NELDA QIVITS WAS WATCHING the World’s Funniest Animal Videos when she heard the outer door of her kunnichuk open and slam, then a knock on the inner door.
“Come in!” she yelled, not getting out of her chair in front of the TV.
The inner door opened and there was that pretty Nathan Active, the naluaqmiiyaaq boy with winter in his eyes. This time he was carrying some caribou—a hindquarter and a backstrap, it looked like. He had never brought her caribou before, just money.
“Arigaa, Nathan, good to see you,” she said as she hobbled over to take the backstrap. The tender meat along the spine was the best part of a caribou, in her opinion. Her stomach rumbled a little in anticipation. But she would have to wait, she saw. The meat was frozen hard. With a sigh, she laid it on her drain board to thaw.
“You could put that hindquarter in my freezer out there, ah? Then you sit down and I’ll make us some sourdock tea.”
Nathan put away the meat, stepped into the cabin, and shut the inner door. Then he sat at her little dining table, his eyes wandering between her tea making and a video about a wild crow that had adopted a kitten in some naluaqmiut town Outside.
“I hear on Kay-Chuck, you find that Robert Kelly, then you’re trapped up in Shaman Pass in our blizzard last week, ah?”
“Yes, we were stormbound five days,” he said. “I was with Calvin Maiyumerak and Whyborn Sivula and Alan Long. We had a good tent and a stove, so it wasn’t too bad.”
“Is that where you get the caribou, Shaman Pass?” She sat down across from him and sipped from one of the mugs.
“I didn’t get it, Alan and Whyborn did, just before the storm hit. So we had plenty to eat, and there was still lots left when it was over. Alan gave me some.”
“What you guys do up there in your tent all that time?”
“Ate and slept a lot, played cribbage. Alan and Whyborn told some old stories. Calvin showed us a lot of string tricks with his hands. And he sang a lot.”
“Calvin sang?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows in the Eskimo yes, which she liked. He was trying.
“What he sing? You mean gospel?”
“No, songs that he made up. He sang about how we found Natchiq and Robert Kelly, and he sang about how we lost them and my snowmachine in Angatquq Gorge. He made it all funny, somehow.”
She shook her head in wonder. She had not known any of this about Calvin Maiyumerak. “He sound like a real old-time Eskimo, that guy.”
“I guess,” Nathan said.
“It was fun for you?”
Nathan paused like he needed to think this over, then looked at her with a surprised expression. “Yes, it was fun,” he said.
“No problem with quiyuk now?”
He shook his head and his smile got bigger.
That knot over his brows was gone, she saw now. Not like the other times, when he came in to tell her about the bullet dream.
“Arigaa! Then you had good dreams up there?”
He smiled. “No bullet dream. But I dreamed I was a ptarmigan flying through Shaman Pass. Was that a good dream?”
“Were you happy?”
Nathan’s face opened up in a huge, relaxed smile. “Very happy.”
“Then it was a good dream.”
He took a sip of the sourdock tea and stood up. “I should go now. Lucy and I have to tell my grandfather a story.”
“Your ataata Jacob?”
Nathan lifted his eyebrows.
“Arigaa,” she said. “He’ll like that.”