Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

Interlude: An Excerpt

Seth Kantner is traveling, so we’re pleased to offer up an excerpt from his new book Shopping for Porcupine, by Seth Kantner (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Seth Kantner. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.

Iñupiaq Mailman

My first memory of him is without sound, his brown face encircled by his wolf ruff, peering in the door, shrouded in the cottony gauze of a snowstorm. The swirling flakes hid his sled down on the river ice, loaded with letters and packages he had brought miles across the tundra and down the river from the village. Any stranger’s or grizzled hunter’s face at the entrance to our sod home was a welcome sight, and maybe that’s all Harry Ticket would have been if his wife hadn’t been postmistress. During the years I was growing up, Harry and Sarah ran the post office out of their house, metering out little bits of the world—welfare checks and sweepstakes, catalogs and letters—to the villagers. My dad told me Sarah had replaced a man who for a few months had had the post office in his log cabin. But he took the stamp money and bought bootleg whiskey and finished off with a free trip to jail.
Harry’s job wasn’t to deliver mail, but once or twice each winter, when his house became crowded with our packages or he had a sudden urge to hunt, he would hitch his sled behind his snowgo and break trail across the miles to our place. Harry’s arrival was like Christmas, only better. It came as a surprise.

He was a heavy man with a respectable stomach and padded limbs. Like many Eskimos, he now only walked when he had to. He loved his snowgo and hunting with it. People hunted caribou when their meat piles got low, but it was chasing and killing wolves that was a passion to most—it brought prestige. In Harry that passion ran strong.

He would duck into our low, buried doorway, set down an armload of boxes, take off his muskrat parka, and shake the snow out of the fur. In those first moments his cold-stiffened face was expressionless, a mask. With his thick hands he would carefully sweep the snow across the hewn boards to make a pile next to the door where it wouldn’t melt. I would quickly slip into my caribou socks so he wouldn’t laugh at my grubby red feet. And then Kole and I might shyly nudge the mailbag and the brown cardboard packages to see what he had brought, to read the return addresses and imagine the contents and the huge cities they had traveled through.

No envelope would be opened while Harry sat at our plywood table. He slurped his scalding coffee and questioned my dad: “Wolf been come around much?” And Howie would run his fingers through his long, dark hair and glance into the surface of the mug of coffee clamped in his right hand. He had hunted and provided for Mabel Thomas, the daughter of an anathuq. The wildness of the tundra and sea ice had captured his heart and made him turn his back forever on his zoology degree as if it had been nothing but a pinch of tobacco in the wind. He told us she had taught him to feel the land, to hear its voices. But that wasn’t the sole reason hunters asked him about the wolves. Here, in this area, we were the only people who lived Out, away from the clamor and the barking of the village. The wolves wandered by as if our home were part of the bluff, which it was, buried in the ground and snow.

Howie trapped other animals for cash and fur for our clothes, but for reasons I didn’t understand, he loved wolves, loved to see a whole pack stroll unafraid down the wide, frozen river, spread from shore to shore, or to watch them track down a moose, or just to listen to their howls wavering in the night. There was something he valued in them that I never valued when I was young. Their skins sold for more than lynx or wolverine, as high as six hundred dollars, and occasionally there were eight or ten on the ice out beyond where we tied the dogs. I always wanted to shoot three or four and have word sweep through the village.

“Yeah, they showed up awhile back out in front on the ice,” he would say. I thought that if he and Harry switched places the questions and answers would be exactly the same, comfortable yet vague and noncommittal, the way people spoke in the village.

When Harry had finally rapped his empty coffee cup down and thanked my mom for the food he seldom touched, he would say, “Well, I gonna go check ta’ country.” Kole and I threw impatient glances at each other. Then Harry would shake the glistening drops of water out of his parka for a last time, grin at us, and call me Apakilik, the Iñupiaq name an old man in the village had given me; it had belonged to an old hunter who had lived on this bluff earlier in the century. Harry walked up the snow steps and disappeared, leaving us excited to open the Grandma packages and library boxes, yet somehow lonesome for people.

WHEN WE WERE LITTLE RAGGED KIDS growing up in the shadow of the Brooks Range, weeks or months would drift by between travelers stopping to warm up and have coffee and dried meat. People seemed to get farther and farther away as the light and sun shrank until the land was only blues and grays.

My mom missed people and light and the freedom of cars. In the winter she stared south at noon at the orange horizon and waited in quiet anguish for the sun to return. Our dad was from a city, too, yet that somehow made him love this silence more. Sometimes he told us about Toledo: the train tracks, gray buildings, a muskrat he once saw down by the river among the old tires. His stories were bleak, the wild animals missing. Erna didn’t join in those stories. Her stories were infrequent and crowded with aunts and uncles and family.

Kole and I liked the land in our different ways, but in the long nights we read books and of course some of those books were about kids who had friends, and we yearned for some of our own. On those nights Howie sawed boards, read, or sewed a mink hat or mukluks, or fox mittens. In the twilight days we could persuade him to crawl through the snow caves we chipped out of the deep wind-packed front drift. I don’t know why we spent hundreds of hours chipping caves. Maybe in the confining blue-blackness of our winding tunnels, caverns, and two-story rooms there was simply less space to miss people, and there under the snow our imaginations had the power to shape the world.