Alaskan

by John Smelcer

  To confront the forty-below-zero night, both men put on insulated boots and warm gear before stepping into the cold. The temperature outside was so low that no one else was on the lake. The few cabins along the edge were dark and empty and buried beneath a mantle of snow, cold and clean. The closest other person was thirty miles downriver.

  “Grab the jugs,” commanded the father in a tone long practiced in giving orders. Then he added, “You think you’re better than me ‘cause you read all that shit?”

  “I never said that,” replied Josey, unable to look his father in the eye. “I just like to read, that’s all.”

  The father spat on the wood stove. The spittle hissed like a snake.

  “That shit won’t make you a man.”

  Josey grabbed the two plastic five-gallon jugs from beside the sink, along with a filling pot he grasped in one crowded hand, and stepped onto the porch.

  “Shut the door, and make sure you close it tight this time,” snapped the father, pulling his hat over his ears.

  In the middle of winter, the lake was frozen solid. The only part that was open was an area the size of a swimming pool a hundred yards from shore where warm water bubbled up from a natural spring at the bottom of the lake. Ice fog rose from the spot whenever, as now, it was very cold. Josey followed his father across the ice through the darkness. The wind-swept surface of the lake shone eerily from the full moon. Josey hated fetching water. The thin ice around the edge of the open water terrified him.

  “Why can’t we just melt snow on the stove?” he always asked his father when ordered to shuffle out the last remaining feet to the edge, which was as thin as a knife blade.

  “Because it takes too long to make even a little water. Shut up and do as you’re told.”

  Josey stepped toward the hole in the lake, sliding one foot after the other ahead, testing the ice cautiously. It never escaped his mind how he would weigh eighty pounds more after the two containers were filled with water. Sometimes he poured them less than full, to keep his weight down. But his father always caught on to what he was doing.

  “Fill them all the way!” his father would demand from his safe distance where the ice was thick enough to support a car or a truck. “We didn’t come all the way out here to fill those damn jugs halfway.”

  Josey held his breath the last few steps, as if doing so made him lighter. He wondered if birds did the same thing before taking flight, as if they didn’t entirely believe the air would support them. The young man knelt and filled the first can with the old cooking pot, which was blackened from years of use over campfires. It took twenty dips of the pot to fill the blue plastic container. The ice beneath him groaned from the extra forty pounds. Josey heard it crack around him. He stood up and started away from the edge.

  “Where the hell are you going?” his father complained.

  “The ice cracked. It’s not safe.”

  “It’ll hold. Get back there!” his father demanded in a tone that left no room for discussion.

  “But, Dad, the ice here is really . . .”

  “Quit cry-babying,” interrupted the father sternly. “Act like a man, goddamn it.”

  The father was always saying things like that to his son, ever since he was a little boy. Josey wasn’t like his father. He was different. He didn’t want the same things his father had wanted when he was a young man. He wasn’t as tough as his father. He wasn’t as practical. He listened to the wrong kind of music. He read too many books. His hair was a different color or it was too long. There was always something between them, like a perilous stretch of unfrozen river. Despite their differences, Josey tried to make his father proud. He tried and tried, and he always failed to measure up to his father’s ideal.

  And his love.

  Josey looked at the two blue jugs perched at the edge of the open water. He thought about the thin ice and the extreme cold and the frigid water, only a degree or two above freezing. His head and shoulders slumped, and he breathed an audible sigh.

  “For chrissake! Do I have to do everything myself?” the man grumbled as he took a step forward in a gesture as if he would do it himself.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

  Josey shuffled back to the edge with his arms extended to the side, the way nervous people always walk on ice. As he had done before, he knelt and dipped the black aluminum pot into the lake twenty times to fill the blue container. Twenty times. No more, no less, unless he spilled some. Even though Josey pushed both jugs backwards onto the thicker ice, as he stood and then lifted both jugs, one in each hand, the ice gave way with a terrible crack beneath him, and he plunged into the water. For several minutes Josey tried to pull himself onto the ice, calling to his father for help all the while. But the thin edge always broke off under his weight and he sank beneath the water.

  His sodden parka and heavy winter boots didn’t help matters.

  Josey tried to grab onto the plastic jugs barely floating in the ice-strewn water, but filled as they were they offered no buoyancy. His core temperature plummeted with every passing moment, as the entire lake—three miles long and a hundred feet deep in places—proceeded, patiently, to raise its temperature by the warmth of a single man. Josey’s strength waned until he could do nothing but hold his head above the water at the edge of the ice, his breathing reduced to a pant.

  No longer shivering, and no longer able to speak or to call out for help, Josey looked up at the starry sky and the northern lights high above, green and shimmering and silent. From a safe distance, he saw his father light a cigar. The flash of the match illuminated the grizzled man’s face and Josey saw the stern countenance—stoic and unmoved.

  Watching.

  Waiting.

  For the first time, Josey understood what separated him from his father. It wasn’t a gulf of indifference, as he had always thought.

  It was hate.

  But why? he wondered, as he struggled ever more feebly to grip the ice. But there was no time left to wonder about that. Soon there would be no more time for anything.

  The father watched his son for a little while longer, and then he turned and walked back to the cabin with yellow light glowing though frosted panes. Once inside, he tossed the books into the wood stove and warmed his hands over the rising flames.

  The Berry Pickers

  September, and blueberries at the edge of the timberline were ripe and sweet. Some were as big around as a thumbnail and yet still firm, not soft the way they turn after a freeze, when they begin to fall from the bush, planting tiny white seeds for the future.

  Isaac Demientieff sat in the middle of a patch picking berries and shoving handfuls into his mouth—his fingers, lips, and teeth stained purple. The sun was high and there was a slight breeze sliding down off the glaciers in the far mountains. It had not rained in a week and few mosquitoes bothered the twelve year old and his dog, gently and meticulously plucking berries from their green-leaved stems. No one had ever taught the dog this, and it was unlikely instinct.

  No doubt he learned from watching the boy.

  It was a perfect fall day. The bright hills were orange and yellow and gold and green, and the sky was deep blue with only a hint of thin white clouds strewn in the distance.

  The two, inseparable since the dog was a pup, had been hunting in the hills since early morning after his grandmother made a hot breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and fried Spam with honey drizzled over the meat as it hissed and sizzled in the black, cast iron pan.

  Spam is the unofficial canned good of the State of Alaska.

  When she wasn’t looking, the boy gave pieces of his food to his best friend who had just finished his own breakfast of dried dog food mixed with warm water and a few pieces of moose fat trimmed from last night’s supper.

  After he was done eating and had placed his clean-licked dish in the sink, Isaac put on his heavy red-and-black-checker
ed flannel shirt and hat and took up his single shot shotgun, an old sixteen gauge his father had given him. He took six shells from a cartridge box in the windowsill and dropped them into one of his shirt pockets. He only needed six. He almost never shot more than two or three birds, but he needed the extra shells because he sometimes missed them on the wing. Though a good shot for his age, the boy had not yet mastered the quick, arcing swing of body and barrel at an unexpected bird exploding in a flash of feather and thunder from cover.

  The trail behind their cabin led up into the hills, far from their village nestled along the wide river. The salmon season was past, men were putting up riverboats for the long, dark winter, and sled dogs barked from the roofs of their tiny, straw-filled houses. They knew that the putting away of boats meant that winter was coming, and soon the great land would be buried under snow and they would be hitched to sleds and allowed to run, and run, and run. Sled dogs love to run. They dream of it. All summer they lie beneath the sun, panting and shedding and staring at the immobile sled—put away for the season, tall grass and wild flowers growing up through the runners.

  The trail wound its way up into the hills, around small, weed-edged ponds, and across a shallow stream. It was lined with spruce trees and berries, and the smell of leaves beginning to decay filled the crisp air. It was perfect country for grouse and moose and bears. The boy and his dog walked quietly into the hills, listening to the forest, looking for birds or rabbits, each thinking to himself or thinking of nothing at all.

  His grandmother was always happy when he brought home a rabbit, but his grandfather, almost ninety, who only spoke their Indian language, was happiest when the boy brought home a porcupine. It was his favorite game. The old man would build a fire outside, and when it was hot enough, he would toss the porcupine upon the flames, turning it over with a long pole until all the sharp quills burned away. Then, he would roll it from the fire and quarter it like any other small game.

  It was an old Indian trick and there were many such as this.

  Although most of the dogs in the village were malamutes, gaunt, powerful runners, the dog weaving in and out of the forest before the boy was a black lab, a natural bird dog, named Tikaani. It was the Indian word for wolf. They had a word for dog, but it wasn’t smooth-sounding and beautiful like the word for wolf. Everyone called him Tik for short. There’s a special bond between a boy and his dog—between a man and his dog for that matter. It’s unfair that we live so long while they live so briefly.

  But a lot can be packed into those compact years.

  On the way up to the tree line, Isaac shot a grouse at the edge of the shallow, gravel-bottomed creek. The bird had been searching for small stones for its gizzard when the two emerged noiselessly from the forest. Tik stood motionless, although his tail twitched in anticipation, as the boy raised the barrel, centered the silver bead sight on the bird, and fired. Within seconds, the dog had jumped across the stream and had the flapping bird cradled in his mouth as he proudly trotted back to the boy, kneeling and smiling and softly patting his thigh. When the dog dropped the bird at his feet, Isaac rubbed his head and ears, his square head cupped in his brown hands, and then he reached into a pocket and gave the dog a piece of dried salmon, hung in the sun and breeze until the strips of fish became almost transparent red. They call it Indian candy.

  Under a bright fall sky with only a hint of a breeze blowing the few mosquitoes away, Isaac and his dog knelt or sat picking or plucking blue berries. An old army rucksack with the grouse inside sat beneath a tree, while the shotgun leaned against the trunk.

  Over the next hour, longer perhaps, they wandered from patch to patch, sometimes simply lying and resting, the sun warm on their skin. Once a rabbit burst from behind a small bush, but the shotgun was too far away, still leaning against the tree beside the faded, green canvas pack.

  The two must have fallen asleep for a bit, but the boy was awakened by the sound of growling and barking. Startled, Isaac sat up and looked for his dog. About ten yards away, Tikaani was growling at a grizzly bear, baring teeth and gums, the hair on the back of his neck raised like a porcupine. The bear too had been picking berries in the hills above the tree line and had stumbled upon the two sleeping concealed among the low bushes.

  It was a large bear, perhaps five or six hundred pounds or more, his blonde head almost two feet across, his dark, black eyes set far apart on a flat face. His ears were back, a sure sign of trouble, and he was flashing his yellow teeth, popping his gums, grunting, and shaking his head side to side. It was a bad situation—surprise in too close quarters. Usually, when there is distance or fair warning, such encounters end peacefully, but these stumbling confrontations were unpredictable and dangerous.

  The young Indian was afraid. He could feel his heart beginning to race, and he had to remind himself to breath. Slowly, he turned towards the tree with his shotgun, but there was nothing. They had wandered too far. Now the gun was out of sight, forty or fifty yards downhill where they first began their early afternoon feast.

  There’s a myth that a bear can out-run a man uphill, but that man is faster downhill. They say it is because their short front legs trip them up. Some books actually advise that you run downhill in such an event. But no matter what direction you run, up or down or slantwise, you will lose every time. In the hundred yard dash, a bear can out-run even a horse, take down a moose or caribou or elk. Running should be a last resort, and only when there is some form of safety within a very short distance—a car, cabin, or bazooka.

  Some books even recommend that you jump in a lake or river or stream—that bears won’t follow—that they somehow detest water. Bad advice again. You’ll simply end up a wet supper like salmon. Bears are fantastic swimmers. Olympians. Polar bears swim across dozens of miles of open sea from ice pack to ice pack in search of seals and seal pups. Northwest coast bears have been known to island hop in search of food.

  Some advise that you curl up in a ball and play dead. Do it too soon and you will surely be eaten. Do it only after a fowl-breathed bear has knocked you to the ground and begun to claw and bite and rip your scalp away from your head. But if the hungry bear is bent on eating you, fight back with all of your desperate strength, for surely you will be killed, partially eaten, and buried for a later snack. Knowing just when to do these things is like playing poker—you have to know when to stay pat or when to call a bluff.

  Isaac knew all these things. He had spent his life learning the unwritten rules of this untamed land from his father, uncles, and grandfather, and he knew, even at twelve, what danger he was in now. He stood up slowly, his eyes on the bear at all times, his arms held out to make himself look larger than he was, and he spoke to it, letting it know he wasn’t a moose or caribou calf.

  The bear saw the boy as if for the first time. Now it felt outnumbered. Two against one. He charged at the black, barking dog in the middle. Out-weighing it many times over, the bear smashed into it like a furry locomotive, rolling it like a ball tossed into the brush. But the dog jumped to his steady paws and lunged at the bear, barking and snapping, his long tail held high like a flag he would later plant atop the mountain of bear.

  While they battled, their terrible ruckus echoing in the fall-colored hills, Isaac screamed at the bear, shouting at it, sometimes in English, sometimes in his Indian language. But the bear did not hear or care. It raked its mighty paw at the dog, its dark brown claws almost five inches long. It popped its gums and snapped its teeth, and its fat and fur shook and reflected in the sun.

  Preoccupied as the grizzly was, Isaac ran to his shotgun, the sound of the fight rolling in the hills behind him, and he grabbed it, opened its breach to check that it was loaded, and then ran back to the place where his dog fought for his life protecting what it loved most.

  When he returned to the field of berries and life and death struggle, the bear was straddled over the dog, trying to bite its head and neck. But Tikaani was stil
l alive, kicking with his back legs into the belly of the great bear and trying to wriggle free.

  Isaac took aim and fired one shot just above the bear’s massive head so as not to accidentally hit Tikaani. The sharp report echoed in the valley, and the bear stopped trying to rip the dog apart, saw the boy, smelled the strange scent of man and steel and gunpowder, and bolted towards the tree line.

  The boy nervously slid another shell into the breach, just in case the bear returned, and walked over to where his dog lay, whining and licking his wounds.

  Tikaani’s eyes were wide and white, and he was breathing fast in short breaths, almost panting. A large section of flesh and muscle was exposed where the bear had torn a length of skin from the dog’s back, as large as a rag and still connected by a bit of skin. Small leaves, pine needles, and dirt stuck to the skin. One of his eyes and most of an ear was missing and that side of his head was wet and sticky. The end of his long nose was split down the middle and bleeding. It was hard to see the red blood against his short, black hair, but it pooled brightly on yellow leaves rotting on the forest floor.

  He simply looked wet and matted.

  Isaac dropped the shotgun, knelt, and put his arms around his dog’s head, their two faces close together. He began to cry. He held him that way for a long time, and when he let go, Tikaani licked his face.

  Still crying, Isaac ran his hand along the length of the dog’s body, feeling for what he could not easily see. He found several deep punctures between ribs and scratches which bled when he touched them, and the dog, by yelping and tightening his bloodied frame, let the boy know that those places hurt.

  This far north, the sun goes down early in fall, and it was already on its steep descent towards the horizon.

  Isaac knew that he had to get help for his dog, but it was many miles back to the small village. Besides, the dog weighed about eighty pounds, maybe more—far too much for the lean, young boy to carry. But if he left to go for help, the bear or wolves might smell blood and come for him, alone, with no one to protect him.