26
CIRQUE
Sandra Kleven
and Mr. Hinkelman were already entering the building. I called, “Gabe! Good-bye!” Did he look back and wave? I can’t remember. By the next week, ice sheets were spreading across the surface of the Kuskokwim River, which in time would freeze deep enough to support snowmobiles, trucks and mail planes, though far below the current would still flow. Shortly after freeze-up began, the State Trooper stormed into the Welfare Department and shouted, “Gabe Fox disappeared!” If he was wandering on the tundra in the freezing cold, his life was in immediate danger. I jumped up. “I have to get to Kwethluk right now!” “No room,” said the Trooper. “I’m filling my plane with searchers.” I turned to my boss Greg, but he refused to give me a travel voucher. “There’s nothing you can do. The National Guard is coming.” “Gabe expects me to look for him!” As clearly as on a movie screen, I saw him hiding and watching the searchers. Did he want me to find him, or fear that I would? My boss said, “You’re too emotionally involved.” “What?” What difference did my affection for Gabe make? Unless someone found him, he would freeze to death. I repeated softly, “He thinks I’m coming. I need to be there.” Greg and the Trooper turned their backs. Could I hire a charter plane on my own dime? There wasn’t much money in my account. Also, with the National Guard and State Troopers swarming over Kwethluk, I would have no place to stay if weather trapped
me. Nor could I risk losing my job in a town with no other social work positions. Gabe expected me, but I saw no way to get to him. For the next seven days, I heard reports of the searches. State Troopers and National Guardsmen walked the tundra and flew above it, over and over, until blizzards stopped them. “He can’t still be alive,” the Trooper told me. Some locals blamed the new gussock social worker for taking Gabe away. They believed he ran away from the Home to avoid punishment. No wonder they thought that, since many of them had been abused in government boarding schools. Yet nothing seriously negative about the Children’s Home has ever surfaced; many of its former residents express fond memories of it. Peter, an Eskimo welfare worker who grew up in a village, told me, “Gabe is town Eskimo. He want to come home but he don’t know the tundra. So he walk the river, but he can’t read the ice. It break. River take him far away.” Officials believed this too, because no one ever found Gabe’s body. He was probably dead before I knew he was missing. I see him approaching the partially frozen river in his boots and scruffy jacket. Does he think his gussock social worker is about to find him? I doubt it. I believe that until the ice broke beneath his feet, he was trying to reunite with his mother. All winter, villagers reported fish and meat stolen from their caches and that they saw a wild child, part boy, part fox, in the distance. “He is turning into the animal he came from.” In Yup’ik Eskimo spiritual and mythological beliefs, a person lost on the tundra may fall into a state called “cillem quellra,” meaning roughly, “made cold by the universe.” Frightened and unable to feel cold, the person may become light enough to walk above the trees. A Yup’ik Native, Apanguluk Kairaiuak, interviewed one hundred elders about this and explained the traditional belief that each person is created by animal, bird and fish spirits. A crisis can drive him back to the non-human phase of his existence. Poems about Gabe filled the Spring 1969 Bethel High School literary magazine. One remains forever paraphrased in my memory: I see the boy far away. A salmon is in his teeth. Hair grows from his long ears.