Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers by Bob Blaisdell

Author:Bob Blaisdell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2014-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

SNATCHED AWAY (1988)

Mary TallMountain

Athabascan, Koyukon, and Russian on her mother’s side, Mary TallMountain was born Mary Demoski in northern Alaska in 1918. She lived for many years in San Francisco and died in 1994.

NEAR FOUR MILE summer camp, the Indians were nudging their fishwheel into calmer water. The Yukon was in a fierce, frowning mood. It tossed spray hissing skyward, hurled it back down like heavy rain into the weltering currents. Where stubborn little creeks shouldered out insistently, the river surged to attack, writhing up in silt-brown rapids. Accustomed to its tempers, the men kept tending the wheel, which alternately plunged two carved spruce arms into the current to rotate with the tide. An oblong wire basket at the end of the arm scooped up fish; on the next rotation, as the arm tipped, the fish slithered into a box nailed to the raft deck of the fishwheel; the arm loomed up again like a windmill blade, fell back, and turned with the force of the tides. The ascent of dog salmon heralded the coming of autumn; fish flowed in a stream of silvery rose.

Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had drowned between Nulato and Kaltag.

Andy was the latest, and him only twenty-two.

The day in 1916 when Clem had unloaded his gear at Nulato Garrison, he had met fifteen-year-old Andy on the riverbank, where the Army had barged the new soldiers upriver. A crooked tooth leaning into his wide white grin, the lad had offered to help Clem with his violin and banjo cases. Even then, Andy was the best there was: hunter, fisherman, trapper, nobody could beat him. Only the river could have beaten Andy.

Clem’s boat chugged into the immense, misted expanses.

He wondered how Andy had felt, knowing himself caught, fighting. Did he see sky and trees flashing past? How long had he struggled, tumbled over and over in the fast rips out here where nothing existed to snag a man and hold him solid so he could keep his head above the deadly tides? Andy had never been found, though two months had passed. A cry had been heard on shore, but when the men got out and rowed toward the sound, only the voice of the river met them. Andy’s empty canoe had floated in a gentle riff behind the island of silt growing in mid-stream.

Their friendship had stretched through the years. Clem had eaten with Andy’s large family, gone with the men on hunting trips when he had leave from duty. He had thought the natives liked him as well as any Gisakk, the word they had for white men.

Clem thought of the afternoon he had spent talking on the riverbank with Andy and Little Jim.

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