Alaskan by John Smelcer

Author:John Smelcer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2014-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

The Abduction of Lucy Secondchief

Almost four years had passed since Lucy Secondchief’s father died. She could scarcely remember what he looked like anymore. To a ten-year-old, four years is a long time—almost half a lifetime.

On the day of the funeral, people kept stopping by their little, tilted cabin on the frozen tundra, telling the grieving wife how sad they were for her loss. Others stopped by to bring food for the community supper after the service. There were boxes of fry bread and biscuits, spaghetti noodles and canned spaghetti sauce, cardboard boxes of frozen moose and caribou meat, and two brown bags full of dried salmon strips. There was coffee and tea, paper plates and bowls, napkins, everything necessary to feed an entire village. It seemed to Lucy as if everyone who visited brought some kind of food.

Some people, mostly old friends of her father’s that Lucy hadn’t seen in a long time, came to say how much money her father owed them. He must have owed a great deal because by the end of the day, Lucy’s mother had given away all of her father’s tools, two rifles, and a large stack of plywood, which he was going to use to add on to the small, sagging cabin. One man was owed so much—so he said—that Lucy’s mother let him take the entire sled dog team, all seven huskies, and the sled.

Lucy spent the whole day sitting on a small chair beside the crackling wood stove, listening quietly to all the conversations that came and left the house each time the door opened or closed. She sat that way all day just listening and holding tight to the cheap, ragged doll her father had brought her when he came back from the city. It was her only toy. Her grandmother used to try to take it away from her during winter. She said that children weren’t allowed to play with toys of any kind because if the winter knew that children were enjoying the slow winter months, it would stay around even longer.

On the night of his funeral, the sky was filled with northern lights. It was the most intense display anyone had ever seen. Lucy knew that the lights, the aurora, were a bad omen, a malevolent force that comes down to carry people away. That’s why parents tell their children it’s important to stay quiet on such nights, so the lights won’t see or hear them. She had once seen some Indian boys challenge the lights, standing nervously outside calling to them and whistling. But eventually they all ran back inside their cabins out of fear.

But on the night of her father’s funeral, when the lights were at their very brightest in history, Lucy walked right out into the middle of a great field, stood beneath the shimmering stars and the dancing aurora, and yelled to the lights, demanding them to take her away. Her mother came out of her titling cabin, calling to her. The

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