by John Smelcer
After a while, not having struck the blade of the shovel with the spear, he gave up and sat down again against the tree.
Far, far off in the distance, up higher than any bird ever dreamed of flying, where the air is thin and cold, a jumbo jet was passing overhead. From the great height, even the wide river in the valley below must look as small as the shrew’s meandering trail. Least-Weasel watched its white vapor trail for a long time, wondering what the people on board would think of him, so far below, out in the whiteness alone, caught in a trap he had set, chained to a tree, waiting for wolves.
He was tired and it was getting late.
While there was still light, the old man collected more wood from the back of the tree. He broke up smaller pieces over his knee and bigger pieces by standing them up against the tree trunk and kicking them until they snapped. He took these pieces and piled them near the fire to outlast the darkness. The temperature had been dropping all day, and now it was around twenty below. The old man would need the wood during the long night for warmth, for reassuring companionship, as a rescue signal, and to ward off wolves.
One day, a terrible hunting accident happened. The men had been hunting sea lions when a large bull killed the chief. After his potlatch and funeral, the villagers decided to avenge the great chief’s death. All the men trained hard. One night, after standing in the sea and beating himself with branches, Blackskin returned to the village, and by the light of the moon, he lifted the great tree right out of the ground! Then, so that no one would know what he had done, he carefully placed it back into the earth.
IT WAS COLD IN THE TINY CABIN when Johnny Least-Weasel awoke in the morning. He had stoked the stove’s belly before he went to sleep, but sometime during the night the fire had gone out, and the glowing bed of red embers had turned cool and gray.
He pulled back the heavy blankets. The top was a quilt his grandmother had made for him when he moved into the small cabin close to his uncle’s house. The bottom two were cheap blankets given to him at a potlatch when his great-aunt died. In the old times, the tribe had such ceremonies to celebrate life. Nowadays, they only held them when someone died. The dancers used to drink a special cold tea made from a plant called Labrador tea. They had a name for the brew in their language back then, but few elders remember it. Now, after many hours of dancing so hard that the balls of dancers’ feet hurt, Pepsi and Coca-Cola were brought out. The last dance used to be in honor of the dancers and the drummers for their hard work. They used to sing one last song as the tea was brought out. Today, they still have such a last song, but it is called the “Soda Pop Song.”
Some tribal leaders even tried to pitch an idea to one of the beverage companies for a television commercial. They thought it would sell sodas if a commercial showed a bunch of Indians in traditional regalia dancing to the music of old Indian men drumming and singing in their native language, their feet pounding the floor like thunder. They say that if your feet don’t hurt after dancing, you aren’t doing it right.
At the end, the camera would focus on a young, good-looking Indian who would hold up a soda can, and the superimposed words Pepsi—The Official Soft Drink of the Potlatch would come up on the screen in big letters.
The company never returned the phone calls.
“It’s still a good idea,” the young man thought, smiling to himself while pulling his pants on both legs at once.
He looked at the thermometer on the wall, the kind that shows both inside and outside temperatures. The cabin was around fifty degrees, which is pretty cold for a house in the morning. It was perhaps five to ten degrees colder at floor level because it was so poorly insulated.
The outside temperature was close to twenty below zero.
Johnny looked out the small front window and wondered about his grandfather.
“He should be home today,” he thought.
It was not that he thought his grandfather was weak. Just the opposite. His grandfather was the toughest man he had ever known. Johnny remembered when he had gone moose hunting with him two years before. He had been around fifteen, and his grandfather was in his midseventies, maybe older. They had taken a green flat-bottom boat way upriver and then followed a winding slough back about eight or nine miles. His grandfather knew of a large, partially shallow beaver pond where he had shot many moose over a lifetime of hunting. They camped on a small rise for two days, shot grouse and the occasional duck, and caught fish. One evening, at the edge of dusk, two bull moose stepped out into the weedy pond and began to feed.
Johnny was alone at the time, hiking along the pond’s edge in hopes that something would be drawn to the water before it got too dark to see. His grandfather was resting back at camp after an early supper of fish cooked in tinfoil over a campfire.
When Johnny saw the two young bulls emerge from the scraggly forest of spruce and willows, he crouched low to make himself small and crept into the woods, unseen by the moose. When he was certain the moose could not see or hear him, he ran up the trail to camp to tell his grandfather. They gathered what gear they’d need in a pack and tromped back to the edge of the pond. The two moose were still there, standing belly-deep with their long heads submerged, searching for food. They were both spike forks, too young to grow the large palmated antlers of a mature bull.
Two beautiful white tundra swans had come in from the north and landed on the far end of the pond near the beaver dam. It was a beautiful scene—the distant rolling hills, gold and orange with a light dusting of snow on top, the dark blue sky, and the perfect reflection of the swans upon the calm water. A beaver was sitting on the edge of the lake beside his lodge, eating something. It was one of Johnny’s favorite memories.
Most people think beavers eat only vegetation, tender branches. But in his lifetime, Johnny had seen beavers eat the heads of salmon lying on riverbanks or on sandbars after the fish had spawned and died in the fall. From a long ways away he had heard their sharp front teeth crunching into the hard fish skulls. Perhaps, he had thought, it was their way of getting calcium or protein. Perhaps they just liked the taste.
His grandfather told him to shoot the closest moose, which fell on the first shot. The other moose raised its dripping head out of the water, swiveled about its long erect ears, and then, seeing nothing, went back to its meal of pond weeds.
“Shoot that one, too,” his grandfather said. “They’re small. It takes two this size to make a big one. Shoot!”
After he had shot them both, Johnny and his grandfather waded across the soggy pond, sometimes up to their chests in the freezing, late-fall water, and each took a moose and dragged it back to shore. It was hard work. Though young, each animal easily weighed six or seven hundred pounds. A full-grown bull could weigh up to fifteen hundred pounds. Even more. Some parts of the pond were shallow, only a foot or so deep, and they had to work hard to drag the dead moose over the pond’s bottom until they floated again in deeper water.
Once ashore, out of the icy water, they gutted both bulls, dragged the piles away from the work area, and then propped the ribcages open with stout sticks. It was late by then, too dangerous to be working with knives in the dark, so they went back to the camp, built a great fire to dry out their soaked, beaver pond–smelling clothes, and returned the next morning to finish the work after a warm breakfast of oatmeal, hardtack, and steaming hot coffee.
When they were done, each carried loads of almost a hundred pounds of moose strapped to a packboard all the way back to the boat, about a mile below the hill overlooking the pond. On the first trip, Johnny tripped and fell. The pack was so heavy that he could not get up. When his grandfather came back for him, he reached down with one hand and lifted him, pack and all, right off the ground. It took them several trips to haul out all the meat and their camp supplies.
On the way back it rained in great rolling sheets, pouring down from heavy clouds the color of wet gray aluminum, sliding over the earth like a shadow, and within half an hour the silty river itself began to rise.
/>
Johnny could still remember sitting in the middle of the high-sided green boat, facing backward and huddled under a tarp while his grandfather stood at the back of the boat, his hand on the outboard’s tiller, with nothing to protect him from the wind and rain. He could still see the cold rainwater flowing down the old man’s face, off his nose, and the way he had to squint to see through the rain to read the river’s rapid and always-changing channels.
From year to year, the great river was never the same. It’s as if such rivers age, grow new lines and wrinkles, sloughs that dead-end, narrow meandering channels half-covered by trees leaning from the steep, fresh-cut banks where their roots will one day give, tossing the tilted trees into the water to be piled up in dangerous logjams downriver.
It must have been around forty above. Maybe a few degrees colder.
It was on that trip that he knew he wanted to be like his grandfather. It was from that experience that he knew his grandfather was the toughest man in the world.
He turned from the cabin’s front window, which had a hairline crack running from one side to the other, and rifled through his clothes drawers for a clean shirt. He didn’t own many clothes, so the search didn’t take long.
Johnny pulled on a yellow smiley-face T-shirt sporting the caption HAVE A NICE DAY! on it, opened the woodstove’s door, threw in a couple scoops of sawdust soaked in kerosene, and tossed in a match. When the sawdust was burning evenly, he set two big split logs on top, closed the door, and opened the damper to let the fire breathe.
He was going to work, but he wanted the cabin to be warm when he returned later that afternoon. Johnny closed the door tight, started his snowmobile with one pull after pushing the broken black primer twice, and turned the handlebars and skis toward the village.
* * *
There were not many jobs in a village so small. The village centered around a general store with few items on the shelves, where everything cost two or three times what it cost in the larger towns, because the only way to get things this far out from cities in the winter was by the expensive means of small aircraft. Gasoline, diesel, and kerosene, which are mostly barged upriver in summer, cost upward of five dollars a gallon.
The best jobs were usually held by white folks—people working for the state or federal government or who were schoolteachers. Most of the teachers didn’t even come from the region. They were often young men and women with a sense of adventure, or they were older folks who’d decided to come out of retirement and go to the far north.
Eventually, though, it didn’t matter why they came or where they came from, only that they all left. This harsh land was very different from anything they’d imagined, and the cold and dark and isolation usually got to them in the first six months.
Johnny was a senior with only a few courses left to graduate. He had been taking these classes through a correspondence program ever since the high-school teacher and his wife left the village shortly after the first snowfall. With so much free time, he worked a couple days a week in the general store. It didn’t pay much, but it was a job. Besides, the store was an important social place in the community. People came in to buy groceries, gas, and beer. The post office was a little room attached to the store where people could check their mail, too. They always had a coffeepot going, and a CB was hooked up to a car battery so that folks could pass along messages up and down the river valley. Sometimes old people radioed in their grocery orders, and Least-Weasel delivered them on his snowmobile for tips.
When things were slow, Johnny sat at the counter and did his homework. For much of the past year, he had been taking the correspondence courses from the state university. They fulfilled his high-school obligations, but most important, they also earned him college credit. He had never been to the campus, which was far away, but several people he knew had gone there and told him about it. They even showed him photos. Most of them stayed for one semester before the sense of isolation and loneliness brought them back to their village, where everyone was somehow related, where ancestors had lived and died, where the land itself still bore names given to it by Indians.
It was a common story in every village. Grave markers in the many small cemeteries told the stories. It’s hard to fit in where you are not wanted and harder still to return to a place that has little future, only a past as old as the land itself. Up and down the great river, in small villages and large villages alike, there were many stories of young people who took their own lives. That’s what happens when they stop dreaming; their dreams are washed downriver like ice in the spring.
Johnny had not been to the campus, but he wanted to go there someday—to learn and to get away from the village. His schoolteachers, as transient as they had been, had told him that he was college material. They said he was smart. He went through books the way some people in the village went through beer. He loved great literature and poetry and books about history and art. During the past year, he had used much of the money he earned working at the store to pay for used books and for his correspondence classes. He had finished two courses and was now on his third, a class about American history, including how Columbus sailed to America a long time ago, saw a million Indians already living here, and went back to tell everyone how he had discovered a new world. It was a funny story and all the elders laughed whenever Johnny told it to them.
Sometimes they would come into the store, hang their thick parkas on nails above the stove, pour cups of coffee, and ask Least-Weasel to tell it to them again. It was like hearing a joke everyone knew, including the punch line, but everyone laughed anyhow when they heard it.
“Tell us that story again,” they would ask of him while he walked the narrow isles, placing cans and boxes of food into stiff cardboard boxes.
Several of the chapters in Johnny’s textbook amused or puzzled or even bothered them. One was about how black slaves, who were stolen from a faraway land, were made citizens who could vote long before Indians could, even though the Indians had lived here for thousands of years and had helped the first white people survive their first harsh winter. Another chapter talked about how many of the first presidents gained office by killing lots of Indians to make way for the land-hungry, expanding nation, as if candidates received votes for every Indian they killed.
Fred Peters came in around noon and asked about Johnny’s grandfather.
“Where you grandaddy?” he asked, picking up a box of .22 shells.
Johnny looked up from his book. “He’s up on his trapline. Been there for several days now.”
The old man placed a package of toilet paper on the counter beside the small green box of rifle shells.
“It been gettin’ cold past couple days. He usually come back when it so cold. Not good to be out there alone. Pretty tough be all alone like that.”
Least-Weasel was bothered by the old man’s words. Fred Peters was only a few years older than his grandfather, and he had quit trapping about ten years earlier. He was a man who knew what trapping was all about, who knew what it meant to be alone and in trouble in the great, unforgiving white.
“I’m sure he’ll be home today,” he told the old man, collecting his money and giving him his change. “It’s only twenty below. I’m sure he’ll decide to come home now before it gets colder.”
The old man looked outside and then shuffled over to his parka, which was warm now from the rising heat of the stove. “He need to come home today. It gonna get colder. Gonna be real cold tomorrow.”
When he closed the door, a little bell jingled, and then it was quiet in the store except for the sound of a log popping in the stove.
During the last half hour before leaving for home, Johnny swept the plywood floor, wondered about his life, about his future, and, most of all, about his grandfather. Although it was only midafternoon, the sun was already heading south.
When he was done for the day, he stopped by to visit his grandmother, hauled in more firewood, emptied her honey bucket down the rough-sawed hole of their o
uthouse in the backyard, and finally drove home to his own little cabin, which was dark inside and cold again.
Once the cabin was warm, he crawled into his bed, pulled up the blankets and the quilt his grandmother had made for him, and thought about what she had told him.
“You grandaddy should been home today. It gettin’ too cold,” she had said without looking up from the pot of soup she was stirring on the stove.
Johnny Least-Weasel, warm in his soft bed, a candle glowing on the small table by the frosted window, dreamed all night of his grandfather. They were bad dreams, and he tossed like the icy river tossing in its silty bed.
When confronted by the menacing bear, the old man wasted no time. He hit the grizzly across the nose, knocking it over. Then he hit it over the head until it was dead. The old man had killed a great bear with only a stick!
IT WAS GETTING LATE, later than the old man usually stayed awake, but he and the night were restless. Several times he rearranged his bed of green boughs, pulled the strings tight on his fur-lined parka hood, turned on his side and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come. His body was restless and tense from sitting under the tree all day with nothing to do but worry and wonder.
It was a perfectly clear night. Frost-sharpened stars filled the sky; a full moon lit the landscape so bright that he could see across the wide valley; and on the horizon above the far white mountains, the northern lights were shimmering and dancing, pulsing across the sky in long shifting ribbons. The only noise was the creaking of the tree in the wind. He watched the dancing sky for a long time. The shimmering waves of green and red light were beautiful. Words were useless. The borealis must be experienced firsthand to be understood by the heart.
