The Fall

Our grandpa wiped a light dusting of snow from the top of the frozen lake with his gloved hands, then gazed toward the ice, nearly pressing his face against its surface. “T’ets,” he said looking at us.

“Frozen?” my brother asked.

“No,” our grandpa said. “Ice.”

Ever since the last person who fluently spoke our native Alaskan language passed away, grandpa has been making it his mission to teach me and Felix all the words he still remembers from growing up. I know he feels guilty, like somehow it was his duty to keep the Eyak language alive. It was his first language. His parents spoke it to him when he was a baby. But when his father died when grandpa was three, his mother married a white colonizer who forbade them to speak Eyak at home. We called him shah, short for weeshGAshah, which means mother’s father.

Shah motioned for us to join him on hands and knees against the frozen surface. We brushed snow from the ice and peered into the dark below, just as he was.

“See the bubbles rising up, frozen in place?” Shah asked. We nodded in response. “This is how you measure whether ice is safe to be on.”

“How?” I asked eagerly, pressing my nose against the ice, feeling the cold burn. I loved my grandpa’s lessons more than anything I learned in third grade.

“You measure how deep they are,” Shah held up his hand. “If they go as deep as your index finger, the ice is thick enough to walk on safely. If they only go as deep as your thumb, it is not safe, and you should leave as carefully as you can.”

I gazed at the trails of bubbles leading deep into the ice and touched my index finger upon its surface, trying to measure their depth.

“This looks even longer than my index finger, Shah!” I shouted in excitement.

“Yeah, but does it look longer than this finger?” Felix held up his middle finger to me and laughed.

Used to this behavior from my older brother, I glared at him. “Idiot,” I muttered under my breath.

All of a sudden, Felix leapt at me and twisted my arm behind my back, pressing my entire face against the ice.

“What did you call me?” he yelled, his full weight bearing down on me as I screamed out.

“Enough!” I heard Shah shout as he grabbed Felix. Even in his 70s, Shah still had enough strength to pull my 12-year-old brother effortlessly from my back and fling him onto the ice. Shah then lifted me to stand beside him, and I wrapped my arms around his waist and clung tight.

Shah looked down at Felix, disappointment etched into his wrinkled face. “When will you learn?” He asked my brother, still laying on the ice. “A sibling is a precious thing to the Eyak, and you only have one.”

Felix glared at Shah for a moment before his face softened. “Sorry, River,” he mumbled without looking at me.

Shah gave his hand to Felix and helped him up. “We have a saying in Eyak. If you can’t even love the people you share blood with, your heart becomes demex’ch… a rotten, soft patch in the ice.”

---

It was deep into spring when Felix and I walked home from school a few months later. There was still snow on the ground, but a long rain had been melting it quickly the past few weeks. The thaw had begun.

We walked by the lake Shah took us to earlier that winter. It was still frozen.

“I told the guys to meet me here to play hockey today,” Felix said, veering off toward the lake.

I followed him across the slick surface of snow leading up to the lake’s edge. “Wait, today? I don’t know, Felix… the ice might be too soft now. It might have too many… what was that word again Shah taught us?”

“Oh, you mean this one?” Felix again pointed his middle finger at me and sneered. “If you’re not going to join then just stay out of the way and go home.”

“Fine, then I will.” I stomped one foot in the snow.

“You always were a sas’qeet,” Felix said over his shoulder as he continued walking toward the lake.

For all the names Felix called me, he knew that baby was the worst. I hesitated a moment, then raced after him.

“Okay, fine, but we have to measure the ice the way Shah said, and if it’s too shallow we’re leaving,” I said.

“Fine whatever,” he said. He threw his backpack and skates down by the side of the lake and walked a few yards across its surface. Slowly, I followed him.

We got down and hands and knees and lowered our faces close to dark ice, seeking trails of bubbles frozen in place.

“I see a trail!” I shouted at Felix, although he was only a few inches away.

“Move,” he pushed me to the side and put his face where mine had been. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Alright we’re good! It’s at least as deep as my index finger.” Felix climbed to his feet and began walking away.

I repositioned myself and peered into the ice, double-checking his work. The bubbles didn’t lead very far into the ice, but they looked like they might have gone as deep as my index finger… it was hard to tell. The ice wasn’t as clear as it had been in the winter. The rain had made its surface murky white. I gazed at the trail of bubbles from every angle I could, but I still couldn’t tell for certain whether they went as deep as my thumb or my index finger. But if Felix was so certain about it, I should trust him, shouldn’t I? He didn’t even think twice.

I stood up and ran across the ice toward my brother, who was lacing up his skates next to a few of his friends who had arrived.

"Felix, are you sure the bubbles were okay?” I asked.

“Oh my gosh, sas’qeet,” he said to the laughter of his friends. “They were fine.” He grabbed his hockey stick, jumped up, and began maneuvering the puck across the ice, skating to the middle of the lake. His friends were quick to follow.

I watched from the edge of the lake as their hockey game began. Felix was the clear star of the group. He skated hard across the ice, unafraid to slam into friends on the opposing team and knock them off balance. Their shouting and grunting cascaded across the ice alongside the scratching of their skates.

Felix and I had gotten into the habit of bringing our skates with us to school every day, so I had mine there beside me. I laced them on. Then stood and slowly skated onto the ice.

“Felix!” I called out. He didn’t look my direction. “Felix, I’m going to skate back there!” I pointed toward the back of the lake, away from the hockey. My brother shoved into his friend just then, stealing the puck away and scoring a goal. As he and his teammates whooped in celebration, I skated past them to the far side of the lake.

Although it had rained the past few days, a chill had again overtaken the air outside, and the clouds hung low overhead. My breath was white as I turned circles on the slick surfaces, and I was thankful that I chose to wear my pink snow pants and a heavy coat today.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. My skates dug deep into the ice with every stroke. Deeper than they normally dug, I noticed.

Scratch, scratch. The sound of grating metal against ice was only interrupted by the shouts of Felix and his friends.

Why does he hate me so much? I cried silently to myself.

Scratch, scratch. I picked up speed, trying to shake my sadness, and began racing across the ice toward the rear edge of the lake. Suddenly, the ice began to change texture. No longer as solid looking, it began to cave in on itself beneath my feet, bending and sinking with each skate forward.

Scratch—the ice gave out beneath my feet. Demex’ch.

All at once, the air was knocked from my lungs as I crashed through the ice and hit the cold water, hard. My entire body sank beneath the dark water. Shock. I only felt shock. I thrashed about in the water, unsure which way was up, until I recognized which way the light was coming from and swam in that direction, up to the surface.

My head emerged above the icy waters and I gasped for air, feeling the cold burn my lungs. The ice had broken a few feet in all directions. As I swam to the closest edge, there was only one word racing through my mind, repeated again and again: survive.

It could have been minutes. It could have been seconds. Time lost all meaning as I thrashed in the cold water, minutes from death. I finally reached the edge of the cracked ice and clung on. I heard my brother yell out. He heard me. He was coming to save me.

I could just make out the words… “How do you like that! Goal!!” He was laughing. His friends were shouting. They didn’t hear me. They didn’t see me. I was mere moments from death on the same ice they were skating on, and they had no idea.

With all the energy I had, I yelled out, “siXAwAX.” The Ekay word for brother. It was as though in my fight for survival, in this most primal moment of my life, I reached through time, deep into the ancestry connecting me to this sacred land, and felt my blood beat time with the earth. My instincts were Ekay.

Suddenly, I felt calm. The water began to tug at me, and I loosened my grasp from the ice. Slowly, I began to slide further and further into the dark waters once more…

Just then, I felt a hard tug on my arm, then another. I looked up and saw Felix before me, lying flat across the ice, gripping my pink winter coat and tugging me out of the lake.

“Don’t let go, don’t you dare let go,” he whispered to me. The ice continued to break as he tried pulling me up again and again, scooting back each time to make sure the ice didn’t crack under him as well. Finally, with one giant heave, he eased me safely onto the ice.

“I know you’re cold, but we’ve gotta go,” he shouted with alarm. “Here, follow me.” He began crawling on his hands and knees back toward thicker ice. He couldn’t risk standing up quite yet.

I felt like I might lose consciousness at any moment, but I followed my brother, crawling right after him. When we got to thicker ice, he put his arm around me and walked me off the ice.

“Are you okay?” Felix asked.

I couldn’t speak, but I tried to shake my head.

“Here, take off your snow pants and coat.”

I tried to do as he said, but my fingers wouldn’t quite work. Seeing this, Felix unzipped my coat, untied my skates, and helped me take off the wet clothes so they wouldn’t freeze on me. I stood there in my undergarments as he then stripped off his outerwear and put it on me. I shivered beneath his coat, his snow pants, and his gloves, but felt warm enough to think that maybe I would survive after all.

“Let’s go,” Felix said, waving to his friends.

Together, we walked the mile back to Shah’s house. His arm was around me the whole time.

---

That night, after I had bathed—cold water at first, as Shah said, so as not to shock the system, then slowly with warmer and warmer water until my insides felt alive again—we ate dinner, then Felix went to bed. He hadn’t talked much all evening.

I sat by the fire with Shah that evening. Wrapped in the thickest blankets in the house, I watched as he whittled away at a small piece of wood from his rocking chair.

“Shah,” I whispered.

“Mhm?”

“I’m sorry for falling through the ice. I did your measuring trick and everything. I must have done it wrong…”

He paused a moment. “Don’t be sorry, sweet si’weeshGAkih. Some of life’s lessons are louder than others.”

I watched the fire crackle across the logs before asking my grandpa a question that had been consuming me all evening. “Shah?” I asked. “Why did Felix save me if he hates me so much?”

Shah paused for a long time, staring into the fire, before answering. “Life is precious, little one,” he said. “We can’t understand everything. We never will. Not about the earth, not about each other. The best thing we can do is just listen, and respond to what we hear. We stop living the moment we stop listening. And if you listen hard enough, maybe one day you’ll hear a secret of the earth, or a secret of another’s heart. It’s the secrets that make life worth living.”

I gazed into Shah’s face for a moment. The light from the fire reflected in his eyes, giving them a warm twinkle.

“Have you heard one? A secret like that?” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me?”

“No.”

“Why not, Shah?”

He exhaled, then set his whittling to one side, finished for the night. “One day, little one, you’ll hear the ones meant for you.”

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