by John Smelcer
“By yourself? You’d just get lost out there. Then we’d have to go look for two people.”
Johnny, still looking down, said nothing.
“Don’t worry,” his uncle said, standing up and escorting his young nephew to the door, one hand on his shoulder. “I can’t go now. I have important meetings for the next couple of days. If he’s not back by then, we’ll go look for him. How’s that? It’s too late to start today anyway. Besides, don’t you have to work at the store?”
His uncle was right on both points. Johnny did have to go to work for a few hours, and it was already getting dark. But darkness really wasn’t a problem. It was almost always dark during this time of year, and people traveled up and down the frozen river trails in the dark all the time. His uncle was just using it as an excuse. Johnny didn’t really understand why his uncle wasn’t more concerned for his own father, but he took his advice to wait.
Johnny went outside to where he’d left his snowmobile idling, zipped up his parka as far as it would go, pulled the strings tight on his hood, hunkered down below the windshield again, and drove to the store. He spent the next four hours sitting behind the counter, reading some of the used magazines on the swap rack because no one came in to buy anything, on account of the cold.
That night he returned to his cabin.
After lighting an oil lamp and starting a fire, Johnny stood outside on the porch for a long time, listening to the slight wind and looking at the frozen river, the stars and constellations, a small square of light cast on the snow from his kitchen window, and the hills brightly illuminated by a full moon.
Next door, he could hear music and yelling and laughing coming from his uncle’s house. There was a party again.
The young Indian went back inside his cabin, collected a few of his things, tossing them into a pack. He threw in extra socks, matches, some dried salmon strips, a flashlight, a hatchet, and a sleeping bag. From behind the door he picked up his rifle, a lever-action Winchester with a shoulder strap that was really just a piece of white rope, and checked to make sure it was loaded. Johnny knew that in such cold, as it would surely be the next day, the oil or grease on moving parts of the rifle would become so stiff that the hammer would not fall and the firing pin would not strike the primer to ignite the cartridge. He opened the breach and used cotton swabs and an old handkerchief to wipe away excess oil. When he was done, he put a few extra shells and a small folding knife into one of the deep pockets of his parka.
The next few hours went by slowly. Johnny cooked some dinner—a fried-Spam sandwich—swept his floor, and tried to read his history book. But his mind was preoccupied with thoughts about his grandfather, and he found himself pacing around the cabin like a caged wolf.
Johnny took up his fiddle and sat on the edge of his bed and began to play. The strings were a bit out of tune so he had to adjust them. They were always out of tune, from the constantly changing temperature of the cabin. When they seemed right, he played for a while. His grandfather had taught him how when he was twelve, and he sold several tanned pelts to buy him this violin as a gift. It was perhaps a hundred years old, and it looked it. The flaming on the neck was worn, and there were nicks on the edges of the shoulder and scratches on the face from generations of use. But it had a beautiful deep sound—rich and smooth—and sometimes he and his grandfather played together for hours. Twice a year, they traveled to nearby villages to play with other Indian fiddlers. Those moments were among his happiest memories.
When he was done playing, he carefully placed the fiddle into the old beaten case and sat it back in the corner.
Around midnight, Johnny stoked the woodstove one last time, set his old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, crawled into his creaking bed with its heavy blankets and quilt, and fell into a fitful sleep.
Outside, beneath the clear light of moon and stars, the temperature dropped, and the thin red line of mercury settled so low in the thermometer that it could barely be seen. It was so cold that the air was stretched tight as a drum.
The small cabins snuggled down into their banks of snow, their windows were dark, and all the people of the village were asleep in their warm beds, shuttered against the cold. Only a little smoke rose from the banked fires. As the galaxy spun around the North Star, bears turned over in their dark winter dens, squirrels burrowed deeper in their nests, and nothing moved on the frozen world.
After a while, the young men who had run away in fear came back and saw what the old man had done. From then on, those young men respected that old man, who had killed a grizzly bear and taught them a valuable lesson.
IT IS NOT GOOD TO BE ALONE in the wild when it is so cold, when even thoughts are sluggish and icy.
There comes a point, an irreversible point, from which the body cannot return. It will fight for its right to survive, but in the absence of reprieve, when there is no warm haven, the body will sacrifice bits and pieces, those inconsequential parts that do not heat heart or mind.
The fingers and toes, nose and ears are first to go. Like soldiers or chess pawns, they are expendable. They buy time for more important functions and organs. At first they hurt, but after a while the pain goes away and you feel warm, falsely believing that the temperature has risen. But they are the false prophets of the North. In truth, those extremities are freezing solid. Blood no longer courses through the veins. It has gone elsewhere. Migrated, like geese or ducks, to a warmer place. Toward the center. The core. It goes there to protect the king, the general, the heart. There, on this small rise, the blood makes its last stand, its defensive effort to purchase the body more time. Once entrenched, it holds the heat close inside and doesn’t send it out too far.
The mind no longer sends or receives signals from those faraway places. They are lost continents. Africa. Atlantis. The eyes see the useless hands attached to forearms, tell the brain to make them open things or strike matches, but they do not respond. Cannot. They are no longer of the body. The simplest tasks become impossible.
In such a condition, even if there was a cabin with firewood, kindling, and matches, you might be entirely unable to start a fire. Clumsily, in tears of anger and uselessness, you’d spill the box of matches all over the dark floor. Your fingers would not open or close, having no memory of opposability. At best, you might clutch a match in a fist, press the box against your chest, and in short, deliberate moves, slide the red sulphur head of the match across the rough striking surface. With the hand frozen, you know only by smell if your flesh is burning.
Even assembling the kindling in the woodstove’s belly would be a torturous and frustrating exercise. Over and over again you would try to ignite a single match and to settle it properly into the nest of kindling. More than likely, your hand would be unable to pick up a single match, and should it succeed in that simple task, the few matches in the box would likely be wasted before you could carry it in your burning fist to the small pile of tinder. At least you’d die inside a cabin where your body might be found whole and not consumed by wolves or ravens. Eventually, you could be given a proper burial in the late spring after the frozen earth had thawed.
If by miracle you started a fire, the ordeal would not end. Having been frozen so long, without blood circulating to the fingers or toes, they would likely be lost. As the core temperature rises, blood is sent out farther and farther, like a scout. The slowly warming liquid tries to push its way through the frozen veins and flesh. At first, the extremities tingle, like after your hand falls asleep. Shortly thereafter, if you’re lucky, the agony arrives, pain so terrible it cannot be explained in words.
The throbbing anguish is for the fortunate. For the unfortunate, the pain does not arrive. Instead, fingers or toes turn black and swell up twice their normal size, burst open and ooze pus. These are called blebs, and they spell the loss of those parts by amputation.
Such loss is common in the Arctic, was common, will always be, and is one of the heavy prices for living on a land so extreme.
Such thoughts filled the mind
of Albert Least-Weasel as the cold crept deeper toward his old and brittle bones. He could still wiggle his toes inside his brown leather boots, but his fingers were cold even inside the heavy gloves. Every fifteen minutes, he had to hold them almost into the short flames to warm them so that they would again move properly.
The old man feared that the boots and gloves would be useless if the temperature dropped even five more degrees.
He looked over at his pile of firewood. It was almost gone. It had gotten him through the shadowy night of the wolves, but he would need more to outlast this day.
Standing up, he saw that he had already broken all the boughs he could reach, except for the one with the squirrel snare on the back side of the tree, and now there was an open area, umbrellalike, where no branches sprouted out from the trunk for almost seven feet. He had jumped a few times to grab the higher branches, but his foot hurt when he landed on the trapped and chained leg, so he stopped trying.
Albert Least-Weasel’s stomach growled. His body had burned all of its fuel trying to stay warm, and now he was very hungry. The stomach is a fickle thing. It does not remember the feast it had only days before. It has a very short memory, like a fish that is released only to turn around and bite the same hook a minute later.
If he could only reach up another couple of feet, there would be enough wood. He thought about this until an idea arrived like a small white bird, fluttering around and finally landing in the nest of his mind.
He rummaged through his spruce-bough bed, looking for a particular piece. When he found one that was long and sturdy, he broke off all the small, green limbs leaving only a hook at the end, about a foot long. Maybe a little less. It looked something like a long fish gaff. He raised the hooked end up into the boughs above his reach, hooked the gaff over one of the branches as far away from the trunk as he could, where the bough was thinner and flexible, and pulled down until the end came to within his reach. Then he grabbed the branch as far out as he could, dropped his long pole, and knelt, using his weight and the angle to break the branch clean off the tree in a snap so loud and sharp it sounded like a .22 rifle shot. In summer, the limb would have been flexible, but now, in such cold, it broke easily.
Over the next half hour Least-Weasel was able to break several other long branches from the tree. He snapped off the thin green boughs at the ends and tossed them onto his bed, making it thicker and higher off the ground. The work warmed him so that he unzipped his parka.
A squirrel came out from its tangled nest far up in the tree to investigate the commotion, scrambled down the trunk, its little claws grasping the rough bark, and stopped when it was close above the man. It began to chatter loudly, the way squirrels do when they are angry, shouting at the man to go away.
After resting and eating several handfuls of slush from the fire’s edge, the old man began to break the boughs into foot-long pieces. When he was done, the pile was big enough to get him through the short day and hopefully through the night.
Sometime toward light’s last breaking, the squirrel scurried down the tree in a loud chatter and scrambled across the lowest branch and into the noose. In a fit of sound and movement, it fell from the limb with the string around its neck and hung itself.
That evening, as stars began to drag across the arctic sky, Albert Least-Weasel sat beside a warm fire under an umbrella of high spruce boughs holding his skinned dinner on a short stick over the happy flames.
For the last time that day, his stomach growled in anticipation. When his tiny dinner was cooked, he ate it quietly.
For the moment, and perhaps for this moment only, he was content to enjoy the meal and the radiant warmth of the crackling and popping fire. In a different circumstance, he would have enjoyed the quiet solitude, the comforting smell of wood burning, and his small, tasty roasted supper.
After he had eaten, he stood, turned toward his home and his wife, who must be sleeping, and sang his sad love song. He sang it softly at first, but loudly toward the end, as if she might hear it even from this faraway place.
Sometime during the longest night of his life, the ever-hungry wolves came down from the hills again, saw the bright fire burning, heard the old man singing, and turned away back into the dark shadow of the mountain.
THE FOURTH DAY
When they arrived where the sea lions lived, the men took their spears and attacked the great bull, the chief of the Sea Lion People. But every man who tried to fight the bull was killed, and all of the other men ran back to the canoes in fear. Just then, Blackskin walked up to the great sea lion, picked it up over his head, and threw it to the ground. He killed it with his bare hands!
THE NEXT MORNING, Johnny Least-Weasel awoke to the irritating, tinny ringing of his wind-up alarm clock. It was early. Even the sun wouldn’t awaken for many hours. It was that interval between night and day when time stops to examine itself.
Before he built a fire or dressed, the young man checked the outside temperature. It was forty degrees below zero. The floor was freezing cold on his bare feet.
Quickly, he built a fire in the stove, dressed, putting on a heavy red flannel shirt over a white T-shirt and long johns, and went outside to cover the snowmobile with the blue tarp and build fires on either side as he had done the day before.
It was almost two hours before the machine started, but it finally sputtered to life, blowing out a black cloud of smoke in an angry complaint about the cold, then died. It was another fifteen minutes before it started and idled by itself.
While the yellow machine warmed, Johnny refilled the gas tank, checked the blue-black oil level, and strapped an extra can of gas, his pack, and rifle onto the back of the snowmobile. Then he went back inside the warm cabin and waited.
When he was ready, Johnny closed the door tight, pulled his hat down over his ears, pulled his gloves over his hands, and mounted his idling machine. He gunned the throttle and headed out of the village upriver toward his grandfather’s trapline.
With sunlight finally rising over the dark-edged horizon, and with his whole body hunkered below the windshield, Least-Weasel sped toward the base of the white hills. With luck, his grandfather would be up there, waiting out the cold in a warm cabin with a pot of hot tea or coffee on the small woodstove, quietly humming one of his favorite old songs that only the elders still knew and sang.
For the first couple of miles after Johnny left the village, a raven flew ahead of him on the trail, landing on one treetop before it would fly on ahead to land and wait on another, as if it were waiting for him, as if it were leading the way. They say that long ago, ravens used to lead hunters to game—caribou and moose—and that in appreciation the hunters shared the remains of the kill, a kind of symbiotic relationship. But over the many generations, both man and bird have forgotten the ancient bond.
After following the frozen river for about fifteen miles, Johnny turned off the well-used main trail, which ran all up and down the great river, connecting many villages, and headed up into the hills. He had been on this trail many times. His grandfather often brought him along to teach him the ways of the hunter and the trapper. Sometimes they came up here in the fall to pick berries and hunt game birds. It was in these hills, almost five years earlier, while picking blueberries and hunting grouse and rabbits in the fall, that Johnny had lost his beloved dog.
* * *
Johnny and his dog, inseparable since the latter was a pup, had been hunting in the hills one afternoon. Earlier, his grandmother had made the boy a hot breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and fried Spam, which had been sweetened with a bit of honey drizzled over it as it hissed and sizzled in the cast-iron pan. When she wasn’t looking, Johnny had given pieces of pancake to his best friend even though he had just finished his own breakfast of dried dog food mixed with warm water and a few pieces of moose fat trimmed from last night’s supper.
After Johnny was done eating and had placed the clean-licked dish in the sink, he put on his shirt and hat and took up his single-shot shotgun, an
old 16 gauge his grandfather had given him. He took six shells from a cartridge box on the windowsill and dropped them into one of his shirt pockets. He only needed six. He almost never shot more than two or three birds, but he needed the extra shells because he sometimes missed them on the wing. Though a good shot for his age, the boy had not yet mastered the quick, arcing swing of body and barrel.
Johnny drove a four-wheeler, pulling a small trailer for his dog. The dog sat on a bed of old carpets, watching the village pass as they headed for the trail-head of his grandfather’s winter trapline.
The salmon season was past; men were putting up riverboats for the long, dark winter; and sled dogs barked from the roofs of their tiny straw-filled houses. They knew that the putting away of boats meant that winter was coming, and soon the great land would be buried under snow. They would be hitched to sleds and allowed to run and run and run. Sled dogs love to run. They dream of it. All summer they lie beneath the sun, panting and shedding and staring at the sled put away on blocks for the season—tall grass and wildflowers growing up through its runners.
The trail wound its way up into the hills, around small weed-edged ponds, and across a shallow stream. The stream was lined with spruce trees that grew smaller up toward the timberline and with willow bushes and berries. The smell of leaves beginning to decay filled the crisp air. It was perfect country for grouse and moose and bears. After Johnny had parked the four-wheeler, he and his dog walked quietly into the hills, listening to the forest, looking for birds or rabbits, each thinking of what his senses told him or thinking of nothing at all.
Johnny’s grandmother was always happy when he brought home a rabbit, but his grandfather was happiest when the boy brought home a porcupine. It was his favorite game meat. The old man would build a fire outside, and when it was hot enough, he would toss the porcupine on the flames, turning it over with a long pole until all the sharp quills burned away, but not enough to cook the flesh. Then he would roll it from the fire and quarter it as he would any other small game. It was an old Indian trick and he knew many others.