by Scott O'dell
We watched together for a while. Then I got up and made breakfast, a big one, pan bread and all. Ten long hours and more had passed since the men had gone out. My father could be coming home now.
An hour past noon a sled came up from the south. I ran out, thinking it might be a sled bringing my father home, but it went on to the village. When I got there, they were carrying Louis Katchatag into the store. He had fallen into open water and was covered with thick ice, even his face.
After he was thawed out, Katchatag told us that my father had been sighted. He was on a large ice floe moving slowly north past the village. The hunters thought they could reach him in a few hours if the wind didn't move the ice floe away from the shore.
I went home and told my mother what I had heard. It was good news, but she said nothing, getting up to look out the window, coming back to keep an eye on the deerskin rope.
Neighbors brought food, special food like caribou steak, that they knew Bartok liked.
The wind came up and slapped hard against the house, against one wall, then another. We couldn't tell what direction it was blowing from. It blew cold air down the chimney and filled the room with so much smoke that we couldn't see the stretched rope.
I got out a pair of my father's best mukluks, the ones made from sealskin bleached in winter weather, soft and almost white. I had made the tops. They had patterns of different-color fur and bands of wolf fish skin. They looked fancy.
Boots are as good as ropes for telling how things are.
I hung them up by the window, where I could see them clearly in the moonlight. As long as the boots move, even a little, if they walk, the hunter is alive. If they stop walking, the hunter will never, ever wear them again in this life.
Hunters drove by on sleds and went to the store to thaw out and eat. I cooked food for them. All the women cooked food. The men were hungry. Jack Eagle ate three thick caribou steaks and a loaf of bread before he went back to the ice.
The news was good. Whenever the snow let up they had caught glimpses of my father. He was still on the big floe and it was moving along the shore, not out to sea. That day, if they could steer a kayak through the fields of floating ice—they had lost five kayaks already—they would reach the floe and bring my father home.
4
Late that night, we heard sleds on the road far to the south. They came closer, passed our house, and we ran after them.
The hunters carried my father into the store. He was stretched out on one of the kayaks. They put him down by the fire and covered him with a robe. He said nothing.
"He's doing pretty good," Anvo Noorvik said. "But he's got a bad hand. It's frozen. Turning black. He needs a doctor."
There was a heavy silence while Anvo Noorvik went into his office and started up his radio. Crackling sounds and sputtering voices were all we heard for what seemed like an hour. It could have been half an hour.
I stood beside my father. He was under a mound of fur robes and I couldn't see any part of him. I spoke to him and he said a few words that I didn't understand. They sounded as though they came up out of a deep hole.
Anvo Noorvik said, "I got Doc Evans. He's over in Grassy Creek working on broken legs. He'll be here in six hours or less, depending on the weather."
John Evans was the only doctor between Womengo and Nome. He traveled around, making regular calls at fishing villages along the Sound. Dr. Evans had saved many lives.
Driving his team of six malamutes, he reached the store at gray dawn and operated on my father. He had to take off all the fingers on Bartok's right hand, all except his thumb.
"Your husband is a strong man," Dr. Evans said to my mother as he left to go up the Sound to Ovakoff. "The worst is over."
We took my father home, but the worst was not over. His hand healed, but there was something strange about him.
About two weeks later, I was sitting by the window, working on the sealskin boots I sold to people in Nome who sold them to visitors in the summer. Our house was on the shore and the window faced westward to the sea.
My father glanced out at the jumbled spires of the eewoonucks. With a groan, he yanked the curtain shut, plunging the room into darkness.
I got up and lit a lamp. As I walked back to the table where I was working, the light shone in my father's face. His eyes were two deep hollows. His mouth was twisted to one side. His bronze skin was pale underneath. For a moment I thought I was looking at a ghost.
That day he ate little of the food we cooked for him. That night I heard him talking in his sleep. I could not make out what he was saying, though it was loud, so fearsome that the sled dogs on the porch stopped their singing. They did not raise their voices again that night.
My father was the chief man of our village. He was called an-yai-yu-kok, the one that everyone listens to. Everyone did listen to him. But two days later, on the morning the elders met to talk about problems, he did not appear. They thought he had forgotten to come, so they sent a messenger to our home to remind him.
When the messenger knocked on our door, my father did not answer. He sent me, saying, "Tell them that Bartok has a fever in his head."
He was silent. He sat all day with his back to the window and stared and said nothing. Whenever the big ice floes drifted down from the north and crashed onshore, making thunderous sounds, he would tremble and turn pale.
Early in February the elders decided that the village should have a new an-yai-yu-kok. My father hadn't been to the meetings for a long while. They chose a new man whom everyone listened to, but said nothing to Bartok about it.
Then Dr. Evans came on one of his visits to the village. He was surprised at what we told him. How my father had quit going to the council meetings, that he never left the house, that he kept the window closed and sat with his back to it, how he trembled whenever sounds drifted in from the frozen sea.
Dr. Evans motioned for Mother and me to go outside. It was a warm day and he stood in the yard with the hood of his parka thrown back. He was tall and broad-shouldered and towered over us.
In a doctor's voice, he said, "I have seen a dozen cases like this before. Hunters who were caught on floating ice and drifted for days, for a week, not knowing at what hour they would freeze to death, afraid to sleep for fear they will not wake up. Others who fell into the sea by accident, who would have died in minutes from the cold had they not been rescued. Not one of these men ever hunted again. It's a phobia."
The sled dogs were barking, eager to be back on the trail. Suddenly they were silent. Bartok had come out to the shed and was listening to us.
My mother had never heard the word "phobia" before. I could tell that it startled her. I had heard it used in school about mad animals, but it startled me, too.
"Fear," Dr. Evans said, "is powerful."
"My husband has hunted since he was a boy," my mother said. "He is not a fearful man."
"Deep down, all hunters are fearful," the doctor said. "But your husband is fearful now, every minute of his life."
"What will happen? What can we do?" my mother said.
"Hard as it may be, it's best that you leave the village and go where this man cannot hear or look at the sea or even smell it. I know of a place. Ikuma. It is on the big river, where fishing and hunting are good. Ikuma has a good school, a better school than here. I am going there next week. I will find you a place to live."
My father came out of the shed huddled up in his parka and turned away from the sea, blinking in the wan light, smiling a wan smile.
Three days later we moved to Ikuma, forty miles from the seacoast. We hadn't much to move—the pot-bellied stove, cooking pans, dishes, knives and forks, a barrel of smoked salmon, a barrel of seal meat, and the six caribou skins we slept on.
We piled everything on the big sled and Bartok drove. He stood straight on the runners. He looked almost the way he did before those days on the floating ice. The dogs were eager to go.
Mary K. and I got on the sled and covered ourselves with
one of the caribou skins. My father cracked his whip. It curled around the dogs' ears. When we came to the hill that looks down on our village, my mother glanced back.
"Bartok was born in Womengo," she said quietly. "And his mother and father were born in Womengo. Their mothers and fathers were born in Womengo. It is sad that we will not see our village ever again."
"You will like the new place," I said, though I felt sad, too, and I had no idea what the new place would be like.
My father cracked his long whip again. He shouted at the dogs and did not look back at the village or the frozen sea.
5
Ikuma was not a village like Womengo. It had more than a thousand people, a post office, two cafés, and three stores besides a trading post.
At first, we lived on the far side of the river, at the edge of the tundra, a great treeless place. Our makeshift house was made of birches bent over and tied at the tops and covered with caribou skins. After a year, after my father got well and found work with the Empire Canning Company, we moved to a house in town and I had my own room, the first one I'd ever had.
The school was much bigger than the school in Womengo. There were three teachers. Helen Grammas taught English and history, such as the Constitution and the Revolutionary War. Ellen Dusek taught arithmetic. John Seward taught geography and other things.
There was also a church where the Reverend Cartwright told us about God and the Devil, about heaven and hellfire. I got mixed up listening to him, because I had always believed in the God Sila.
Sila is a mystery. He lives far apart from us, way off in nothingness. No one has ever seen him. No one has ever heard him speak. But he watches to see that we do not harm the world we live in—the air and water, our friends the animals, the land and the sky. If we do harm them he will become angry and all of us will vanish from the earth like mist in the morning.
John Seward encouraged us to play games. He led the school band and taught me to play the trumpet. Dog sledding was a very popular sport. The school had two sleds, three dogs to the sled, and he taught us how to race. He could do everything.
The Yukon is a wonderful river for sleds. It winds back and forth like a mammoth snake. And in places it is more than a mile wide. When the ice is covered with a light snow and the dogs can get a footing, the sleds fly.
I was the only student in school who owned a dog team, but in the town there were dozens, and most of them raced on Saturdays.
Usually the races were thirty miles long. The prizes were merchandise from the stores and meals at the two cafés. I never won, but I did finish every race and came in second twice. I won a dinner at the Blue Goose Café and once a glass cooking dish.
My father didn't like his job at the Empire Canning Company. They canned salmon in the spring, but this was deep winter. The big tin building was deserted. All Bartok had to do was to be a watchman for three hours, six days a week, and look out for prowlers. It was a lonely job, walking around empty tables and silent machinery. When he got home, he never had much to say.
"Why don't you go out like Bright Dawn does and race the dogs?" Mother asked him one night.
My father frowned. "Dogs are meant for work, not for racing."
"They are trained to do both," I said.
He gave the supper table a blow with his big fists. They set the dishes to rattling. "For work, not for play," he said.
But we kept at him. Every night at supper we brought up dog sled racing. It took us most of the winter to get him on a sled. We were not surprised that he came in third in his first race and won a pair of beaded mukluks. In the next race he came in first and won a new parka.
After that he was on the river every Saturday and I didn't have a chance to race until spring. He was very short and had a bow in both his legs, but he was strong. In the bad places he jumped off the sled and pushed and kept pushing for an hour, even with his bad hand. He grasped the caribou whip with only his thumb and sent it singing along the backs of our seven sled dogs. He won six races, then the big one, the three-hundred-mile race, and $500.
Ikuma was a check station on the Iditarod, the famous dog sled race that starts in Anchorage on the Gulf of Alaska, crosses rivers, vast stretches of frozen tundra, two great mountain ranges, and ends in Nome, on the Bering Sea, after 1,179 perilous miles.
At Ikuma, drivers check in and out. Their times are kept in a book and sent by radio from one checkpoint to the next. In that way it is known which drivers are first and which are last and which in between.
The Iditarod was a big event in Ikuma, the biggest of the whole year. People talked about it months before it happened. I played a horn in the school band. Two weeks before the racers came through the town, we practiced on Yukon Street, marched up and down, and got ready to greet them.
The mushers came on the nineteenth of March. It had taken them more than thirteen days to travel from Anchorage to Ikuma. They still had to travel one hundred and seven miles to reach Nome.
The night before they came and even the night before that, I couldn't sleep. I had heard about the Iditarod for years. In Womengo people talked about it, but I never thought that I would stand in a crowd somewhere and watch the race. I had never dreamed in my wildest dreams that someday I would march in a band playing my silver horn, wearing a spring parka trimmed with wolverine fur, and welcome racers of the famous Iditarod.
It snowed hard all day on the nineteenth of March, but everyone in Ikuma was waiting on Yukon Street when our school band gathered in front of the Gem Café and welcomed the first drivers with "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful."
Seventy-one mushers had started from Anchorage, we heard, but only thirty-five arrived in Ikuma. The rest had dropped out.
They checked in, one after the other, for three days. On the third night, the last driver that appeared was a girl. She staggered when she got off her sled. She looked so cold and bedraggled that I invited her to come home with me. She smiled weakly.
Her name was Deborah Reed. She was about nineteen, a year or two older than I, and came from Penobscot in Maine.
My mother cooked a hearty meal for her, but she didn't eat it. All she wanted to do was sleep.
"For how long?" I asked her.
"Forever," she said.
"There's hot water. Do you want a bath?"
"Sleep," she said.
"Are you going to give up?"
She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"When do you want to leave?"
"Wake me in five hours, please."
She fell asleep in the chair. She had frostbite on her cheeks.
I went outside and fed her dogs. I kept track of the time and got her up in five hours. She ate two bowls of soup, and I made her some moose sandwiches.
"I've run in some races," I told her. "But they were nothing like the Iditarod, of course. Tell me about the Iditarod."
"You bounce along on a rough trail," she said. "Sometimes on no trail at all. A wild wind blows in your face and the temperature is forty below. With the wind, it could be one hundred below. You freeze and think you are going to die and wish you would. You sleep four hours a day. You wake up and make a fire and feed a dozen dogs. You examine their feet and legs and boots. You harness them to a towline. It snows. The snow turns into a blizzard.
"Comes another day. It's the same but different. You climb a steep hill, too steep for the dogs, so you get off the sled and push. The dogs want to lie down. You urge them on. Over the hill the trail plunges down, back and forth. You stand on the brake. You put out the snow anchor, but the sled races on while you grit your teeth. Then there's another day. The same but not the same."
Her face was pale under the skin that the cold had blackened.
The sun came up and she got on her sled. The dogs lunged against their harness. I watched her disappear in the falling snow. With all my heart, despite what she had told me, I wished I was on the sled racing for Nome.
Then something strange happened. That night wh
ile we were eating supper, Bill Weiss, president of the Empire Canning Company, and Frank Gibson, owner of the Gem Café, appeared.
"Every year," Mr. Weiss said to us, "we enter a driver in the Iditarod."
"We have entered six drivers, but none of them has won," Mr. Gibson said. "In fact, none of them has ever finished the race. It's not very good for Ikuma. Gives Ikuma a bad name."
Mr. Weiss said to my father, "We've heard about the races you've been winning around here."
"Quite a record you've established," Mr. Gibson said.
"We've been wondering if we could enter you in next year's Iditarod," Mr. Weiss said suddenly.
My father was startled.
Mr. Gibson said, "The first prize is fifty thousand dollars. There are other prizes, too. One hundred and fifty thousand in prizes."
My father was silent. Money did not mean anything to him. He thought the white man was crazy, talking money all the time. If my father could gather warm parkas for his family, boots that kept the water out, dry wood for the stove, enough seal and fish to last the winter, then he was a happy man and made us happy.
Mr. Weiss seemed to know this. He was half Eskimo and half Tlingit Indian. It was the Tlingit part that had made him rich.
"It's not the money so much," he said. "It's the test. In the Iditarod a man finds out who he is and what he is. It's a test of bravery."
My father rubbed his bad hand against his chin, a sudden glint in his eyes.
Then Frank Gibson said that they would pay for everything—supplies, food for the driver, food for the dogs, food drops at the checkpoints. "Everything. A dog team, if necessary."
"It takes a year to train for the Iditarod," Mr. Weiss said. "You'll be on the payroll of the Empire Canning Company, the same as always, but you'll spend ten hours a day on the trail, getting your team in shape."
My father was dumbfounded. He stared at the two men.
