Wrangel Island

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of my throad outside of it hards a little and knight wants me to go out to the traps but my eye is very ach so I can’t go out when my eye is that way because in evening I could bearly stand the ach of my eye and one side of head if anything happen to me and my death is known there is bead stirp for bennett school bag. for my only son. I wish you please take everything to Bennett that is belong to me I don't know how much I would be glad to get home to folks."

And yet, no, "happy” was not quite the word to describe her, either. It was simply her disposition to be cheerful most of the time, to tend today’s problems today and trust tomorrow’s to be tended tomorrow. She had been born with the guileless optimism of a people who lived in the moment, without worry for the future, and even growing up in the white man's world and enduring the heartache of an unhappy marriage had not taken that quality away from her.

To be sure, it was a childlike quality, and in many ways she had seemed a child in the beginning, before Knight and the others had turned harsh toward her. Like a child, she had wanted approval and been too shy to seek it outright. But when she was bent over her work, sewing, or scraping a skin, or chewing a hide to the soft suppleness of glove leather, with silence dram about her like a cloak, if someone said something kind, or smiled in her direction, her black secret eyes lighted instantly and the flush under her olive skin heightened, and she would respond with the quick shy eagerness of a child anxious to please.

In the beginning she had very much wished to

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please. But the mood of the camp was not often suited to smiling kindness. The thermometer was already dropping below freezing, the season, of storms and darkness was on its way, and there was much to be done before that came upon them. The boys took themselves and their mission very seriously and although they were nice enough , even Knight was nice enough in the beginning, the fact was no one really paid her much attention. She had not minded that, at first, only she was never able to feel that she knew the boys or to be at ease in their company especially when they were all together and she was expected to talk to more than one of them at a time.

From the outset she had liked Crawford, the one the others considered the leader although she noticed that he always talked with Knight before deciding anything important. Crawford was quiet, and patient, and he knew more about the strange meteorological instruments than anyone else. She thought he was probably the smartest person she had ever seen. Galle, the youngest, not yet twenty, who spoke with a texas twangy drawl and was the least experienced in the north country, was not easy to talk to and Maurer, the only one who had been on the island before, was often too busy writing letters to his wife, whom he had married only a few days before sailing, to talk to her at all.

Anyway, if she was not quite happy those first days, neither was she unhappy and she had been able to tell herself that her fears on the ship had been foolish. And for awhile she had believed that to bo so, and was reasonably content.

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"April 3rd. My eye is getting better and swelling going down.

April 4th. My eye is just the same yesterday but my stumoc was on bum and I don't feel pain in my throad but my eyes was foggy today and I haven't been out for three days.

April 5th. I go out today and carry snow for water and took ship poket out.

April 6th. I made saw bock today and chop wood and I feel better today and I open case of biscuits. Blowing today.

April 7th. Blowing al day I didn't go out today and yesterday on account of wind blowing.”

As she wrote, the calendar said it was spring and truly it was. The geese had not yet started to come in calling but behind the frequent storms and the wind that blew across the tundra there was a drift of softness moving and melting more snow than was falling.

But twenty months ago the calendar had said it was autumn and it had not been true then. The water stayed free of ice and, although the temperature had continued to drop and the winds blew colder, no snow came at all. Well, without ice there could be no sealing, and without snow there could be no sledging to bring in game that was shot, and she had begun to get uneasy about it. When the boys seemed not to be troubled at all, she decided they really were troubled but were saying nothing to her, and that it explained their growing strangeness. And that confused her because she wanted to

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trust the boys' judgment and experience, and surely something was wrong! Suppose, now, that Sila the weather or Nuliayuk the Spirit of Waters or Neqivik the goddess of game animals had been displeased because they had come to this island? — or forgetting that ancient nonsense, and what was worse , suppose that God the Father was displeased, and Jesus His Beloved Son? How dreadful it would be if that were so, and who was to say for certain it was not? That was a frightening thought, and so it was not long before the old fears were back and she was contented no more.

"April 8th. I got up early this morning and then chop wood and I went out to the traps and caught one frozen fox nothing but skin and bone and I open can of kold oil, and I finish one side yarn glove for Galle and stard another side.

April 9th. I was over to the traps nothing doing only one fox track. and I take a bath this evening. Very clear wind from every direction and I knit today."

She was proud of her knitting. During the great war, women in white uniforms with red crosses on the sleeves had rolled bandages and knitted things for boys in trenches overseas, things like scarves and socks and gloves. The women of her own people, though skilled with scrapers and triangular needles, were often clumsy with their hands in other ways, some could not hold a spoon or butter a piece of biscuit, and could not learn to manage the slender ivory needles at all. But her hands, small and delicate like the rest of her, were strong too, and deft, with almost an intelligence of their own,

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and she had very quickly discovered how to cast on, rib, purl, tuck, and widen or narrow as necessary on the needle.

This had not seemed to particularly impress the boys, but it gave her a secret pleasure to know that she was proving herself to be worth the fifty dollars a month they had agreed to pay her as a seamstress who had not been expected to knit at all.

"April 10. I caught one female fox, very small but it's good mead. Clear and sunshine.

April 11. I was over to the traps no fox or tracks. I went to other side and saw wood and haul them home.

April 12th. I was out to the traps but there is nothing and I went to other side and saw three cuts of wood and bring them home and I'm short of yarn for Galles gloves."

Short of yarn, now. She may have misjudged the amount needed but even if she had not, even if she had known there was too little yarn, she probably would have started the gloves anyway. Yes, because it was important to her to go on making things for the three boys who were gone. She thought of the gloves as being for Galle, but they could as easily have been for Crawford or Maurer, she wanted very much to keep each of the boys in her thoughts. As long as she continued to do that, kept them in her thoughts and worked for them as she had done all these past months, sho could go on believing they still lived and had not died out there on the ice during those terrible howling nights of storm last January.

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But now to run out of yarn, that might be a bad omen, might it not?

“April 13th. I was to some of traps but see nothing and I fix the slade today and knight one of his legs stand to swellen again.

April 14th. I was out to the traps today and got nothing but I saw fresh tracks behind the camp, and I open case of biscuits and cut out skins for my boot soles and I made thread cut of sinew and gother biscuit crumbs together and take them out. Very clear and sunshiny.

April 15th. I was out to the traps they was nothing and storming looking weather today and I got boot soles all ready and soaked them and knight said he was feel bad."

To look at Knight today, nothing but skin and bone, pain and impatience, and to remember him as he was the first weeks on the island, was to see two different people. That other Knight had been strong of body and strong of mind, so sure of himself and so much too busy to try to understand even for a moment what it was like to be a woman. True, no man did understand that, ever, but this one seemed blinder than most and so did the others, Maurer and Galle, and Crawford too. And how was she, a |native woman, to speak to white men about such a thing as her anguish when the moon cycle came upon her?

To be sure, that was never a matter of great consequence to a man. Even to women she had known, any woman of her own people, it was simply a thing that happened each

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month until she got with child, then it stopped and did not happen again until she gave up suckling the child. It was that natural and uncomplicated, no more worthy of comment than the coming up of the moon, or the changing of seasons from autumn to winter to spring, or the taking of a woman by a man who wanted her.

But for her it was never that simple. For her it was always a time of agony which began with a brooding sense of foreboding, grinding down cheerfulness and bringing such a heaviness upon her that she was of no use to herself or anyone else for days on end. It was not pain so much as an intolerable pressure plunging her into an abyss of black despair. A single word from anyone was enough, then, to send her into a paroxysm of weeping. She tried not to believe in evil spirits, yet surely at the moon cycle one did take possession of her body, jabbing and twisting and tightening until, finally, her whole being became one silent scream.

And how explain any of this to boys who could not possibly understand? Even Crawford would not understand. So she had said nothing, and felt their disapproval, and had known suddenly that they hated her and wished her dead. She did not remember clearly what happened after she had decided that, but she had become hysterical, begging them not to use their knives, to shoot her instead, which they would not do. They simply believed she had gone mad overnight. And at that point she had tried to kill herself.

"April 16th. I was out to the traps but see nothing and when I come home I starded chew my boot soles and then sew them on and I finish them by evening. Wind from east."

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April 17 th.

"I was out to the traps today but nothing to see but nice day. I guess knight is feel worse he didn’t take tea this evening. He said he was headach.”

What she had done twenty months ago was swallow what she believed to be poison.

All the boys had been in the tent that day, doing one thing or another but it had seemed to her they were mostly cleaning their guns and sharpening their knives. She had sat apart wrapped in silence, not working, not moving, watching them and thinking her thoughts until she could bear to watch no longer because she knew for certain what they were intending to do. So she slipped out to the other tent and there she had come upon a bottle of liniment. Its label may have borne the words “Fatal If Swallowed” , there was not time to read it through to make sure, but she tucked the bottle under her coat before she sat down on a box and used another box for a table to write a hasty farewell note to Crawford.

She wanted to explain what she was going to do, and why she must do it, but what are the words to explain a troubled heart? So what she wrote was that Crawford was to keep her cherished pencil and also a ring which she had worn for many years. She put both these articles on the box next to her note, and left the camp, heading away from the water toward the distant humps of snow-covered hills

But after walking and walking, the hills were as distant as before and there behind her, following, came Crawford and Knight. She had tried to run, but they came on faster and so she gulped the liniment, but not all of it, not

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much of it at all. Then the boys had come up to her and she could do nothing except scream and weep, and struggle as they took her back to the camp, not hurting her, not even touching her more than was necessary.

A short time afterward that moon cycle was finished. None since had been quite so bad. But in all these months, not one of the boys understood more what it was like to be a woman than he had understood that first month on the island.

"April 18th. I saw wood this morning first and then I went out to the traps but there is nothing and then this afternoon I clean three foxes skins and I took four more in so I can clean them tomorrow. Cloudy and snowing today.”

Like the sick man in the tent, she had been losing weight these past weeks. It was not for want of food, there was food enough, rice and sugar, dried vegetables, canned foods and jam, boxes of biscuits, yeast, and flour for baking baneks. Even so, she weighed barely a hundred pounds now, and the weakness that came over her sometimes was very like Knight’s weakness, not so bad but bad enough. And yet she was not sick as Knight was sick. The pain and swelling in her eye, for instance, had been something altogether different from what Knight had, and was maybe perhaps caused by the snow glasses she had found, wearing them too much or not often enough, because looking back in her diary she saw that the trouble had come upon her only a few days after she discovered the snow glasses.

Well, of course it was good that there was no

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more pain and swelling. But it was not good that eight days had passed now without fresh meat, and even that had been just one female fox, very small.

"April 19th.

I clean one and put in stretcher and skin other three fox and this afternoon I haul one load of wood and chop wood. Didn’t go to the traps but I could see them with field glasses but see nothing. Very clear.

April 20th.

I didn't go out today on account of wind blowing I just clean fox skin I clean two and put them in stretchers."

When she brought the skins in from outside they looked more yellow than white, and shapeless, the fur matted with frozen blood. She cleaned each skin by chewing it, sometimes she chewed for hours, her olive skin gleaming in the lamplight, her eyes distant, her whole being aloof and alone with secret thoughts. And when she was done, not a shred of fat would be left on the skin which she then put in hot water to be tanned, and later stretched on a wood frame to be dried. At such moments, doing these things, she was passive and relaxed, there was no tension in her, no discontent, she was simply a woman of her people sharing with them a quality of the primitive and the timeless.

But when she sat down to write in her diary by the light of the same coal-oil lamp, she left the women of her people far behind and became another person. Black hair drawn back in a neat bun, head bent and tilted slightly, her slender fingers gripped and squeezed a pencil that labored to catch up with thoughts, or paused to wait for thoughts to come. She