Tisha (40 page)

Titus nodded.

“Well then I think you better take him and the little girl too.”

He came over to where I was standing beside the sled and started to undo the ties. I don’t know what happened to me then. As soon as Cab put his hands on Ethel I saw red. “No!” I yelled, and it was the strongest no I’d ever given to anyone. I didn’t think and I
didn’t care. I just gave him the hardest push I could and he went sprawling. He looked as surprised as he had when Fred had hit him.

“These children are mine!” I yelled at him. “They’re mine and nobody is going to take them away from me.”

Cab stayed lying where he fell. One leg up in the air, he played the clown, looking up at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then Fred came over and stood beside me. “Calm down, Anne,” he said.

“I’m
not
going to calm down. Ever since I came here everybody’s been telling me what I’m supposed to do and what I’m not supposed to do. Now I’m going to do what I want to do!”

Titus’ dogs weren’t any friendlier than Cab’s, so the Indian who’d stayed by the sled found a jag of ice he could chain them to. Then he came over and joined Titus. It was Arthur Jack. He looked over at Chuck, then said something and Titus nodded. I got in front of Chuck.

“Better let ’em have ’em, Teacher,” Cab said. “They can get pretty mean.”

I stayed put. “Titus, please, let me keep them,” I pleaded. “Don’t take them away from me. What chance are they going to have there in that place? What chance will Chuck have—the chance to grow up speaking broken English and maybe get a job sweeping up at a roadhouse? Or going to work on the riverboats? What chance will Ethel have except maybe to wind up living with some white miner the way her mother did?”

“They belong Indian village,” Titus said grimly.

“They belong with me! Their father gave them to me.”

He thought a moment. “You take girl,” he said. “We take Chuck.”

“Take him to what? What are you taking him to? Lame Sarah, who can’t even feed herself?”

“You come talk Council. Not my business. Chuck Indian boy. You take him you make him white boy.”

“I’ll make you a promise. Let me keep him and Ethel and I swear I won’t let them forget their own people. I’ll never let them forget where they came from.”

He was softening. I could feel it. “Titus,” I said, “don’t take them. I can make them strong, I can help them to be proud and stay proud. Let me do it.”

He stared at me for the longest time, then his eyes flicked to Chuck and Ethel. Before he could say anything, Cab spoke up.

“Titus,” he warned, “you no take these kids, them people in Chicken are gonna be mighty
sahnik
with ya. You gonna have Mr. Strong to deal with an’ everybody else here in the Forty Mile. Now you be smart an’ do the right thing, you hear? I’m warnin’ you.”

A wind came up, sending swirls of snow across the frozen surface of the river while Titus mulled the warning over. Then he asked Chuck a question in Indian.

“Aha,”
Chuck answered. Yes.

Then, just like that, Titus turned on his heel and headed back for his sled, Arthur Jack following. It happened so fast I didn’t realize for a few seconds that Chuck and Ethel were mine. Cab did, though. “You know what the hell you’re doin’?” he called after Titus.

Titus didn’t pay him any mind and Cab took a few steps after him. “Titus! Damn it, are you deef?”

Titus finally turned around when he reached his sled. Cab stood with his back to me and Fred. I thought Cab was going to start more trouble, but he was as unpredictable as he was stubborn. “You wanna race to the village?” he called to Titus.

“You give me start,” Titus called back.

“Hell, I ain’t gonna give you no start,” Cab said. “I got half a load of whiskey.”

“I got full load fur.”

“Give you a quarter mile ’n’ betcha fifty dollars.”

“Bet,” Titus answered. “I fire two shot.”

Titus’ sled drove off and Cab came back. “Teacher,” Cab said, “don’t be mad at me. I was doin’ what I thought was right.”

I didn’t pay any attention to him because I’d made up my mind I’d never say another word to him again.

“If it means anything,” he went on, “I ain’t gonna say anything to anybody about Titus lettin’ you have those two kids.”

“You really mean that?”

“I truly do. Shoot, I’m no snitch. I did my best an’ that ugly weasel called my bluff. So how about lettin’ bygones be bygones.”

“All right.”

He still looked in bad shape. I didn’t see how he could have the energy left over to run another race. He did, though. He smiled at me. “Teacher, I’ll tell you somethin’ and I mean it from the bottom of my heart. You’re an Alaskan.”

“Thanks, Cab.”

Fred released the brake on the sled and I got on the runners.

“See ya soon,” Cab called.

“See you soon,” I called back.

And that’s the way we parted.

Fred found a place off the river that was out of the wind, then after we fed the dogs and built a fire we had some beans and jerky washed down with tea. Dead tired, Ethel fell asleep practically in the middle of eating, but Chuck was wide awake.

I’d asked him if Cab had treated him and Ethel all right and he said he had. He was confused, though. Too many things had happened too fast. “Where we go now?” he asked me.

“Back to Chicken.”

“I not like that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Want go Indian village.”

“You
want
to go to the Indian village?”

“Yiss. You come too there.”

“I could take you there, Chuck, if that’s what you
want, but I couldn’t stay.” I was disappointed. It was the last thing I’d expected him to say.

“We go other place maybe. You know other place?”

Then I realized what was on his mind. He wanted to be with me, but he was scared to go back to Chicken, scared of being grabbed again by Mr. Vaughn and the others.

I pulled him close to me. “Nobody’ll take you away like that again,” I said. “Don’t you worry. I promise you, they’ll be too scared to do anything like that. Isn’t that right, Fred?”

“It sure is,” Fred answered. His jaw was swollen, and it was all black and blue. “They try anything like that we’ll beat ’em all up.”

“You do that?”

“Sure will,” Fred said.

Chuck smiled. He liked that. His head pressed into my shoulder, the fur around his hood tickling my nose.

Starting out, we piled Chuck and Ethel into the sled and Fred and I took turns riding the runners and trotting alongside. We’d take the route Mr. Strong followed, Fred said, along the river. If the weather held we could make the O’Shaughnessy roadhouse in seven hours, stop there to sleep, then push on for Chicken. He didn’t say what we’d do if the weather didn’t hold and I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me it might not.

It would have been an easy trip if it hadn’t been for the wind and the fact that we’d been up for almost twenty-four hours. The longer we kept going the more I couldn’t help but wonder at the courage of men like Uncle Arthur and Ben. They’d come into this frozen land as newcomers, before it had hardly even been mapped, and they’d built cabins and made a go of it without any help from anyone. Uncle Arthur had told me he’d never even used a thermometer for the first ten years he’d been here. In the winter he’d just leave a vial of quicksilver out on the windowsill. “And if the quick froze, you knew it was too cold to go out,” he’d told me.

Even now, thirty years after they’d settled here, the land was just as raw as it had ever been. Maybe it was settled a little more and had more people, but it was
still a long lonely distance from one bleak outpost to another.

We’d been traveling for almost an hour. It must have been around nine o’clock and the sun should have been coming up. Instead it was growing darker and the wind was getting worse, lifting drifted snow and hurling it at us like balls of smoke. I was trotting alongside the sled when all of a sudden a blast came along that banged at us so hard I was nearly bowled over. Even the sled rocked. Fred stopped it and the dogs immediately dropped on all fours and started curling up.

“We’re in for it!” he yelled.

The snow drove at us like a wall. We couldn’t even talk. The two of us got down behind the sled and sat, waiting the blast out.

“Is it over?” I said after it died down.

“It hasn’t started,” Fred said, getting up. “This is just a lull.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Keep our fingers crossed. There’s a cabin we can head for. A couple of miles farther up. We can hole up there.”

A few minutes later the wind was at us again. It wasn’t strong enough to keep us from going on, but it was meaner and colder than ever. I began to feel thirsty, and I had to stop myself from eating some snow. In this kind of cold it would be the worst thing to do, sucking precious body heat and giving nothing in return. The temperature was dropping fast and evaporating every bit of moisture. Even when we hit smooth ice the sled was balky and Fred had to trot behind it. The wind kept snapping at us like an icy whip, teasing us, then whacking at us hard. My mouth felt dry as dust.

We swung around a small delta, and Fred headed the sled for a big cleft in the bank, a slough. “Cabin’s about a quarter mile up!” he yelled.

It was a long quarter mile. No sooner had we started up the slough than the lead dogs almost disappeared. Too deep and soft, the snow swallowed them up. Fred had to get out his and Chuck’s snowshoes and the two of them moved ahead of us breaking trail while I drove the sled after them at a snail’s pace. We moved up the
side of the slough after a while and traveled along its bank, but even there the snow was piled too deep for the dogs.

The land leveled off a little, and finally Fred stopped. He and Chuck went off to look around. There was wood around us and it helped against the wind. I leaned an elbow on the handlebar and tapped the back of Ethel’s hood. She turned around, brown expectant eyes staring at me over the mask of her scarf.

I smiled, then I remembered she couldn’t see my mouth. I pulled my scarf down. “Where’s the monkey?” I asked her. She thrust it out from the fur robe around her. It was her favorite toy, a fuzzy red monkey with brown button eyes. She’d held onto it even when they’d dragged her out.

“Monkey,” she said.

“A happy monkey?”

“Monkey,” she repeated, offering it to me. I made as if to grab for it, and she pulled it back under the robe. When it appeared again I made another grab and it went right back under.

Fred and Chuck came back.

“I can’t find that cabin,” he said.

“You sure it’s here?” For a second I had the awful feeling we might be lost, but Fred nodded.

“Somewhere. It’s probably drifted in.” He put a hand on Chuck’s shoulder, pointed. “Take a look over towards that rise,” he told him.

Chuck went off in one direction, Fred in another, and I had to marvel at how fast they could move on snowshoes. Using them exhausted me, but Fred and Chuck swept around on them without the slightest effort. Fred kept moving farther and farther away, looking for landmarks, anything that would give him a bearing on where we were.

The dogs had been lying down quietly, muzzles flocked white. Now, one after the other, they got to their feet, sniffing the air. Either the wind had shifted and they smelled something they hadn’t smelled before, or something was around that hadn’t been up to now.

Pancake uttered a low growl, the ruff around his neck bristling. The other dogs were doing the same
thing, and some of them began to whine. I called to Fred and he snowshoed over.

“What is it, boy?” he asked Pancake.

Pancake hung his head and kept growling. He was scared.

“Whatever it is, we can’t worry about it,” Fred said as Chuck joined us. “We’ll head over that way.” He pointed to where a double line of straggling willow and birch marked the path of a creek. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

He and Chuck started off, and I mushed the sled after them. A few minutes later we came to a clearing where the snow wasn’t that deep and Fred and Chuck were able to take off their snowshoes. Fred took the sled from me. We mushed around the clearing, then down a sidling trail. We ended up beside the slough again, a little above where we’d left it. Below us were our own trail marks.

“It must be above us. We didn’t come up far enough,” Fred said. “Mush!” he yelled at the dogs. They started to move up the slough, then stopped dead, and no matter how much Fred yelled at them they wouldn’t move. Pancake’s hair was really up now. Fred moved up to him, grabbed his collar and jerked him forward with a curse, but Pancake braced his forelegs and wouldn’t budge. When Fred tried to pull him forward again he snarled and bared his fangs. He meant business. I could feel the hair on my own neck start to rise.

“Fred, maybe there’s a good reason why he won’t go.”

“He has to. We can’t stay here. We’ve got to find that cabin!” His face above his scarf was dotted with pinpoints of blood from the driving wind.

He dragged Pancake forward a few feet and then that was the end of it. Pancake simply lay down and whimpered.
Do what you want to me,
he was saying,
I’m not going.
The other dogs did the same. It was eerie. Whatever was a little farther on had them too frightened to move.

“Stay here,” Fred said to me and Chuck. He moved along the edge of the slough, then when he was almost out of sight I saw him stoop down and pick something
up. He came back with it—a length of dog harness. It had been chewed. “There’s what’s left of a dog over there, just the skull, a few bones and some hair.”

“Bear?” I asked him.

“Wolf,” Chuck said.

Whatever Fred was thinking he kept to himself. He chained the dogs to a tree, then took his rifle out of the sled. “You stay here with the kids,” he said to me. “I’m going to take a look around.”

“Oh no. We’re going with you.” Nothing in the world was going to keep me there with him gone. I took Ethel out of the sled.

We slogged after him. I knew that wolves didn’t attack people—at least not people who were alive—but I still felt nervous. Any minute I expected something to come running out at us from behind a bush or a tree. I held Ethel’s hand tightly. Instead of going straight up the edge of the slough, Fred made a wide circle, then started working back towards it. Before we reached it we found the remains of another dog. Again it was only a skull, the wind had swept the rest away. There was something else too. Chuck found it snagged in a bush—a small length of polished hardwood with some webbing attached. It was part of a sled.