But the day I got kicked out of school for fighting, Dad had told me, No dogs. I wasn’t to run them or play with them or even feed them, which really just meant more work for him. He was awful mad about what I done to that girl in my class, and it was the worst punishment I reckon he could come up with, other than telling me I couldn’t hunt.
I worked to become a good musher, but I have always been natural at hunting. I liked to do it and I liked to read about it, we had plenty of books round the house on the subject. My favorites was: A Knife and Your Wits: Minimalist Survival by Joe Wilcox, and What’s Good to Eat: Edible Wild Plants by Nancy and Bill Philomen, and Traps and Trapping by Alec Cook, and best of all, How I Am Undone by Peter Kleinhaus, which is not a guidebook but a regular book, but I still learned a lot about survival from it. Peter Kleinhaus is this guy who come to Alaska from the lower forty-eight and tried to live outdoors for one whole winter, and the only shelter he had was whatever he built himself, and the only food he ate was whatever he killed or scavenged. He lost an earlobe and two toes to frostbite but other than that he come out okay in the end.
I have always liked the Kleinhaus book best because there’s parts where he stops teaching you things and just writes what he was thinking, and I tell you what. There are books out there that when you read them, you wonder how some stranger could know exactly what’s in your own mind. There’s a part where Kleinhaus has been outdoors for about three months, and it has been snowing a blizzard for almost four days straight. He is stuck on a ledge on the side of a mountain, no fuel for his fire. So he wakes up in the middle of the fourth night and finds the snow has finally stopped. The sky is clear, with all the stars like metal filings shook out across a black cloth, and the cloth is so wide it never ends but goes on and on so you feel you could be swallowed up by the sky, and you almost want to be swallowed up, just to be part of something so big. And even though he is cold and has no fire, he just sits and stares up into the sky. He writes, Under this vastness I forget myself. My humanity slips away and I am no longer recognizably me, but one more animal under an ancient, heedless sky. First time I read that, I had to shut the book and go outside. It made my head spin.
Driving made my head spin, too, but not in the same way. Trees whisked past and the sky unrolled overhead, gray with the promise of snow that hadn’t yet been delivered. I was cruising well under the speed limit, but the truck’s studded tires whined something awful on the pavement, and I eased up on the gas as I come round a curve in the road and tried not to look at the shoulder.
My mom died the month before I turned sixteen. It was a car accident. She wasn’t driving but walking alongside the road. All the places we got to walk on our property, but she decides to take a walk on the shoulder of the highway.
The road that goes past our place is mostly a straight shot with good visibility. But there’s one spot where the road curves sharp and runs downhill, and if you are coming round too fast you might not see whatever’s on the shoulder till it’s too late. The guy driving the truck said he only looked away for a second. I didn’t even see her, is what he told the village safety officer, he only heard his car hit what he first thought was a big dog or maybe a moose calf.
The impact threw my mom into a tree. I suppose that is what killed her. If you trap a squirrel and it ain’t dead when you find it and you are not yet strong enough to snap its neck with your hands, you can knock it hard against a tree and do the job that way. What I wonder is what went through her head as she sailed into the air. Was it like how you hear, how time stretches out and you have what seems like hours to think about your life or watch how the snowflakes fall around you like stars drifting down and settling on the ground and the night gets brighter when everything is clean and white? If she thought of anything, I hope it was that.
What I also wonder is what she was doing out, middle of the night, walking along the road. It is not a pleasant place to walk. When a car whizzes by, it spits up rocks and snow and dirt, pummels you with the wind that kicks up in its wake. I can’t see the draw of a place like that. But there she was, on the road, alone in the dark, till a pair of headlights lit her up.
Scott wasn’t there when I pulled up to the school, I waited and watched the other kids stream into the schoolyard, the ones who lived farther away loaded onto the bus, which is how me and Scott used to get to school till I got us kicked off the bus, too. According to the principal, I had been trouble since day one.
Finally I got out of the truck and brushed past the groups of older kids who was horsing around, talking and laughing before they got on their four-wheelers to head home. And there was Beth Worley, a splint on her nose and a bandage covering the stitches she’d got earlier that week. I was surprised she was already back in school, the way she cried when they carried her off to the clinic, you’d of thought she was dying. She glared at me, and her friends fell quiet as I walked by, then started their whispering when they thought I was far enough away. But I have always had better hearing than most.
I found Scott kneeling outside his classroom, his books scattered all round. Wasn’t till I got close enough to help him scoop them into his backpack that I seen he had a nice bruise blossoming at the corner of his mouth.
Who done that? I asked.
He shook his head. Doesn’t matter. Let’s go.
You know I’m the one who’s supposed to get in fights, don’t you? I told him as we left the building.
You’re a trial, Tracy Sue Petrikoff, he said and sounded exactly like Dad had sounded back in September when he got a call from the school saying I’d kneed some kid in the groin after he threw a ball straight at my head in gym class.
I reached out and socked Scott in the shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, just playing.
Shut your hole, I said.
He pushed me back.
Shut yours.
Watch out, Scotty! some kid called from across the schoolyard. She’ll bite your face off!
Then laughter from a group of kids that wasn’t even in my grade. Word spreads fast when you got too many people in one place, all of them running their mouths.
Go to hell, Scott hollered back.
Hey, I said. Ain’t that kid your friend?
Scott shrugged. Yeah, but he’s also kind of a jerk. And you’re my sister.
I ruffled his hair, the way I knew he hated. He smacked my hand.
We swung by the village store like Dad asked and I made Scott run in and put up the sign. Then I steered us back toward home, me growing more at ease the farther we got from the gas station and the roadhouse where folks was lined up at the counter, practically shoulder to shoulder, like them little fish in a can. The inside of the truck smelled like grease and wet fur, it made me think of all the times all four of us would cram into the cab and ride into the village to stock up on supplies, and sometimes, before we headed back, we would eat at the roadhouse. That’s when men would come over to our table to shake Dad’s hand or buy him a drink. The entire state knew the name of Bill Petrikoff Junior. Seemed like a whole other life back then, like something I must of read in a book. After Mom died, things changed fast.