Lone Wolves by John Smelcer Page A

to buy it myself. I did all kinds of little jobs to make money, and then I bought that bike. I took such good care of it, because I knew how much work went into getting it. It was special. Grandpa’s sled may be old-fashioned, but it’s beautiful because he made it with his own two hands. His sweat is in the wooden heart of that sled. There’s power in that. I wrote another poem. It’s corny. No need to explain it. Sometimes, a poem’s meaning is obvious.
    Yours,
    Denny

    Portrait of the Artist as a Teenage Girl

    Although I am nobody
    writing lines to poems
    no one will ever know,
    I do not fail to cast
    a tiny shadow
    on the
    snow.

    p.s. Grandpa also talked about having heart. He said I have the biggest heart. I wrote another poem. Seems like good words to live by . . .

    Heart

    Heart is like a mirror—
    bury it in mud
    let it rust and grow with moss
    and no more will it reflect the world’s beauty.

    Ciz’aani

    Ciz’aani ke’ uyii na’stnal’aeni—
    kiighiłtaen tah bestl’es
    k’ena na’stnal’aeni tsaan’ ‘eł kołii kae dlaadon’
    â€˜eł na’stnal’aeni galdiine’ niic nen’ kasuundze’.

6
    Ts’iłk’ey dzaen yuuł
    A Day’s Journey
    O n the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Denny left before the last period so that she could get the dogs on the trail early enough. She wanted the pace of the thirty mile journey to the village upriver—where the teacher was killed—to be leisurely, not overly tiring for the dogs before the race the next day. Sampson followed on his snowmobile.
    Denny’s mother didn’t go.
    â€œGo run your stupid race,” she had said from the porch, while Denny was finishing hitching the dogs to the sled. “When you lose, maybe you get that nonsense out of your head, once and for all.”
    â€œThanks for the support!” Denny shouted sarcastically when she pulled the snow hook and commanded the dogs to run.
    Her grandmother waved goodbye from the frosted window.
    Sampson started his snowmobile. He waved to his wife and shouted goodbye.
    â€œ Xonahang ‘aat’ !”
    Halfway to the village, the trail left the frozen river and meandered through the woods because that stretch of the river was largely unfrozen. As Denny made her way through the forest, another musher approached from the opposite direction.
    Denny recognized the man.
    It was Lincoln Lincoln. He was from her village and a good musher, just like his older brother, Bassille. Bassille had died two years prior when his team broke through thin ice on the river and never made it out. Dogs, musher, and sled . . . all yanked beneath the ice by the current.
    â€œTrail!” yelled Lincoln above the din of the barking dogs.
    Deneena knew the command, a request to yield the right of way. Snowy forest trails are typically too narrow for mushers to pass easily. One musher has to drive off the trail to make room for the other—a kind of sledding courtesy.
    â€œHaw!” shouted Denny.
    The lead dog guided the rest of the team off the left side of the trail and waited for Lincoln’s team to pass.
    About an hour later, without incident, Denny and her grandfather arrived in the village. They stayed at Joseph Yazzie’s house for the night. Joseph was Sampson’s first cousin. After the dogs were fed and bedded down for the night, all on piles of straw to keep them off the ground, Denny came inside for a supper of Joseph’s deep-fried burbot, a freshwater cod, which he had caught while out ice fishing earlier in the day.
    â€œGood ts’anyae,” Joseph said during the meal, using the Indian word for burbot. “Poor man’s lobster.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?” asked Denny, looking inquisitively at her grandfather.
    â€œThat what they say about the white meat of burbot,” replied Sampson. “They say it taste like