13 Moons: #5
May 23, 2005

Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada

Fifty-odd years ago, this was the capital of the Yukon. The road to Alaska had just opened when I got in to town. The Klondike gold rush was long over, and Dawson City was inching towards respectable.

I stopped in Dawson long enough to buy some supplies, then headed downriver. I wanted to get away from people, get to a place I could let the wolf out and not worry about killing anyone. It took me weeks to get a small hut built. Nothing fancy – one room, one door, one window. No stove, just a stone firepit and a small sleeping platform.

I lived there for a couple of years, the wolf hunted fur animals and I traded skins at the Trondëk Hwech'in reservation downstream. The reservation was a depressing place – rampant alcoholism and grinding poverty were the least of its worries – but Charlie Tetlichi made up for it. He was old, so old he didn’t know when he was born. He’d made a small living during the gold rush hunting for the miners, and had saved enough money that he was able to afford a little better than the rest of the village.

Age had made him tiny, skin like parchment stretched over knobby bones, black eyes gleaming from his withered face. Charlie traded the skins I brought him for food and clothes, some of which I took back to my cabin, some of which he had me leave outside houses in the dead of night. Everyone knew Charlie was the source of the gifts, but it was understood that to publicly acknowledge them would bring shame on the giver and the recipient. When men from the government came to the village, it was Charlie that talked to them.

From the start, he knew what I was. He made me promise to stay away from the village during the week of the full moon, but otherwise he and the others welcomed me. I brought in food they couldn't get otherwise, brought them pelts they could trade for more luxuries - books, fabric and thread, bullets for the few rifles in the village. For my end of the bargain, I got comfort, warm human voices and a friend.

One day, when I knocked at his door, Charlie didn't answer. I saw him sitting at his table, not moving, so I broke the door open. He was alive, paralyzed - he'd had a stroke. I carried him to his bed, cleaned the caked shit off of him and tucked him in, dribbled some water in his mouth. I sent one of the young men to get the government doctor, a day's hike away. I stayed by his side, feeding him, talking to him. His eyes were still alive, black and deep, frightened. He knew what was going on, but he couldn't talk or move at all.

When the doctor arrived, he walked into the room, listened to Charlie's heart and gave his diagnosis, speaking to me as if Charlie was already dead. "He's had a stroke, and he won't recover. I can get him to a provincial hospital he might linger on a while longer there. He's as good as dead now, his brain's probably already gone. Really, it's a miracle he lived as long as he did."

I thanked the doctor and walked him out the door, talked to him before he drove away in his truck. "We'll make a decision and let you know."

When I came back in, I looked at Charlie. "Well, old man? Do you want to stay here?" He blinked his eyes rapidly at me. "Hold on - one blink for yes, two for no. Do you want to go to the hospital in Dawson?"

blink-blink

"Do you want to stay here?"

blink-blink

"What do you want, then?"

blink-blink

"No? I don't understand - where do you want to go?"

blink-blink

"You've got to live somewhere! I can stay and help, but-"

blink-blink

"Do you want... do you want to die?"

blink

"I can't do that."

blink

"No, I can't! I can't do that!"

blink

All night long I sat with Charlie, talking, telling him stories about the world I'd seen - the trenches of The Somme, Paris, London, Poland, San Francisco, the Alps, the jungles of Africa. His face never lost its rubbery slackness, the drool still trickled out the corner of his mouth, but his eyes smiled. All night long I talked, and when the sun came up, my voice hoarse, I asked him. "Are you sure about this?"

blink

"I'll miss you, old man."

blink

He closed his eyes then, and I pulled out the syringe I'd got from the doctor. It took some doing, but I got it into the vein on his arm, drove the plunger home. I like to think the morphine took him back to his childhood, when his people owned the forests and there were no whites and no government men around. I held his hand until he stopped breathing and grew cold, then walked out the door. No one in the village would meet my eyes, and I knew I wouldn't get the same welcome there any more.

When I got back to my cabin, I got good and drunk and didn't come outside for a week. Three months later, a mining concern bought up the land I was on and I was out of there.

Coming back now, I can tell that nothing's changed - not the important stuff. The river's more polluted, the First Nations are still treated like shit, the wild places get a little smaller each year. There's nothing here for me now, nothing worth staying for. I drive out of town to a secluded area, take off my clothes and shift, letting the wolf take over again. Tomorrow I'll move on, probably south, try to figure out where this trip is taking me.