Lone Wolves (5 page)

Dear Nellie,

I had a long talk with grandpa about my dad. I never talk about him, not even to mother, but I think about him all the time. It's like I have this giant hole inside me. I mean, if anyone in the world is meant to love you, it has to be your parents, right? How can a father not love his child? I'm half of him; he's half of me. People always say how much I look like him. What does he think when he sees me? Does he feel anything? Does he even see me? I don't understand at all. Sometimes I get really sad when I think about it. Sometimes I get mad. Grandpa thinks I'm ready to enter a race, but I'm not as certain as he is. I know all the other kids want to move away as soon as they can, but I love it here. I can understand why Grandpa loves it so much. I love it, too.

Yours,

Denny

Riversong

I never want to leave this land.

All of my ancestors are buried here,

listening to riversong

from picket-fenced graves,

their wind-borne spirits

linking past and present.

When I finally fall to pieces

this is where my pieces will fall.

After washing dishes and taking her nightly bath, Denny read the last pages of Anne Frank's diary. She learned from the epilogue that Anne and her fellow occupants of the “secret annex” were eventually discovered and sent away to Nazi concentration camps. In the last sentence of the last page, Denny read with dismay that Anne died seven months later at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Jewish prisoners were murdered because they were Jewish.

She closed the book and sat for a long time with the book on her lap, looking at the cover through tear-filled eyes, caressing the spine and pages, trying to imagine Anne's life . . . and death. She couldn't fathom life in one of those terrible places. She and Anne were almost the same age and shared many of the same teenage concerns, like boys, and the struggle to figure out who you are supposed to be, and most importantly, how to deal with the uncertain relationships to mother and father. After a while, Denny got up, put the book in her school backpack, pulled out her own diary from its hiding place—its secret annex—and sat on her bed scribbling a postscript with a purple-colored pen.

P.S.: I HATE the end of this book! Our teacher didn't tell us anything about how Anne dies at the end! She was almost the same age as I am. How could that happen? How could people do that to each other? Where's the kindness that Grandfather talks about? What kind of god allows such terrible things to happen? Was all of Anne's suffering and sacrifice for nothing? She never even got a chance to be a girl. She never got a chance to really live. Grandpa's right; I should enter that race. If he could do it, then I can do it! Carpe diem!

5

Hnae ghu' ‘aen

Words Have Teeth

D
uring breakfast the next morning, Deneena told her grandfather that she would enter the race.

“Good for you!” said Sampson, slapping his knee. “A chip off the old block. I'll call my friend and get you signed up.”

Denny's mother stopped what she was doing.

“What's that about a race?” she asked, with her arms across her chest.

“I'm going to be in a dogsled race this weekend,” replied Denny happily. “Grandpa says I'm ready.”

Delia glared at her father.

“Why do you fill her mind with such notions? She's a girl, Dad. She shouldn't be racing dogs or hiking up to cabins all by herself, for god's sake! It's too dangerous.”

“But, Mom, you're always telling me that a woman can be anything she wants to be,” said Denny. “You're always telling me to believe in myself. Were you lying?”

“No,” replied her mother. “But you need to act more like a girl, or you'll end up all alone.”

Denny thought her mother was really talking about herself. She knew that her mother's generation had, for the most part, turned their backs on the old ways, wanting their children, instead, to fit in with the new world . . . the white world.

“You need to stop hanging around with dogs in the woods and make some friends. Why can't you wear a dress once in a while? And would it kill you to put on some make-up? Why can't you be more like that Mary Paniaq?”

Denny bit her lip, literally. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something.

Be like Mary! If Mother only knew what I know, would she think a pregnant, pot-smoking, alcoholic teenager with a total disregard for her baby is better than me?

“What about what I want?” she yelled, almost in tears. “What about who I want to be? Maybe I don't want to be like
you
!”

On hearing the last words, her mother let her jaw slack and her arms fell to her side.

Denny grabbed her parka and school bag. She wheeled around in the open doorway.

“I
am
going to be in the race! You can't stop me!” she shouted before slamming the door.

On the walk to school Denny felt bad. She realized how hard it had to be for her mother, raising a child alone, living with her parents in a small village offering but few good jobs, living where everyone knows your business. Denny remembered how Anne had written in her diary that she hated her mother but how, by the end of the book, she came to understand how much it would hurt her mother to read something like that from her own daughter.

“I don't hate her,” she said to the deaf trees. “I just want her to love me for who I am.”

At school, while standing behind the building during lunch break, Denny told everyone that she was going to enter the dog
race.

“That's crazy!” said Johnny Shaginoff, taking a drag on a cigarette.

“Girls don't mush,” said Mary Paniaq, taking a sip from her flask.

Norman Fury rolled his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

“You don't have a chance in hell,” he said.

Only Silas Charley said anything encouraging.

“I'll go,” he whispered, when everyone else was talking about something else.

“What'd you say?” asked Deneena.

“I'll go watch you race.”

After everyone else went into the building, Denny grabbed Silas by his jacket and stopped him in front of the main doors.

“How come you're being nice to me?” she asked.

“I just like watching dog races. My uncle used to race.”

“But you've never been nice to me before. I mean, whenever you guys are all drunk or high, all you ever do is make fun of me, saying how I don't have a father, how I'm such a tomboy, or how I'm such an old fashioned goody-two-shoes.”

Silas leaned close to Denny.

“I'll tell you a little secret,” he whispered. “I don't really do none of those bad things. I just want people to think I do, so they'll like me. That's all.”

“But I've seen you do that stuff a hundred times,” replied Denny.

“The way I see it, there's three ways to deal with peer pressure,” he said, with both hands in his pockets. “You can join in and screw up your life or maybe someone else's life. Mary's doing enough of that for anyone.”

Denny nodded slowly, impressed that Silas saw the same thing she did.

“You can walk away,” Silas continued, “which says to the others you think you're better than they are. Maybe this works, but you won't have too many friends. No one likes to be reminded they act like idiots.”

Denny recognized that this was her approach. She didn't mean for people to think that she thought she was better than they were.

“And then there's
my
way. I'm what you might call a
faker
. I
pretend
to take a swig or a puff. Like, at a party, I pour out my glass of booze, little by little, when no one is looking. No one ever notices; they just figure I must have drunk it all. I know . . . it sounds lame. But that way, I fit in without messing up my life. The way I figure, I'm not hurting no one . . . just wasting a lot of booze, that's all.”

Denny grinned. She did a similar thing with brussel sprouts when she was a little girl, hiding them in her napkin when her mother wasn't looking so that her mother would think she ate them all and praise her.

“I hadn't thought of that before,” she said.

“Well, now you know,” replied Silas, with a smile that would disarm a snarling wolf. “Besides, I've never actually said a bad thing about you. I just nodded whenever the others did, but really I was just moving to the music in my head.”

Denny laughed, a little uncertainly.

Just then the fourth-period bell rang.

When Denny walked through the cabin door after school, her grandfather was working on the sled in the living room. The sled was upside down, with the bottom of the runners facing up.

“What you working on grandpa?” she asked, removing her school pack and parka.

“Sanding the runners. Gotta keep them smooth. Sleds go faster without nicks and gouges. You need every chance for the race.”

Deneena knew that rocks hurt the runners. Rocks were not normally a problem on the snow-covered trail itself, but sometimes a musher had to drive on or across a road to get to the trail.

“Nowadays, racers put Teflon strips on the bottom and they replace them whenever they get bad. But I like the old way—wood on snow,” he said while leaning close and looking down the long runner, checking for rough spots.

He sanded a spot and then ran his fingers along the place.

“Good as new,” he said, smiling. “Come feel for yourself.”

Denny ran her hand along the entire length.

“Nice job, Grandpa.”

“I got to put a coat of lacquer on the wood to seal it. Wanna help?”

While the two worked, one on each side of the upturned sled, Sampson taught his granddaughter the words for all the parts.

“The sled we call
xał
.”

Denny repeated the word, pronouncing it the way the old man did: hoth.

“We call the runners
xał tl'aaxi,”
said Sampson, while thinly applying the lacquer with a brush.

Denny repeated the name.

“The basket we call
xał yii.”

By “basket” the old man meant the part of the sled in which cargo is carried—any cargo: people, supplies, fuel, firewood, moose or caribou meat, sometimes even a sick or exhausted dog. Anything that will fit inside the frame.

Sampson grabbed one of the short braces that gave the sled strength. “These stanchions we call
xał dzaade'
.”

Denny committed it to memory, the way she cataloged every word her grandfather ever taught her.

“What is the word for the handle?” she asked, pointing to it.

“We call that
xał daten'.
There is a word for every single part of a sled, just like there are words for every part of a snowshoe.

“And the main line? Is there a word for that?” asked Denny.

Sampson chuckled.

“I just tell you, there a word for everything, even the littlest part. You don't listen very well. But then, you Gramma always telling me I don't listen to anything she says. The main line is called
łitl'uule'.
”

Denny pronounced the new word aloud.

“Very good. Don't forget that spot over there,” her grandfather said, pointing his brush at a small place that Denny had missed.

Denny carefully applied lacquer to the spot, drawing the brush in long, slow strokes.

“Grandpa,” she said. “Do you think I have a chance with an old sled like this? I mean, nowadays, racers use high-tech, lightweight sleds. This one has to be almost twice as heavy.”

“This a
great
sled,” said the old man gripping a stanchion and giving the entire sled a shake. “I built it myself. Very strong. Can take a beating.”

Denny thought she might have hurt her grandfather's feelings.

“It's a wonderful sled, Grandpa. But all those racers have super-light sleds made of high-tech materials. They even got satellite cell phones. Most of them have business sponsors to pay for everything, and they have patches and the names of their sponsors sewn all over their expensive jackets. I don't have any of that stuff. I'm just an Indian girl from an Indian village with a bunch of Indian dogs.”

Sampson set down his brush and stood up straight.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, almost angrily. “You gotta be proud of who you are and where you come from. Let me tell you something else. The person who wins, he don't win because he has the fanciest equipment or rich supporters. Those things can only take you so far. What matters is
ciz'aani—
heart
.
You got to have
heart
to win. You got to want something so bad that you can't give up, not even an option. When things seem to go really bad, when failure knocks you down and kicks you in the gut, that's when heart matters most. You gotta dig deep inside yourself to find the strength, to find out what kind of person you are. Yes, the person who wins sometimes has the best equipment. But just as often, the winner is the person who wants it most. You, Granddaughter, have a big heart. Maybe the biggest. I see that in you. That why I'm giving you this sled.”

“But I don't have any of the things other racers have. People will laugh at me.”

“It don't matter what other people think. I teach you that already. Only heart matters and that never changes just because we got television or cell phones. People give up too easy nowadays. Look around the village and you can see that. You got to work hard for something to appreciate it. Only things that are earned from hard work and sweat mean anything. Don't quit just because something is hard. You kids gotta learn that.”

That night, as Denny lay in her bed thinking about what her grandfather had said to her and about the coming race, she gazed at the sled glowing dimly in the yellow light from the flames of the wood stove—the flickering light casting dancing shadows on the walls. Sometime after midnight, Denny pulled out her diary and turned on the little nightlight beside her bed.

Dear Nellie,

I think I learned something important tonight. Grandpa talked about how most people don't appreciate things that come too easy to them. I think I understand what he meant. All the time I see people in the village get free money. They go buy expensive new snowmobiles, and within a year the machine is a piece of junk because they didn't take care of it at all, because they know they'll get more free money one day. I remember when I was ten, and I really wanted a new bike. Mother made me work all winter to save up enough money to buy it myself. I did all kinds of little jobs to make money, and then I bought that bike. I took such good care of it, because I knew how much work went into getting it. It was special. Grandpa's sled may be old-fashioned, but it's beautiful because he made it with his own two hands. His sweat is in the wooden heart of that sled. There's power in that. I wrote another poem. It's corny. No need to explain it. Sometimes, a poem's meaning is obvious.

Yours,

Denny

Portrait of the Artist as a Teenage Girl

Although I am nobody

writing lines to poems

no one will ever know,

I do not fail to cast

a tiny shadow

on the

snow.

p.s. Grandpa also talked about having heart. He said I have the biggest heart. I wrote another poem. Seems like good words to live by . . .

Heart

Heart is like a mirror—

bury it in mud

let it rust and grow with moss

and no more will it reflect the world's beauty.

Ciz'aani

Ciz'aani ke' uyii na'stnal'aeni—

kiighiłtaen tah bestl'es

k'ena na'stnal'aeni tsaan' ‘eł kołii kae dlaadon'

‘eł na'stnal'aeni galdiine' niic nen' kasuundze'.