Black Star, Bright Dawn

On the tenth day of November the sun did not rise. This was the day the sea froze up and there were no more waves. All the birds, except the ravens, flew south and we would not see them again until spring. It was very cold. The air was so still you could hear people talking far away at the end of the village.

My father did not go out on the ice that day. It was thick enough to hold a man’s weight, but he waited two days, then three, hoping that leads, streaks of open water, would appear. This is the best time to hunt in the kayak, the little canoe made of deerskin.

After the third day and the streaks of open water had not appeared, a blizzard blew in from the north and lasted almost a week. It brought floating ice down from the Bering Sea, and the polar ice pounded against the ice along the shore.

Bartok, my father, decided not to wait for the leads to open. He told me to get the dog sled and harness the dogs. He would hunt without a kayak.

“We’ll hunt bearded seals on the ice,” he said.

Bearded seals are heavy. They can weigh six hundred pounds. I harnessed our seven dogs to the sled and chose Black Star to lead the team. Bartok did not like him. When Black Star was a year old, my father decided that he would never in this world make a good leader.

“He’s stubborn,” my father said. “You tell him something and he does something else.”

“He’s smart,” I said, remembering the winter when we were coming home and, just on the other side of Salmon Creek, Black Star pulled up and wouldn’t move. My father took the whip to him and still he wouldn’t move. Then my father walked out on the frozen creek and fell through the ice up to his neck. I remembered this time but said nothing about it. “Black Star knows a lot,” I said.

“Of the wrong things,” Bartok said. “He’s got too much wolf in him. His father came up from Baffin Bay and had a lot of wolf blood. They bred him to a Siberian Husky. So he’s mostly wolf.”

I liked Black Star. I had liked him since he was a month old. There were seven in the litter and he was the most playful of them all. He bounced around and took nothing from his brothers and sisters, giving two bites for every one he got.

He was of the purest white, with a black star on his forehead and black slashes under big eyes. But of everything, it was his eyes themselves that captured me.

They were ice blue, the color of the ice that floats down from the Bering Sea on the days when the sun is at its tallest. At first I thought how cold and suspicious and wild they were, looking at me from a world I had never seen and would never know.