by John Smelcer
Denny stood up and hugged Ms. Stevens, her favorite teacher, who always challenged students to think for themselves. Mary joined the embrace while the rest looked down at the floor or out the window, trying to hide their grief.
When school was over, Denny practically ran home. As usual, the dogs barked excitedly when they saw her. When she burst through the door, her grandfather was squatting on a blue tarp on the floor skinning a beaver he had caught during the day.
“Close the door!” shouted her mother.
Denny closed the door, and before taking off her parka she blurted the news.
“A teacher was killed by wolves!”
All three adults stopped what they were doing and sat down with Denny at the table to hear the amazing story. Bear attacks on people were commonplace, especially in the summer and fall, and they had all heard stories of wolves killing and eating sled dogs, an easy meal when chained outside to a dog house. But it had been a long time since they had heard of wolves attacking people. The last one either Denny’s grandparents could remember was back in the 1950s, when a woman was killed in her village while carrying a bag of groceries home from the general store.
“Better keep an ear and eye out in case they come around here,” said Sampson, looking to make sure that his rifle was still leaning beside the door. “Thirty miles not far for a wolf, especially if they follow the river.”
After a while, everyone went back to work.
Sampson finished skinning the beaver, and his wife cut up the dark meat for a stew. Nothing went to waste. In the old days, even the teeth were used as amulets worn about the necks of infants. It was believed the teeth instilled the power of industriousness and hard work, a desirable trait in a people who had to live on such a harsh and unforgiving land.
Sampson called his granddaughter.
“Denny, come give your granddaddy a hand.”
As he held down one edge of the hide on a board, fur down, he instructed her to nail it. Then he pulled the opposite side of the hide taut across the board so she could nail it down as well. In no time at all, the beaver pelt was properly stretched into a circle and ready to be scraped, the first step in tanning any hide. The work would normally be done outside. But in the winter, when it was so cold and dark outside, both large and small game were often butchered inside the house. Sampson had cut up caribou and moose on the floor dozens of times.
Denny knelt beside her grandfather, watching him scrape the fat from the skin.
“Grandpa, I thought wolves didn’t attack people?” she said, trying not to imagine the last terrible moments of the teacher’s life, her utter horror when she must have realized what was happening.
“That true most the time,” he said without looking up. “But wolves are wild. Everything wild is unpredictable. Take a family dog. One moment it’s on its back letting you rub its belly, and the next it attacks a child or somebody else. That dog is a thousand generations removed from its wild ancestors. And yet, some ancient memory of hunting and killing lies just beneath the surface.”
Denny nodded. She had heard many stories of dogs attacking children, not only in her own village, but in villages all over. She knew one woman who, as a young girl, had half her face bitten off by sled dogs.
The old man turned the board so he could scrape the hide from a different angle.
“Village dogs in a pack are even worse. Being in a pack erases half of those thousand generations. They turn half wild. Now imagine a wolf, never made to serve men—not even once in all of wolf history—running in a pack, killing to survive, without no mercy and hard as the land itself.”
“But why did the tikaani kill her?” Denny asked, using the Indian word for wolf. “Why didn’t they just catch a moose or a caribou?”
The old man chuckled.
“It not that easy, Granddaughter. Big as the land is, sometimes it’s empty, especially in winter. Maybe all the caribou go away someplace else. Maybe them wolves starving. They had to choose between their life and the woman’s life.”
Deneena was quiet for a few minutes, just watching the way her grandfather meticulously scraped the pelt, careful not to cut the dead animal’s skin.
“You remember the word for beaver?” he asked without slowing his work.
“Tsa’,” Denny replied, properly pronouncing the one-syllable word “chaw.”
“Very good. And what about the pelt?”
“I don’t think you or grandma ever taught me that one,” said Denny.
“The word for skin is zes; so the word for beaver pelt is tsa’ zes,” said the old man.
Both were quiet for a long time. Finally, Denny broke the silence.
“There are a lot of wolves in this country. What if they come after me when I’m out on the trail alone?”
The old man stopped, raising his eyes to meet hers.
“Just be wary at all times. You never know what a wild animal is going to do. It don’t matter how much respect you show it. A bear may bite you whether you call it bear or Mr. Bear. For the most part, wolves keep to themselves when it comes to people. Sometimes they don’t. I was attacked by wolves a long time ago, when I was fifteen. I was alone, just like that teacher—a small, scrawny boy all alone in the great white with nothin’ but a single-shot .22 rifle. I thought I was a goner.”
“What did you do? How did you escape?” asked Denny.
Just then her mother called out that it was time for supper.
The old man struggled to his feet, placed a hand in the small of his back and groaned.
“I tell you some other time,” he said, as he shuffled to the dinner table.
That night, after helping her grandmother wash the dishes and taking a bath in the metal tub, Denny lay in bed and wrote in her diary.
Today a teacher was killed by wolves. I always liked her. All day long I’ve been thinking about that terrible moment. Did she run? Did she try to fight them off? I don’t know what I would have done. I’ve never been afraid of wolves before, but now I don’t know. At school Mary P. was drinking again. I told her it was bad for her baby, but she blew me off like always. Why can’t people see the destruction they cause? I mean, people blame the past for their bad decisions, but someday in the future, their choices become the past. Time is a circle in that way. Everyone’s always saying how they can’t wait to leave the village. I don’t feel that way. What would happen if all the young people left? Who would take care of the elders? If only they could see the beauty of this place, instead of what they see on television—all them music videos trying to convince them that life is one giant party if they only lived in a big city. I’ve been thinking about another poem. I wrote part of it during school today. It doesn’t have a title yet. I know it’s not important. No one will ever read these. No one even really cares.
I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.
Only elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.
There are not many words anyhow.
They are scattered like clouds,
like salmon in Stepping Creek
at Tonsina River.
I do not speak like an elder,
but I hear the voice of a spirit,
hear it at a distance
speaking quietly to me.
Dahwdezeldiin’ koht’aene kenaege’,
ukesdezt’aet.
Yaane’ koht’aene yaen’,
nekenaege’ nadahdelna.
Koht’aene kenaege’ k’os nadestaan,
łukae c’ena’ ti’taan’, Tez’aedzi Na’.
Sii ‘e koht’aene k’e kenaes,
Sii ndahwdel’en,
dandiilen
s’dayn’tnel’en.
3
Na’ baaghe
River’s Edge
The week
passed quickly with no sightings of the wolves that had killed the teacher, and Deneena woke up excited on Saturday morning. Her mother had reluctantly agreed that she could snowshoe up to a small log cabin about seven miles back in the mountains to stay the night. She knew how much Denny loved the peace and quiet of the wilderness. Besides, Denny always took one of her school books to read at night.
Denny packed a knapsack with food she’d need for the trip: a couple of moose sausages to roast over a campfire for lunch, a can of chili for dinner, and bacon and biscuits for breakfast. She tossed in a pack of matches, a roll of toilet paper, and a couple extra candles, just in case the oil lamp was empty. On top of everything, she carefully set her diary, along with Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, which Ms. Stevens had assigned them to read over the weekend for English and history.
When she was ready to leave, her grandfather handed her the pack.
“I’ll come check on you ‘round suppertime. Make sure you got a hot pot of tea ready,” he said in his grandfatherly tone.
“But, Grandpa, I don’t need anyone to check on me.”
“I know,” whispered the old man, glancing over his shoulder at Delia who was sitting beside her mother on the worn sofa sewing and doing beadwork. “But you momma worried about you. I promised to go check on you. That the only way she let you go.”
He winked. He knew she would be safe at the cabin, but Denny’s mother worried about a young girl hiking up into the mountains all alone, especially after the wolf attack on the teacher.
“Here, take my rifle,” he said, handing it to her. “You know how to shoot it. I got another one in the closet. Here’s a few extra bullets.”
Denny put the bullets in her parka pocket and slung the rifle over her shoulder.
“Thanks, Grandpa,” she said and gave him a hug.
She turned toward her mother when she opened the door to leave.
“See you tomorrow.”
Her mother never looked up from her sewing.
Denny loved the long trek into the hills, the solitude, where the only sound was that of her snowshoes and the wind in the trees. Along the way, she saw deniigi, a bull moose, far up on a hillside nibbling thin alders and willows. She shot two ggax—rabbits—which during winter turned totally white to hide from the many predators that hunted them.
Life was hard at the bottom of the animal food chain.
It took Denny almost three hours to snowshoe to the cabin, which was as cold inside as was the whitened world outside its door. She quickly got a fire going in the belly of the wood stove. While it roared, she unpacked her knapsack. Then she went outside and filled a large pot with packed snow, which she sat on the smoking-hot stove surface. It was only after completing these chores that she sat down at the little table by the small window and began to read Anne Frank’s diary.
She got up after reading thirty pages to put another log in the stove and to check on her water. All the snow had melted, leaving only a few inches of water in the bottom. She stepped outside and added more snow to the pot. It was a slow process, melting snow for drinking and cooking water, but it was less strenuous than hauling water at eight pounds a gallon. After poking the fire to settle the hissing and popping logs, Denny finally took off her parka and sat down to resume reading. Several pages in, something outside the window caught her eye.
A wolf was in the front yard snuffling in the fresh snow around a deadfall. He was jet black, except for one gray-white ear. Denny had seen wolves before, and she knew that while most wolves were gray and mottled, some were all black. But for this black wolf to have one discolored ear was rare—one in a million.
Suddenly, it stopped, gazed intently at the ground, pricked its ears, and pounced, catlike. It didn’t catch whatever it was chasing. She watched as the wolf spun about, snuffled in the snow and pounced again. After several failed attempts, the wolf finally caught a small mouse. From where she sat, she could see the thin tail hanging from the wolf’s mouth. She leaned closer to the window, knocking over a salt shaker. The sharp sound startled the wolf, and he ran away.
For the next half hour Denny busily worked on writing a new poem, wondering why the wolf was all alone.
That evening, right on time, Sampson arrived on his snowmobile, the bright headlight glaring through the window. He shut off the engine, and darkness and quiet returned to the valley. As promised, Denny had a hot pot of tea on the wood stove. She poured him a cup when he sat down at the table after hanging his hat and parka on a hook.
“The trail was good,” he said, warming his hands around the cup. “I made it here in less than twenty minutes. Saw two moose on the way up.”
Denny told her grandfather about the wolf she had seen out front pouncing on a little mouse.
He laughed on hearing her description.
“People always think wolves just eat moose and caribou, but a big part of their diet is small things like mice. It take lots of dluuni to fill a wolf belly.”
“Grandpa,” said Deneena.
The old man could tell from her tone that she had something serious to say.
“Almost all of the other kids at school drink all the time. They even smoke marijuana when they can get it. They always make fun of me when I don’t do it with them. I want to fit in. I want them to like me, but I want them to like me for me, for who I am.”
Sampson peered out the small window into the darkness outside. Denny could tell he was thinking about what to say. Elders were like that, taking their time to say something. She waited.
Finally he spoke.
“What they do, what you do—it not a matter of legal or not legal; not even a matter of right or wrong. It about being true to yourself, about deciding your own path. People are like rivers, and the hours of our days flow to the sea. But no two rivers are the same, and no river is today what it was last month or last year. It always trying to find new channels, shifting in its gravel bed, hurling itself against boulders and trying to undercut steep banks. Some people are content to follow the course set before them. Life easy that way. Others, like you, jump their banks, daring to be different. Like rivers, people end up at the same place, but how we get there is what makes us who we are.”
Denny nodded as if she understood. But she wondered if she was too young to understand what her grandfather was saying. Such knowledge, she thought, comes only from having lived a long life, from long awareness. She was only a girl, she thought as she nodded with a kind of dawning of understanding, the way geese flying above clouds and mountains must be vaguely aware that the world is round.
The old man continued, slowly.
“You have to decide who you want to be and what will make you happy. There is nothing you must be. There is nothing you must do. And despite all them commercials on television, there is nothing you must have. If you ask me, finding your own happiness in a hard world is all that means anything. Happiness isn’t someplace else, and it don’t come from a new car or a big house or fancy clothes or computer games. That snowmobile outside don’t make me happy, but at my age, it gets me into the woods, which makes my life worth living. Having lots of money and things can’t make you happy. It comes from here,” he said, thumping his fist against his chest.
Denny scooted out from her chair and hugged him around his neck for a long time.
“Tsin’aen,” she whispered and kissed him on his coarse cheek. “Thank you, Grandpa.”
That night, after Sampson left on the snowmobile for the village, Denny thought about what he had said earlier in the week about how wolves sometimes go hungry, and how that hunger forces them to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. She kept thinking about the lone wolf hunting little dluuni, such a small meal for a wolf. After a while, she got up and threw one of her rabbits out in front of the cabin—a gift.
Denny read for another hour or so and worked on one of the many puzzles stacked on a shelf befo
re she finally climbed into the bed in the loft, which was much warmer than the downstairs. She lay in the dark, listening to the sound of wood popping, hoping to hear the wolf outside, and wondering if it could get inside the cabin.
In the morning, after she rebuilt a fire in the wood stove and added snow to the pot for coffee, Denny looked out the frosted window and saw that the rabbit was gone. Fresh wolf tracks littered the snow where it had been.
She smiled.
After a breakfast of bacon, biscuits, and two cups of tea, Denny swept the floor, made the bed, carried in an armful of firewood for the next visit, closed the damper on the wood stove, and while the cabin cooled, she wrote in her diary.
Dear Diary,
I just LOVE Anne Frank’s diary! From now on, I’m going to address you as Nellie, the way Anne called her diary Kitty. It’s a girl’s name that means black bear. It’s normally spelled nel’ii. It makes me feel like I’m writing to someone real, like someone really cares and understands. Anne wrote a lot about trying to get along with her parents, especially her mother, who didn’t seem to understand her at all. That’s exactly how I feel. Sometimes I don’t think my mother loves me at all. She’s always saying, “Why can’t you be more like the other girls in the village?” But if she knew even half of the bad things they do, she wouldn’t say that. Grandpa says I’m fine the way I am. I wrote this poem at the cabin after seeing a wolf outside. I used a little poetic license with some stuff. So sue me! I think it’s the prettiest little poem I ever wrote.
Yours,
Denny
On Feet of Clouds
A cloud arrives
quiet and gray
as the wolf
hunting field mice
