THEY ARRIVED AT Leroy’s sheefish camp at a more favorable hour than on their previous excursion—barely after three, by Active’s phone. Sun still high in the sky with some wispy cirrus streaking up from the south, a nice breeze popping the white canvas of the tent, temperature maybe ten above but cooling.
Nita checked the sheefish holes near the tent while Active and Grace went inside to check things out. A couple of ice-encrusted silver tails poked out from under one of the cots.
“I guess somebody borrowed Leroy’s tent, huh?”
“This must be the rent, all right,” Active said. He pulled the fish from under the cot. “Nice of ’em. Not headed and gutted, though.”
“They keep better if you freeze them whole, naluaqmiiyaaq.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Looks like we’re gonna have to go old-school tonight and eat some quaq, ah?” He pronounced it the naluaqmiut way, which produced a grin from her.
“That’s why I brought the seal oil,” she said. “I see Leroy’s got a hacksaw in the box by the halfagascan there. You saw off a steak and I’ll shave it into strips while you help Nita find a hole and get set up. Then I’ll come and we’ll have some old-time Eskimo snacks out at the hole and I’ll show you how it’s done.”
Nathan grunted assent and found the hacksaw in Leroy’s everything box. Then he cleared some cartridges, a Coleman stove, a box of pilot bread, and a can of Spam from the top of a set of utility shelves Leroy had with his usual practicality thrown together from a pair of old wooden gas crates. Active laid one of the sheefish on some cardboard and newspaper from the everything box and went to work with the hacksaw at the narrow part between the body and the tail.
In a couple of minutes, he had shucked off his parka and the vest underneath and was down to the wool shirt and snowpants. Finally the tail came off and he went to work a couple of inches higher up. This time it went a little faster, or at least easier, as he hit the rhythm.
“There,” he said. “One prime sheefish steak, as ordered”
“Except the guts are still in.” She pointed.
“Oh, yeah.” He found a tool box on the bottom shelf under the sheefish and a hammer inside that, then used it to tap out the medallion of frozen intestines at the center of the steak.
“Very good. We’ll make a real Eskimo out of you yet.” She pulled an ulu from a dishpan by the halfagascan. “Now you and Nita go find us a hole.”
He pushed open the flaps of the tent and stepped outside. “Any of these look good?” He waved at the four or five craters in the ice nearby.
Nita wrinkled her nose and squinted. “I don’t like them. They look fished out to me.”
“You can tell?
She raised her eyebrows. “Ah-hah. I’m a real Eskimo.”
“Ah-hah. And where do you suppose we might find a hole that’s not fished out?”
“I dunno, maybe down by Christina’s tent.”
“By Christina’s tent? That’s pretty far to go back and forth.”
“Maybe I should spend the night again.”
“Hmm. I never thought of that. We better go ask your mom, huh?”
They did. Active made a “please!” sign with clasped hands behind Nita as Grace pretended to ponder.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We wouldn’t want you to be a burden.”
“I won’t, Mom. I’ll help Christina’s mom cut fish or wash dishes or anything she wants, I promise.”
“Well, let me give ’em a call, then.”
Grace made the arrangements on her cell, Nita gathered her things for the night, and they set off for Christina’s tent a half-mile down the ice while Grace stayed behind to shave the sheefish.
Christina bounced out as they came up and her mother, Fannie, followed.
The two girls hugged and Nita admired her friend’s chin for a moment. “I sure like your tattoo.” She looked at Fannie. “I sure like Christina’s tattoo. You did really good with it.”
Active studied the chin in question. The traditional lines of dark gray dots fanned down from the lip toward the chin. They were making a comeback among the young for some reason, though the tradition seemed to have skipped over most of the women in Grace’s generation. Fannie, with her own chin tattoo, was one exception. Perhaps that was because she was from Katonak village, a hundred or so miles up the river from Chukchi. The old ways tended to hang on there.
“You know what your mom said, Nita,” Fannie was telling the girl. “No tattoos till you’re sixteen.”
“Arii, I wish my mom was cool like you.”
Fannie wagged a finger at her. “I told you, don’t say nothing like that. Someday you’ll be your mom and your little girl will be you and she’ll say mean things to you and then you’ll know what it’s like to be a mother and you’ll cry, lotta times.”
Nita’s face softened and Active thought this might be one of those times. But she turned to Christina. “We gonna go catch some sheefish?”
Christina pointed at a crater in the ice a few yards off with a stack of sheefish beside it. “Look at that hole we found.” Nita dug her sheefish rig out of the jockey box and the two girls raced off.
“You wanna come in for some sheefish stew, Nathan? They’re real fat and oily this year.”
“I don’t know, maybe later. I think we might take a nap.”
Fannie tilted her head for a moment, then grinned. “Ah-hah.”
“We’re real tired.” Active grinned back and mounted the Yamaha.
“You could come back later for dinner, in case you need to build up your strength after your nap.”
“Maybe we will.”
When he got back to camp, Grace had laid out the sheefish strips with pilot bread and a jar of seal oil. “Arii,” he said. “I was thinking we might take a nap.”
Grace chuckled. “The old-timers say seal oil and quaq will build a fire in your belly.”
“That’s been my experience on the trail, yes.”
“So that’s a good thing, right?”
“All for it.” He dipped a strip of quaq in the seal oil, chewed it till it thawed enough to swallow, and chased it with a bite of pilot bread. The familiar warmth started in his belly almost as soon as the stuff hit. “Now I’m a real Eskimo, ah?”
“You’re getting there.” Grace had a boffo splibo going. She puffed on it, then got some quaq of her own and they crunched in silence for a while, side by side on the cot in the incense of the boffo.
“So,” Active said. “About that nap…?”
Grace pointed at the sun coming through the tent flaps. “But it’s full daylight, m’lord. Surely you can’t mean…?”
“I can and I do, wench. Now peel off that Arctic insulation lest I do it for you.”
“Just you try!”
He tackled her and threw her to the cot. She mock-fought back and he waited for some sign it would call up too many memories and turn real. But, no, she stayed in the moment and let him wrestle off her clothes.
And there she was.
“There’s something sexy about being this naked when you’re fully dressed,” she said. “Or maybe it’s the boffo.”
She opened his snow pants, then his jeans, and slipped a hand down the front. “I see Little Nathan is perking up. But he feels so constricted, with all those zippers and things. Would m’lord like me to see what I can do?”
He nodded and she stripped him down and they crawled under the sleeping bag on the cot and tried the sixty-nine position.
“Poor baby,” she said a few minutes later.
“Not my day, I guess,” he said. “But I don’t mind. I’m just glad you got there.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Seriously. It’s OK.”
“Let’s see what the magic hands can do.”
He lay back in anticipation while Grace fished around her in backpack. The mouth usually worked. The hands, always.
“Crap,” she said. “I think I forgot the baby oil.”
“Meh,” he said. “Next time.”
“No, wait, try the missionary position. Maybe this’ll be the one.”
She rolled onto her back and wrapped her legs around his waist and guided him to her entrance, then froze into that familiar rigidity at his touch. He felt himself wilt.
“Sorry, baby, I am so…” She didn’t say any more.
“Are you crying?” He kissed salt on her cheeks and eyelashes. “Don’t, it’s OK, really.”
“No, it is not OK! It means I’m a failure. A woman who cannot do this is not a real woman! She’s—I don’t know what. But not a woman.”
“We’re getting there.”
“I wish. I hope. But I’m not sure we’ll ever make it.”
He was out of variations on “it’s OK,” so he just pulled her into the spoon position they always used at the end.
As usual, the contact brought him to life. She lifted her leg and bent her knees and pulled him between her thighs. She rubbed and rolled her thighs and he responded even more.
“Wow, baby,” she said. “You’re like a walrus tusk.”
He realized he was witness to another of her uncanny emotional rebounds, and crossed his fingers it would get them through the rest of this.
“Tell me about it. Except for being kind of dry, that feels a lot like the real thing. I’m dying here.”
“There’s gotta be something we can do.” She started to dive down for another try with her mouth, then snapped her fingers. “Let’s do what the old-timers probably did.”
“Say what?”
She stretched across to Leroy’s shelving unit and grabbed the seal oil.
“Come on, seriously?”
She giggled. “Seal oil and cock? A match made in Inupiat heaven, right?”
She oiled her hands, slid them up and down his length, then oiled her thighs and slipped her fingers up and down the outer folds of her sex.
She pulled him back into position between her thighs, bent her knees and squeezed and rolled him again, even rocked her hips so that her lips slid up and down his shaft. He grabbed her hip bones and drove back and forth.
“Oh, God, no, I don’t I can’t—oh, Jesus!”
She laughed and kept him in the divine grip. “That was quick.”
He shook his head. “We oughta bottle and sell that stuff. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“Tell me about it.” She put her hand between her legs. “Holy crap. See how swollen I am.”
He slid his hand between her thighs and slid his fingers along her folds.
“What you waiting for? Do me again!”
He did, with his mouth, locking his arms round her thighs to hang on as her hips began to convulse. By the end, she was slapping the top of his head and screaming, “Stop, stop.” He did.
“Don’t stop, goddammit. What is wrong with you?”
He resumed and hung on again till it was finally over and she came down from wherever she was. “Wow, I’m not doing that again without a helmet. I was kidding about having my skull crushed between a woman’s thighs.”
She sighed.
THEY WERE PACKING the sled the next morning in jackets-open sunlight and preparing to retrieve Nita from Fannie’s tent when Christina pulled up on a snowgo with Nita riding behind. The snowgo stopped and the pair bounded off to stand side by side, like twins.
“Look, Mom,” Nita said as Grace came through the tent flaps. “I got my tattoo.” She pointed at her chin.
Active checked the chin—it did indeed have the lines fanning down from the lip, though the dots looked a little more bluish than Christina’s. He stepped back and busied himself loading the sled to avoid the explosion, though not so far back as to miss another round in the long-running tattoo fight.
“Jesus Christ,” Grace said. “What did I tell you?”
Nita’s face set into a look of pure stubbornness. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“And what the hell is Fannie doing? I told her about this. I’m going to—”
She stamped into the tent and returned with her phone, tapping at the screen for Fannie’s contact.
First Christina, then Nita, cracked, and burst into laughter.
“Look, Mom.” Nita licked a finger and rubbed the tattoo until it smeared. “It’s just ballpoint. We tricked you.”
Grace glared at them, then tapped her phone off and shook her head. “All right, good one, you got me.” She grinned finally. “Now load your stuffs into our sled and let’s get going. I’ve got things to do back in town.”
She caught Active’s expression. “This is not funny,” she hissed. “A daughter between princesses and puberty is an instrument of torture to her mother.”
“Maybe just a little tattoo?” Active whispered.
“Children,” Grace said with a look of disgust. “Men are children. The more so the older they get.”
“Didn’t Nelda Qivits say it might be good for her?”
“You leave Nelda out of this. This is family and I told her so.”
“Oh, yeah, Mom,” Nita said from the sled hitched behind Christina’s snowgo. “Look at this.”
Active watched Grace steel herself for another tattoo but Nita unlashed a corner of the cover on the sled. “See what I caught?”
Active counted the sheefish. Six, all told.
“Wow,” Grace said from his elbow. “Those are for us?”
Nita lifted her eyebrows. Then she wrinkled her nose and stared. “Aaqaa you guys! What you been doing?”
Active masked his grin and enjoyed the spectacle of Grace groping for a response.
“Oh, we spilled some seal oil,” she said finally. “You know how hard it is to clean up. But you caught all these fish?”
The girl lifted her eyebrows again. “Aren’t they awesome?”
“You’re awesome,” Grace said. “We’ll take ’em back and get ‘em weighed in for the sheefish derby in case any of them are big enough to make the top ten, then I’ll cook one tonight.”
“Can I help?” Nita said. Then she paused in thought for a moment. “With cooking the sheefish. Not with cleaning up the seal oil. Aaqaa!”