For What He Could Become Read online

  “Uncle Charlie?”

  The words hung in the air until old Charlie looked at him; him standing there with his arm’s spread to his side beseeching providence, the ghost of his parents, and Charlie to let him go.

  “I am not a child anymore. The Old Ones live along the way and if I get in trouble they’ll help me. I know where food and water is—and it’s still summer. I can make it easy. How can you keep me here when there is nothing for me here? Don’t I have some rights?”

  “You have rights!” Charlie confirmed. He tried to sort them out in his head. For thirty years he had been an elder; he didn’t remember how to think like a youth. Carl would stay; Bill would go.

  Bill stood anchored to the floor, his head back, arm’s out to his side, still as a statue.

  After a minute, Charlie exhaled. “I think you can go.”

  Whichever way Charlie decided, Bill had expected to feel something. He could go. Now. Yet he didn’t know what to think or feel. The chew of salmon sat in his mouth and he wondered how he had kept it there when he was hit in the stomach.

  In the morning he had a small pack with an extra shirt and socks and some food. There was a trail down the west bank of the Chandalar River to Venetie, where he could catch a boat to Fort Yukon and then down the Yukon River to where the highway was being built. Surely they would hire him—he was young, strong, and knew the country. They would need someone like that.

  Herb Chulpach and his daughters Ilene and Verda were with his uncle Charlie in front of the house when he came out.

  Charlie had his usual sad-eyed expression on. He would grow older here and probably die before Bill got back. Herb would probably be gone too. Ilene, he longed to see again. He thought he loved her, but he’d never told her—he didn’t have much to say to a girl, and that was a hard thing to get out. He didn’t have anything to offer a girl, either. What he needed now was freedom and a chance to make some money. He didn’t know what either would be like but he knew he wanted both.

  Bill and Herb shook hands. He wanted to hug Ilene, hold her tight to him, feel her strong body pressed against his. She looked into his eyes and stood as close to him as she could. Maybe she wanted it too—but there were all these people around. He held out his hand and she took it.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “I know you will.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Me too…and I’ll write you.”

  “Write often. Tell me what you’re doing and where you are—and when you’ll be back.” She squeezed his hand again. “Be careful, Bill. It’s a long ways.”

  “I’ll have money too.”

  “That’ll be good.”

  He was looking in her eyes when he slowly lowered her hand. They looked like they were asking for something. Whatever it was, he wanted to give it to her. But what could he give her when he was leaving?

  He came to Charlie who was looking at his feet. When he raised his head he was blinking.

  “I haven’t been as good for you as your Dad would have been.”

  “You’ve been plenty good, Charlie.”

  Bill noticed that he wore the same shirt he nearly always wore, faded cotton with frayed edges at the collar and a button missing on the pocket.

  “Carl thought he would be here but he might not make it, since he’s fixing the fish wheel. You might catch him when you’re going downriver—tell him goodbye. He’s a good brother.” He shifted his feet. “Bill—you don’t know the hardships ahead of you.”

  “I think I can do it okay.”

  Charlie gripped Bill’s hand with both of his and held onto it for a long moment. Then he dropped his hands, turned, and walked toward the shed.

  It took Bill a minute to get the pack adjusted on his back, since one of the straps was broken and wouldn’t tighten. He had a little trouble with it because his eyes were misty. He waved to Ilene and Verda, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and walked south out of the village toward Venetie.

  Carl had done the ninety miles in three days during the winter of 1937, and Bill figured to make it in two to three days. He might not be able to kill a bear but he could sure walk out of the village on his two feet. It seemed reasonable that he could walk to the Yukon River, get on a boat, and find work on the highway. No one from Arctic Village had ever done that, and there was no reason he couldn’t be the first.

  The fish wheel was up on the bank with Carl bent over the axle, his back to Bill. The river sound would cover his steps—he could sneak up on Carl, scare him for once. But when he was ten feet away Carl spun around, a fish knife in his hand.

  “Gotcha!”

  Bill froze.

  “Saw you coming.”

  “Oh.” Bill started breathing again.

  “Is that how you got up to the bear?”

  “I did better than that.” Bill tried again to adjust the strap on his pack.

  “Not much,” Carl said.

  “He didn’t even know I was there.”

  “Well, he knew when you crapped your pants,” Carl said.

  “Who told you?”

  “Charlie told some. Herb told some. More than likely they only got it half right. Where you going?”

  Bill walked over to the fish trap and shook it. “Venetie. Gonna go work on the highway.”

  Carl looked at him for a moment. “You know how far it is to Venetie?”

  “I know how to walk.”

  Carl smiled. “Ninety miles is more than a walk, little brother. Let me see what you got in your pack.” He opened the flap and rummaged through. “You remember how to write?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Well, you write us a letter at least every six months and let us know where you are and what you’re doing.”

  Bill nodded.

  “Take care of yourself. You won’t have me there to back you up or get you out of trouble.”

  “I’ll survive without it.”

  Carl smiled and offered his hand. Bill took it and immediately regretted it, for in one quick motion Carl pulled him forward so fast he couldn’t move his feet, and the next thing he knew he was face down in the grass, the pack riding on his head.

  “Damn you, Carl.”

  “Don’t let them do that to you out there. Now get going, you’ll never get to Venetie in that position.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The first six miles were easy, although his leg hurt some towards the end. He would not have known how far he’d gone except for a note on a spruce tree blaze written in pencil that read “6 m to A. Vil” and an arrow pointing the way he’d come.

  At about twelve miles he stopped alongside a feeder stream and took out the caribou jerky, smoked salmon, and some dried low bush cranberries. He scooped water from the stream with his hand, then lifted his pants leg and examined the swollen black and blue wound. The scabs were tight, and so far there was no sign of infection. Leaning against a tree, he let his eyes drift over the river that flowed in front of him, looked up at the scattered clouds in an otherwise clear sky, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

  It was a good day to be alive.

  The food tasted good and the water sparkled.

  When he finished eating he started to stand up. He staggered, then regained his balance but not before he dropped the food sack at his feet.

  He frowned.

  His joints were stiff like an old man. His boots seemed too small. Dizziness disoriented him for a moment and then he straightened up and stood without weaving. He’d thought he could at least cover thirty miles a day, and here he was wearing thin at twelve miles. The damaged leg throbbed.

  He marched in place until the stiffness abated, stuffed the food in his pack and started down the trail. In thirty feet he stopped, reversed direction, and went back to the creek for more water. How many times had his Dad told him to drink water to help avoid cramps and stiffness?

  For the first time, ninety miles seemed like an awful distance to travel.

  The stiffness went
away within a mile, and he picked up the pace. The dusk moved in early along the river with tree shadows stretched across the trail and the sun over his right shoulder, his eyes adjusting to less daylight. He stopped on a level place before it was dark and built a fire.

  He awoke with the sun in his face, determined to make it to Venetie that day. He had heard of people who’d walked forty to fifty miles in a day. If he ate and drank while he walked and kept his mind focused, he could make it.

  The damaged leg was swollen and tender, but so far it hadn’t held him back. He decided to run part of the way.

  When he tried to run the pack jumped all over his back, but at a slow gait the pack more or less stayed in place. He jogged for 100 paces, then walked for 100 paces. He got bored with counting the paces and soon he was jogging until it was hard to breathe, then slowing to a walk until his breath came normal again.

  After a few hours he stopped for water and jerky even though he wasn’t hungry and the water tasted awful. He tried to recall what his Dad had said about eating and drinking and resting, but it wouldn’t come.

  At mid-morning he ate some jerky even though he wasn’t hungry. In mid-afternoon he sat down on a small bank above the trail. He stared at his feet and tried to wiggle his toes, which were so tight inside the boots he couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. Now he remembered what his dad had told him: “Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty, rest before you’re tired.”

  “Well—he didn’t say anything about my feet.”

  He got up and dipped water from the river that tasted like it came from a moose pond. He bit off a piece of jerky and tucked it between his lip and gum and let it sit there tasting like sawdust. He would chew it in a few minutes when it had softened up and then he would try and figure out why there was no good taste to anything.

  A glance at the western slope told him he had several more hours of sunlight followed by several hours of arctic twilight. He didn’t know if he had it in him to go further. And then there was the satisfying thought that he could just lie here until he felt like getting up and going on.

  His eyes closed and then his mind shut down and his entire body relaxed into sleep.

  When he awoke he started to roll over and sit upright, but there wasn’t a muscle in his body that would respond. Finally he was able to slide his arms under his hips and lever himself onto his side. He lay there for several minutes, then managed to sit up.

  His legs, dangling over the side of the bank, were numb. There was no mental connection with them. He squeezed and rubbed the muscles to massage the numbness out. A cramp hit, and the pain forced him to stand. He struggled. Once up, he locked his knees and stood weaving on the uneven ground.

  The pain returned, and he pulled up the pants leg until it stuck on the claw wounds. He eased the crusted material away from the seeping wound, which throbbed in the cool air. Infection. He went to his pack for an extra T-shirt to wrap it with, but the shirt wasn’t there. Strange – he was sure it had been there yesterday.

  He started to walk in little circles, urging his body parts to work together again, his feet feeling like solid blocks. He had not gone a mile when he picked a level place to remove his boots. With some misgivings he peeled off his right sock, pulling it inside out, a brown-red stain coming into view as he stripped it off from where it seemed glued to the last two inches of his toes. There were ugly stains where the skin on the toes had swollen, then blistered and broken.

  He took the boot and sock off the left foot, which was nearly as bad.

  While he rubbed the foot cradled in his lap he thought about how easy it all had seemed—walk to Venetie, get on the riverboat, get to the highway job. What could be so hard about that?

  The food tasted like old wood and the water like melted pond ice in the spring. He sipped a mouthful of water, then spit it out.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to clear his mind. He rubbed his feet until calmness settled on him, then put on his extra pair of socks and lay on his back and looked up at the sky.

  Birds awakened him and for a second he didn’t know where he was. He got up on his hands and knees and then stood. The blisters stung. There was a stain on the new sock and he didn’t know if he should pull it loose or not. He decided to leave it there and put on his left boot. The foot wasn’t so bad, but the swelling and pain from the infection were worse. He put on the right boot.

  He tested his feet in both boots, lifted them up and down and noticed the clear morning with few clouds, a light breeze off the river, perfect weather for walking. The damaged leg sent tingling messages up to his groin and down to his ankles, and lagged behind the other one so that his gait was uneven. A nausea accompanied by weakness came and went.

  When he cleared a bend in the trail he sat down again. He tried drinking but only got a little water down. In a few minutes he stood up and walked and thought about jogging and even made it a few yards before he fell back into a walk.

  His lips hung open and he breathed through his mouth, which dried out his tongue first, then the inside of his cheeks and then his throat. His feet moved at a little over two miles an hour as he walked into the day that was beginning to warm up, the morning sunshine spilling over the low mountains and splashing a new day’s color on everything.

  Around midday he collapsed on a low bank and thought about his feet, which had given up the numbness and started to hurt. He had limped for some miles but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was going on with them.

  The red stain on the sock stopped him. There wasn’t anything he could do about a bleeding foot. He pushed on the ball of his foot, and pain coursed through to the ankle. He felt with the tips of his fingers under the toes, around them, and on the ends. There was no feeling, and now he debated about taking the other boot off.

  A chill in his chest startled him and he shivered.

  ‘It isn’t cold. Why am I cold?’

  He reached around, took the blanket out of his pack and pulled it over his shoulders. After several minutes he tried another sip of water.

  He yelled at the river. “It’s your mind that tells your body what it can do! I’m limping but my leg isn’t broken. I’m young and strong and Venetie is not the end of the earth!”

  Using both hands he opened up the boot as wide as he could and jammed his foot into it. He pulled hard on the laces and bound the foot tight. His feet could bleed on the trail or drop off, but he would not stop until he got where he was going.

  Bill walked into Venetie on the fifth day after leaving Arctic Village. He had missed the riverboat by two days, and it wouldn’t be back for two weeks, which was okay with him. The emergency medical man in Venetie needed only five minutes to determine that he was dehydrated and to start a Ringers IV in his arm. Then he called a midwife in and asked if she would be so kind as to get a pan of water, soak Bill’s socks off, and clean his feet—and please ask the medic to get him some sulfa power for the damned infection.

  The sulfa would take care of the infection; in two weeks the feet would heal. The bruise on his leg would fade after several weeks. The claw marks would soften in the years to come, but their outline would remain for the rest of Bill’s life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bill walked out onto the deck of the Northland Echo, a paddle wheeler headed up the Yukon River for Dawson City. At Fork Yukon the captain had leaned one elbow on the bridge railing and looked down at him when he limped up to the gangplank.

  “Can I work my passage to Whitehorse?” Bill asked him.

  “Looks like you’re somewhat limited in what you can do,” the captain shouted down.

  “My dad taught me I’m only limited by what I think I can’t do.”

  The captain looked upriver and started to put his pipe in his mouth. Then he yelled down; “If you can cut and haul wood, it’ll buy you a passage.”

  “I can do that,” Bill said.

  “Come aboard.”

  The captain leaned on the railing smoking
his pipe, his eyes following Bill as he climbed the steel stairs to the bridge.

  “My wood crew took off to work on the new highway and I’m needing wood for my return trip.” He looked toward town and took several puffs on his pipe. “I’ll drop you off at Forty Mile. Then I’ll be back, and go to Whitehorse. Should be there in a couple of weeks. Go below and see Orville, he’ll fix you up with a place to sleep.” He blew the smoke away from Bill.

  “Where you live?”

  “On this boat, I hope.”

  The captain smiled. “Not very damn long you don’t. Pretty soon you’ll be living with the gnats and mosquitoes, bucking wood twelve hours a day and wondering if I’ll ever come back upriver.”

  Orville had “fixed him up” with a blanket thrown on a wooden frame against the bulkhead.

  Now he was standing on the deck of the first paddle wheeler he had ever seen, the hard wood vibrating with the rhythmic pounding of the engines, tickling the new skin on his feet. He wondered what Ilene would think about all of this and where he might find pencil and paper to write home.

  As the boat neared a group of sandbars and small islands, it slowed, shuddered, and with a grinding sound stopped and held steady against the current. Two men brought a small boat to the fore deck, slid it over the side, attached a rope to the gunnel, and rowed away.

  Bill watched them work the boat to the left bank and attach the line, which itself was attached to a cable, to a large cottonwood tree twenty feet up from the bank.

  When the engines came to life, the giant winch tightened the cable until it was taut to the tree. And then, like a fish being hauled in, the stern swung around and the winch on the bow of the steamer reeled in the line, dragging the boat across the sand bar.

  The captain yelled down at Bill: “Get away from the bow!”

  Bill moved back to mid-ship and stood in the cargo door. The boat plopped into the deeper water when it slid off the sand, the cable went slack, and the men on shore rushed to unhook it from the tree.