Alaskan

by John Smelcer

  The boys looked at each other in amazement and disbelief.

  “It wasn’t no easy thing, let me tell you. Dem eagles are big and got big claws and long, sharp beaks. Sometimes they turn around and take a bite outta ya. I seen plenty of dem boys go crashing down through dem trees missing a finger or a bit of their nose or ear or cheek. Hurt like hell.”

  The old man, who had a long scar above his left eye, tossed a slimy fish head into the muddy river, and four sea gulls dived for it, while two dozen lean sled dogs lay around them on the gravel bank sleeping and dreaming and shedding in the sun.

  “That’s how you grandaddy got that scar on his face,” he said looking at none of the boys in particular because it didn’t matter which one he was talking about, since almost all Indian men have scars on their faces from something or other.

  A fish hook in the eyelid.

  A knife cut across a cheek.

  Each boy was thinking the same thing as the old man slowly finished telling his story.

  “But if you did it, if you pulled a feather from that eagle, you were a man, and everyone knew you were a man just by lookin’ at ya.”

  With that said, the boys ran up into the hills along the great, silty river where they knew eagles built their giant nests, sometimes as big across as a river boat. By mid-afternoon they found one with an eagle sitting inside watching the river, tired red salmon spawning in the shallows, a raven two trees away, and the three boys standing at the base of the tree looking up wondering how the hell they were going to climb that tree all the way to the top. Not only that, they were wondering who was going first.

  Matthew had the solution. He always had the solution, even when it was wrong.

  “I’ll pick a number between one and ten. Whoever picks closest to it has to go first.”

  The other boys thought this fair and agreed.

  Peter went first.

  “Five,” he said, because five is in the middle and no one hardly ever picks five ‘cause it’s so obvious.

  “Nope,” Matthew replied, smiling. “Not even close.”

  Then Johnny suddenly got smart, even though he never showed it in school.

  “Hey. You gotta pick a number, too. It’s not fair that only us two gotta pick.”

  “Ok, Matthew replied, “I pick two. But that’s not close either, so it’s your turn.”

  Johnny thought for a minute. He knew that two and five weren’t even close, so he figured the true number had to big bigger.

  “Eight,” he said.

  “That’s it!” Matthew chirped. “How’d you guess? That’s damn smart thinking.”

  So it was Johnny, the most gullible and the youngest of the three boys by one year, who worked his way up to the top of the tree with that eagle staring and blinking with every branch he approached.

  “You can do it!” the other two yelled from the ground, so far down that Johnny thought he was looking through one of those birds-eye camera lenses.

  But when he finally reached the nest, nervous and trembling from thinking about missing facial parts, he stopped just beneath it and listened. He waited for a few minutes, but all he could hear was the breeze pouring through the green leaves of the trees and the low, thunderous hum of the great river in the distance.

  Slowly, he reached up, grabbed one of the thicker branches of the nest and pulled himself up so that he could look over the edge. There was the eagle, so large that its wing span was easily six feet across, staring blankly at him with his black eyes just behind his curved, yellow beak which looked even longer than the wing span this close up.

  The eagle shrieked.

  The boy screamed.

  Matthew and Peter ran. And Johnny Peters, almost fifteen years old who didn’t even know the Indian word for eagle or tree or shit, let go of the thick branch and fell. He didn’t fall all the way down. Instead, he kind of ricocheted from branch to branch, from limb to limb. He kept falling down in such a manner until he dropped unhurt to the ground beside where the two other boys had stood before they started running home to the village.

  Johnny stood up, dusted dirt from his pants, and ran as fast as he could after the other boys, looking up and over his shoulder the whole way home.

  From then on they never tried to do things the way Indians used to do them in the old days, thinking Indians must have been crazy back then.

  The Owl That Heard His Name

  Three brothers sitting around a campfire at the edge of a river talking about their hunting trip, boasting how they had killed a cow moose. It was the first moose any of them had killed in years. They shot her as she stood on a sandbar, her yearling calf nestled against her on the other side. The bullet passed through the mother’s belly and into the calf’s neck, killing it instantly. The men butchered the cow in the growing darkness, tossing only her quarters into the long, green boat, and returning to the cabin while there was still enough light to read the river with its treacherous shallows and submerged logs.

  They left the calf on the sandbar beside the gut pile of its mother.

  The added weight of the moose and the upriver current slowed their return. Twice the boat struck bottom, snapping the sheer pin on the propeller, which required a

  Back at camp, they hung the quarters of the moose from a meat pole. They would hang for several days until the muscles loosened, making the meat more tender. The trick was to keep flies away until the outer layer toughened, making it difficult for the flies to lay their eggs.

  The men’s father and the oldest brother’s son had stayed behind in camp—too old and too young to join them.

  The brothers were drinking their way through a case of beer, stopping occasionally to stare into the flames, listening to the fire’s sad, fleeting story.

  All fires tell stories.

  Listen.

  On their fiery death bed each piece of wood recites its life, recalling the welcomed summers, the insufferable winters, the birds that nested in their limbs, the porcupines that climbed them, the toilsome beavers that fell their forebears or siblings, the bears that gouged claw marks on their barky skin, slow-healing scars marking territory.

  Trees remember.

  Listen.

  The old man sat on a stump at the edge of the light, listening to the conversation of his sons, saying nothing, raising an eyebrow whenever any son bragged too much. It was not their way to do such things. The individual is part of the community, not separate. To rise above it, to think one better than others, is to weaken the group.

  The eldest son stood up, pulled a long knife from a leather sheath, and brandished it in the fire light.

  “They should call me Bear-Killer, because I can kill a bear with my hands,” he boasted.

  The middle brother stood up, almost falling into the fire.

  “They should call me Wolf-Killer, because I can kill a pack of wolves with a hatchet.”

  The old man raised an eyebrow.

  The youngest of the three men stood up, teetering, and faced his older brothers.

  “They should call me Squirrel-Slayer, because I once killed a squirrel with a slingshot.”

  The three men laughed for a long time and then they walked to the cabin, steadying one another, the oldest nearly falling over, leaving the boy and his grandfather alone by the crackling fire beneath a star-filled sky, green Northern Lights dancing above the rim of a mountain. The boy tossed a handful of dry wood on the flames, which caught and burned brightly, sending sparks rising toward constellations like small, short-lived stars. He sat back down, poking at the fire with a long stick, stirring it.

  “What will they call me, Grandfather?” the boy asked.

  Just then loud music came from inside the cabin.

  The old man didn’t say anything for so long that the boy almost forgot his question.

  “Canaani,” he said finally, p
ronouncing the word slowly: kan-aw-nee.

  “They will call you Canaani.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The boy was too young to know the words of their language. Even the man’s sons did not know. Only the old man’s generation remembered, and it would die with them soon enough, as the fire would die and turn cold and gray and no one would remember its warmth or mourn its passing.

  A beaver splashed in the dark river, followed by the soft hoot of an owl.

  The old man smiled at his grandson.

  “It’s a word we use for the greatest hunters. It means ‘Hunter’s Luck’. But it’s not because a man has killed a great many things that we call him this. It’s a word of love and respect. Love even in death.”

  The boy stopped poking at the fire, listened carefully.

  “You are too young to understand, grandson, but you will. You will wear the name all your days, and none will know it. Only the animals will know who you are. They will recognize you.”

  “But grandfather, what good is a name no one will know to say?”

  The old man leaned close into the light so that his face showed clearly.

  “This I know. The true hunter kills only for food. No more. He is sorry for the life he takes, asking its forgiveness. He tells what he has killed how thankful he is, promises to use all of its meat, wasting nothing, and to share it among his family and community. He does not revel in death. He does not celebrate it over a case of beer.”

  The boy looked at the empty cans littered around the fire, most of them crumpled.

  “He does not talk about it,” the old man continued, his voice resolute as the river. “He weeps for the dead, realizing that one life is not worth more than another. Life is life.”

  The boy rolled his stump closer to his grandfather. The brilliance of the fire was burning down, the sphere of light tightening.

  Somewhere far off a wolf howled at the lonely moon. A dog lying on the cabin porch jumped to its feet and barked into the nothingness. After a while it lay back down, convinced of its own bravery.

  The old man placed a hand on his grandson’s shoulder and spoke again.

  “When you show respect the animals will give themselves to you. They understand how the great cycle depends on such things, and they will give themselves to you willingly, stepping into plain sight. Other hunters will fail in arrogance and return empty-handed. But you will not know such failure. You must love what you kill as you love yourself. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded without a word, pretending to understand. He wanted to understand, but he was too young. Nonetheless, the seed of a great truth took root in his heart. In time, he would know.

  The sharp-eyed owl watching from a high limb already knew.

  He could see it on the boy’s face.

  When the fire had burned down to a heap of embers, the old man and his grandson joined the other men in the cabin. A Waylon and Willie song was playing loudly on the stereo. All three brothers were sitting at the table drinking rum and cokes. When the boy walked in, the oldest of the brothers, his father, held up an empty glass, rattled the ice cubes.

  “Make me another drink,” he demanded.

  The boy had mixed hundreds of such drinks in his life. But because he loved his father and his uncles, he always made the drinks weak, far weaker than they made their own. It was his way of helping them, however small and futile. Sometimes they figured out what he had done and added more rum. But more often than not, they were too drunk to tell the difference.

  “This one will never be a great hunter,” said the middle brother, looking at his nephew, sizing him up. “He won’t even be half the man I am.”

  The younger brother took a long drink from his glass, emptying it.

  “He’s too soft to be a hunter. He’ll make a good housewife,” he said, then laughed at his own joke. “Pour me another one,” he said, hoisting his empty glass at the boy almost as if making a toast.

  “I will be a great hunter,” said the boy under his breath, taking the glass to fill it, tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

  All three brothers laughed, including his father.

  The boy glanced at his grandfather, who winked at him.

  When he was done, the grandson went back outside. So late in the fall, the night air was crisp, a reminder that snow could come at any time. He stood beside the river, listening to its familiar song and the wind whispering through the swaying trees. He loved the sound of the world sleeping.

  Behind him he could see the warm glow of light from the cabin windows.

  The full moon lit the night, turning the surface of the river silver, casting shadows from trees—and within the shadows the owl peered out from the darkness. The boy stood beneath the stars, smiling, taking long breaths, and sighing as deeply as the sliding river.

  The Author

  John Smelcer is the poetry editor of Rosebud magazine and the author of more than forty books, including 2013’s Lone Wolves (Leapfrog Press). He is an enrolled member of the Ahtna tribe and is now the last tribal member who reads and writes in Ahtna. John holds degrees in anthropology and archaeology, linguistics, literature, and education. He also holds a PhD in English and creative writing from Binghamton University, and formerly chaired the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

  His first novel, The Trap, was an American Library Association BBYA Top Ten Pick, a VOYA Top Shelf Selection, and a New York Public Library Notable Book. The Great Death was short-listed for the 2011 William Allen White Award, and nominated for the National Book Award, the BookTrust Prize (England), and the American Library Association’s Award for American Indian YA Literature. His Alaska Native mythology books include The Raven and the Totem (introduced by Joseph Campbell). His short stories, poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in hundreds of magazines, and he is the winner of the 2004 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and of the 2004 Western Writers of America Award for Poetry for his collection Without Reservation, which was nominated for a Pulitzer. John divides his time between a cabin in Talkeetna, the climbing capitol of Alaska, and Kirksville, Mo., where he is a visiting scholar in the Department of Communications Studies at Truman State University.