Free Lone Wolves by John Smelcer

until after we eat,” Denny’s mother replied with a thank ful smile. “It’s not going to hurt them to stay outside until then.”
    By five o’clock, all the food had been delivered and all the guests had arrived. Many had come from neighboring villages up and down the river. Hundreds of people sat in two rows of metal chairs—one row along the wall facing toward the middle of the room and one row facing them, with several feet in between, leaving space for later events. Two girls carrying a large roll of white paper walked down the middle of the rows, pulling a long sheet of paper from the roll and setting it on the floor like a giant placemat. Elders smiled at the girls. The entire room was filled with conversations. A few of the oldest elders spoke among themselves in their native language.
    The rest spoke in English.
    When it was time, younger people began to carry the food down the rows, the guests filling their plates with traditional foods like moose soup and salmon-head soup and smoked salmon, among many others. Denny carried two pots by their handles, one in each hand.
    â€œBeaver or porcupine?” she said to most of the guests, asking which one they wanted.
    To the elders, she asked in the old language.
    â€œTsa’ ‘eł nuuni?”
    The word for porcupine always made her smile. It rhymed with the word for mouse.
    Silas carried a big tray with chunks of boiled moose meat.
    â€œThis one tough old deyaazi ,” he overheard one elderly woman say after taking a bite. “It hard to chew.”
    Silas turned to Denny and asked what deyaazi meant.
    â€œIt means a cow moose,” she said, knowing that her grandfather would have been proud that of all her generation no other young person knew the language the way she did.
    Aside from the traditional foods, there were also pots of spa ghetti, macaroni and cheese, coleslaw, baked beans, biscuits and rolls and fry bread, as well as dozens of cakes and pies and trays full of cookies. Through a special school program when she was in junior high school, Denny had been invited to participate at a potlatch in an Eskimo village up north. Added to the menu was whale blubber, walrus, seal, and Eskimo ice cream, a delicacy made of rendered whale fat with berries and sugar. At that potlatch, close family members wore the clothes of the dead as a way of temporarily reconnecting to their lost loved one.
    Denny saw her schoolmates leaning against a back wall, listening to music through headphones, tuning out everything around them, while two eighth-graders walked around with kettles of hot tea.
    â€œ Tsaey ?” they had been instructed to ask in Indian, though the word was actually Russian, from a bygone era when Russia had owned the land. Maybe a hundred words in their language came from that time, mostly the names of dry goods.
    When the community meal was over, all the paper plates and plasticware were thrown away, the giant paper floor mat removed, and the floor swept or mopped where there was a mess or spilled tea. Only after the great hall was cleaned did Denny’s grandmother give the signal to begin the potlatch. All the chairs on the outside—those facing the wall—were turned around so that everyone could look into the middle of the room. Silas Charley helped two boys to spread out large blue tarps across the floor.
    For the next half hour, dozens of people carried in the potlatch gifts from cars parked outside and stacked them on the tarps. They brought in blankets, boxes of food or clothing, rifles, and envelopes containing cash, which they handed to Denny’s grandmother. The pile grew larger and larger, a sure sign that Sampson had been well-respected. Everything was ice-cold from sitting in parked vehicles outside during the long supper. At -38, the metal on the guns could burn exposed hands and fingers. Once inside, the black metal of the rifles turned gray with frost. As the gifts were brought in,