by John Smelcer
“Strange,” he thought, squinting, trying to see through the fog. The sky had been clear as far as he could see when he lay down to nap. Not a single cloud had drifted in the sky.
The commotion grew louder.
Willie reached for his rifle. It was gone. In its place was a long, sharp spear. Hearing the trumpeting sound again and what sounded like voices, the hunter grabbed the spear and walked cautiously through the fog in the direction of the furor. Soon, he came upon a band of hunters surrounding an enormous creature, a swaying, trumpeting, raging colossus of a beast. A woolly mammoth. The men were shouting and threatening the giant animal with the tips of their spears. The mammoth loomed above the men with two spears stuck in its lower flank. The bleeding animal rushed one man, trampling but not crushing him with the edge of his broad foot, while one of the other hunters jabbed his spear upward into the mammoth’s side. The shaggy creature reeled toward the attacker. One of the heavy, curved tusks struck the man and sent him flying. The trampled man scrambled to his feet and limped to safety.
For the first time Willie noticed that the other hunters were wearing fur skins and fur boots. Their hair was long and black. He looked down and saw that he was clothed the same. He was also wearing a necklace made of bear claws. A stone-bladed knife in a sheath hung from his waist.
Suddenly, the mammoth saw Willie and charged him, his head down, his tusks aimed right for him, his eyes blazing with fury. The strange men shouted at Willie, who didn’t understand a word.
But he knew the peril.
With the colossal mammoth barreling toward him, its trunk flailing, Willie crouched, ready to jump right or left. At the very last moment he jumped safely out of the way. As the shaggy monster passed, too heavy to stop in its track or wield about quickly, he plunged his spear into the creature’s neck. The mammoth’s shrill trumpet blasted through the fog. He stood shaking his head, trying to dislodge the spear. Blood gushed onto the tundra.
The other hunters circled the dying animal, and each stuck his spear into its side. The mammoth lumbered a couple of steps, swayed for a few moments, and then collapsed into a giant, shaggy heap of brown fur.
As Willie stood beside the carcass, the hunters approached him, each patting him on the shoulder. Willie understood the gesture. One of the men, with more gray in his hair than the others, stood before him, placed his hands on Willie’s shoulders, and repeated a word, over and over, while Willie nodded ignorantly.
The men spent the rest of the day quartering the giant beast. One man was dispatched to summons others to come help carry the meat back to their village.
That evening, the hunters sat around a campfire roasting strips of the meat. Although he didn’t understand a word they said, Willie smiled as he listened to the other men talking and laughing. At one point, he could tell they were reciting the hunt, acting out certain events, including Willie’s courageous stand. The man who had been trampled seemed to be alright, aside from a large bruise on his side and thighs. Sometimes when he laughed too hard, he stopped suddenly and placed a hand against his side and grimaced. Willie wondered if the mammoth hadn’t broken some of his ribs.
That night, they all slept on the tundra, covered with heavy furs.
Willie awoke, stretched and looked around. The sky was clear and blue. The sun was low on the endless horizon. His rifle was beside him. He stood up. He could see no sign of the battle with the mammoth. No bloody carcass. No sign of the hunters. No cold campfire.
He bent over, hoisted the heavy pack of meat to his shoulders, jumped a little to adjust the load, and picked up his rifle. Before heading in the direction of home, the hunter stood on a small rise, his eyes taking in the landscape—the bright tundra painted in the colors of the fleeting season and the ragged peaks of faraway mountains.
Beneath a low sun etched in an endless sky, Willie Paniaq stood and wept.
River’s Edge
“Watch out!” Chawnee Fury shouted as a cow moose and her calf suddenly emerged from the thick wood and stepped onto the narrow dirt road.
Chawnee’s cousin, Thomas Fury, slammed on the brakes, and the truck swerved to miss both animals.
The terrified mother bolted for the safety of the river running parallel to the dusty road. A lifetime of experience told her that predators would not pursue her into the raging water, aptly named “Undercurrent River” in the local indigenous language.
And so it was.
The river began its winding course in the distant mountains about thirty miles upstream, where a crouching glacier peered into the wide, green valley below. The slow melting of the ice gave birth to the river, which eventually emptied into a much larger river, after which the local tribe was named. Miners who had come into the region during the great Gold Rush called it the Copper River, but the Native people had always called it Atna Tuu. The People were named after the river, the lifeblood of their history, and their small villages were nestled along its banks.
Raven had made the river, the bringer of salmon, for The People, and they had a story of how he made salmon.
In the story, after Raven had created the world, salmon could only swim at the surface because they were too buoyant to swim the depths. They were therefore easy prey for hungry eagles and bears. One day, Chief of the Salmon People spoke to Raven, telling him of their miserable plight. After consideration, Raven agreed to help. He cut a small slit in the top of the salmon’s head and inserted two tiny stones. From that time on, salmon could dive deep and escape talons and claws alike. As proof of the myth’s veracity, even today one has only to cut a salmon head in half to see the two tiny gray stones, exactly where Raven had placed them.
The story was remarkable in the consciousness of The People because Raven rarely did anything nice for anyone. In that respect he was like a black-suited agent from the government who says he’s come to help.
A different kind of trickster.
At a thousand pounds, more or less, the sturdy long-legged mother forged her way across the rapids, eventually stepping safely onto the far gravel bank. But much lighter, the young calf was washed downriver, the strong current tumbling her head over hooves, the undertow yanking her beneath the waves.
She was drowning.
“Stop the truck!” shouted the boy, who was named after the word in their language for grizzly bear. Chawnee Fury. Raging Grizzly.
Quiet and small and skinny for fourteen, his ferocious name did not suit him.
After his cousin stopped the truck, the boy jumped out and ran to the edge of the river.
“What are you doing?” his much older cousin yelled.
“I have to save it!” shouted Chawnee over his shoulder. “It’s our fault if she dies!”
The boy ran along the river’s edge following the drowning calf, hoping to grab hold of her. But she never came close enough and the current worsened up ahead. With no other choice, Chawnee jumped into the icy water and swam for the moose. He grabbed her around the neck and tried to hold her head above water as the unlikely pair rose on the crests and plunged into the troughs of each wave. At one point they narrowly missed an enormous boulder against which they might have been pinned or pulled into the dangerous, swirling eddy behind it.
The dumbfounded mother watched from the far shore.
The frightened baby moose struggled in the boy’s grip.
“It’s okay,” spat Chawnee as they crested a wave. “I’ve got you.”
The calf relaxed, not because she understood the words of reassurance but from exhaustion and cold.
With the calf’s head pressed against his own, Chawnee used his free arm to swim toward the near shore, away from the cow moose. Laboriously, one stroke at a time, boy and moose made their way into shallow water where they eventually found weak footing.
Both climbed onto the beach.
Like a bear on all fours, Chawnee coughed out the river from
his lungs, while the little calf shook herself the way a dog shakes itself dry—the spray splattering on the gravel, turning the gray stones dark. Then she bolted into the forest.
Sopping wet, his sneakers squishing when he walked, Chawnee walked back to the dusty road, where his cousin was standing beside the truck, which he had driven downstream anxiously observing the drama. When Chawnee was some thirty or forty yards away, Thomas yelled to him.
“You’re crazy! You know that? You could have drowned.”
Just then the baby moose came trotting down the road behind Chawnee. She walked right up to him and pressed her blonde head against his chest, against his heart. The older cousin watched as Chawnee ran his hands along the moose’s neck and mane and then hugged her. After a moment, the calf turned and trotted away, toward her mother, who was crossing back from the other side of the river.
Chawnee walked slowly up to the truck with his hands in his pockets, smiling at his cousin.
“That’s the damndest thing I ever saw,” said Thomas Fury, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re one crazy Indian.”
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
In his soaking wet clothes and squishy black shoes, Chawnee Fury smiled all the jostling way home.
The Awakening
Elijah High Horse fired two shots across the small, oblong lake. It was at least a hundred fifty yards to the other side, more or less. The shots roared in the cup of the frosted valley, and a flock of small birds lifted from a leafless tree and flew over the white hill.
Johnny Secondchief stood looking at the far side of the lake, his long, black hair blowing in the light breeze.
“What are you shooting at?” he asked, squinting to see the distant shore.
“That caribou on the sand bar. Right there,” he said pointing.
Johnny’s eyes followed his arm and the pointing finger.
“There’s nothing there,” he said, still squinting. “You must have missed.”
But Elijah worked the bolt, shoving another cartridge into the chamber. He brought the butt of the rifle to his shoulder, set it tight, aimed carefully, and fired again.
Johnny raised his old, beat up rifle and looked through its scope across the water.
“What are you shooting at?” he asked again, his voice growing angry and impatient.
“That big bull standing right there. Can’t you see it? Look at the size of its rack,” he said, his head moving slightly left as if he were following something moving on the other side.
“Damn it. There he goes. Damn. He got away.”
Johnny raised his rifle once more, looked for a moment, then turned to his cousin.
“There wasn’t nothing there, Eli,” he said, nodding his head.
“It was right there, standing on the shore by that tree. You had to see it?”
The cousins, their mothers being sisters, had grown up together. Everyone in the village grew up together in one way or another. It was too small not to. And they had always joked around, especially when they were drunk, which was often. But they never drank on the hunt. It was their rule, and it was a steadfast rule they never broke. When they went into the woods, they were hunters, the way hunters were meant to be. Indians knew this. It was nearly sacred—a time to be what they had been long ago.
They stood arguing as the sun set over the hill and a shadow fell into the valley. It would be dark soon.
“I’m not joking, Elijah!” Johnny said for the fifth or sixth time. There was nothing there. You were shooting at nothing.”
But his cousin stood his ground, certain at what he had seen.
Finally, near darkness, they paddled a small canoe across the lake to where Elijah had seen the caribou and walked up and down the shoreline for a while before giving up for the night.
“I don’t get it,” Elijah finally said, puzzled, his warm breath rising on the air like the flock of small white birds they had seen earlier. “It was right here.”
They looked down again. The ground was sandy and soft enough that they could see their own boot tracks weaving around the place in their search for caribou sign. But there were no other tracks of any kind. Nothing had walked across this spot in days or weeks. There had been no caribou—only emptiness and the rolling hills of spruce and pine in the distance.
As darkness settled upon the northland, curled upon itself like a sled dog to get comfortable for the long night, the two young Indians paddled back across the flat, dark water. A loon called from the far side and an owl’s hoot came softly through the night.
That night, their campfire embers glowing outside, they lay in their fluttering tent talking about the vanishing caribou.
“I saw it as clearly as I see you right now,” Elijah whispered, his voice serious. “I’m not joking. I had it dead on.”
That night Elijah slept restlessly, dreaming strange dreams. He awoke often, thinking he heard rustlings outside the tent. A bear maybe. Maybe not, he’d think after listening for a long time, warm in his sleeping bag. It was a long night.
The next day they packed camp and drove back to the village. They stopped at their grandfather’s house. He was a traditional chief and a deeply spiritual man. He was born back when Indians still spoke their language, when they remembered the old ways, before things changed forever. He was standing outside wearing a baseball cap and a thick red flannel shirt with suspenders changing a tire on his car. The boys gave him a hand.
“Grandfather,” Elijah said after the tire was mounted and the lug nuts tightened. “I have to tell you something.”
He told the story of the previous night, how he had seen the caribou, shot at it. Johnny told the part how there were no tracks in the soft earth.
“It was like it wasn’t there at all,” Elijah said.
The old man sat down stiffly on a rusty fifty-five-gallon metal barrel turned on its side. There were dozens of them scattered around the field like wild flowers. At the far edge of the field near the tree line, abandoned cars decayed slowly, becoming homes for small animals.
His grandfather looked at his grandson for a long time before he spoke.
“That’s because it wasn’t really there, Elijah,” he said slowly, the way elders always spoke, as if nothing was in a hurry anymore, not even their words.
“You saw the spirit of a caribou. You saw its ghost. When an animal dies—be it fox, beaver, moose, grizzly bear, or caribou—its spirit stays in this world. This is heaven to them. They still walk around doing the same things they always did. They don’t know they’re dead. But most people can’t see them. They exist only in the spirit world. They are all around us, even now, here in this field, in those trees on the hillside. Even the spirits of salmon swim the rivers, following their cousins and children as they spawn each summer. Only a shaman can see them.”
Elijah knelt down close as the old chief continued.
“When you were born, we knew that you would be a shaman one day. When the local priest came down to the village to Baptize you, your nose started bleeding when the water touched you. All the elders remember that day. But no one can tell when it will begin. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until one is very old and is willing to see the world of the dead. Sometimes it happens too soon, when one is unwilling to believe their own eyes. The knowledge can use up a weak man. We knew that you would see what you must see when it was time. There was no reason to tell you while you were so young. We knew that one day you would come to us.”
Elijah and Johnny walked the old chief to his house, helped carry in two five gallon jugs of drinking water, which they placed in a corner near the wood stove, and left.
They drove down to fish camp, an open area along the great, silty river where both their families spent several weeks each summer catching salmon to hang and dry in the sun and wind. The river was low. This late in the fall, glaciers didn’t melt and rivers began to s
hrink.
They built a fire, brought two tree stumps close to sit on, and sat a small cooler full of beer beside them. They didn’t talk for a long time, but stared into the fire and out across the river towards the great white mountains in the distance. The mountains dominated the landscape of the region. They were so tall that snow never melted from them. All summer they were buried in whiteness. It is said that the spirits of Indians go there, and that the wisps of smoke rising from volcanic vents are the campfires of the dead.
Johnny finally broke the silence.
“Eli,” he said quietly. “I have to tell you something.”
His cousin turned away from the spell of the fire, holding his beer can gently between two hands nestled in his lap.
“When I was fourteen, I was hunting grouse and rabbit up in the hills behind my father’s winter cabin. It had been snowing hard for a long time and the snow was deep. I got up one morning and hiked all the way up the hill in snowshoes. I must have shot five or six grouse, I think. I don’t really remember.”
Elijah took a drink from his can, turned more towards his cousin so that he could face him, and waited.
“On the way back, I saw a moose. It was the biggest moose I had ever seen. The snow was so deep that it had a hard time moving. I remember thinking it would be an easy meal for wolves. I don’t know why, but I started chasing it. I wasn’t going to shoot it or anything. I was just having fun. I remember it as clearly as I see you sitting there. It was running, stumbling in the deep snow. I can still see it in my mind—its rising breath, its eyes wide and white in fear, its muscles moving under its hide. I kept chasing it, laughing and out of breath. Little by little, it got further away until it finally reached the timberline and vanished. I stood in the deep field catching my breath, listening to the wind and the cold silence. I took off my hat and gloves to cool down. I even unzipped my parka.”
