Never Say Die (2 page)

Aklavik sits in a sharp bend in the west channel of the river. Our town of six hundred in the delta of the mighty Mackenzie is hemmed in by water on all sides, including the ponds and swamps at our backs. The Mackenzie spills into the Beaufort Sea—our stretch of the Arctic Ocean—only sixty miles to the north. There's no road to Aklavik unless you count the ice road in the deepest part of winter. The Canadian government calls Aklavik a hamlet, but my family says town. Jonah says a hamlet sounds like breakfast—an omelet with ham.

I tied the boat close to where my grandparents live. On my way to Jonah's I walked down the street alongside the school. The sign in front has these words, arranged like this:

MOOSE KERR
SCHOOL
AKLAVIK “NEVER SAY DIE”

Moose Kerr was the principal here for a long time. “Never Say Die” is the motto of the school and our town, but these days for me, it's much more about my grandfather. At the moment, minutes from his door, I was wiping tears from my eyes. I couldn't bear to lose Jonah, and the end was coming soon.

Battling hard to get control of my emotions, I reached for my Inuit sense of humor. “Blubber good, blubbering bad,” I said with a grimace. By the time I reached his door I had pulled myself together.

My grandparents' small home was filled with the aroma of fresh-baked bannock as I walked in after shucking my boots and torn jacket in the mudroom. Jonah was happy to see me as always, his eyes playful yet penetrating. He could tell I hadn't arrived with caribou but he wasn't disappointed. My grandfather reached up for my hand with both of his, but stayed seated in his tattered recliner, where he was spending most of his time these days.

Jonah was wearing his favorite vest, the one with the image of a bull caribou on either side. Instead of jeans he was wearing light sweatpants. It was shocking how little of him there was inside his clothes. The muscles were gone from his neck and shoulders, from his torso that used to be like a diesel drum, from those arms and legs stout as driftwood timbers.

Four years into his cancer, the great man inside the withering body hadn't gone away, though, and that's what counted. For now, the grandfather who was like a father was still with me. “So good to see you, Ug-juk,” I said.

Jonah laughed at the old nickname. When I was a little kid I used to touch his chin whiskers and call him by the name of the bearded seal. He liked that. Bearded seals are large and powerful. As his laughter subsided, Jonah chuckled and said, “I'm getting more like
ugjuk
all the time. Ask your grandmother. Now that it's spring, I haul out of bed and bask in the sunshine all day.”

I pulled a chair close and set up the TV trays. Gramma Mary brought food and tea from the kitchen. I gulped tea and filled my face with thick slices of bannock that I slathered with Mary's mixed jam—cranberries, blueberries, and cloudberries that my family or some of the other relatives had picked for her the summer before. “Delicious,” I said in her direction. Jonah nodded his agreement though he'd barely nibbled at his.

We made small talk about how early the ice had gone out this year. The river had been open since the third week of April. Even when I was young, the ice wouldn't go out until May. The ice jams hadn't gotten that bad, hardly backing up the river, no flooding at all. As we talked I ate sliced goose breast and spread goose-liver paste on another piece of bannock. A few days back, I'd shot a bunch of geese and ducks and dropped them at the relatives' and friends' on my way home.

“Good food you've been bringing around,” my grandfather said. “You haven't had much sleep since breakup, I bet.”

“The long days are here, Grampa. School gets out at three and I can hunt until nine. I'll catch up on sleep when the short days come back.”

Jonah nodded and smiled. “That's the way, all right. I hear there's only a few guys out for caribou this spring. You see anybody else on the tundra?”

“Nope, same as yesterday.”

“Makes more sense to wait until fall. You'll get plenty then, like you always do. But tell me about your hunt today. You've always got a story for me.”

“Do I ever.”

“Sometimes a story is even better than meat.”

“This one's a whopper but it's true. By the way, I got a caribou, but then it got away.”

His thin eyebrows lifted. “Not wounded, I hope.”

“No way, I dropped him clean. Nice bull, a two-year-old.”

“It got away dead. Hmmm …”

“I lost it, would be more accurate.”

My grandfather loved riddles. It didn't take him long to figure this one out. “You had bear trouble?”

“Fifty feet from the boat, with the meat in two bags on my back.”

All the humor drained from his face. “A grizzly?”

“Nope.”

“Polar bear?”

“Nope.”

“Black bear?”

“Nope.”

“Got me stumped,” he said, shaking his head. “Panda bear?”

“Grampa, this is a true story I'm telling you.”

“Give me a hint, Nick. I got no idea.”

“Well, your first two guesses were correct.”

“Hmmm … a grizzly and a polar bear. You ran into
two
bears, not one. There, I got it.”

“Nope, there was only one bear.”

“One bear that was a grizzly
and
a polar bear?”

“That's the animal—a cross between the two. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“Never. Tell me what it looked like.”

“Light brown head of a grizzly, wide and dished-out in the forehead. The muzzle was almost white. It had the long neck of a polar bear, with the fur getting less brown and more white between head and shoulders.”

“Hump of a grizzly?”

I had to think a bit. “Not hardly. And the shape of the body was longer, like a polar bear's, like it was made for swimming. The fur on the torso was white like a polar bear's, but dirty white. On its legs the fur went from white high on the haunches to dark brown below the knees.”

“What a strange-looking animal!”

“I know!”

“Long claws on the front feet like a grizzly?”

I closed my eyes and remembered the bear standing above me. “I'm pretty sure the front claws were shorter, like a polar bear's. And the feet were shaggy and big as frying pans, like a polar bear's.”

“Fur on the bottom of the feet?”

“Some, but not as much as a polar bear's got.”

“How big was this bear?”

“Bigger than any barren-ground grizzly, big as a polar bear. Nine hundred pounds, easy, and aggressive like you wouldn't believe. Like it had no experience with humans and saw me as prey.”

“Tell me what happened.”

I did, from when I first saw the bear at no more than twenty feet to when I escaped in the motorboat. As he listened, Jonah never blinked once. When I was done, he said, “Nick, you were lucky to get away with your life.”

“Don't I know. He came an eyelash from nailing me. What do you figure it was, Grampa?”

“A grizzly and the great white bear have mated, sounds like. Get that close, used to be,
aklak
and
nanuq
were trying to kill each other.”

Grampa Jonah worried his chin whiskers. “We hear about grizzlies crossing on the sea ice to the islands up north. We hear about starving polar bears hundreds of miles south of the ocean. Now this strange new stalking bear with no fear of man. This last year since I've been too sick to go with you, I haven't worried. I was hunting on my own to feed my family when I was twelve, and you're a real good hunter. But maybe for now, with this aggressive bear in the area, you should go with one of the other hunters.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“We'll have to get the word out. It might show up in town anytime now. This is one more bad sign, Nick. Things are changing so fast, I don't know what the world is coming to. I don't even know the names of some of the birds and the insects that are showing up. The crazy winters we're getting these days, less and less sea ice, more wind and open water in summer, harder to go whaling, the caribou not showing up where they used to and not so many, more bad storms with lightning, even. We're not supposed to get lightning up—”

Jonah's voice caught and he started coughing real bad. My grandmother looked startled. I quickly poured him a cup of tea. He was able to drink a little and stop coughing.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “That stuff about things changing for the worse isn't any fun to talk about.”

Jonah shook his head. “Fun has nothing to do with it. It's important to talk about those things. We have to deal with whatever comes, Nick. We're just going to have to adapt, that's all. We have always adapted—that's why we're still here. It's going to be up to you and the rest of the young people.”

“We'll do our best,” I said, without being able to picture what that even meant. If the future didn't include enough animals to hunt, I had no idea how I would live or what I would live for.

I
made a beeline for home. The walk to my side of town took only ten minutes. My mother was away, but the rest of the family was there, my aunt Becky and my cousins Billy and Suzanne.

My mother was six hundred-some miles away in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, taking the classes she needed for a better nursing job at the clinic here. It was killing my mom that she couldn't be home to look in on her father every day. I knew how afraid she was that he might die while she was away.

“Any luck?” shouted Billy as I came through the door. Billy was eleven, keen on hunting, and starting to get good at it. Suzanne, two years younger, was asking the same question with her eyes, as was Aunt Becky, who was at her sewing machine working on a pair of sealskin mukluks. She sews for the Aklavik Fur Company.

“No luck,” I mumbled, putting off my story until I'd eaten. My eyes went to the counter and the stove top. The dishes were already done. It was seven in the evening.

“Plenty of stew left in the pot,” my aunt said cheerfully.

“Thanks. Smells great. I'll get washed up and be right back.”

“Tell him about the letter,” said Suzanne. She was doing homework at the kitchen table across from Billy.

I was in a hurry to take a look at my aching shoulder but there was something in Suzanne's voice that stopped me in my tracks. I get a lot of emails, but letters almost never. “What letter?” I said as casually as I could manage.

“It's not from Canada,” Billy chimed in with a knowing look.

“It's from the States,” my aunt explained.

“It's mysterious,” added Suzanne.

As soon as I had the envelope in hand, I saw what it was that had them acting strange. The letter was addressed to Nick Powers, which used to be my name, but not for the last three years. When I was twelve I told my mother I hated the name Powers. I still remember her reaction. “What's up?” she teased. “Won't you miss the kids at school calling you Super Powers?”

“A little,” I admitted. “I just can't relate to Powers. It's not who I am. I want to have your name and Jonah's. I want to be Nick Thrasher. That's who I am.”

So here I was, three years later, getting a letter addressed to Nick Powers. My eyes went to the name of the person who had sent it: Ryan Powers. I'd never met Ryan Powers but I knew who he was—my much-older half brother. We had the same biological father, an American named Conrad Powers. My white DNA comes from him.

My mother and my father met by chance at Shingle Point, where most of Aklavik goes every July to escape the bugs, to fish, and to hunt beluga whales. Conrad Powers was kayaking the Northwest Passage across the top of Alaska and Canada all the way to Greenland. He was the first to ever do it in a kayak. “An adventurer” is how my mother describes him. He never came back to marry her, like he was talking about. He died climbing a mountain in the Himalayas when I was only a month old.

“Hmmm,” I said, slapping the envelope against my leg. “I wonder what this is about.”

Inside the bathroom, I set the letter aside and took a look at my shoulder. I'd gotten off with a couple of welts.

Just to be safe, I scrubbed the welts with soap and sterilized them with rubbing alcohol. My eyes kept going to the envelope. The return address was Flagstaff, Arizona. I already knew my half brother lived there. When I was born he was thirteen years old. These days my white brother would be … twenty-eight.

I used to check out his website when I was younger, but I hadn't been on it since I changed my name. I made myself get over my curiosity about him.

I was dragging my feet about opening that envelope. “Later,” I mumbled, “after I eat dinner.” It's not like I wasn't curious to find out what the letter was about. It's just that I didn't want to react like this was a huge big deal.