Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

wringer washer. Over the heater, rows of wires were strung for drying socks and mittens. Only the village school had electricity, and the people hauled water from the river in buckets.

      While Phil and I chatted with Jessie around the counter, Albert brooded in a corner of the dark cabin. Like most of the villagers, his days seemed a tedium of inactivity. For hours he would sit beside his cache, staring at the ground. He seemed a sad and lonely man and in poor health. I found the silences between us too great to span, but in truth I never tried. Albert Williams, I thought, watching him covertly while I talked with Jessie, the early missionaries were wrong. A man should keep his own name. I wondered what else had been taken from him.

      “You want some fish?” Jessie asked, turning from the propane stove with a skillet of fried grayling. She had been generous, often feeding us meals or snacks of dried caribou, pilot bread, and jam. Although they seemed at a loss to understand us, the whole village treated us with kindness. The three of us ate in silence, each wondering what to say. Although her English was good, our backgrounds were so different that we often misunderstood one another.

      “We caught some fish too,” I boasted, “only they were suckers.”

      “Oh, we don’t eat those,” she told me seriously. “Too many bones.”

      My attention was drawn to something bubbling mysteriously on the back burner.

      “Whitefish guts,” Jessie said, following my gaze. “Very good.” She seemed defensive. “You try some?” So far she had fed us muskrats (boiled in their skins) and boiled geese, heads and all.

      “Sure. . . .” I forked out a bit and gingerly tasted them. The guts were much like oysters.

      “Is there anyone else we could ask to take us upriver?” I finally asked.

      “Maybe Robert Frank takes you when he get back from drinkin’ in Fort Yukon,” Jessie replied irritably. “I worry about you,” she said after a minute. “Maybe you get into lotta trouble. Two years back, this white man, he went and live by himself. We never see him again until the Trooper, he go back there in the wintertime, lookin’ for him. That man, he builded himself a little house, so small he couldn’t even stand up and with no real door, just canvas. And he didn’t have no food. He eat up everything and then he shoot himself.”

      She got up and placed tea before us on the counter. “Even good Native boys, sometime they get killed. Last winter a Native boy (he know what he was doing too!) die when his snow-go break down not too far from the village either.” Jessie watched us, chin in hand, from her stool on the other side of the counter.

      I guessed that others were wondering too as they studied our little canoe or talked quietly with us. Some of the young men had borrowed Lady Grayling for a frolic near the shore, for none had ever been in a canoe before. “We’ll be okay,” I smiled reassuringly. “Next spring we’ll be fat as beavers. Just call us the upstream Indians.”

      She looked uncomfortable for a minute and then declared, “You aren’t Indians.”

      The door of the cabin stood open and drugged mosquitoes drifted in and out of the punk smoke. The smell of the slowly burning insecticide coil tinged my thoughts, reminding me of the Mackenzie River and other people who had entered my life briefly along those faraway banks. Outside in the hot sunlight, flies buzzed about the dogs. Often sadly neglected, they were kept as status symbols, a cultural hangover from the days before snowmobiles. I remembered Great Slave Lake in Canada where the dogs were abandoned on small islands to survive the summer or die. In the fall, they would be gathered and fattened for winter work.

      A dog was probably the last thing we needed, but watching them from Jessie’s cabin, I decided I wanted one. Phil and I both loved dogs, and I missed that relationship. Seeing the ratio of dogs to humans, I assumed we were in the ideal location to acquire a pet. We set off, following one lead after another around the village. People were friendly and proud, bragging about their dogs—which were all shapes, colors, and sizes—but no one wished to part with a single animal.

      It was evening when our quest brought us to young Sonny Eric Jr.’s place.

      “Just woke up,” he said, swinging open the door of the small cabin reputed by old Johnny Frank to be a haunt of the undesirable.

      “We’re trying to buy a puppy,” I began. “One to take up the river with us. Somebody told us you had some.”

      Reluctantly, he led us around the corner of the cabin to a makeshift wire pen enclosing a dozen colorful balls of fur. “I had to put ’em in jail.” He pointed to the tumbling puppies. “They broke into Abraham Christian’s cache and ate up all his dry salmon. And he wanted that fish for himself.”

      I laughed and Sonny looked up in surprise from tying on a blue head-band. I suddenly was aware that humor takes more than a common language: it takes shared assumptions.

      “I’m gonna race these dogs,” he finally stated, obviously embarrassed at the request. The spring intervillage dog races were a big social occasion. “I don’t want to sell none of ’em.”

      That evening Robert Frank returned from Fort Yukon, his boat ladened with a cow moose he had shot along the river. After we spoke with him, he agreed to take us up to the old abandoned gold town, which was probably as far as his boat could go in the rapid-strewn river.

      It was sprinkling fitfully the next morning as Phil and I trudged up and down the hill behind town, lugging gasoline on the footpath from the airstrip. As we broke camp, Sonny Eric Jr. appeared unexpectedly with the runty mongrel I liked. He told us that he had dreamed he would be killed in a boat accident. To prevent this, he said, we should take the puppy.

      So for five dollars we acquired a bundle of problems that we named Net-Chet-Siil, or “Little Girl” in the Gwich’in dialect of Athabascan. She was a pretty little thing, just weaned—all honey and cream with strawberry tongue and licorice-drop nose. Her coat was thick and soft, her tummy bald and freckled, fuzzy ears flopped over her puppy-blue eyes, and her voice carried for miles.

      As we loaded our outfit aboard the Jon boat everyone in the village came down to see us off. With a wave of farewell we shoved into the current.

      Go! Go! Go! Pleeeease! I pleaded silently as we crept up the tumbling river.

      Robert Frank seemed surprised by our sluggish pace. He shouted a conversation with Phil above the roar of the outboard, and I caught the words, “One time I got four moose in this boat! I chartered a plane on floats and just fly around and look for ’em!”

      He was a handsome, cheerful man of medium stature, about thirty and already head of a large family. Like many of his generation, tawny eyes, bronze skin, and big bones spoke of better nutrition and perhaps a mixing of genetics. He motioned to Ken, a slender youth of seventeen, and turned the motor over to him. Then settling his back to the wind, Robert Frank cupped his hands about a cigarette and opened a can of soda. Ken drove the powerful engine, standing proudly in the stern, young legs apart, eyes scanning the water, and long hair streaming.

      I held our new puppy in my arms. Net-Chet-Siil burrowed under my red woolen coat, soft and wriggly next to my body, as I craned forward, urging the boat. We plowed toward the foothills as rainbows and showers played over a landscape bathed in nameless shades of velvet green. I saw Robert shake his head as Ken again swung the motor up to avoid sudden shelves of gravel.

      “I think I go back to the village and get more gas tonight,” Robert shouted to Phil, flipping the empty soda can overboard. “We sure use it up this way.” Phil reached into his pocket and drew out our remaining cash, handing it to him. It was the last money we had in the world. Finally, I crawled under the overturned canoe to get out of the cold drizzle.

      Then we were stopping. I stuck my head out as Phil ran nimbly forward and leapt ashore with the bowline. A pair of tiny old men greeted us cheerfully as we climbed the bank to arrange ourselves about their smoldering fire. Like other places we had noticed along the river, this