by John Smelcer
But Sam remained, with the needs of the living. George mechanically remembered to feed the dog, to provide water, and periodically to let him out to do his business. But he didn’t pet him or talk to him or play fetch with him like he used to. Sometimes the dog only sensed that the man was in the same room, the way they say dogs can sense the lonely spirits of the dead.
A year or two after his wife left, George began to breathe again, to gain solid form until he was able to move things. He stopped sitting in Tabby’s room for hours weeping and praying that everything could be like it used to be. Everything in the room had been left the way it was the day she died, a ten-by-twelve-foot museum to grief and guilt. George’s vanished wife hadn’t taken a single thing from the room.
A van, a slow-moving blue van, drove by on the road above the pond, then stopped for a moment before backing up. Two men stepped out from the idling vehicle. Even from that distance George recognized them. Two Fists ran down the hill without a jacket. Victor followed, carrying a coiled rope over his shoulder.
Both men stood at the edge of the pond.
“We’re coming to get you, George!” shouted Two Fists.
“Hold on, George!” shouted Victor.
Quickly, Victor tied the long rope around Two Fists’ waist, leaving about thirty feet of rope in Two Fists’ grip, more than enough to reach George and the dog. While Victor stood safely on dry ground firmly holding one end of the rope, Two Fists shuffled out across the ice toward the struggling man and dog, holding the loose rope in his hands as he moved.
“Hang in there, George, I’m almost to you,” he kept saying.
When he was as close as he dared go—the ice threatening to break beneath his feet—Two Fists slung the coiled end of the rope toward George. It continued to unwind as it slid across the pond’s frozen surface, its long end splashing into the icy water within easy reach.
“Grab on!” he yelled. “You can do it!”
Still holding Sam against his chest, George grabbed the rope, gripped it as tightly as his cold hand would permit.
Two Fists pulled in the slack and began to back up, each step finding thicker ice. Digging his heals into the firm crust of snow-covered ground, Victor pulled in the slack between them. Together, they pulled George and his dog from the water, the way Eskimos pull a walrus or a whale from the icy sea. They kept the tension until George was able to get to his feet and stumble to shore, still gripping the rope. Sam walked beside him, shuddering.
“Shit, Man,” said Two Fists to George when he was safely off the pond. “You’re freezing. Let’s get you to my van and take you home.”
The two Indians helped George up the hill and into the warm van. Two Fists climbed into the driver’s seat, turned up the heater to full blast, and drove down the road.
Victor stayed in the back of the van helping George.
“I gotta get you out of these soaking-wet clothes,” he said, as he carefully removed George’s coat and red flannel shirt. “Here, Man, put this on,” he said, placing his own jacket around George and then patting him on the shoulder. “You’re gonna be alright.”
Sam lay on the floor shivering and licking ice from between his paws.
“Hey, George,” said Two Fists, turning his head just enough to see the freezing man behind him, “sure is lucky for you that we was driving by, eh?”
Victor agreed. “Yeah, Man, you sure are one lucky dude. Another minute and you’d have been dead.”
George nodded. He could smell alcohol on their breath.
When they arrived at the house, Two Fists led George to the bathroom and started a hot shower for him. He helped him take off his boots and socks while Victor made a pot of coffee and dried Sam with a towel he found hanging in the kitchen.
“Hey, George,” said Two Fists before he closed the bathroom door, “don’t forget to put something on those scratches when you’re done. Damn dog got your face pretty good.”
The two men sat in the kitchen drinking coffee laced with shots of whiskey from Victor’s flask until George finally came out wearing a bathrobe and warm house slippers.
“I want thank you guys,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting at the table.
Two Fists poured a cup of coffee and slid it toward the man.
“Drink up, George. It’ll warm up your insides.”
George drank from the hot cup, holding it with both hands, warming them.
No one said a word after that. It was so quiet that the ticking clock on the wall filled the room.
“Listen George,” said Two Fists after a while. “I’m sorry about what happened, Man. You know, about your kid and all. It was an accident. Maybe we’re even now, eh?”
“Yeah, Man,” said Victor nodding in agreement, “we’re real sorry about what happened. We didn’t even see her until it was too late. Shit happens, you know?”
George stared into his cup, rubbed a thumb along the rim. He didn’t breathe until the clock’s ticking again filled the room.
“Did you hear us, George?” said Two Fists, placing a hand on George’s arm. “We said we was sorry.”
“I’m tired,” said George without looking up. “I think I’ll take a nap.”
The two men stood, gathering up their coats from behind the chairs.
“That’s a good idea, George. You get some rest,” said Victor. “We gotta get going anyhow.”
Two Fists turned before he closed the door.
“Remember, George,” he said. “We’re even now.”
He closed the door, and a moment later George could hear the sound of snow crunching beneath tires as the van backed into the road and drove away. He sat at the kitchen table. After a while, he got up and walked into his daughter’s room. He sat on her bed holding a picture that was taken on her sixth birthday. In the photograph, Tabby is holding the puppy against her chest, while George and his wife are kneeling beside her with their arms around her. Everyone is smiling.
Sam ambled in, his nails clicking on the wood floor, and plopped down on the hook rug with a sigh.
George knelt beside the dog and petted him. He wrapped his arms around the dog’s neck and held his head close to his own, weeping for all he had lost. He wept for the long-abandoned bird nest that was his heart.
The dog occasionally licked the man’s face.
Later, as the sun began to set, George got up, wiped his face, dressed, and put on a dry coat, boots, and a hat. He called to the dog, still sleeping on the floor.
“Come on, Boy. Let’s go for a ride.”
The dog followed him outside and, when George opened the creaking door, jumped into the truck. At ten ripe years, jumping up onto the bench seat was getting harder and harder for Sam.
George drove to the pond with Sam sitting on the seat beside him, watching the white world pass by. The night was clear, and the moon shone with a hard-edged clarity, casting shadows. When they arrived, George parked along the edge of the road, near to where the blue van had pulled over. Although it was dark, he could see the footprints leading out to the pond, see them vanish at the thinly-frozen place where he and Sam had fallen through. For several minutes he sat in the warm truck and stared at the scarred surface of the pond. He was struck by how the recently formed ice gave the appearance of something solid, solid enough to bear a man’s weight. He laid a gentle hand on Sam’s head. The dog turned and looked into the man’s eyes.
George climbed out and let the dog jump down. He reached behind the seat and pulled out his rifle, checked to make sure it was loaded.
“Let’s go for a walk, Boy,” he said, without looking at the dog.
Eagerly, the dog trotted toward the pond, occasionally turning around to make sure he had not lost the man.
Darkness
Andrew Angiak struggled to lift himself from his thin bed. The steel springs squeaked until he finally sat uprigh
t, his bare feet on the floor, which was always cold. This far north, the ground never thawed. Ice penetrated the earth hundreds, even thousands of feet deep. In summer, only the first couple of feet thawed, forming a thin bed of soil on which tundra flowers grew quickly, for the sun lasted briefly here.
The old man bent over, feeling for his slippers. He lit the oil lamp beside his bed and coughed for a long time. Then he checked the oil stove. It was empty again. With little income, the old man had to ration what money he received. He could not afford to keep his house warm all the time. He had to balance the high cost of heat against the high cost of food.
Eat or stay warm—one or the other—never both at the same time.
In the old days, men did not purchase heating fuel. Instead, they earned it through labor hunting whales and rendering fat into oil, which warmed and lit their homes and fed their bellies. There was never a shortage. No family went cold or hungry.
Andrew carefully poured a gallon of oil into the small tank and lit the pilot, turning the knob to its lowest setting. The fire would burn until sometime after noon, then it would die, and the temperature inside would drop until bedtime, when he would again feed the thirsty tank. The old man measured winter by the gallon. Sixty gallons a month sparingly spent, one gallon at a time.
“Five hundred gallons of oil,” he often told the other men in the village. “Spring will be here soon.”
And the other men would begin to prepare for its arrival, mending nets, oiling rifles, tuning outboards, making plans for the short-lived season when the sky releases its burden of light and color. In the old days, all men knew the coming of spring by the shifting of the ice pack, by the way beluga whales arrived from the south following schools of salmon and herring. Back then, men knew how to live off the land, and the land provided to them. Now they remembered only a little.
Andrew looked out his only window, small and frosted. It was dark outside, and the darkness went forever—distant and deep. In the middle of winter, as it was, the sun had not visited the horizon for over a month. Sled dogs lay curled inside their little houses, trying to retain what little heat they could muster, and polar bears nestled in their ice-hewn dens, smelling the relentless wind, their hunger rising. Out of the darkness, the silence of the ice pack mounted toward him. Nothing moved, not even the shivering sled dogs. There was nothing against which to gauge time’s passing.
Nevertheless, it passed.
Still looking out the window, the old man thought of the story of how long ago Raven had brought light to the world, how before that, the world had toiled in darkness. He understood the deepness of such dark. Priests had long ago told him that such stories were childish. Raven was nothing but a black bird. God has no wings. But Andrew liked the old stories. They were of the north. They explained things—why the moon rises and falls, the origin of seals, the northern lights. He wondered what harm there was in their telling.
Once the small heater began to radiate warmth, the old man cut a thick slice of whale fat, which he laid across pilot bread, a thick unsalted cracker popular in the north. He sat a dented kettle of meltwater on the heater, tossing in a single bag of black tea. When it was hot, he drank it slowly in the only cup he owned, looking at the twenty year old calendar hanging on the wall—his only art.
Andrew Angiak was a simple man. He had lived a long, full life—ninety years in fact. He had been a great hunter in his youth, a boat captain on many successful whale hunts from which he pulled as many men from the sea as had been lost to it. Only the hardy and the fortunate survived this far north. He had brought home countless seals and walrus, which he shared with the infirm in the village, those who could not hunt or fish for themselves.
Now he was poor and alone. A hundred years is a long time—too long, he thought. And although he had never ventured far from the sea-edged village, he knew the world. Everything changes. The present destroys the past. History moves forward and backward, written and unwritten, repeating itself. Wars wage whenever peace has lasted too long. Andrew knew the great truths: compassion begets love; jealousy begets ruin; darkness precedes light; death precedes death; and despite it all, life endures.
The old man slowly buttoned his one good dress shirt, set his feet into mukluks, tied them, and donned his fur parka hanging on a nail near the oil stove. He turned down the wick of his oil lamp and blew out the small, yellow flame—the only sun the room had known in months.
After pushing hard to close the door, the old man quickly crossed the village to the church. The frozen sea lay behind it, giant wedges of ice piled endlessly for as far as the eye could see, almost glistening beneath the moon, which looked as though it were a hole torn in the black canvas of the night. It was twenty-eight degrees below zero. A wind arose, the ice pack heaved, and darkness lay on the land.
The church was the largest building in the village, built during The Great Death, when diseases carried from afar decimated the People. Death was everywhere then, in every house, in every igloo, on every family. Andrew had lost two wives and a son. The church, seeing an opportunity, blamed the epidemic on the People’s superstitions, told them that God was punishing them because they did not know Him. He had brought it upon them, His vengeance swift and terrible.
That is what they said, even though the missionaries themselves, among others, had brought the disease in the first place.
Within a couple generations, the old world vanished. The language decayed. Customs rotted. Myths turned into ghosts. Even ghosts found somewhere else to dwell. The old gave way to the new. The People were as lost as any man who had ever lost himself in the Arctic.
Nowadays, they had electricity, television, and soda pop. They had a new church to guide them, built of whitewashed planks with stained glass windows and gilded icons suspended on the inside walls. Icicles hung sharply from the roof eaves. Before each whaling season, whaleboat captains and hunters hauled umiaks through the wide doors for blessing. The tall steeple was visible for miles. Hunters used it to find their way home, a beacon of sorts, since they could no longer steer by stars.
A lone raven, ruffled and discontent, hunkered atop the steeple sulking about the cold and dark.
The church was comfortable inside, warm and well lit. Andrew volunteered at the church often, repairing the roof after high winds, replacing cracked windows, oiling door hinges, maintaining the rattling furnace, and polishing the hardwood floors.
Already, the pews were filling with villagers. The large room smelled of kerosene and smoked salmon and seal oil. It smelled like home. The old man took a seat in the back row and waited. He was glad for the warmth, for the light, and for the company. He had known these people all his life, their fathers and mothers—and their parents.
Minutes later, the priest approached the altar cradling a Bible in his hands and the room became as quiet as the sea. He looked around the room, smiling at the many faces, before opening the book and reading a passage aloud, softly at first.
For a long time the priest spoke about how sinners go to Hell, consumed eternally in a seething Lake of Fire, forever suffering for their sins.
“For all fall short of the Glory of God!” the priest shouted across the room, looking at the anxious faces staring back at him. “All are sinners!”
The priest declared how God was the Light, and how everlasting life came only through Him. Andrew looked out a window, saw the frozen world outside, lightless. When the service was over and the pews emptied, he remained sitting in the back row, his head hanging in the palms of his hands.
The priest came alongside.
“Why do you linger, Andrew? The service is over.”
“Father,” the old man asked, still looking to his hands. “If you had not told us about God and sin, would we go to Hell?”
The priest smiled softly, placed a hand on his shoulder.
“No, my son. The Lord does not punish those who do not know him.�
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“Then,” said the old man, raising his tired, gray eyes, “why have you told us?”
Later, the old man shuffled back to his small house, passing other small houses, the snowy yards littered with old caribou antlers, empty and rusted fuel barrels, and broken down snowmobiles and boat motors. He lit the lamp and checked the heater. It was almost out of fuel. Even the lamp was near empty, the small yellow flame flickering. Andrew sat alone at his small table, his hands clasped, his eyes closed. He prayed for his people. He prayed for forgiveness. Most importantly, he prayed for understanding.
That night, as the old man slept, the heater ran out of fuel. The lamp oil ran out. Outside the small house, cold and darkness gathered. Even stars stopped burning.
The Bear
The hunter heard a snap when he fell while shambling down the steep talus slope leading to the creek. Thinking it no more than clumsiness, he tried to stand, but almost passed out from the excruciating pain that shot up his leg. His twisted foot was wedged between two large rocks. Taking a deep breath, the man grabbed his ankle and wrenched the foot free. His face drained white, and a cold sweat soaked through the grimacing creases. He sat for a long time, looking around him, clenching his teeth until the throbbing subsided. In spite of the sudden dizziness and terrible pain, the man was awestruck by the beauty of the red and yellow and orange-leafed valley and the jagged, surrounding peaks, dusted with new snow.
The man slowly pulled up the bottom of his jeans so that he could see how badly his leg had been hurt from the fall. Halfway to his knee, something stuck out from his skin. For a moment he thought it might be a bit of rock embedded from the fall, but when he felt it, he could tell that it was his own broken bone protruding through the skin.
For an instant, the hunter chuckled despite himself. He couldn’t have picked a worse place for disaster.
