her attention back to her bowl of soup.
“I wish I had gone with him this time,” Johnny said, reaching for a piece of bread to dip in his soup.
“Hmm,” the old woman said again. “He happy by himself.”
Johnny thought about her words for a moment before he spoke again.
“But I worry about him. Sometimes I dream he gets hurt, or that his snowmobile won’t start or runs out of gas and that he’s stuck way out there alone,” he said, nodding toward the window as he uttered the last words of his sentence.
Morrie Least-Weasel spoke slowly, the way all elders did. She was born before there were many white people in their country, back when all Indians still spoke Indian.
“He been going out there to that trapline since before you daddy born. He don’t need you or nobody when he go out there. Someday you learn that, Johnny.”
The old woman smiled, and finished her last spoonful, but there was something in her voice and the way she looked at the outside thermometer and the clearing sky that bothered him. It was as if she, too, was concerned, but respected her husband’s pride enough not to send the boy after him when he was not yet gone too long. While vision and hearing fades, old bones turn thin and brittle, and once-strong muscles grow weak, pride endures to the very end—resisting change like the great land itself.
People say that wild animals—bears and wolves—held in captivity die not from a lack of food or water or from disease, but from a loss of pride.
Now the television show they had been watching was on again. It was about a group of teenagers who lived in Beverly Hills. The characters were sitting and talking over espresso in a huge mall with more stores in it than salmon in a river in July. The young people in the villages watched the show and talked about it. They wanted fast cars; swimming pools; bright, crowded shopping malls; and cell phones buzzing in their ears like mosquitoes.
But they could have none of that here. Not one part. Most of the teens had never even been beyond the next few villages up or down the great river. They knew, vaguely, that a whole other world existed far beyond the white mountains in the direction where the sun arose each morning. But they watched the TV show every week just like they went to church on Sunday, where they learned that Raven was really a skinny white man with long hair, blue eyes, and a beard, a man whom no one had loved enough to save when he was nailed to a totem pole.
The old woman didn’t care for it—the television show. She stood up, took her bowl and spoon over to the sink, and poured some coffee into a white cup with “INDIAN PRIDE” printed in bright red letters on it.
“Want some, Johnny?” she asked, lifting the old-style percolator pot.
“Yes, tsin’aen,” he said, and brought over a cup with the symbol of their tribe on the side. Tsin’aen was their word for “thank you,” and he pronounced it “chennen.” He knew some words that his grandparents had taught him, mostly the names of animals and how to count to ten, but only the elders still spoke the language. Apparently it was a secret you could not know until you had lived for a very long time.
When he finished his coffee, Johnny placed his cup and bowl and spoon in the sink and turned off the television. He opened the latch to the woodstove, saw that there was only a glowing bed of red embers, and stuffed two fat pieces of wood into it before closing its door and spinning the damper open until he could hear the glowing embers bite into the bottom log, find its secret place, and drag its flames screaming and hissing into the world.
He watched the fire for a few minutes, turned down the damper, and put on his parka, hat, and gloves. He stopped at the door and turned to the old woman sitting on the couch with her moccasins and needle.
“Good night, Grandma. I’ll stop in and see you tomorrow.”
“You a good boy, Johnny,” she replied, looking up only briefly.
With that, he opened the door and stepped into the thick, swallowing darkness. It was so dark that it seemed as though some of the light went out of the cabin and was replaced by grayness. He closed the door, pulling hard until he heard the lock catch, and then he walked out into the frozen world, pulled the starter rope of his snowmobile twice, and drove back toward the village set along the great river’s edge. His dim yellowish headlight bounced off trees and snow-banks and the occasional rabbit as he made his way below bright and luminous stars.
When they were far up in the hills, the hunters saw a grizzly bear coming slowly toward them. It was the biggest bear they had ever seen. The young men started yelling and throwing rocks and shooting arrows at the bear, which only made it angry. All the young men ran away, leaving the old man to face the giant bear alone.
THE TINY SHREW that had made the faint, scurrying tracks in the new snow darted from its hole and disappeared around the back side of the tree. A slight breeze brought the scent of spruce down through the swaying dark green boughs, settling on the old man at its base.
Albert Least-Weasel knelt on one knee on the hard frozen earth he had uncovered and studied the trap. The metal was very cold, and it burned his fingers when he touched it. A few degrees colder and his skin would have stuck to the trap.
But Albert knew better than to touch the metal in a situation like that, so he pulled his gloves back over his freezing hands.
All traps such as this one work in the same way. The hunter steps on both sides until his weight opens the snarling teeth. Then, still standing, he reaches down between the straining jaws and sets a small, thin latch that holds the teeth wide open. The bigger the trap, the more weight it takes to pull open the hungry teeth.
A grizzly trap took two men to set. Even then, it was a scary thing to do.
Albert Least-Weasel remembered what happened to a man from a village downriver, about thirty years before. Maybe longer. The man and his cousin were setting grizzly traps in a cluster all around a tree. There must have b
een about six or seven traps, maybe more, and they hung a whole moose front-quarter from a strong branch about eight feet off the ground. When he was done hoisting the heavy bait, the man accidentally backed up and stepped into one of the monstrous contraptions. When the steel jaws closed, they shattered his leg bone about a foot above his ankle, and the man from downriver fell backward into the waiting jaws of another grizzly trap, which killed him instantly.
The old man hadn’t set such a dangerous trap since the death of his own father many years ago. Many bears used to roam these hills, especially in late summer when they’d comb the hillsides for ripe berries before descending to the river to eat spawned salmon rotting on the banks and shores.
There weren’t as many bears anymore. There weren’t as many of a lot of things nowadays. Villagers had to travel farther and farther from home to find big game.
With his one foot inside the trap, even though it didn’t hurt, Albert could not press down on the two sides evenly with enough weight or pressure to open the persistent jaws. He tried pushing down on each side with all his weight on his gloved hands, feeling the strain through his arms and shoulders, but the trap would not open. Not even a little. It just glared up at him as the sun shone off the snow. It knew nothing except that it was closed as it had been a hundred times, and that it was happy to be closed, to be relieved of the tension of the springs.