stefansson-wrangel-09-34-008

4.

22nd.
One female fox I caught today it test like chicken
and I start to make bead belt for myself and I
made about six inch long."

Nineteen months ago.
It seemed a lifetime ago.

In a way it was a lifetime, looking back on it
and beyond, like the old women of her childhood who crouched
in shadowed corners mumbling about the past while they scraped
at skins and chewed hides with bony gums. When time warps so
that days and weeks and months slide into each other, losing
meaning, the past can be more real than the present, and moments
out of her childhood had lately been coming vividly alive —
the fishing village, and the thick-walled earthen house warm
and cheerful with its seal-oil lamp, wick floating in blubber,
that sent light flickering up to the whalebone rafters while
her mother suckled her sister and she herself played naked on
the dirt floor, And the mining town with its draggle of wooden
huts tottering along a street ragged with stumps and rocks,
mud and pit-holes. And Nome, outside the mission school, lawless
and violent, filthy, without sewers or ditches, its drinking
wells no deeper than she was tall and contaminated so that no
child was safe from typhoid or pneumonia, and men beaten and
stabbed and shot down in the streets, and children knowing
well the look of death before they knew much about life. Some-
times, lately, all this would have more reality than the traps
she set, or the wood she hauled, or the tent in which she sat
writing.

The diary was a help in holding time within a
familiar framework, but oven so memory would play tricks. It