to fend for herself.
The musher was wearing a white parka that came down to his knees and the number 06 on his bib. “Whoa,” he called out, and his malamutes slowed to a stop, panting. The swing dog - the one closest to the sled - curled up like a fiddlehead on the ice and closed her eyes.
The children spilled over the riverbank, tugging at the musher's coat. “Alex Edmonds! Alex Edmonds!” they shouted. “Do you remember me from last year?”
Edmonds brushed them off. “I have to scratch,” he said to Trixie. “Um. Okay,” she answered, and she wondered why he thought he had to make an itch common knowledge. But Edmonds took the clipboard out of her hands and drew a line through his name. He handed it back and pulled the sleeping bag off the basket of the sled, revealing an old Yup'ik man who reeked of alcohol and who was shaking even as he snored. “I found him on the trail. He must have passed out during the storm. I gave him mouth to mouth last night to get him breathing again, but the weather was too bad to get him back to the medical center in Bethel. This was the closest checkpoint ... can someone help me get him inside?” Before Trixie could run up to the school, she saw Carl and the other volunteers hurrying down to the river. “Holy cow,” Carl said, staring at the drunk. “You probably saved his life.”
“Whatever that's worth,” Edmonds replied. Trixie watched the other volunteers drag the old man out of the dogsled and carry him up to the school. The bystanders whispered and clucked to each other, snippets of conversation in Yup'ik and English that Trixie caught: Edmonds used to be an EMT... Kingurauten Joseph ought to pay for this. . . damn shame. One Yup'ik woman with owl eyeglasses and a tiny bow of a mouth came up to Trixie. She leaned over the clipboard and pointed to the line splitting Edmonds's name. “I had ten bucks riding on him to win,” she complained. With all the dog teams accounted for, the onlookers dispersed, heading into the village where Willie had gone. Trixie wondered if he was related to any of those little kids who'd been cheering for Edmonds. She wondered what he'd done when he got home. Drunk orange juice out of the container, like she might have? Taken a shower? Lay down on his bed, thinking of her?
Just as suddenly as all the activity had arrived, there was nobody on the bank of the river. Trixie looked north, but she couldn't see Finn Hanlon and his team anymore. She looked south, but she couldn't tell where she and Willie had come from. The sun had
climbed almost directly overhead, washing out the ice so that it made her eyes burn even to pick out the trail from the field of white.
Trixie sank down beside Juno on the straw and scratched the dog's head with her glove. The husky stared up at her with one brown eye and one blue, and when he panted, it looked like he was smiling. Trixie imagined what it was like to be a sled dog, to have to pull your weight or realize you'd be left behind. She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.
* * *
When the river froze in the winter, it got its own highway number, and at any given time you would see rusted trucks and dogsled teams driving over the ice in no particular direction or parallel course. Like most Yup'ik Eskimos, Nelson didn't believe in a helmet or goggles; to brace himself against the wind on the old man's snow machine, Daniel had to crouch down close to the windshield. Laura sat behind him, her face buried against the back of his coat.
In the middle of the river was a stationary white truck. As Daniel slowed the snow-go, he could feel Laura relax - she was freezing, even if she wasn't complaining. “This must be a checkpoint,” he said, and he got off the machine with his thighs still thrumming from the power of the engine.
A dreadlocked white woman unrolled the driver's side window.
“Kingurauten Joseph, for the love of God, go pass out in someone else's backyard.”
Kingurauten was Yup'ik for too late. Daniel pulled down the neck warmer that covered his nose and mouth. “I think you've got me confused with someone else,” he began, and then realized that he knew the woman in the truck. “Daisy?” he said hesitantly. Crazy Daisy, that was what they'd called her when she used to run the mail out to the native villages by dogsled back when Daniel was a kid. She frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Daniel Stone,” he said. “Annette Stone's son.”
“That wasn't the name of Annette's kid. He was”
“Wassilie,” Daniel finished.
Daisy scratched her scalp. 'Didn't you bug out of here because
. . .'
“Nah,” Daniel lied. “I just left for college.” It was common knowledge that Crazy Daisy had gotten that way by running with Timothy Leary's crowd in the sixties, and that she'd pretty much fried the functioning parts of her brain. “Did you happen to see a snow-go pass by here with a kass'aq girl and a Yup'ik boy?”
“This morning?”
“Yeah.”
Daisy shook her head. “Nope. Sorry.” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the truck. “You want to come in and warm up? I got coffee and Snickers bars.”
“Can't,” Daniel said, lost in thought. If Trixie hadn't come past Akiak, then how had he missed her on the trail?
“Maybe later,” Daisy yelled, as he turned the ignition on the snow machine again. “I'd love to catch up.” Daniel pretended not to hear her. But as he circled around the truck, Daisy started waving like a madwoman, trying to get his attention. “No one's passed by this morning,” she said, “but a girl and boy came through last night, before the storm hit.” Daniel didn't answer, just gunned the engine and drove up the riverbank into Akiak, the town he'd run away from fifteen years earlier. The Washeteria - the place they'd gone with their laundry and for showers - was now a convenience store and video rental shop. The school was still a squat, serviceable gray building; the house beside it where he'd grown up had two dogs staked out front. Daniel wondered who lived there now, if it was still the schoolteacher, if she
had children. If basketballs still sometimes started to bounce in the
gymnasium without being set in motion, if the last one to lock up the school building ever saw the old principal who'd killed himself, still hanging from the crossbeam in the only classroom. He stopped in front of the house next
