Tisha Read online

  “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Fred, I mean it. My hands are killing me … Whoa!” I yelled to the dogs. It came out like a whisper and they didn’t pay any attention. “Fred—”

  He was trying to keep a straight face, but he couldn’t.

  I didn’t see anything funny about it. “If you don’t take this right now I’m gonna let it go.”

  He was laughing so hard he could barely yell whoa to the dogs. He stumbled out of the sled, trying to stop, but every time he looked at me he’d start all over again. Finally I started to smile in spite of myself. He took me in his arms and gave me a big hug, then he held me away from him. I couldn’t think of anybody who ever looked at me the way he did then, unless it was Granny Hobbs. Only it was a lot different, and it made me feel a lot different. I had all I could do not to tell him I loved him right then and there. Because I did. Maybe I hadn’t had that much experience with boys, but that didn’t matter. I knew I’d never felt this way about anybody and that I never would again about anybody else. And I saw in his eyes that it was that way with him too.

  Once the hummock ice was behind us we moved along fast, and finally we reached the crest of a hill from where we could see West Fork joining the Forty Mile River. Ahead of us stretched endlessness.

  Months before the river below had been running, rushing along so fast that there didn’t seem to be any force on earth powerful enough to stop it. But now something had. Something held it in a mighty grip, freezing it solid, freezing West Fork all the fifteen miles back to where it began, freezing the Forty Mile all the way to Steel Creek and beyond to the Yukon. The sun was just coming up over the mountains—blood-red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship.

  We found a picnic spot at the base of a soaring face of rock, and Fred tied the dogs. They were pretty well-trained, but they still had enough wildness in them so that if they spotted a rabbit or some other small animal they’d take off after it. In a little while, what with the fire and the bright ball of sun, it was warm enough for us to take off our parkas. I made some tea and we sat drinking out of tin cups.

  “You think we’ll ever get to go to the roadhouse with each other after the dance?” I asked him.

  “No.” He took my hand and held it in his own. There were cuts all over his from where the skin had been torn by the cold steel of the traps. My own hands were chapped and rough, but compared to his they were slender and soft. Most of his fingernails were broken off.

  “Look at the difference,” he said.

  “Next time you come over I’m giving you a manicure.”

  “I meant look how light yours are—how dark mine are.”

  “I like your hands.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. We shouldn’t even be here, together like this.”

  “What can anybody do to me, take back more pots and pans?”

  “It’s no joke. They can be a hard set, some of these people. When I told my mother we were going on this picnic … Well, I guess you know how she felt. She told me she went to see you. She’s really upset.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’m worried. About you and about my mother.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Well, I do. If I had any sense I wouldn’t have taken you out here all alone.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “No.”

  He put some more wood on the fire and then I moved into his arms. After a while I didn’t feel too well.

  “What’s the matter?” Fred asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m dizzy from holding my breath every time you kiss me.”

  “Then what are you holding it for?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to?”

  “I never heard of that.”

  “That’s what I always thought.”

  “If you breathe through your nose a little it’ll be easier. Try it.”

  I tried it and it made all the difference in the world. Up to then I’d been wondering why kissing someone had been so much trouble but now I saw how much fun it really was. You learn something all the time, I thought. I could have kept on all day after that, except that my lips started to burn after a while. “I just learned something else,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why Eskimos rub noses. Their lips are always chapped.”

  “I don’t rub noses.”

  “You’re only half-Eskimo.”

  He smiled at that, then a moment later his eyes flicked to someplace in back of me. “We’re being watched.”

  I tried to sit up, but he held me tight. “Don’t move too fast,” he said. “Just turn your head slowly.”

  I did what he said, but I didn’t see anything.

  “There,” Fred said, “standing by that rotted spruce.”

  I finally saw him—a shaggy-coated moose. He’d been feeding on some willow, but now he was still, looking our way. He was tremendous, the racks on him wider than I was tall—maybe six feet and covered with white winter fuzz. He didn’t seem to see us.

  The sled was only about ten feet away, Fred’s rifle slung across the handles. He started to ease away from me.

  “Let him go, Fred.”

  “Anne, that’s fresh meat—eight hundred pounds of it. Think of it,” he said, “pickled tongue, braised kidneys, liver, heart, steak. You’ll have enough for the whole winter.”

  “But we won’t have a picnic.” He’d have to butcher it right then and there and it’d be a mess of blood and entrails. He thought about it, then waved a hand toward the moose. “Have a good dinner,” he said. The moose saw the movement, dipped his head and shambled off.

  After we ate we took a walk out onto the river. It had frozen smooth in the center, but near the banks it was a mass of twisted shapes that looked like a sculptor had gone crazy. On our way back to the sled we were moving through a thick tangle of buckbrush when all of a sudden the whole brush came alive and exploded. I thought it was some big white animal jumping up and I screamed. The air churned with the flapping of wings—a whole flock of ptarmigan I’d flushed. In a moment they were gone.

  When we got back to the sled I was all for building up the fire and staying there, but it was dark already and Fred said we should get back.

  We hadn’t seen another person the whole day, and on the way back I kept imagining we never would again, that we’d just go on and on through the moonlit night until we came to some magic place that we’d never have to leave. I leaned back in the sled and stared up at the heavens, imagining that we were on our way up to them, gliding into the stars on a trip to the Milky Way.

  I came back to earth with a jolt, because suddenly there was an ominous crack from under the sled. Right after that the bottom dropped out from the right runner, the sled tipped over, and the next thing I knew I was tossed out like water from a dipper.

  I thought I was going to land soft, but I didn’t. There was a crust of ice under the snow. I crashed through it and landed with a jolt on bare ground about a foot below. Fred went tumbling too, but he got to his feet right away, waded across snow that cracked and gave under him like pie crust and charged into the dogs. They were on solid ground, but they’d been jerked off their feet. As soon as they got up they started snarling and fighting with each other and tangling themselves up in the lines. Fred had to kick a few of them before they settled down and we were able to take stock.

  We’d been lucky. We were shaken up, but aside from a few bruises we were all right. It could have been far worse. We’d gone through some “shell ice” that had formed over a shallow basin. Rain had probably filled up the basin, then frozen on the surface while the water below had seeped into the ground. It was one of the hazards of the trail.

  The sled was on its side, but it wasn’t damaged. The dogs’ momentum had carried
it to the edge of the basin and it hadn’t gone through. We were able to right it fairly easily without even unharnessing the dogs, and then we were on our way again.

  It was after six when we reached the settlement. Fred said good night to me on the porch. “See you at the dance Friday night,” he said.

  A few minutes later I’d changed into some slipper moccasins and Nancy and I were preparing supper when she told me we were going to have a visitor later on.

  “Who?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.” She acted as if I should have known who it was. “He’s from Eagle.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Really? From the way he talked you’d think you were engaged to marry him.”

  “Now I have to know who it is.”

  “Cabaret Jackson.”

  XII

  A little later on Cab stomped in, all dolled up in his Saturday-night cowboy clothes. He’d taken a bath at the roadhouse and pomaded his hair so that he smelled like a barber shop. He brought me a big heart-shaped box of candy, and just as Nancy had said, he acted for all the world as if the two of us were just one step away from the preacher if I’d just say the word. He was as loud and brassy as when I’d seen him in Eagle last, but he was such a good-natured grinning fool that I just had to like him.

  He was leaving in the morning, he said, and he wanted to take me over to the roadhouse for some dancing. I told him that I had a headache and wasn’t feeling too good, so he said in that case he’d stay over and take me for a sled ride the next day and supper the next night. I got out of the sled ride, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer on the supper, so I said if he’d take Nancy too I’d go, and he settled for that.

  I’d offered him coffee, but he said he was drunk on love already and didn’t want to sober up. “Cab, I can smell what you’re drunk on and it isn’t love, I can tell you that,” I said.

  That made him whoop up a storm. “Ain’t she some-thin’?” he said to Nancy. “Ain’t she really somethin’? Come on, Teacher, you gotta come over the roadhouse—just for a little while. I got all this money a-jinglin’ in my belt, and if I can’t spend it on the most beautiful gal in the Forty Mile what’s it good for?”

  “You must have struck it rich.”

  “I sure did,” he said craftily. “What I got on that sled a mine’s more precious than gold, grub or fire.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Never you mind,” he said. “Those delicate ears weren’t meant to hear things they shouldn’t.”

  He was running liquor, Nancy told me after he left. “He runs it all over the Forty Mile.”

  “Isn’t he afraid of getting caught?”

  “Not him. He’s got the fastest dog team around, which is about all he’s got. The deputy marshal went after him once when he started selling it in the Indian village, but that didn’t stop him. He was so cocky he left notes for the marshal wherever he went, even told him where he was heading for next. The marshal kept on his trail for two weeks, then finally gave up. Cab’s team was just too good.”

  I saw his team the next day, kenneled in back of the roadhouse. They were a mean bunch, but they looked fast: lean in the flanks and heavy in the shoulders. If Cab had wanted to make money honestly with them he could have. There were always people who were willing to pay top dollar for a man who knew the country and had a good team of dogs—metallurgists or businessmen who wanted to be mushed into the interior for one reason or another. It made me feel kind of sorry for him. He just didn’t want to do things the right way, or maybe he didn’t know how. All he was interested in was wasting his time drinking and bragging about how he’d been in every cabaret and honky-tonk from Dawson to the Bering Sea. I more or less told him that when he took Nancy and me over to the roadhouse the next night.

  “Teacher,” he said, “no truer words have ever been spoken. What I need is a good woman to keep me followin’ my star. Somebody like you.”

  “Not me, Cab.”

  “I’d take a vow that nary a drop would I touch, and I’d build you a cabin that’d be a palace.”

  I told him thanks, but I intended to stay single.

  “I tell you, Teacher, if you’d say yes, you wouldn’t be sorry.”

  When he took Nancy and me back to my quarters he said he still wasn’t going to give up. It was a game to him now and he was enjoying it. He was heading down toward Tanacross the next day, he said, and he’d be coming back through Chicken in time for the next Friday-night dance. He’d try again then.

  We told him to come on ahead because that was going to be the Thanksgiving dance. We’d be having a party and everybody was welcome. It was due to start in the afternoon with the Thanksgiving pageant the class was putting on, then there’d be games and supper and finally the dance itself. Cab said he’d be there, “and if the answer is still no by then, Teacher, I’m gonna mush up to the Arctic and never come back.”

  “You better get an outfit together then,” Nancy told him, “’cause your prospects don’t look too good.”

  The Friday-night dances were fun, but the Thanksgiving party was the biggest blow-out we’d ever had. We’d planned it for weeks and by the time Friday rolled around we were ready. The schoolroom really looked festive. The class had cut turkeys and pumpkins out of colored paper and pasted them on all the windowpanes. Streamers and paper chains hung from the ceiling. “B’Gawd, missis,” Uncle Arthur said when he saw it, “you can hang me if this isn’t the most Thanks-givin’est lookin’ place I ever saw in my whole life!”

  By four o’clock there were so many people in the schoolroom that even though an icy mist rolled in every time someone opened the door, we hardly needed the stove. Except for Fred’s mother, who was down with a cold, and his father, just about everybody showed up.

  Nancy was the hit of the whole party, but before it started she didn’t even want anybody to look at her. She and I had cut her hair short the night before, then marcelled it the next morning. She’d put on the dress we’d made for her and I’d helped her put on lipstick and rouge, just about the smallest amount you could wear and still have it show, but as soon as she looked in the mirror it was all I could do to stop her from washing it off and jumping back into her bib overalls.

  “Anne, I look like a flapper! Everybody’s gonna laugh at me.”

  “You look beautiful,” I told her. And it was the truth.

  “The dress is so short,” she complained.

  “Nancy, you’ve seen the pictures in the catalog yourself. It’s no shorter than any girl your age is wearing now.”

  She was scared and happy at the same time and I couldn’t blame her. I’d felt the same way when I wore my graduation dress. She was even more scared because compared to how she’d been dressing up to then she looked racy. Her old dresses had come down below her calf. This one had a sloping hemline that was about an inch below the knee. The only way I could finally get her to keep it on was to threaten to take off my own dress and wear bib overalls. It was one threat I didn’t want to keep, especially since Fred’s mother had made the dress for me and it was my favorite. A chemise with a flowered print, it had soft fur along the cowl neckline and insets of tatted lace along the bodice and the flounce. Mrs. Purdy had told me it was an old Eskimo design, but it looked smarter and more modern than anything I’d ever bought in a store.

  When the first few people came in Nancy pretended to be busy at the stove and wouldn’t even turn around. She couldn’t get away with it when some of the children swept in, though. Jimmy Carew was in the lead and he stopped short. “Who are you?” he asked. He didn’t even recognize her.

  “Who do you think I am?” Nancy said grimly.

  “Holy cow!” He stared at her, his mouth gaping. “Nancy, you look beyootiful!”

  She was a hit all right. When Ben Norvall took a look at her, he rubbed his eyes in astonishment and started quoting Shakespeare. “‘But soft!’” he said, gesturing grandly, “‘What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east,
and Juliet is the sun.’ “

  Nancy blushed beet-red, loving it. “Oh, now you get outta here,” she said, slapping his arm.

  The only one who didn’t say something nice was Mr. Vaughn. Sure enough, he said she looked like a flapper. Nobody paid any attention to him, though. He was so old-fashioned that he wouldn’t let his daughters dance the foxtrot.

  As soon as we counted heads and found everybody was there the class put on the pageant. It was about the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and what they went through during their first winter.

  After that we had early supper, and everybody dug in. We’d all saved our appetites, and with Maggie Carew’s bear soup simmering on the stove to tantalize everybody, we were starved. Along with a whole load of oranges and apples, we’d had corn on the cob freighted in from Fairbanks, and everybody helped themselves to dozens of succulent moose spareribs, pickled caribou and dried king salmon. Willard Carew was sitting alongside me. He’d never seen whole corn before and was eating the cob and all.

  “I sure don’t think much of this,” he whispered to me. “It’s makin’ me sick.”

  “Try eating just the yellow part,” I told him. “Most people don’t bother with the rest of it.” He liked it a lot better after that.

  We topped it all off with dried-apple pie and ice cream, but the best part of the whole meal were the apples and oranges. They’d cost us a lot—two bits apiece to have them shipped in, but they were well worth it. We hadn’t seen a piece of fruit in a couple of months, and even though the apples were mealy and the oranges weren’t the best, everybody sat around biting into them and making faces at each other as though they were in heaven. I’d almost forgotten how sweet fresh fruit tasted.

  Once the supper was over we cleared the tables out of the schoolroom, and after the women did all the dishes Fred struck up his banjo and the square dancing was on. Filled up as everybody was it took a little time for them to get going, but inside of an hour Rebekah had three skirts off and the lanterns all over the schoolroom were shaking as though there was an earthquake.