I left Charlie and Debra to talk and went outside again. The land rose up from the site of the cabin in a long, slow incline. There were lots of spruce trees with good-sized girths, which obviously fed Charlie’s stove. I kicked around the buildings taking perspectives from different positions that its elevated site had thrown up. But whatever spectacular vista was set before me, I was not taking it in. I had travelled this far ostensibly to learn and attempt to understand the spirit world of these people through this old shaman. Their profound belief in the ‘spirit’ of the land, or ‘inua’ (a Gaelic and native Alaskan word for spirit), is why they survive here. But now, having come so far, I suddenly didn’t feel so determined to enquire into this world. There was some kind of futility in walking into people’s homes and lives in pursuit of old stories, as if in coming to this extreme place the door of the spirit world would blow open. And what if it did? Would I be able to look into it and understand its reality? If I was hardly taking in the landscape in front of me, how could I hope to see into the other world that lay both in it and on the other side of it?
That evening and for the rest of my stay all of us except Lena slept in the big living room with Charlie. Even two of Charlie’s grown sons, who stayed most of the day in the fish-camp tent or went off in a small boat returning late in the evening, occasionally joined us in our communal slumbers. They never spoke and were gone again in the morning. Sometimes one of them would come up to the cabin during the day, make himself something to eat, then leave again without much more than a nod of acknowledgement, and only then if I had initiated the exchange. At first I thought it was embarrassment, or even surliness, but I later learned it was neither. The silence of the Arctic is overwhelming, but it is neither unsettling nor disturbing. It certainly blew away the cobwebs in your senses and could be deeply rewarding. I was beginning to understand its sonic qualities, about which the composer John Luther Adams had spoken to me. The great empty silence that blew around the cabin was, to me, comforting, and sometimes, I thought, idyllic; Charlie’s sons had simply subsumed this silence into themselves. They had both spent nearly forty years living within it, and the clutter of words or banal though well-intentioned exchanges were alien inconveniences.
Charlie was also uncommunicative. His injury and severe lack of mobility had tied him to the cabin and his bed. I found it difficult to speak with him. Sometimes I thought he was cranky. He seemed to want a lot of attention from Lena and Debra. But I suppose that’s true of any older person who finds him- or herself so debilitated that they no longer have any function in life. I gathered from his conversations with Debra that his own reputed healing powers had diminished, prolonging his own self-administered recuperation. Debra spent many hours working with him, massaging and exercising his withered muscles. In the evening she would perform a shamanistic healing ceremony, calling up the spirits to the ritual of drum and chant as she whisked incense about him with a feather-and-bone rattle. Charlie seemed to enjoy this attention, and my own attention was drawn constantly to learn whatever power Charlie and Debra were attuned to. Lena radiated something else. I could sit in silence with her with no awkwardness or discomfort, but I didn’t have to. Lena conversed with easy grace, occasional seriousness and much mischief. She made me laugh at the devilment in her small black eyes, dazzling like polished onyx.
Lena grew up travelling from camp to camp with her family in the Kobuk Lake area, and every summer, when she was thirteen or fourteen, ‘there was this young man out there’, as she put it. Her mother told her about him. He kept coming round. Then she and her two sisters were in Kotzebue (which was an extremely small place at the time) and Charlie showed up again, looking for pups for his dog team. The girls took him to someone who had pups for sale. He gave them each a puppy, which made them very happy. Then he started showing up in the winter, which was unusual because it was more difficult to travel in the winter, especially just for a social visit. At some point that winter, when she was seventeen, she went home with him by dog team for two or three months. They went back to her parents for three months after that and her mother asked why they weren’t married. They eventually married when Lena was eighteen and Charlie said he was twenty-eight. She laughed, saying she did not believe him. Charlie told me basically the same story but from his viewpoint, which was that he too was moving around from camp to camp and would visit Lena’s family. He said he noticed that she did real good work, and he thought she would make a good wife so he decided to marry her.
I remembered Charlie’s remark about being a nomad like the caribou and could only imagine the incredible hardship of surviving half a century in the Arctic outback, living out of a dog sled and eking out a living against incredible odds. Only the Inupiak, the Yupik and those born into it could have endured it.
They had thirteen children, two of which died in infancy and one as an adult. Lena raised these kids while moving and travelling from camp to camp. It was a lifestyle even more difficult than the way they lived now, which was basic enough but in comparison to those years on the tundra quite plush. During the winter Charlie made a living making log houses, and eventually boats as well. When he was in his thirties he suffered a stroke which left him debilitated. That’s when he became a healer. He healed himself by massaging and moving his body, bringing himself back to complete recovery. That was the beginning of his unique and particular brand of healing. He continued by helping others. Soon he became well known and sought after. Apparently, some years later Charlie sustained a second, more severe stroke, which again he overcame by his own healing methods. Both strokes, Debra explained, had been confirmed by doctors at the medical centre in Kotzebue. Those same doctors could not explain how Charlie had managed his own recovery twice, but they were content to let him treat other patients for whom their own skills and medicines had little effect. It was several evenings before I got to talk to Charlie about this.
I kept thinking about their early life together, giving birth to and bringing up thirteen babies while constantly on the move in the north-west of Arctic Alaska. This was, for me, the greater miracle. When Lena was a young mother there were no doctor’s clinics or trained midwives; there were no medicines or epidural injections. Lena’s labour pains and the screams that accompanied them would have been blown away in the howling winter winds that brought storms and temperatures no human being was supposed to survive in, never mind give birth in.
It was inevitable that I should spend more time with Lena than with Charlie. Lena was up every morning at around five to stoke the fire for the day. She ate little and was gone to the fish camp by 5.30. I followed her, like a lost pup, and spent as much time as I could with her. At first she was bemused by my presence and all my questions, but after a while, instead of answering my insistent ‘what’s this for’ or ‘why do you do that’, she simply showed me and then told me to do things. In those first few days she soon had me tanning seal skins, preparing seal meat for the winter, cleaning and racking fish, and preparing blubber to be rendered into oil. Lena worked me hard. Apart from meal breaks she would work the fish camp until six or seven p.m., and then she would either continue working on the hides in her tanning shed or sew mukluks – Eskimo boots made from moose hide, wolf and seal skins – and decorate them with the most intricate embroidery.
Her energy was phenomenal, her humour infectious. She was constantly teasing me about being lazy, and that if I wasn’t so lazy I would have more than two sons. Then she would pity my wife and me because I was ‘too old’. I teased her back, and she laughed her shy laugh, her head averted and her hands at her mouth.
Soon I had progressed from the fish camp and she showed me her hide shed. Pelts of wolf and wolverine, bear, moose and caribou hung everywhere. The snow-white fur of the arctic hare and fox lay draped over wooden trestles. But it was the whole skins that impressed me. Lena had carefully removed the hide so that the face mask of the creature was intact. They were beautiful things, and I couldn’t resist brushing my face against her wolf as
I walked among the hanging pelts. I fingered them delicately. The wolf paw was as big as my hand. Deftly I threw one of the wolf hides over my shoulder and inset my head under its face mask. I wasn’t sure, but as I turned to look at Debra and Lena who were talking behind me they suddenly stopped and looked at me with expressionless faces. After a few moments Lena invited me to come and help in the shed the next day. Only it wasn’t an invitation, it was an instruction, with a further command to ensure that I closed the door and bolted it after me.
I was left alone in what I mentally registered as this ‘hide-hung house of the dead’. Holding the wolf skin I had dressed myself in, I walked slowly around the small shed, touching, smelling, stroking and allowing these wild creatures to caress my face. I thought for a moment of the wolves in Jack London’s White Fang. I remembered the strange feelings and thoughts I had had about the wolf pack in Denali, and I recalled too the wolf that had crossed our path as John Reese and I drove down through the hills above Fairbanks. It seemed the wolf had been stalking me all these years, a shadow creature at the edge of my life’s horizon. In London’s books, and in my young imagination, the creature was a metaphor for nobility, justice and freedom. If it was bloody, savage and remorseless, it was also intelligent, social and lovingly defensive of its own. The native peoples believed the wolf was ‘very human’, and in much of their literature the wolf is indeed depicted as a disordered reflection of the human psyche. The man-beast, the werewolf, embodies all the conflict of good and evil that is a part of Jack London’s landscape, just as it is in each of us if we honestly examine our own souls.
Alone with these thoughts, I donned the skin again, pulling the wolf's face down over mine. I looked out through the eye sockets at all the other hides around me. I was part of the pack, and I could imagine myself running through the bush with my brothers and sisters panting and howling beside me. I was looking out through the eyes of death, intoxicated with blood lust. The moment passed, and I pulled the wolf from my shoulders and skulked out of the ‘hide-hung house’, locking the wild creatures inside.
The next morning, I returned again with Lena. She sorted through the various pelts to find me something to work on. I asked her if she skinned the animals herself. She explained that mostly her sons did this while she prepared the hides after they had been left hanging for some months. Her sons travelled far into the bush on snow machines during the winter months when the wolf trail was easy to follow and their fur was always at its thickest. Sometimes they were away for several days. She explained that the wolf skin I had dressed myself in was taken from an animal that had come right into the compound of the cabin. ‘He came to give himself to us,’ she said. I couldn’t argue, but I remembered the ranger in Denali explaining how wolves sought no correspondence with human beings.
Did she know how to skin the wolf, I asked? Without answering she spread the pelt, then, lifting up the headpiece, she gestured with backward slash marks using her thumb as a knife. She made the gesture of hooking her fingers under the nose, yanking her hand upwards and backwards simultaneously. I never asked why the process begins with the head. I knew that native peoples always treated their kill with respect and that it was not good to look a dead creature directly in the eye. Its spirit was still present, watching you. I suppose that by removing its facial mask, the creature’s identity was gone and its dignity was maintained. To simply decapitate the creature would have been a gross insult. Lena then made cutting marks with her thumbs circling her wrists, afterwards drawing long lines up the inside of her arm. Deftly she made a snapping gesture with her two hands while pointing at the carcass where the paws would have been. ‘Then we have to hang him upside down to take the overcoat off, and that is why a man must do this work.’ I listened and smiled at her words. I sensed that this was only half true, for I knew there were many ritual taboos about women and the preparation of these powerful spirit creatures. In any case, the last few days had shown me that Lena was as fit and able as any man, certainly fitter and abler than me.
With the imaginary beast hung before me, Lena mimicked the action of teasing and pulling the thick, shining coat from the animal. I could imagine the red-blue sinewy shape peeled of its luxurious skin. Lena lifted the hide and explained how the ears are pushed inside out with a short stump of wood so that they will dry in the upright alert position. What happened to the rest of this magnificent animal? ‘The body is burned way out far from the houses,’ she replied. Sometimes the sweat glands from the corpse were extracted to produce a lure for the traps. Years ago, people would sell wolf feet and skulls to buyers from the city, but mostly the buyers wanted the fur for shoes or parka-hood lining.
I looked at the wolf skin stretched out before me. It was longer than I was tall. Lena’s elaborate mime had dismantled the creature with silent efficiency, but it could not diminish its enigma. Its spirit was as real to me as it was to those who believe in the supernatural power of the animals. I knew Lena believed it too. I suppose anyone who hunts such creatures must come to the same conclusion, for their relationship with their fellow animals is a complicated one. They ‘take’ the animal’s life because their own well-being and survival depend on it, and more especially for the regard they hold for these creatures. Once you have developed a physical and spiritual dependence on or even fellowship with them, then ‘taking’ them does not become a self-indulgence, rather a fitting acknowledgement of the creature’s being. The human and the wolf world are deeply intertwined.
Lena said, ‘This one is for you,’ and spread out a pelt on the ground for me. She squatted down on her knees with her scraping tool – a piece of copper pipe rammed into a short scrap of wood. She proceeded in short backwards and forwards movements to scrape the dried rind of flesh from the hide.
‘I can do that, Lena,’ I said. Debra had joined us, and Lena said something to her to and began to laugh. ‘What is it?’ I asked, seeing that the upturned hide was too small to be a wolf.
‘This work is for old men,’ she said, still laughing.
‘It’s a wolverine,’ Debra told me, and then she explained the joke that Lena had shared with her. ‘The wolverines are real recluses, and they wander a lot. I think Lena might be telling you something!’ Debra was smiling, and I smiled too at being given an old man’s work.
I set to my task with vigour while Lena and Debra watched. They both smiled down at me as if I was a child discovering a new toy. After a while they left me, and soon I learned what back-breaking work this was. Sweat lashed out of me, and mosquitoes buzzed around me. My shoulders ached and my wrists and forearms burned. My reading about Eskimo folklore had informed me that the wolverine was the most powerful spirit animal, and Lena was making sure that I did it justice. Perhaps I was a mystery and a stranger to Charlie and Lena in the same way the wolverine is. Anyway, I scraped and shoved and sweated with the wolves watching me. I stopped often out of sheer exhaustion and looked at them.
Since my experience in Denali I had picked up bits and pieces of information about the wolf whenever they had come my way. One interesting fact was that more wolves die of starvation than are eaten by their own kind or trapped or shot. Maybe that was part of the enigma. The wolf preys on itself. It is the predator, and ironically it is the prey. Was this the natural circle of life? There was something vaguely eucharistic about it. Life and death were wheeling about me. Here I was with the wolverine below my knees and the dead eyes of the wolf, the bear and all the other creatures watching me. I toiled away, sweating and swatting mosquitoes in the Arctic sunlight. I was alone in this tiny shed, not knowing where I was or how I could map my way out of here with the spirit of the wild everywhere around me. I was deliriously happy.
The days passed, and I felt more content by the hour. I learned much from Lena, apart from working in the hide house or down at the fish camp. We went with Charlie in his small boat to collect water, which simply meant filling as many containers as we could with snow from the many remaining snow banks. On another occasion we w
ent to check and repair Charlie’s salmon traps. Lena took great delight in showing us the various wild plants she collected and used in her cooking. I supposed she could have grown vegetables during these long months of continual sunlight, but why would she need to? The wilderness offered her all she wanted.
During one of our collecting trips we came upon a small herd of musk ox. When they saw us approach they charged through the tundra and collected together, the adult animals forming a tight circle around their young. There they stood rock solid, the steam flaring from their nostrils, their chests heaving, their black, boulder-like heads with a crown of solid horn sweeping down below their ears turning outwards to face whatever threatened them. This primordial phalanx of bone and muscle fixed us in its stare; the twenty or so animals seemed to have fused into one mass. It stood there silent and unmoving. Like a primed explosion, it declared, ‘Go away!’ Only their great fur overcoats of black, brown and creamy beige blowing in the wind told you that this was a living thing. The adults were about half the size of a plains bison, but their coats were twice as long. I relished their iron will. I marvelled at their instinctive collective defiance. I knew what a rare sight stood eyeballing me thirty yards away. The musk ox had all but disappeared but was very slowly reclaiming its species and its territory. I remembered the circling caribou dance, and my blood lust in the wolf skin. I wished these creatures well. My stay in the Arctic had been made very special by meeting such creatures and I knew I would think about this moment often and tell my sons of the pow-wow of the musk ox.