by John Smelcer
It was a beautiful clear night, even though it was so cold now that his boots and gloves barely kept the old man’s feet and hands warm. If the temperature dropped much farther, they would be useless. If there was any consolation in the cold, it was that there were no tormenting clouds of mosquitoes.
He carefully dropped a few more pieces of wood onto the fire, and for a few minutes the flames were happy and provided light and warmth. But no matter how good it felt, the old man knew that there was not enough wood to burn such a bright, hot fire all night. He had to ration what firewood he had, so he curled into a tight ball, hugging himself to keep his body heat from being swept out across the field and into the clear, star-raddled night.
But no matter how tightly he curled up his arms and legs, as if to have them vanish entirely so that the cold could not touch them, he still shivered and trembled. When he opened his eyes, he could see the snowmobile and sled, where his sleeping bag lay inside a dark green waterproof bag.
“How different this night would be curled up in that bag,” he thought.
He closed his eyes again and tried to sleep, tried to dream about home and his warm bed in his cabin with its smell of wood smoke and fish-head soup. He tried to dream about his old wife nestled against him in their small, warm bed.
He was close to falling asleep finally when he heard something in the distance. It was getting closer. It sounded like breathing, like panting. Then it was closer, sounding like the panting of sled dogs after a long run. The old man sat up slowly, without turning his eyes from the approaching sound, and reached for his spear leaning beside him.
He could see something coming from the far side of the field, shadows loping and panting and kicking up snow as they crossed.
Wolves.
He could see them now. There were five. Two were in the lead and three more ran about a body length behind the next. They were coming straight for the tree, straight for the man who did not move or utter a sound.
A lone wolf is a timid creature, nervous and unsure of itself. But a pack of hungry wolves is a dangerous thing, quick and cunning and deadly. The old man remembered how a pack of wolves, scavenging along a great lake, once came upon a cabin with a dozen sled dogs chained to their little windproof houses. The wolves killed and ate several dogs before the trapper, hearing the howling ruckus, came out and drove the wolves away with his rifle. He had had to put down his lead dog.
The wolves stopped when they came upon the snowmobile and its hitched sled, sniffed around for only a minute, until they found the moose quarters. All five attacked, though the frozen meat was not alive and did not move. They ripped the meat from the strings securing it to the sled, dragged it onto the snow, and tore at it and growled and fought one another until there was nothing left but the heavy stripped bones.
Then two of the wolves turned their attention to the huddled shadow crouched beneath the tree. Cautiously, they came closer, weaving from side to side, stopping to look and smell. Curious. Wary.
The others followed.
This wasn’t the first time the old man had been encircled by wolves. Once, long ago, when he was still a boy, a pack of wolves had followed him as he trudged home on snowshoes, carrying a rucksack full of rabbits he had shot in the wintered hills. He had been all day in the field with his single-shot .22 rifle. For over a mile they followed him, weaving on and off the trail ahead and behind him. At times, they loped along in the scraggly trees left or right of the trail, hiding behind tree trunks or deadfalls, curious and determined.
When he came upon a clearing, the pack circled him, snarling and snapping at the cold air. He had stood his ground with his rifle, even though he knew he would get off only one shot before the pack fell upon him.
But they didn’t.
Both sides stood their ground on that white field, yelling or growling, showing their power and menace. Finally, Albert realized that it was the contents of his pack they wanted. They could smell the game. Slowly, without taking his eyes off the wolves, he fumbled with the drawstring, opened the bag, reached in and pulled out each rabbit, and flung it as far away as he could. While the hungry pack devoured their easy meal and fought over bits and pieces, the young boy ran home as fast as his snowshoes could carry him across the deep snow.
The wolves did not follow, and he never saw them again.
But on this day, on this wintered field, five wolves were only steps away. The old man stood up and shouted, holding his spear tight in both hands, his legs apart. He yelled and waved the sharp-pointed spear while the wolves growled and bared their fangs and took quick snapping bites out of the cold air, making terrible clicking sounds with their teeth. Their ears were pulled back flat against their dark shaggy heads, and their eyes seemed to glow in the moonlight.
But no matter how loudly the man shouted and no matter how he waved the long spear, they did not retreat. The man’s presence might have frightened a lone wolf, or even two, but he did not intimidate a pack of wolves.
Still shouting and holding the spear and without once moving his eyes from the pack, the old man bent over slowly and reached for one of the long, thick spruce boughs he used for his bed. When he found one, he stood up and eased the bushy end into the fire. Within seconds the entire end was engulfed in flames and seemed to light up the whole world. He waved the firebrand, and the wolves, fearing fire more than the old man, turned and ran back into the night, into the trees and on into the far hills.
When he could no longer see them, he placed the burning bough on the fire and stood for a long time, catching his breath and calming his nerves. Somewhere nearby, in a tree across the field, an owl was calling to him. Some Indians thought that the hoot of an owl outside your window at night was a harbinger of death.
But Albert Least-Weasel sat down and did not listen to the owl.
“Go away!” he shouted to the darkness. “Tonight is not my time to die.”
His mind began to wander to warm places. He thought about the small sauna behind his cabin. Once a week, he and his wife went out to the sauna and sat inside it until the sweat flowed from their bodies. Every so often, they would step outside to cool down beneath the stars, steam rising off their naked brown bodies.
He wished he could be in the sauna with his wife now.
But there was no warmth here, and no companionship, only a dry wind singing over the snow.
For the rest of the night, the old man did not sleep. He sat with his back to the tree, his arms folded across his chest and his knees tucked up close against his folded arms. He waited like that, watching for shadows to come down from the hill on the other side of the wide moonlit field.
But nothing came.
The hours dragged on, and the night dragged on. Sometime long past midnight, the owl flew away, and the great white world was quiet and empty again, so quiet the old man imagined he could hear starfall as he sat waiting for the onrush of sleep.
THE THIRD DAY
The next day, when the other men approached the tree, the very first one was able to wrench it from the ground. They all shouted, “We are ready!” and they ran off to their war canoes. Blackskin asked if he could go, especially since the chief was his uncle. They let him go, but only to bail water from the back of one of the long canoes.
JOHNNY LEAST-WEASEL HARDLY SLEPT. The cabin was warm enough. He even got up in the middle of the night to toss a few logs onto the fire, but his mind was full of thoughts about his grandfather. After lying in bed for hours, he got “Jimmy-legs,” a sensation in which his legs felt the need to run, and he tossed all night trying to make it go away. Johnny was restless.
When he finally decided to get out of bed in the morning, it was still dark outside, since the sun didn’t come up in winter until almost ten o’clock. It was strange. In the winter, the sun never came up at all in some places, never showed its face even once for more than a month or two at a time. But in the summer, around late June and most of July, it never went down. No wonder they called this place the Land
of the Midnight Sun.
And it was.
Johnny made a pot of coffee and read a chapter from his history book and took notes. But every ten minutes or so, he got up and looked at the thermometer. After four or five times, it was clear that the temperature was dropping, only a couple of degrees now, but given several hours it would be perhaps ten or more lower.
It was already close to thirty below.
Had he a telephone, he would have called someone to express his concern for his grandfather. But lacking one, he would have to drive his snowmobile to the village if he wanted to talk.
Johnny put on his heavy winter parka, his white bunny boots—as a generation of soldiers had called the fat white boots—and then his gloves and hat. When he was completely bundled, he went outside to start his snowmobile. But no matter how many times or how hard he pulled on the engine’s rope, it would not start. The cold was stronger than his pull, stronger even than his will.
At such temperatures, crankcase oil solidifies and does not pour at all. At sixty below, antifreeze and oil can freeze solid. In the old days, when airplanes were first used in the bush, a pilot would land on a frozen river or a lake or a field, and while the engine oil was still warm, drain the plane’s crankcase of oil into a five-gallon tin, which was carried inside and placed near a woodstove. The next morning, the pilot would go outside, brush snow from the wings, check the skis and cables for ice, and pour the warm oil back into the engine. The airplane would start on the first or second try, and moments later the little craft would bounce down the river and take off, flying low above the trees before vanishing in the low sun.
Although airplanes opened the vast expanses of the far north to commerce and trade, it was a rough beginning. Having no knowledge of the science of flight or machinery, many Indians in the early days walked right into spinning propellers and were beheaded.
Johnny went inside to fetch his bucket of kerosene-soaked sawdust and brought out a folded plastic tarp, which he set up over the machine using two sawhorses and a couple logs from the woodpile. Then he started little fires under the tarp, one on each side and close enough to the machine so that the tarp would hold the heat, but not so close that the plastic of the yellow snowmobile or the blue tarp would melt or ignite. He stayed outside for nearly an hour, crouched beneath the tarp to stay warm and to watch the fire. When the flames got too high, he rolled the logs around with a stick.
Close to noon, after the fires had died, he removed the tarp, pumped the primer twice, and pulled the rope’s black handle. The engine started on the first pull, sputtered for a few seconds, and then died. He pulled again and again, and finally it started and idled without his working the choke or the throttle.
While the snowmobile was warming, he filled the tank with gas and went inside to wait. He made himself a moose-meat-and-cheese sandwich, cleaned a few dishes, and stoked the stove with a few split logs.
When he looked at the thermometer again, it was thirty-five below.
Johnny drank his last cup of coffee and then drove over to his grandmother’s cabin. The ride over was so cold that he had to hunker down below the cracked and duct-taped plastic windshield to keep his cheeks from freezing, so cold that the moisture on his eyes tried to freeze solid, so that, when he blinked, his eyelashes froze together.
When he arrived in the village, little else was moving. All the chimneys poured out smoke, which, because of the cold, settled in the village instead of rising into the clear sky. Even the sled dogs did not come out from inside their little doghouses. They lay curled on straw beds with tails wrapped tightly across their noses, dreaming dog dreams of summer and salmon strips drying on racks in the sun.
From outside his grandparents’ cabin, he could see that his grandfather’s snowmobile was not out front. Johnny left his machine running while he went inside, afraid that it might not start again.
“Dzi’di’da, Johnny,” Morrie said.
The greeting was common, though without English equivalent. Loosely translated, it means, “So, you’re still alive.” In such a dangerous place, where people may not have seen one another for months or seasons at a time, it is not difficult to imagine why this greeting became tradition. It is a salutation that respects survival and resourcefulness.
“Close the door,” she said while sweeping the floor.
The young man took off his parka and hung it on a hook near the fire.
“Any word on Grandpa?” he asked.
The old woman stopped sweeping, leaned the battered broom against a wall, and sat down in her chair.
“No,” she said finally.
“But, Grandma, it’s been too many days and it’s very cold. He should have come home when the temperature started to drop.”
She didn’t say anything, but Johnny could tell that she was worried.
“Maybe he’s waiting out the cold in one of his trapping cabins.”
His grandmother reached for her sewing things.
“Maybe,” she said without looking up.
Johnny sat down on the couch opposite her and rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them.
“Maybe he decided it was better to wait it out.”
“Maybe,” she said again, but this time she looked up at her grandson and their eyes held, filled with more concern than their words.
They sat quiet for a few minutes. They could hear the clock on the wall, ticking between a picture of Christ on the cross and a print of two wolves lying beside a lake. Their reflection on the still water was that of an Indian man and woman. Husband and wife. Mated for life.
Finally, the old women broke the silence.
“You go look for him, Johnny,” she said with a steady voice.
In her Indian way, it was not a request, not a question awaiting an answer. It was a statement, something he had to do, like when she told him to bring in water or firewood.
“But, Grandma, it’s almost forty below. Besides, I don’t know which cabin he’s at.”
This was true and the old woman knew it. In her younger days, she had gone up into the trapline with her husband many times. In the old days, before there were snowmobiles or four-wheelers, they used to go on foot. Back then, it took a whole week to walk in and back out.
“You get you grandaddy,” she said again, rising from her chair to check on something cooking on the stove.
“You a good boy, Johnny. You get him.”
She didn’t say another word after that. When she was done stirring the pot, she walked back into her bedroom and did not come out again.
Johnny checked the woodstove, poked at it a bit with a long iron rod, and then went outside to his still-idling machine. He made a wide turn in the front yard, barely missing several empty fuel drums, and headed back toward the village.
* * *
His uncle was working at the tribal office, so Johnny stopped by to talk to him. It was the largest building in the village. It even had a room filled with rows of washers and dryers, which were always broken. Outside, buried under many feet of snow, was a playground built for all the Indian children. But now it, too, was broken. The chains to the swings were gone, and the ladder to the slide was missing. Almost everything was broken in the village—snowmobiles, boats and boat motors, even the village firetruck with its flat tires and the bright red fireweed growing up through its wheels in the summer.
“Come in, Johnny!” his uncle yelled when he saw his nephew.
Even though he drank hard almost every night, his uncle never went to work drunk. It always amazed Johnny that he could do that. The few times Johnny had ever got drunk, he was sick all the next day.
“What’s goin’ on?” he asked from behind a gray government-surplus desk.
Johnny sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk and looked at the maps on the walls. They all depicted their tribe’s land, and each was marked in black ink, denoting Indian allotments and rights-of-way. On the wall behind him was a poster that read “INDIAN POWER” in big red letters and
another one with a picture of a bunch of Indian kids that said “INDIAN PRIDE.” Posters such as these hung on many walls throughout Indian Country.
“I’m worried about Grandpa,” Johnny finally said quietly.
“He’s not home yet? I thought he was coming home yesterday.”
“No. He’s not back. Grandma’s worried. She wants me to go get him.”
His uncle leaned back in his chair, which creaked from the shifting of his great weight.
“Ah, he’s okay. Probably got a girlfriend up there at Twenty Mile.”
They both laughed.
Finally, Johnny spoke again. Serious. “I saw Fred Peters at the store yesterday. He thought Grandpa should have come home before the cold set in.”
“Tell you what, Johnny. Let’s give it a few more days. If he’s not back by then, we’ll go look for him. Maybe it’ll be warmer by then.”
Johnny wasn’t convinced.
“I don’t know. What if it stays cold or gets colder?”
January was the coldest month of the long winter. Sometimes when a cold front came in, it would settle in the valley like a houseguest come to stay too long, and hang around for weeks. A couple of years before, the front stayed under fifty degrees below zero for almost a month before it finally decided to move on to torture villages upriver. At its coldest, it had reached sixty-two below! When the wind kicked up, even a little bit, the temperature was as low as seventy below. At such temperatures, his grandfather would freeze to death within hours if he was not in the warmth and safety of one of his small log cabins.
“Grandpa can take care of himself. He been doin’ it for a long time,” his uncle said, lowering the front legs of his chair back onto the floor.
Johnny stood up, then looked at his boots while he spoke.
“Maybe I’ll go get him today.”
