by John Smelcer
When he looked up again it was fall and an old man was sitting beside him whittling. It was his grandfather who had died when Highmountain was young, even before his drunken father died in the car accident. But he recognized him anyhow. He was wearing the tanned leather jacket with beadwork shaped in floral patterns that he wore to traditional ceremonies like the Potlatch.
The birch trees were full of yellowing leaves, and the ground was still green and alive. A small crackling fire surrounded by stones burned before them. On the air was the faint scent of ripe berries, and wood smoke drifted like a ghost through the changing season. The sun was high and a slight wind kept away the usual torment of gnats and mosquitoes. In the village below, Philip could see boats running up and down the river and clothes hanging outside drying in the gentle breeze and sunlight. Barefoot children were running along the sandbars throwing sticks in the rippling shallows for their dogs to retrieve.
It was the village of his youth.
When he was only eight or nine, his grandfather used to bring him up here in the fall to hunt grouse and rabbits. They would stop on the hillside to build a fire to boil water for tea. He always had dried fish, and they would sit and eat and drink while grandfather told stories about Raven and the way things were in the old times.
In the village below, families were busy drying and putting up salmon for the long winter. All along the banks, they could see alder smoke rising from beneath traditional drying racks.
It was one of his favorite childhood memories.
The old man stopped carving and looked straight at his grandson.
“You are tired,” he said slowly, with the unmistakable accent of an elder who does not know many words in English.
There were few like him left nowadays. Only the very old remained. The Indian was too cold and weak to speak, but he nodded his head.
“Your brothers are down there,” the old man said, pointing towards the river and village with the knife in his hand.
“They are waiting for you. They are all waiting for you.”
Philip tried to talk, but his muscles were too frozen to speak clearly, and all he managed to say was a single word, one that summed up everything he ever needed to know about his life.
“Why?” he asked, so soft that he barely heard himself.
The old man took a long stick and rolled a log back onto the fire.
“Life is a strange thing,” he said while watching the flames build.
“We are made by the people around us and by the things that happen when we are young. A place like this gets inside your heart. Sometimes it is a wickedness you cannot spit out. Unforgiven, it follows you. You cannot have two hearts. You cannot change who you are or what you shall become. We only live the life set before us.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes while the old Indian carved. When he finished, he handed his grandson the object.
It was a smooth salmon.
Philip understood the gift. Like a battered salmon fighting its way upriver to the place of its birth only to spawn and die, he too had returned to the river of his birth—the river of his dreams.
Highmountain slowly turned his head and looked down at the small village. It was winter again, and here and there were open stretches of water and steam gathering in small whisps above the river winding quietly through the night.
A wolf howled somewhere in the far distance.
When the Indian turned back, his grandfather, like the season, was gone, and he was once again alone as he had been for most of his life.
Highmountain stared at his gift. He was very tired as he leaned against the thin tree trunk and thought of nothing more until he could no longer hear the sound of the wind or the distant caws of ravens, only the calm of winter. In the quiet of that cold and solitary place, the black bird of Philip Highmountain’s spirit floated like a feather above the ancient river of his youth, through the slow burning of winter, into a rising sun slowly stealing towards the blue light of a distant, familiar mountain.
New Year’s Resolution
It was the coldest day of the year when Johnny Secondchief left for his father’s cabin far up on a frozen river that now lay quiet like the rest of the still, white north. It was so cold that trembling spruce trees huddled close together, as if praying for the return of the sun. The only thing that moved across the land was a young man on a yellow snowmobile bundled in a parka with thick gloves and a warm hat covering his face so completely that only his watering eyes were visible as he came down from the white hills towards the windswept floodplain of the silent river.
Few things moved over the arctic landscape during January except hungry ravens and stars blown about the sky by wind. Even bears knew enough to hide and sleep away the long, dark, eternal winters. Although it was very cold, it had not snowed in weeks. What snow there was covering this glacial world was brittle and hard-packed, and the trail ahead was well used. Here and there, less used trails spun off from the main line like small tributaries heading towards distant cabins on small, frozen lakes.
Rounding a steep bend in the winding trail, the young man wondered why his father had invited him to stay at his cabin during such a cold spell, when no one else was on the trails, but safe and warm inside oil-heated homes watching television, breaking New Year’s resolutions, and taking down Christmas trees and long, tangled cords of colored lights. Though late in the afternoon, it was already pitch black outside, the way it was almost all of the time during the long winter months this far north.
They had not spoken for several years since his father and mother had divorced. It was a bitter end to a marriage so poisonous that even time was unable to heal the wounds. His father was still angry and did things purposefully to hurt his mother.
Johnny had moved away from the village to the city, and the weekend alone promised to be a time of reconciliation—a time to air differences, which were many and hardened like packed snow. But no matter what the reason, the young man was glad for the time he and his father would have together.
Almost an hour passed before Johnny found himself on the wide, frozen river, heading north much faster than before. The moon was a thin crescent, like an open net cast into the night to gather stars. On the far horizon, the faint glow of Northern Lights began to build and dance above the dark hills. He watched the world illuminated into existence as his dim headlight bounced along a rough stretch of the river.
After another hour on the uncomfortable machine, Johnny could see light from windows and sparks and smoke rising from a stove pipe chimney. Moments later, he stepped into the warmth of his father’s cabin, the heat curled and billowed out the door until he pushed it closed and leaned against it hard until the latch clicked, locking the icy world outside.
His father sat at a small table by the front window. He was wearing an old red flannel shirt, and his face was rough and gray as if he had not shaved all week. Although half Indian, his hair was white and thin. He was drinking, and he did not turn from his glass when his son came inside to hang his frost-covered parka on a hook near the wood stove.
The young man stood by the stove in the room’s silence trying to thaw his hands held close to the metal. Several times he looked over at his father, still sitting at the small table, staring into his now-empty glass. A bottle of whiskey stood beside the short glass. It was empty save for an inch at the bottom. Johnny was certain he had drunk it all at once, though he had not known his father to drink so much whiskey at a sitting.
“It was a cold ride in,” he said, still holding his hands above the stove, but turning his head towards the old man.
His father looked up for a moment, said nothing, and then turned back to his glass, so thick it might have been carved from river ice, wrapping both hands around it as if in prayer. Johnny walked over to the other window and stood in silence. Even the black wood stove did not rattle, its damper closed so tight it could hav
e been his father’s tongue.
“I didn’t even see a moose or a rabbit on the way,” he said looking out the frost-lined window into the blackness that suddenly seemed more comfortable than the room with its smell of wood smoke. “Seems like there was nothing alive out there. No place for man or animal.”
At this news, his father stood up, pulled down his own parka off a nail in the wall beside the stove, and zipped it up almost to his chin. He took his gloves and hat from a rickety table, turned and spoke for the first time.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he said in the slow, deliberate words of an elder.
But Johnny had just come in from the cold after almost two hours on his machine which even now was warm from the journey. He wanted to sit by the fire, eat something, drink hot tea or coffee, and thaw out.
“But my gas tank’s almost empty,” he protested. “I’ll need to fill it up.”
His father pulled his hat down over his head and fastened it tight under his chin. The black of the hat contrasted with the gray of his emerging beard.
“Just a little ride,” he said. “You don’t need gas.”
Having said this, he stepped into the night in a swirling cloud of heat escaping out the door. A moment later, Johnny could hear his father pulling the starter rope until his machine finally sputtered to life, cursing something about being asked to work in such cold.
Johnny pulled on his parka and gloves and hat and stepped into the night under the Northern Lights, which were directly above, shimmering red as blood. He flipped the kill switch and gave the rope a sharp pull. The still-warm engine started on the first try.
When his father saw his son’s machine running, he lowered his head below the plastic windshield, turned his handlebars and skis towards the river, and gunned the throttle. Johnny sat on his idling machine for a long while, watching the red tail light of his father’s snowmobile bouncing along the river’s frozen surface before it vanished around a bend.
It was a clear night and the sky was filled with stars and eternity. It was far too cold to be outside, especially when the cabin was so warm and safe. Johnny didn’t want to go, but he had always tried to live up to his father’s expectations. But it was hard. The old man had been taken from his village and family when he was a boy and shipped away to boarding schools in a land far, far away, filled with other Indian children stolen from the love of their homes. In such places, love and kindness was beaten out of the children, as they were beaten for speaking the words they had carried on their tongues all of their short lives. They were places for breaking spirits, for replacing one culture with another, one worldview for another. Those who returned home never fit in and were never accepted again. They were outcasts with empty hearts who turned to violence and the bottle. Johnny’s father was such a man. There no love left in him. No compassion. Such things been beaten out of him with a stick.
Hesitantly, Johnny pressed the throttle on his handlebars with his right thumb, and soon he was speeding upriver chasing a small, red light far ahead. The two machines wound around sharp bends of the meandering river for several miles, until his father turned into the woods at a place where Johnny knew there were many trails, so many he would be confused in daylight, so many he could get lost on a night such as this.
Trees lined the trail in the close forest and leaned over it, bent over by heavy loads of snow. Instead of slowing down, it seemed as though his father was going faster, so fast that Johnny could barely make the sharp, leaning turns. He was not as experienced as his father. Years of living in the city had dulled such skills. The young Indian slowed for turns, but held the throttle wide open on long, straight stretches. In such a way, he was able to keep his father in view, though it was difficult.
Then, like a northern wind, a slight panic began to well up inside him, a concern that if he lost sight of his father he might get lost and run out of gas in search of a way home. At such low temperatures, so far from the cabin, he might certainly freeze to death by morning.
Only two years before, his younger brother died out here. It was a couple months after his parents’ divorce during a cold snap. They found his frozen body about a mile from his snowmobile, its gas tank empty. Everyone figured he got lost in the dark or in a snow storm, and they called it a tragedy.
After several miles of winding across the tortured landscape, they came upon an opening in the forest of spruce and snow. The light from the fingernail of moon and the stars cast shadows on the surface of a frozen lake. It was not a large lake—perhaps several hundred yards across. His father’s machine raced across the surface as fast as it could go, its high-pitched engine screaming and kicking up ice and water in a tantrum.
It was too late when Johnny saw the line of open water his father had carved for him. The lake was spring fed, and the warm rising water kept the surface from freezing through. His father must have known this, Johnny thought. He knew everything about this country—every mile, every stream and field and lake. He knew this place, and he knew that the lake was only partially frozen in the middle, where the water is deep and springs bubble up from the pressured depths of the earth.
It was too late to turn back or slow down. All he could do was lean back on the machine to keep the heavy engine and skis from diving in, and to hold the throttle down as far as it would go, and pray that it would not stall or run out of gas. If he fell into the water, he would surely die within an hour.
The snowmobile slowed and rocked sluggishly as the rear sank into the darkness, but the wide track kept turning and turning, swimming its way towards the far bank. Johnny stood up on the machine with his feet far back on the runners, still pressing the throttle as far down as it would go, and then, close to shore, where the lake was shallow and snow turned to ice, the straining machine and its nervous cargo rose out of the water and slid on its metal belly into the dark trees of the shadowy forest.
After Johnny made it safely across the lake, his father seemed to lose enthusiasm for the trip, and he turned back towards the river and his warm cabin with its cord of split spruce neatly stacked outside. He drove much slower now, as if a race was over and he had lost. All that moved upon the glacial earth were two snowmobiles with dim yellow headlights measuring the lonely, white miles of the frozen river.
When they finally returned to the still-warm cabin, his father took off his parka and gloves and hat, tossed several logs into the hungry black stove, took up his near-empty bottle of whiskey, and shuffled off into the back bedroom without saying a word, closing the door forever.
The Ties That Bind
Simon Joseph was sitting at a narrow table by the front window of his small, plywood-sided house at the end of a long dirt road on the reservation. The siding was stained picnic-table red, and its tarred roof leaked badly when it rained. Several buckets were stacked in a corner near the door, awaiting the next storm. Simon was alone. His mother was still in bed, and his father hadn’t come home since leaving after dinner the night before.
Something caught his eye outside the window.
In the distance, he could barely make out his father walking up the gravel road toward the house with a beer can in his left hand. Even from that distance, Simon could see that his father was drunk again, which was nothing new in the young boy’s life.
His father was always drunk, the way the sun always goes down.
Unmoved and unmoving, Simon measured the man’s staggering progress toward the house, noted how he kept his head bent, looking always at his feet, as if to be certain they were moving in the proper order—right, left, right, left—until he approached the porch and passed beyond the boy’s sight at the porch steps. It was always more peaceful around the house when his father was gone, but now the quiet would turn to shouting. The boy prepared himself, waiting for his father to walk through the front door and yell at him to fetch another beer from the fridge.
But the door did not open.
&nbs
p; Even after a few minutes, no one entered the small house to disturb the warm air with its comforting smell of wood smoke. Simon stood up and went to the door. He opened it slowly, not out of concern but out of a fearful curiosity.
There was his father on his knees at the foot of the three porch stairs, trying to stand up. Blood, bright as that spring day, was flowing from his face like the broad, dark river beyond the driveway. It was apparent that he had tripped on the first step and fallen hard on the porch, too drunk to catch his fall. His face had smashed against the wooden planks, and his lip had caught on a loose nail, cutting a wedge clean up to his nose.
Little pools of blood dotted the porch, the steps, and the front of his father’s white shirt, with its yellow stains under the armpits, was streaked down to the untucked tail that hung out of his pants.
Simon pulled off his own flannel shirt and pressed it against the pouring wound, trying to slow the loss of blood, but his father pushed him away hard.
“What the hell are you doing, boy?” he yelled, still on his knees.
“You’re bleeding,” the boy pleaded. “You fell down and your face is cut bad.”
His father tried to stand up but he couldn’t. Blood had been dripping all over the ground, at first pooling on the dirt, and then absorbing into the dusty earth, which readily drank it up in short, fast laps, the way sled dogs drink fish-broth soup.
“I just tripped a little, that’s all. I’m alright, goddamn it. Hell, it’s just a scratch,” his father continued, looking around for the beer can he dropped during the fall.
Simon stood in the doorway and called for his mother, but she didn’t hear him.
“Dad,” he said, “you’re bleeding real bad.” He tried to hold his wadded shirt against his father’s cleft lip, but the man pushed it away so roughly that it fell from the boy’s hand.
