Edge of Nowhere

by John Smelcer

  But then he thought that he surely would have heard some ruckus, the barks and growls and yelps of a deadly struggle. The realization that nothing of the sort had startled him awake was heartening, giving him some measure of hope, albeit small.

  As Seth walked along the beach, fearing that he might be alone, he suddenly thought about his mother. He missed her terribly. They had been a close family, more so than most. He remembered how when he was a little boy his parents used to sit in bed with him, one on each side, reading to him before bedtime. When they were finished, they would tickle him, pull the sheets up to his chin, pat him gently on the chest, kiss him on the head saying how much they loved him, before turning out the light. In the dim-lit hallway, he would watch his father embrace his mother, kiss her on the cheek. He always fell asleep wrapped in their love, even on snowy winter nights when the wind blasted against the rattling windowpane.

  Seth stopped walking to wipe his eyes and cheeks with a shirt sleeve.

  By mid afternoon he was hot from walking all over the island, searching for his lost dog. Seth smiled as he thought how people outside mistakenly imagine Alaska as a frozen wasteland whose inhabitants dwell in igloos surrounded by penguins. For one thing, penguins lived on the other side of the planet. Truth is the highest temperature on record in Alaska is 99 degrees! Many summer days, especially in the interior, approach 90. It is so warm that even pestering mosquitoes take refuge from the sun.

  Seth decided to take a swim in a cove, where a little piece of the sea was briefly captured by the land. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the cold water. It felt good to be cold. But he couldn’t help remembering how his feet and arms had grown numb in the cold sea when he and Tucker had struggled to stay afloat during the storm.

  He swam out a couple of hundred feet from shore, turned over on his back, and floated lazily, looking up at the sky, as blue and deep as the sky in a child’s crayon drawing.

  A strange noise disturbed the peacefulness around him. It sounded like air suddenly released under pressure, the way a bus sounds when the doors open. Then he heard it again and again. Seth rolled over, treading water, turning to look for the source of the noise. Several killer whales were behind him, closing in. He could see the tall, black fins slicing the taut surface.

  One fin looked to be four feet high, maybe more.

  Seth panicked.

  He spun around and tried to out-swim them to shore, an impossible feat. Almost nothing in the sea swims faster than a killer whale. He was so terrified that his form was sloppy and he slashed wildly more than swam. In a moment, the whales were upon him, coming so close he could have touched one. Seth stopped flailing as the four whales encircled him. He could see their black and white patterns, their black eyes sizing him up, their sharp ivory teeth.

  Seth knew that killer whales hunt in packs like wolves. In fact, they are called sea wolves. Marine biologists have seen them hunt giant whales, taking vicious bites, trying to kill the larger whales by riding on their backs, using their weight to drown them. Whales have sometimes been found washed ashore, whole portions of them missing, seagulls pecking at the wounds.

  As Seth waited for the inevitable, he suddenly recalled a story his grandmother had told him. It was the story of the first killer whale. In the story, a man named Natsalane’ carved a whale from a red cedar log. His grandmother had pronounced the man’s name: Not-SAY-law-nay. He pushed the carved shape into the sea, where it transformed into a killer whale with its mouth of sharp, white teeth. The man told his creation to kill his enemies in their distant canoe, who had tried to kill him. He watched from shore as the killer whale raced toward their canoe, capsized it, and killed the men aboard, ripping them to pieces, turning the sea red. He could hear their screams. When it had finished its task, the whale returned to its master, awaiting further commands. Terrified of the awesome ferocity of his creation, the man told it to never again kill people. And, so the story goes, killer whales have never attacked people since.

  Seth didn’t know if it was true.

  It was just a story.

  Nonetheless, he spoke to the whales, his voice breaking from fear.

  ‘You won’t eat me, will you?’ he said. ‘Please don’t eat me.’

  He kept pleading with them, hoping they would realize he wasn’t a seal or sea lion.

  This time, when they came close, he reached out and let his hand pass along the length of their lithe bodies, feeling the smoothness of their skin. He could feel their sleek forms, their sheer power. They were beautiful, a force of nature.

  They were nature.

  After a while, the whales turned and swam back out to sea. Seth paddled to shore, sat naked on the gravel beach, warming under the sun, drinking the wild air, and watching until their fins were too far away to see. He held his arms across his chest, afraid he was going to cry with relief. Instead, he heard himself laughing, at first quietly, to himself, then louder and louder until his joyful voice thundered across the bay.

  No one will believe me, he thought.

  And he was probably right.

  • • • • •

  That evening Seth caught another salmon and tried to make a fire. Once again he used various sticks and stones, varying his technique. No matter his persistence, not even the ghost of a wisp arose from his labor, and once again he ate his fish raw.

  That night a stiff wind arose, and Seth slept alone curled up in his shelter with his yellow slicker draped over him. He worried about Tucker all night, sitting up a dozen times, thinking he had heard a bark from far away, fluttering along the beach like a leaf on the wind.

  The next day was calm and sunny. Seth walked around the island in the other direction, forcing his way through almost impenetrable brush where the beach ended, calling for his dog, and worrying about bears. While ensnared in the woods’ dense alders more than a hundred yards from the shore, Seth heard an airplane. He stopped to listen, trying to determine its direction. He forced his way through the brush, stumbling, branches slapping him in the face. By the time he emerged on the beach, the plane had already passed. The boy stood and watched until it became as small as a mosquito buzzing on the horizon, hoping it would turn around.

  But it never did.

  After an exhausting day, Seth finally returned to his camp near the salmon stream, the only freshwater creek he had encountered on the island. And there, sleeping on the yellow raincoat spread over his mattress of spruce boughs, was Tucker. When the dog heard the boy’s footsteps on the gravel, he raised his head and pricked his ears. When he saw who it was, Tucker bolted down the beach, kicking up small rocks, his ears flopping as he ran. Seth dropped to a knee, and with the biggest smile he ever made, held his dog to him, kissing his hairy face, rubbing him everywhere.

  Nine – Qulnguan

  The Indian looked around and saw that this room was also empty, and then he answered the old, sad chief. ‘I have not killed your people. I have never killed a person in my life. I do not know what you are saying, old father.’

  ‘Look around you,’ said the chief. ‘See how we are alone here now where once these halls were full of my people.’

  The young man looked again and replied, ‘But I did not kill anyone.’

  A week had passed since the night of the storm. Seven days without television or video games. Seven days without music, cell phones, or pizza. Seven days away from his comfortable home and his father.

  Seth began to worry. Until this point, he had been certain that he was simply biding time, awaiting rescue, which would arrive at any moment—another boat, this time closer, motoring around a bend; a plane flying overhead, lower, looking for him on a beach. All he had to do was stay alive during the tedious hours between lost and found. Now a notion began to creep into his mind, slyly, the way a lynx stalks a rabbit—the troublesome thought that after a week any ongoing search for him might be called off. To the once-sear
ching world of home, he might be dead.

  Seth tried to shake away the worrisome consideration from his mind and went out at low tide to scrape mussels from the giant, exposed boulders. While he worked, low gray clouds rolled in across the sea, from the south, and tangled in the green mountains on the mainland, barely visible through the increasingly heavy air. A soft, misty drizzle fell from the gloomy sky, light as a cool breath, a whisper of the rain shortly to come.

  When Seth and Tucker returned to camp, retreating from the incoming tide, the lean-to was destroyed, its driftwood supports and crossbeams strewn up and down the beach, spruce boughs everywhere. Tracks in the sand told the story. The mother bear had followed the scent of the boy and the dog, perhaps worried that the strange smell might represent some peril to her cubs or competition for the fish.

  Perhaps she was just curious.

  Either way, she and her cubs had wrecked the shelter.

  Just then, as Seth stood looking about him, wondering how to put it all back together again and if he should move it to a safer distance, it began to rain—a heavy, thunderous downpour that fell with such intensity that Seth could barely see ahead—a deluge so torrential it reminded him of the story of Noah and the Flood. The sea seemed to be filling up with rain. Much of the southern coast of Alaska, especially the southeast, as it pours down the edge of northwest Canada, forms Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the wettest place on the continent.

  Seth ran into the woods, looking for shelter. He chose a large spruce tree, its wide green limbs blocking a fraction of the downpour. For the rest of the day and into the night, he sat against the trunk of the tree, Tucker curled up beside him, the incessant rain loud on the hood of his slicker. They were miserable, sitting hunched in the teeth of the world, their hardship keen as an axe, heavy and biting.

  Seth’s spirit wilted.

  Tucker’s face drooped.

  ‘I’m sorry, boy,’ said Seth, looking at his unhappy companion squinting up at him. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

  To add to his misery, Seth had to go really bad. Peeing wasn’t a problem, but he hated the other business, especially in a downpour. Usually, when he went camping with his family, they brought rolls of toilet paper, kept dry in plastic bags. But here, stranded in the wilderness without any conveniences, Seth had to use whatever was at hand: leaves, dry grass, seaweed, pine cones.

  Pine cones were the worst.

  Seth began to think of home, shuffling through his memories—the way Lucky shuffled his worn-out playing cards—flipping them over and laying them out one after the other on the table of his mind until he came upon a particular memory, brought on most likely by the rain.

  It was a recollection from when he was ten or eleven. One cloudy summer afternoon, just before the fishing season, his father had taken the family on a boat ride to an island. He moored the boat in a small cove, and the family hiked along a path up a steep hill, his father carrying a wicker picnic basket. Sometimes he let his son carry it. It was so heavy and unwieldy that Seth had to use both hands, holding it against his waist as he wobbled along. At the top of the hill his mother spread out a green-and-white checkered blanket, a classic picnic accessory, like the wicker basket.

  The three enjoyed their happy lunch of cold fried chicken, potato salad, apples, and grapes—talking, telling jokes, and laughing. When they had finished eating, his mother stood at the hill’s edge, looking out over the sea, their blue-and-white fishing boat floating patiently far below. Seth’s father crept up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her on the neck. They stood that way for a long time—a mother and father, husband and wife—holding onto each other and the memory of that moment while their son sat on the blanket watching them, trying to understand that kind of love, feeling its warmth as from a campfire.

  Just then it began to rain.

  The small family hastily packed their belongings and dashed down the trail to the boat, sliding in the mud, laughing as they occasionally slipped to the seat of their pants. When they finally made it to the boat, all three were soaked and muddy. His father insisted on taking a photograph of Seth and his mother.

  In it they were both smiling.

  Seth could still remember the laughter.

  The rain hadn’t ruined their day, couldn’t ruin it. Some things are indestructible, the way memories never change. Only we change. The world changes.

  Everything changes.

  Sometimes Seth locked himself in his bedroom and sat for hours holding the photograph, listening to music, touching her face through the smudged glass.

  The bone-deep memory only increased Seth’s misery. He was all alone, save for the drenched and droop-faced dog beside him. He was cold and empty. For the first time during his ordeal, Seth was really frightened, not a fear like being left alone in the dark or of an unnamed thing hiding beneath the bed or waiting in the wardrobe, but a dread of being alone, perhaps of dying alone. For the first time, hope slipped from him, made slippery by the rain. The loneliness beat down upon him like the never-ending rain, cold and eroding.

  Seth began to cry.

  He rested a wet hand on his wet dog and wept for a long time. It is a deeply personal place, the desolate country of tears. He wanted to cry out for his mother, the way grown men sometimes want to cry out for their mothers, especially in times of despair—the way some religious men, near the hour of their demise, call out to the beloved mother of another man who was once lost in a wilderness and who died a long time ago.

  Home seemed far away, separated by more than distance and sea. All through the insufferable twilight he tried to sleep, but sleep was impossible. Exhaustion aggravated his fear, compounded it, and gave it even more edge.

  Seth suddenly looked up and saw a raven hunkered before him on an old, broken tree limb. His black head was cocked sideways, his black eyes blinking against the rain, staring at the boy, as if pleading to share his yellow slicker. To Seth, the raven looked every bit as miserable as he and his dog. When it became apparent that he was not to be invited, the raven shook his black feathers and flew away, cawing his discontent, cursing the bursting clouds.

  Caw! Caw! Ga-gok!

  As he watched the black bird evaporate into the sodden greyness, Seth recalled stories his grandmother had told him about Raven, a god-figure in their culture, more cruel than kind, more Destroyer than Creator, though he is always both. An enigma. A Trickster. Stories of Raven appear in every culture in Alaska, as common as the ubiquitous birds themselves. They are true survivors, perfectly adapted for the hardships of life in the Far North. One of the stories Seth remembered from his grandmother was about Raven and the first salmon. Because salmon are such an important resource to the People, there are many stories about them, mostly about their creation and about respecting them. She told it to him one day while they were cutting salmon to smoke and can. In the story, salmon could only float on the surface of water when Raven first made them—easy meals for bears and eagles. So, Chief of the Salmon People pleaded with Great Raven.

  ‘Please help us,’ he implored, after telling Raven of their plight.

  Raven thought and thought, and then he cut a slit in the Salmon Chief’s head and placed two small stones inside. From then on, all salmon could swim deep, escaping teeth and talons.

  As proof of the myth’s truth, Seth’s grandmother cut a salmon head in half, laterally, between the nostrils and the eyes. Smiling broadly, she showed her grandson the two small, gray stones, exactly where Raven had put them. Seth understood that it was really the brain, but he could understand the association.

  Seth remembered the word for raven. He had heard it many times, perhaps more often than any other word his grandmother had taught him.

  Abalanaq.

  He voiced the word several times, trying to get the pronunciation just right.

  Ah-BOLL-in-nok.

  • • • �
� •

  Sometime after dawn the rain ceased, the fog dissolved, and the low sun glared through disentangling clouds, shining on a patch of yellow flowers, the world smiling. Morning was still yawning when Seth picked himself up and stretched his limbs, beads of water sliding down his yellow slicker, the tiny rivulets soaking into the already rain-drenched ground. The constant patter of rain on leaves and on the hood of his slicker was followed by a silence as crisp as the newly burst sunshine piercing into the empty spaces between clouds. Just then a small, black-capped chickadee alit on a trembling branch and began to sing the welcoming song of morning.

  Seth listened for a while. For the first time he understood that given the right moment, everything is extraordinary, even in despair. Then he walked down to the beach near the lapping water’s edge, followed closely by Tucker, who stopped several times to shake himself dry. Mist arose from the warming beach stones, made black from the rain. Salmon rolled and splashed in the languid sea. Seth faced the eastward rising sun, the direction of home, running a hand over his face and chin, feeling the course stubble of a new beard. He realized he hadn’t shaved since the morning the boat had left the harbor. That had been ten days earlier.

  Suddenly, Seth understood what he had to do. No one was coming for him. He would have to save himself. Like the resolute salmon, he must journey homeward toward his own headwater, his own birthplace.

  He would become a salmon.

  Ten – Qulen

  After many days, the longboats returned with all the hunters except the young husband. The young wife frantically searched the faces of the returning men, asking about her husband. One of the older men spoke to her.

  ‘Your husband is gone,’ he said gravely. ‘He harpooned a mighty whale. But the harpoon rope was tangled around his ankle, and the whale dragged him into the sea.’

  A small airplane flew low along the shoreline, only slightly faster than stall speed. Jack Evanoff held a pair of binoculars on his lap, lifting them to his eyes whenever something caught his attention. Lee Walsh looked out his side window as he piloted the aircraft, its response at such a slow speed a little more sluggish than he liked. As it had done before, on the way from town the small aircraft followed the mainland coast in a generally eastward direction, its bird-like shadow passing over beaches and the narrow mouths to long bays, which extended far back into the glacial valleys. Once the fuel gauge needle reached the halfway point, Lee turned the plane around and flew along the inside of the islands facing the mainland.