by John Smelcer
Delia glared at her father.
“Why do you fill her mind with such notions? She’s a girl, Dad. She shouldn’t be racing dogs or hiking up to cabins all by herself, for god’s sake! It’s too dangerous.”
“But, Mom, you’re always telling me that a woman can be anything she wants to be,” said Denny. “You’re always telling me to believe in myself. Were you lying?”
“No,” replied her mother. “But you need to act more like a girl, or you’ll end up all alone.”
Denny thought her mother was really talking about herself. She knew that her mother’s generation had, for the most part, turned their backs on the old ways, wanting their children, instead, to fit in with the new world . . . the white world.
“You need to stop hanging around with dogs in the woods and make some friends. Why can’t you wear a dress once in a while? And would it kill you to put on some make-up? Why can’t you be more like that Mary Paniaq?”
Denny bit her lip, literally. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something.
Be like Mary! If Mother only knew what I know, would she think a pregnant, pot-smoking, alcoholic teenager with a total disregard for her baby is better than me?
“What about what I want?” she yelled, almost in tears. “What about who I want to be? Maybe I don’t want to be like you!”
On hearing the last words, her mother let her jaw slack and her arms fell to her side.
Denny grabbed her parka and school bag. She wheeled around in the open doorway.
“I am going to be in the race! You can’t stop me!” she shouted before slamming the door.
On the walk to school Denny felt bad. She realized how hard it had to be for her mother, raising a child alone, living with her parents in a small village offering but few good jobs, living where everyone knows your business. Denny remembered how Anne had written in her diary that she hated her mother but how, by the end of the book, she came to understand how much it would hurt her mother to read something like that from her own daughter.
“I don’t hate her,” she said to the deaf trees. “I just want her to love me for who I am.”
At school, while standing behind the building during lunch break, Denny told everyone that she was going to enter the dog race.
“That’s crazy!” said Johnny Shaginoff, taking a drag on a cigarette.
“Girls don’t mush,” said Mary Paniaq, taking a sip from her flask.
Norman Fury rolled his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.
“You don’t have a chance in hell,” he said.
Only Silas Charley said anything encouraging.
“I’ll go,” he whispered, when everyone else was talking about something else.
“What’d you say?” asked Deneena.
“I’ll go watch you race.”
After everyone else went into the building, Denny grabbed Silas by his jacket and stopped him in front of the main doors.
“How come you’re being nice to me?” she asked.
“I just like watching dog races. My uncle used to race.”
“But you’ve never been nice to me before. I mean, whenever you guys are all drunk or high, all you ever do is make fun of me, saying how I don’t have a father, how I’m such a tomboy, or how I’m such an old fashioned goody-two-shoes.”
Silas leaned close to Denny.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” he whispered. “I don’t really do none of those bad things. I just want people to think I do, so they’ll like me. That’s all.”
“But I’ve seen you do that stuff a hundred times,” replied Denny.
“The way I see it, there’s three ways to deal with peer pressure,” he said, with both hands in his pockets. “You can join in and screw up your life or maybe someone else’s life. Mary’s doing enough of that for anyone.”
Denny nodded slowly, impressed that Silas saw the same thing she did.
“You can walk away,” Silas continued, “which says to the others you think you’re better than they are. Maybe this works, but you won’t have too many friends. No one likes to be reminded they act like idiots.”
Denny recognized that this was her approach. She didn’t mean for people to think that she thought she was better than they were.
“And then there’s my way. I’m what you might call a faker. I pretend to take a swig or a puff. Like, at a party, I pour out my glass of booze, little by little, when no one is looking. No one ever notices; they just figure I must have drunk it all. I know . . . it sounds lame. But that way, I fit in without messing up my life. The way I figure, I’m not hurting no one . . . just wasting a lot of booze, that’s all.”
Denny grinned. She did a similar thing with brussel sprouts when she was a little girl, hiding them in her napkin when her mother wasn’t looking so that her mother would think she ate them all and praise her.
“I hadn’t thought of that before,” she said.
“Well, now you know,” replied Silas, with a smile that would disarm a snarling wolf. “Besides, I’ve never actually said a bad thing about you. I just nodded whenever the others did, but really I was just moving to the music in my head.”
Denny laughed, a little uncertainly.
Just then the fourth-period bell rang.
When Denny walked through the cabin door after school, her grandfather was working on the sled in the living room. The sled was upside down, with the bottom of the runners facing up.
“What you working on grandpa?” she asked, removing her school pack and parka.
“Sanding the runners. Gotta keep them smooth. Sleds go faster without nicks and gouges. You need every chance for the race.”
Deneena knew that rocks hurt the runners. Rocks were not normally a problem on the snow-covered trail itself, but sometimes a musher had to drive on or across a road to get to the trail.
“Nowadays, racers put Teflon strips on the bottom and they replace them whenever they get bad. But I like the old way—wood on snow,” he said while leaning close and looking down the long runner, checking for rough spots.
He sanded a spot and then ran his fingers along the place.
“Good as new,” he said, smiling. “Come feel for yourself.”
Denny ran her hand along the entire length.
“Nice job, Grandpa.”
“I got to put a coat of lacquer on the wood to seal it. Wanna help?”
While the two worked, one on each side of the upturned sled, Sampson taught his granddaughter the words for all the parts.
“The sled we call xał.”
Denny repeated the word, pronouncing it the way the old man did: hoth.
“We call the runners xał tl’aaxi,” said Sampson, while thinly applying the lacquer with a brush.
Denny repeated the name.
“The basket we call xał yii.”
By “basket” the old man meant the part of the sled in which cargo is carried—any cargo: people, supplies, fuel, firewood, moose or caribou meat, sometimes even a sick or exhausted dog. Anything that will fit inside the frame.
Sampson grabbed one of the short braces that gave the sled strength. “These stanchions we call xał dzaade’.”
Denny committed it to memory, the way she cataloged every word her grandfather ever taught her.
“What is the word for the handle?” she asked, pointing to it.
“We call that xał daten’. There is a word for every single part of a sled, just like there are words for every part of a snowshoe.
“And the main line? Is there a word for that?” asked Denny.
Sampson chuckled.
“I just tell you, there a word for everything, even the littlest part. You don’t listen very well. But then, you Gramma always telling me I don’t listen to anything she says. The main line is called łitl’uule’.”
De
nny pronounced the new word aloud.
“Very good. Don’t forget that spot over there,” her grandfather said, pointing his brush at a small place that Denny had missed.
Denny carefully applied lacquer to the spot, drawing the brush in long, slow strokes.
“Grandpa,” she said. “Do you think I have a chance with an old sled like this? I mean, nowadays, racers use high-tech, lightweight sleds. This one has to be almost twice as heavy.”
“This a great sled,” said the old man gripping a stanchion and giving the entire sled a shake. “I built it myself. Very strong. Can take a beating.”
Denny thought she might have hurt her grandfather’s feelings.
“It’s a wonderful sled, Grandpa. But all those racers have super-light sleds made of high-tech materials. They even got satellite cell phones. Most of them have business sponsors to pay for everything, and they have patches and the names of their sponsors sewn all over their expensive jackets. I don’t have any of that stuff. I’m just an Indian girl from an Indian village with a bunch of Indian dogs.”
Sampson set down his brush and stood up straight.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, almost angrily. “You gotta be proud of who you are and where you come from. Let me tell you something else. The person who wins, he don’t win because he has the fanciest equipment or rich supporters. Those things can only take you so far. What matters is ciz’aani—heart. You got to have heart to win. You got to want something so bad that you can’t give up, not even an option. When things seem to go really bad, when failure knocks you down and kicks you in the gut, that’s when heart matters most. You gotta dig deep inside yourself to find the strength, to find out what kind of person you are. Yes, the person who wins sometimes has the best equipment. But just as often, the winner is the person who wants it most. You, Granddaughter, have a big heart. Maybe the biggest. I see that in you. That why I’m giving you this sled.”
“But I don’t have any of the things other racers have. People will laugh at me.”
“It don’t matter what other people think. I teach you that already. Only heart matters and that never changes just because we got television or cell phones. People give up too easy nowadays. Look around the village and you can see that. You got to work hard for something to appreciate it. Only things that are earned from hard work and sweat mean anything. Don’t quit just because something is hard. You kids gotta learn that.”
That night, as Denny lay in her bed thinking about what her grandfather had said to her and about the coming race, she gazed at the sled glowing dimly in the yellow light from the flames of the wood stove—the flickering light casting dancing shadows on the walls. Sometime after midnight, Denny pulled out her diary and turned on the little nightlight beside her bed.
Dear Nellie,
I think I learned something important tonight. Grandpa talked about how most people don’t appreciate things that come too easy to them. I think I understand what he meant. All the time I see people in the village get free money. They go buy expensive new snowmobiles, and within a year the machine is a piece of junk because they didn’t take care of it at all, because they know they’ll get more free money one day. I remember when I was ten, and I really wanted a new bike. Mother made me work all winter to save up enough money to buy it myself. I did all kinds of little jobs to make money, and then I bought that bike. I took such good care of it, because I knew how much work went into getting it. It was special. Grandpa’s sled may be old-fashioned, but it’s beautiful because he made it with his own two hands. His sweat is in the wooden heart of that sled. There’s power in that. I wrote another poem. It’s corny. No need to explain it. Sometimes, a poem’s meaning is obvious.
Yours,
Denny
Portrait of the Artist as a Teenage Girl
Although I am nobody
writing lines to poems
no one will ever know,
I do not fail to cast
a tiny shadow
on the
snow.
p.s. Grandpa also talked about having heart. He said I have the biggest heart. I wrote another poem. Seems like good words to live by . . .
Heart
Heart is like a mirror—
bury it in mud
let it rust and grow with moss
and no more will it reflect the world’s beauty.
Ciz’aani
Ciz’aani ke’ uyii na’stnal’aeni—
kiighiłtaen tah bestl’es
k’ena na’stnal’aeni tsaan’ ‘eł kołii kae dlaadon’
‘eł na’stnal’aeni galdiine’ niic nen’ kasuundze’.
6
Ts’iłk’ey dzaen yuuł
A Day’s Journey
On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Denny left before the last period so that she could get the dogs on the trail early enough. She wanted the pace of the thirty mile journey to the village upriver—where the teacher was killed—to be leisurely, not overly tiring for the dogs before the race the next day. Sampson followed on his snowmobile.
Denny’s mother didn’t go.
“Go run your stupid race,” she had said from the porch, while Denny was finishing hitching the dogs to the sled. “When you lose, maybe you get that nonsense out of your head, once and for all.”
“Thanks for the support!” Denny shouted sarcastically when she pulled the snow hook and commanded the dogs to run.
Her grandmother waved goodbye from the frosted window.
Sampson started his snowmobile. He waved to his wife and shouted goodbye.
“Xonahang ‘aat’!”
Halfway to the village, the trail left the frozen river and meandered through the woods because that stretch of the river was largely unfrozen. As Denny made her way through the forest, another musher approached from the opposite direction.
Denny recognized the man.
It was Lincoln Lincoln. He was from her village and a good musher, just like his older brother, Bassille. Bassille had died two years prior when his team broke through thin ice on the river and never made it out. Dogs, musher, and sled . . . all yanked beneath the ice by the current.
“Trail!” yelled Lincoln above the din of the barking dogs.
Deneena knew the command, a request to yield the right of way. Snowy forest trails are typically too narrow for mushers to pass easily. One musher has to drive off the trail to make room for the other—a kind of sledding courtesy.
“Haw!” shouted Denny.
The lead dog guided the rest of the team off the left side of the trail and waited for Lincoln’s team to pass.
About an hour later, without incident, Denny and her grandfather arrived in the village. They stayed at Joseph Yazzie’s house for the night. Joseph was Sampson’s first cousin. After the dogs were fed and bedded down for the night, all on piles of straw to keep them off the ground, Denny came inside for a supper of Joseph’s deep-fried burbot, a freshwater cod, which he had caught while out ice fishing earlier in the day.
“Good ts’anyae,” Joseph said during the meal, using the Indian word for burbot. “Poor man’s lobster.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Denny, looking inquisitively at her grandfather.
“That what they say about the white meat of burbot,” replied Sampson. “They say it taste like lobster. But I don’t know if that true ’cause I never ate lobster.”
“That’s because you’re a poor man,” said Joseph with a big smile.
All three laughed.
“It was hard out there today, standing around on the ice checking my holes and waiting for fish to bite,” said Joseph. “I’m getting too old for that kind of thing. Better to sit inside where it warm and drink tsaey. That’s tea, in case you didn’t know,” he said to Denny.
“I know what tsaey is,” Denny replied d
efiantly.
Sampson interrupted.
“We both getting old,” he said.
“How old are you now, Cousin,” asked Joseph.
“Seventy-six, which means you seventy-five.”
Joseph Yazzie leaned back in his creaking chair.
“We getting old, I tell you what,” he said, and then got up to stoke the dying fire and pour a cup of hot tea from a blue pot on the stove.
The next day, more than a dozen different dog teams crowded into the village for the race. All the mushers, except Denny, were men. Denny was checking the rigging and the booties on each dog when Silas Charley arrived on his father’s snowmobile.
“Told you I’d be here,” he said, after turning off the engine and raising the visor on his helmet.
Denny smiled.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’m really nervous.”
“Just run the race. Don’t worry about everyone else. You’re pretty good. I’ve watched you,” said Silas.
“Thanks,” replied Denny.
Just then her grandfather came over.
“It’s time,” he said. “You need to get over to the starting area.”
He helped Denny tie on her race bib with a large, black number 7 on the front and back.
“That a lucky number,” he said.
A drawing determined the order in which each musher would leave the starting gate. Denny was sixth, about halfway among the teams. In sled racing, each team starts several minutes after the previous one, providing room on the trail. Unlike with a marathon or other foot race, officials mark the start and finish time of every team. Whoever completes the race in the shortest time is the winner. Sometimes a team “scratches,” or pulls out of the race, if they encounter an insurmountable problem, like a broken runner.
The race course was a simple route. It went upriver for about seven miles, turned off into the woods and followed a slough back to the river where the race started. Mushers were to run the loop twice. Locals lined the trail in places, sitting on their snowmobiles or lawn chairs, drinking hot coffee, and cheering for their favorite musher, often a relative. Some spectators built bonfires around which children and adults alike roasted hot dogs or marshmallows.
