by John Smelcer
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Ts'iłk'ey
Nadaeggi
Taa'i
Denc'i
‘Alts'eni
Gistaani
Konts' aghi
Łk'edenc'i
Ts'iłk'ey Kole
Hwlazaan
Ts'iłk'ey Uk'edi
Nadaeggi Uk'edi
Taa'i Uk'edi
Denc'i Uk'edi
‘Alts'eni Uk'edi
Copyright
For John and Jane Jones, Leo Walsh,
and my grandmothers, Mary Smelcer-Wood
and Morrie Secondchief
There is no agony like
bearing an untold story inside you.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Prologue
AS WESTERN EUROPEANS SETTLED ALASKA, they brought with them diseases against which the indigenous peoples had no natural immunity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fully two thirds of all Alaska Natives perished from a pandemic of measles, smallpox, and influenza. No community was spared. In most cases, half of a village’s population died within a week. In some cases, there were no survivors. It was the end of an ancient way of life. Natives still refer to the dreadful period as the Great Death.
This is the story of the last two survivors of one little village, two young sisters who had to save themselves … and in doing so, save each other.
Ts'iłk'ey
(One)
In Yani’da’a, the long-ago time, Raven was flying around looking for something to eat. He was very hungry as usual. Once, he had even been hungry the day after he finished eating a whale.
SOME STORIES ARE TOO BIG to be told all at once, even if they seem small. Largeness of story has nothing to do with the length of each word or of each sentence or with the number of pages, but with the capacity of the heart, which can take only so much.
This is such a story.
It begins in a little-known corner of Alaska less than two decades after the end of the Klondike Gold Rush, one of America’s last great adventures. Back then, there stood a small village at the northern edge of a great lake surrounded on the south side by mountains and fed by a glacier. A fast-running river flows from the far eastern side of the lake. Indeed, the name for the river in the local indigenous language, Tazlina, means “swift river.”
Don’t bother to look for the village on a map; you won’t find it.
The People had lived in this country forever, not forever in the sense that a farming family that has lived on the same farm for generations would use the word, but so long as to give depth and width and the smell of age to the word.
More than two dozen families dwelled in small log houses at the edge of the lake. They weren’t very tall houses, for they were built partially into the ground, which had the benefit of cooling them in summer and warming them in winter. The roofs were covered with sod, the heavy soil insulating the homes. They were abloom with weeds and wildflowers. And every green roof was adorned with weathered, gray caribou and moose antlers—some very large, for game was plentiful in those days.
Smoke from cooking fires rose and drifted through the village, helping to drive away mosquitoes, the plague of summertime, from which there was no true escape. Racks made of willow were laden with strips of red salmon hanging to dry in the sun and wind. Little houses on tall legs stood back in the forest of black spruce. These caches, accessible only by ladder, stored dried fish and meat out of the reach of animals.
Canoes were pulled up on the gravel beach. At the western edge of the village, a thin footbridge made of a fallen timber spanned a clear stream, which was full of bright red salmon. Dogs ran about barking and sniffing and searching for something to eat. Children helped their families—sons helping fathers and uncles, daughters helping mothers and aunts—or they chased the dogs along the beach or skipped rocks on the water.
In such a small village, everyone was somehow related. But on such a harsh land the amity of other villages was important. In time of famine, when the great herds of caribou did not come into the country during winter, that sense of wider community could mean the difference between life and death. Sharing in time of need is paramount in the north, where snow and quiet and darkness rule the land for half a year at a time. It is one of the most essential laws.
It was in this village that the story begins.
But it does not end there.
* * *
Several spear-holding men were standing knee-deep in the stream as it widened and shallowed, emptying into the lake. The bottom of the creek was sand and pebbles, where salmon congregated and readied themselves for their final push upstream, up to the headwater that would welcome their spawn—life arising from death as day arises from night; such is the cycle of existence.
The men stabbed salmon with the long, barbed spears, flinging them ashore to their wives, who deftly cut them open and tossed the innards back into the water so that the spirits of the salmon could return to the sea. It was important that the People respect the salmon, which they depended on to outlast the long, desolate winters. If the salmon spirits thought they had been disrespected, they might not return in the future.
Two eagles watched everything from the treetops. Seagulls hovered and mewed above the women, diving and fighting one another for whatever was flung into the moving water, and far out on the lake, ducks floated on the shimmering blue-gray surface. Even farther, on the distant horizon, the white glacier crept in the distance.
Upstream from the men was the little footbridge, and upstream of that stood two young girls, sisters—the older and taller on the right bank, the younger girl perched precariously on a large rock midstream, several other large rocks protruding from the water behind her.
“Jump!” shouted Millie from the bank. “You can make it!”
“But I can’t!” Maura shouted above the din of the rushing water. “I’ll fall in!”
Maura had jumped from one rock to another, but now the distance to shore seemed too great.
“You’re always afraid of everything!” shouted Millie. She was impatient because her mother had asked her to fetch her younger sister. Mother would be angry at her for taking so long, even though it was Maura’s fault they were late. She had stood on the boulder for a long time, too frightened to leap. But that wouldn’t matter. Millie was older; it was she who would be blamed.
“I am not,” replied Maura quietly, barely audible above the rushing water, almost losing her footing on the slippery rock.
But it was true. Maura wouldn’t even go to the outhouse alone after dark. She always made her sister go with her, and she always sang a little song while inside, her heels nervously tapping against the boards.
Running past Millie, a lean dog chased a squirrel up a tree and then peered eagerly into the limbs, barking at the chattering escapee. It wasn’t their dog. Dozens of dogs roamed the village.
“Hurry up and jump!” Millie shouted. “Mother said to come home!”
“I can’t. I’ll fall in,” replied Maura, almost in tears, thinking of the swift, icy water.
Millie reached out her hand. “Grab hold when you jump! I’ll catch you!”
Maura crouched, not nearly low enough, and jumped, landing in water up to her waist. Salmon darted from beneath and about her, splashing every which way up and
down the stream, the way they do when wading bears try to pounce on them. Maura stood only a step from shore crying, the ends of her long black hair floating around her.
Millie leaned forward and helped her little sister out of the stream. “You’re too frightened. You really must grow up.” Her tone was stern, in a motherly sort of way, though she was only three years older. Millie even looked like their mother. Maura took after their father.
Maura stopped crying as she walked behind Millie on the narrow trail to their house, her dress dripping. Mosquitoes buzzed about them; the squirrel-chasing dog followed on their heels, stopping often to mark bushes and trees.
“But I’m only ten,” she said quietly, feeling a little ashamed of herself.
“At your age, I was swimming in the lake,” Millie said over her shoulder. “You’re too afraid even to wade in the stream.”
Maura didn’t say anything for several steps but finally managed, “I can’t help it if I’m small.”
As she walked, Maura stretched her stride to match the prints left by her sister’s moccasins on the sandy trail.
Millie stopped and turned to Maura. “The badger is small, but even the mighty bear fears him.”
Neither of the girls said a word after that. The mosquitoes continued to buzz, and the dog ran off after another squirrel.
When they entered their small house, their mother was cooking fish-egg soup over an open fire, adding wild potatoes to the black cast-iron pot. The inside of the house was smoke-filled and crowded, consisting of a single room with two beds mounted along the hewn-log walls. A small table stood under the only window in the cabin. Now, at midday, the table was bare, except for an unlit candle and a box of matches. Two rickety chairs flanked the table’s end, though it served a family of four.
No art adorned the walls, no pictures of any kind, no photographs. There were no books, no fine china, no dolls or other playthings of any sort, no cupboards or toilets or closets. The floor was earthen but clean-swept. A lever-action rifle leaned in a corner below a dozen traps hanging from nails, a box of cartridges on the floor beneath it. On one wall hung three beaver pelts and a great many smaller muskrat and marten furs; on the opposite wall hung two wolf hides. The home smelled of tanned leather and wood smoke. A large bear hide was stretched and nailed on a wall outside, dry and cracked from the sun and wind.
“There you are,” their mother said without turning.
Millie steeled herself for Mother’s reaction.
“I told you to go find your sister a long time ago. What took you so long? I had to gather the firewood and prepare the soup by myself.”
Then Mother looked over her shoulder and saw that Maura was soaking wet.
“What happened to her?” she shouted at Millie.
Millie tried to explain that she couldn’t find Maura at first, that she had finally seen her playing on the other side of the creek, and that when they crossed the creek above the bridge, her little sister had fallen into the water.
“It’s your responsibility to watch after your sister,” Mother said sternly, stirring the pot with a rough, hand-carved wooden spoon. “How many times have I told you that you must take care of her?”
Millie looked at the earthen floor. She couldn’t look at her mother’s face, couldn’t bear to see the disappointment wrinkling her forehead.
Millie hated looking after Maura. She wanted to sew and bead and sit with other older girls as they tanned moose and caribou hides for leather to make moccasins, gossiping all the while about boys. It wasn’t fair that she had to spend so much of her time keeping an eye on Maura.
Sometimes, Millie hated her little sister.
Nadaeggi
(Two)
Raven was flying around when he saw a village at the edge of the frozen sea. He landed and spoke to the chief of the village.
“Oh, wise chief,” he said cunningly, “the village up the coast is planning to attack your village.”
The old chief was very concerned. “What shall we do?” he asked.
A COMMOTION AROSE at the lakefront. Dogs were barking, and everyone in the village was running to see what the excitement was. Millie and Maura raced down the little hill and joined the crowd, most of whom were standing along the upper beach watching three men approach the village. Still far away, they walked along the shore from the direction where the river begins, about a mile down the lake.
“Who is it?” an old woman asked.
A boy replied, “I don’t know, grandmother. I can’t see them from here.”
“Is it a chief from downriver?” someone else asked.
Every village had a chief.
The elder men talked among themselves and quickly agreed to dispatch several young men to meet the approaching party halfway. They ran along the path that meandered close to the lakeshore. On reaching the men, they stopped and spoke briefly to them, and then the group walked together to the village, several of the loose dogs sniffing the strangers.
One of the men was from a village downriver. He was a cousin to several older villagers, and they clasped his hands when they saw him. But the two men with him were strange-looking. Their skin was light, almost white. One had red hair, while the other’s hair was like that of a light-colored grizzly bear. Both had blue eyes!
Millie and Maura had never seen anyone like them before, though they had heard of such people in stories told by the men who sometimes left the village to go downriver to trade their furs for large sacks of flour and dried beans and tea and other goods, such as small glass windows, iron cooking kettles, metal axes, saws, guns, bullets, knives, and steel animal traps.
The two girls pressed through the crowd so that they could see better and hear the conversation. They wondered if the men were friendly or if they meant harm. The strangers were taller than any man in the village by a head. Their clothes were different. Their boots were different. Even the outsiders’ words were different. No one in the village understood what they were saying. The strangers had to speak first to the man from downriver, who turned and spoke to the villagers in their language, even though some of his words sounded a little different because he spoke another dialect.
The white men asked how many people lived in the village, how many men and women and children. They asked if there were other villages farther up the wide valley. The chief, an old man whose hair was mostly gray, answered the man from downriver, who turned to tell the strangers, one of whom quickly scrawled a little stick against broad, white leaves bound in hide, which he had retrieved from a rucksack.
“Have you any news?” the chief asked the man from downriver.
The man coughed into his hand a few times before answering.
“Yes,” he said, clearing his throat. “Many of the old ones have died this summer. So have some of the very young. It has been a bad time.”
Then he began to recite the names of the dead. Some were relatives of those who stood quietly listening, shocked by the long list. They had seen some of those very people only the previous spring.
“What can we do to help?” the chief asked.
“Nothing,” replied the other Indian. He looked to be a few years older than Millie and Maura’s father, who was standing beside the old chief. “Our shaman exhausted himself trying to heal the people. But then, old as he was, he too died from the sickness, and now we have no shaman. Death is everywhere, in every house.”
The shaman from Millie and Maura’s village had died of old age during the winter. Some people said he was ninety years old.
The man coughed again, harder this time, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Little red spots dotted his hands and arms, which no one had noticed until then. Neither Maura nor Millie had seen such spots on a person before. Millie wondered if he had been bitten by a hundred mosquitoes.
One of the strangers, the red-haired man, reached into his pack and pulled out a brown wooden box. The other man untied something from the side of his pack. It had three wooden legs, which he s
tretched out longer and longer. The red-haired man set the box atop the three-legged device. He looked closely at the thing, his fingers working little levers and dials. Then he spoke to the man from downriver, who told everyone to stand close together while the man squatted behind the device.
Millie and Maura giggled. Others laughed as well. The strange red-haired man looked funny hunched behind the box, glancing up and motioning for the people to move closer together.
A sharp sound came from the box, like the snap of a dry twig when it’s broken and thrown into the cooking fire. Click. Maura grabbed Millie’s hand, frightened by the noise, but when nothing happened, she let go. After a moment, the man looked up, lifted the thing—legs, box, and all—and moved it a few steps closer and to the side before hunkering behind it again. Click.
Both men then walked around the village, setting up the device here and there, the man with light brown hair continually scrawling on the white hide. Most of the villagers followed them, curious about what they were doing and what it was the man saw of such great interest inside the little box. Perhaps it was some sort of ritual. Sometimes the men asked villagers to stand before a cabin or a tall cache or a rack full of drying salmon. Sometimes they asked individuals to squat beside a dog or a canoe. They asked Millie and Maura’s father to stand beside the bearskin stretched and nailed to the outside wall of their cabin. It was a very large skin, at least nine feet long. Then the red-haired man gestured for Millie and Maura to stand alongside a dogsled with tall grass and fireweed growing up through its runners. When they didn’t understand, he took them by the shoulders and gently pushed them closer to the sled. Maura didn’t like the man touching her, but she moved all the same.
After a while, the women began to prepare a great meal. The men and children followed the strangers, watching them curiously. It seemed like every dog in the village sniffed them. A few kept their distance, barking until someone led them away and tied them up. Smoke from a dozen fires drifted in the air. Everyone was busy. Millie and Maura helped their mother, while some of the other children continued to follow the strangers around the village. Both girls wanted to be outside too, but Mother insisted that they help her with the preparations. The man from downriver spent most of his time speaking with the men of the village and visiting in the homes of some of his relatives, talking about those who had died.
