2

“You’re such a treasure, Meeloa. I mean it. If I hadn’t found you, my entire project would have been a bunch of guesswork and academic projections and nonsense like that.”

The woman on the passenger side of Tessa’s Jeep smiled somewhat ruefully. “I’m glad you think so. Now, if you could only convince one of the eligible guys of what a treasure I am . . .” Her thought ended in a sigh.

Tessa took her eyes off the road for a moment to glance at her friend and translator. Meeloa was twenty-six years old with long, lustrous, pitch-black hair that she spent no time on beyond daily washing and brushing but that always looked like a cosmetic designer had just arranged it for that coveted “healthy, outdoor girl” look. Her features showed her Inuit blood, as did the amber tint of her skin. Her eyes were arresting, a bottomless black that sparked with laughter and softened with compassion. Her eyelids canted upward very slightly, giving her face an oriental aura. She’d studied structural linguistics at Anchorage University, a degree that, Meeloa said, qualified her to clean houses, work in a pet-grooming operation, or wait tables to make a living. Fortunately, she’d been spared those professions by serving part-time as a translator for the Denali Park Service. The assignments were sporadic and the money light, but she lived in Fairview and had frequent contact with the People, and those two things were very important to her.

“Well, those guys are pinheads,” Tessa said angrily. “A woman like you—pretty, articulate, bright—”

“Aha,” Meeloa broke in, “you said the magic word: bright. In the minds of the traditional People, a college education is as useful to a woman as a baseball glove is to a trout. And the new generations of the People—at least most of them—don’t think much differently.”

“That’s dumb. Really dumb.”

“But that’s the way it is. I won’t consider spending the rest of my life cleaning fish and gutting caribou and having babies. So, maybe it’s not so much the men rejecting me as me rejecting them. Either way, the end result is the same.”

“But, Meeloa, there must be native guys in the cities—Anchorage or Nome or wherever—who realize we’re in the twenty-first century. Couldn’t you . . .”

“Again, my choice. I went to university in Anchorage, and I couldn’t wait to put the city behind me. I belong in Fairview, and I’ll stay in Fairview.”

“Native men aren’t the only men in the world,” Tessa suggested.

Meeloa paused for a moment. “I don’t expect you to completely understand this, but if I marry at all it must be to an Inuit. It’s a promise I made to myself. My people are changing too fast, leaving traditions that have endured for hundreds of years behind. Our elders are dying off, and there’s no one to replace them. I have an obligation to my blood, Tess.” She paused again and added, “Case closed.” There was a finality to her tone that told Tessa the conversation was over.

They listened to the babble of the radio as they followed the two-lane highway at a sedate-for-Alaska sixty-five miles per hour. Tessa had quickly learned that the purpose of speed limit signs was essentially to assist Alaskans in sighting their new hunting rifles, and beyond that the signs were uniformly ignored. There was no residual tension left between Meeloa and Tessa after the marriage discussion—they’d had much the same conversation a few times before. The friendship between the two women was a solid one; it could withstand disagreement or stumbles in communication.

“The turnoff is right up ahead, Tess—by the dead tree,” Meeloa said.

“Yep. It always seems to sneak up on me.” She downshifted, and the blown muffler of the Jeep rumbled and grumbled like the exhausts of a NASCAR racer.

It was much more a path than a road. Years ago there’d been some logging of the white pines that were dense in the area, but the long winters and the problems involved in hauling the cut trees made small lumbering operations financially unfeasible. Some ruts from the heavy trucks remained, but they were weed and grass choked, and the rocks that had been pushed to the surface at the end of each winter threatened all but the highest or most effectively shielded drivelines and undercarriages.

Tessa threaded her way around the worst of the holes and rocks in first gear. “What about you, Tess?” Meeloa asked. “What are you going to do when this study is finished? Is there a guy back in Minnesota?”

“No, there’s no man in the picture. I suppose I’ll go back home and take up with the university where I left off. I’ll write about my experiences here for the journals, of course. ‘Publish or perish’ is still very much the rule in advanced education. I’ll probably get tenure before too long.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.”

“No? I guess . . .” She stopped for a moment and then went on. “It’s a good life. It’s not what you’d call exciting, but it’s what I know, and I’m really comfortable in academia. I suppose it’s a kind of sheltered life, but I’ve never been big on partying or crowds or huge circles of friends. Maybe I’m too analytical, but that stuff isn’t me at all.”

“Do you think you’ll ever marry?”

Tessa grinned. “Gee, Meeloa—go ahead and ask probing, personal questions that embarrass me, why don’t you?” “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”

Tessa waved a dismissive hand. “Come on—I was only teasing.” She paused again. “I don’t really know if I’ll marry. I hope so, but I’m not at all frantic about it. Like I said, I’m pretty analytical, and I’ll have to be 100 percent sure before I consider a lifelong commitment.”

“Well, suppose you met someone here, in Alaska.”

Tessa laughed. “Sure. And suppose I become an astronaut and command the first spaceship to Mars.”

“Stranger things have happened, you know.”

Tessa sighed. “Not to me.”

The group they were going to call upon consisted of three women and one man. Each of them was beyond eighty—how far beyond, none of them knew or cared. They were a dour, taciturn lot, self-conscious with the white woman and her questions. In her mind, Tessa referred to them a bit sarcastically as “The Joy Luck Club” because of the rarity of laughter or even smiles among them. They’d been born into the genuine, ages-old Inuit hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and their memories remained keen, and the stories of their childhoods and young adulthoods were the best type of anthropology—living history.

The three women were sisters; the man was a cousin. They were too old now to move with the seasons and lived in a small cabin left behind by the loggers. Each of them readily admitted, as if it were a casual thing, that they’d have been long dead in the old days. Those who were too sick or too elderly to move with the group were simply left behind. Their language was a polyglot of words and phrases attributed to the Inuits—the people once called Eskimos—and Tessa tape-recorded each meeting in order to study the linguistic structures involved. But more than language, Tessa was interested in their culture, their concept of how groups function together, the leadership within their people, their religious beliefs and traditions, and their vision of their own place in the world.

It was obvious that the elders trusted Meeloa, but they seemed to find it easy to ignore Tessa. Nevertheless, they responded to questions asked by Tessa through Meeloa’s translations. In the course of the five previous meetings Tessa had accumulated over eleven hours of recorded comments. Later, Meeloa would translate the tapes word for word.

Tessa initially found it difficult to tell the women apart and had problems pronouncing their names. Their voices were quite similar, and their craggy and lined faces were similar enough that a person could wonder if they were triplets. For the purposes of her study, she and Meeloa referred to the sisters as A, B, and C. The man’s appearance was only slightly different from that of his cousins. His hair was shorter although still shoulder length, and his build was stockier, with broader shoulders. His designation was D. The system seemed terribly impersonal and academic, but it worked.

Tessa was unusually excited about this day’s meeting. At their last visit two of the sisters had promised Meeloa that they’d perform a bit of throat singing, which was a phenomenon anthropologists talked about but few, other than those who’d traveled to Mongolia, Tibet, or remote parts of Alaska, had seen or heard.

Meeloa’s knock on the door of the cabin brought an invitation to enter in a masculine voice in the native tongue. The four elders were seated on a long couch that showed its age by the tufts of stuffing poking through the worn fabric. A blanket hung from the ceiling at the rear of the single room, creating sleeping quarters for the sisters. The man, Tessa and Meeloa learned, slept on the couch. A large black coal stove hulked in the center of the room, cold now but capable of putting out more than enough heat for Alaska’s winters. The cabin was clean and tidy, the wooden floor well scrubbed, the few windows sparkling like fine crystal. Two folding chairs were set up a couple of feet apart in front of the couch. Meeloa sat in one, Tessa in the other. Tessa switched on her battery-operated tape recorder and set it carefully on the floor.

Meeloa began with effusive thanks to the elders for sharing their time and stories, for opening their hearts, for their greatly appreciated kindness. It was almost a rote speech, but it was expected as a sign of respect and seemed to put the elders more at ease. Eight dark eyes that glinted like polished obsidian focused on Meeloa as she spoke.

Tessa, as she had at every other meeting, felt that she could have spontaneously burst into flame and not gained the elders’ attention. Hand gestures and body language were major parts of the dialect, and Tessa watched her friend’s hands and body as she spoke. When Tessa said the word katajjaq—throat singing—and ended the thought with a rise in her tone of voice, two of the women rose rather ponderously from the couch and moved to the center of the room. There they hunkered down on their haunches facing one another, about a foot apart. Tessa hoped she’d be able to lower herself with such grace when she was half their age. Tessa and Meeloa turned in their chairs to watch.

The sound was unlike anything Tessa had ever heard before. It seemed to emanate not from the mouths or throats of the elders but from somewhere else deeper inside them. There was a rhythm in the tones and sounds the two women exchanged with one another—while one sang the other rested, and vice versa. The rhythmic motif became louder then more subdued, rapid then slower, but it remained a constant in the singing. The voices were soft, but there was a guttural hint to some of the phrasing; it was music in the way the tolling of a bell is music, clear, repetitive, both sweet and sharp in the air. She felt a strange sensation—a sort of tingling—in her throat as she listened.

Tessa blinked her eyes and leaned forward in her chair. She was positive she wasn’t mistaken—one of the women was producing two tones at the same time, distinct from one another yet completely united. The sensation in Tessa’s throat became stronger, almost as if she were trying to swallow but couldn’t.

There was a hypnotic texture to the singing, and Tessa could feel herself being coaxed into the sounds, the eerie music becoming all there was in her world. The music was a quiet voice that spoke solely to her of the history of the people she was studying, of the tapestry of their love for the land, the climate, the very animals that they both used and feared, of the glorious bands of light that appeared in the skies to gladden their hearts during the endless and barren winters.

The singers stopped together, and the silence in the cabin seemed as strange as the sounds did a few minutes earlier. The two women stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, appearing disoriented and dazed. Then they rose to their feet. Tessa, throat dry and eyes wide, sat staring at the spot on the wooden floor where the elders had performed, her mind chasing itself out of the clouds where it had found shelter. A strangely childlike giggle brought her back to reality. The woman who’d been left on the couch next to the old man was pointing at Tessa, laughing, her teeth bright against the color and the lines and shadows of age on her face.

She’s laughing? Tessa thought. I’ve never even seen her smile. What’s so funny?

As the singers moved back to the couch, Meeloa asked a long question and received an equally long reply from the elders, who were all laughing now. The old man pointed at Tessa and grinned, just as his cousin had done.

What in the world?

“Your throat,” Meeloa explained. “Your throat was moving just like the throats of the singers were. It was as if you were throat singing without making a sound. The elders find that hysterically funny.”

Meeloa, Tessa couldn’t help but notice, was attempting to swallow her own laughter. Tessa raised her hand to her throat, feeling her face redden with a flush of self-consciousness. Her gaze again dropped to the floor in front of her and stayed for a few heartbeats, until her natural feistiness manifested itself. She raised her eyes and glared at the four Inuits on the couch.

Her glare softened immediately. The eight eyes that had, during several earlier visits, either avoided or ignored her were still as black as pitch but were now suffused with a warmth, a sense of shared humanity.

“And everything changed right in that little moment, R. E. All four of the Inuits were talking at once and laughing and going on so fast poor Meeloa couldn’t keep up with them. I got more insight and information in that one meeting than I’d gotten in all the times I’d been there before. And guess what? Next week the ladies are going to prepare a traditional meal for us from salted bear meat and dried roots and things like their ancestors carried with them when they moved with the seasons.”

“That’s terrific, Tess,” R. E. said. “I guess the elders saw that you were genuinely into them and their traditions, and that made all the difference.”

“Well, something like that, anyway,” Tessa agreed. She waited a moment. “What’s bothering me, though, is that I came across as some ivory-tower geek holding a life-form under a sterile microscope and dictating notes full of fancy academic jargon.”

R. E. shook his head. “I’m sure you didn’t come across that way at all. You don’t have it in you to think of people as numbers or bits and pieces of some study. You’ve got to understand that those elders and many other groups of old folks like them have been plagued by students and social scientists and sociologists and overage hippies who’ve tried to make the Inuits into a New Age, Back-to-the-Earth, Peace and Love movement. The People don’t feel they have to support their traditions by explaining them, and they don’t think they owe their time to anyone who wanders by with a notebook or a tape recorder. I’ve seen lots of these self-styled students, and they’re not students at all—they’re focused on stuffing the Inuit way of life into the molds of their own agendas.” He sat back, looking a little embarrassed at the heat he’d heard in his own voice.

“None of that is what anthropology is really about,” Tessa said. “Cultural anthropology isn’t an academic exercise or a forum to further a philosophy or belief at all. Our interest is in understanding the ideologies, laws, patterns, and beliefs of the groups we study. It’s all about human diversity.”

“Yeah, I know that. Meeloa advocated for you to the elders because she knew you wouldn’t exploit them. Now, they realize that too.”

Several women and a few men came into the store talking amongst themselves. One of the women held a small notepad, and she and the other ladies checked the writing on the page and spread out around the store. The men gravitated toward the display of tools and the Arctic Cat snowmobile R. E. had uncrated and assembled a few days before. It was a sleek, streamlined sled without the boxy look of earlier snowmobiles. The men stood around the shiny, powerful-looking machine just as experienced horsemen would cluster about a fine quarter horse that happened to be for sale. One of the men, Tessa noticed, was holding a brown paper lunch bag in one hand as he crouched and brushed the fingertips of the other hand across the polished black surface of the machine’s cowl. The men murmured quietly to one another, their voices like those of people in a church. Tessa didn’t recognize the dialect, but they were clearly not speaking English. The fellow with the lunch bag stood and waved toward R. E. and Tessa at the table where they were sitting. R. E. smiled, returned the wave, and stood up. “Guess what that guy has in his bag,” he said under his breath to Tessa.

R. E. approached the men and shook hands quite formally with each of them. The man with the bag pointed to the sign on the Arctic Cat that read “$10,449.” R. E. nodded. The man spread his arms as if in amazement and shook his head slowly from side to side. R. E. took a half step back and held his hands in front of him, palms up. The old fellow grinned, reached into the bag, and pulled out a banded sheath of bills about an inch thick. Then he reached down and covered the “449” of the price with his hand and gazed expectantly at R. E.

R. E. scratched his head and appeared to be deep in thought. After a long moment he shrugged his shoulders and then nodded, a smile replacing the look of concentration on his face. He extended his right hand to the Inuit to seal the deal. While the two were shaking hands the other men began tugging the snowmobile toward the front door and the truck and trailer they’d left outside. The women had spread their purchases on the front counter, and R. E. walked over to them and rang out the canned goods, bolts of cloth, boxes of ammunition, and the pair of child’s boots they’d selected. Within a few minutes the snowmobile and the shoppers were gone.

R. E. pulled out his chair and sat down with Tessa.

“No paperwork?” she asked. “No warranty or registration or any of that?”

“Nah. If the sled breaks down he’ll bring it back and expect me to make it right. I will. He’ll take good care of the machine. These people aren’t much on paper promises. If they didn’t trust me they wouldn’t come here.”

Tessa shook her head in awe. “A ten-thousand-dollar transaction based on a handshake. Whew. I guess I’m not in the lower 48 anymore, am I?” She grinned and added, “After a sale like that, you’re not going to charge me for my coffee, are you?”

R. E. looked gravely offended. “Certainly not! It hurts me that you even had to ask, Tessa. For you—today only—coffee is half price.”

Tessa laughed but then turned serious.

“What?” R. E. asked, puzzled as to why the smile had left his friend’s face.

“I . . . I just don’t get you, R. E. You could find yourself in a carload of trouble over that snowmobile. Without papers, there could be ownership issues—liability or something, if that man hurts somebody using the snowmobile. Even here, isn’t business . . . well . . . business?”

“No,” he said, “at least in my mind, it isn’t. Business and contracts and legal loopholes and all that are what I left behind. In a sense, they’re what I ran away from, or turned my back on, or however you want to say it. I had to get away from it. It was a kind of life that wasn’t working for me—not at all.”

Tessa nodded, not quite sure what to say. The intensity in R. E.’s voice was matched by the sudden flare of emotion in his eyes.

He took a breath. “Look,” he went on with more control in his voice. “Changing my name might seem like a really silly thing to do, right?”

“No, I don’t think that. If you—”

“Please, let me finish. I did it because to me it was a sort of reversal—maybe a negation—of the earlier years of my life. I wanted to make a full break from it, to begin all over again, or as much as that’s possible for a guy my age. I’m R. E. now, Tessa. If somebody called out my given name I doubt that I’d respond at all. That guy is gone. And I’ll tell you what: I like this R. E. fellow a whole lot better.”