Leslie Marmon Silko

Every day the sun came up a little lower on the horizon, moving more
slowly until one day she got excited and started calling the jailer. She
realized she had been sitting there for many hours, yet the sun had not
moved from the center of the sky. The color of the sky had not been
good lately; it had been pale blue, almost white, even when there were
no clouds. She told herself it wasn't a good sign for the sky to be
indistinguishable from the river ice, frozen solid and white against the
earth. The tundra rose up behind the river but all the boundaries
between the river and hills and sky were lost in the density of the pale
ice.

She yelled again, this time some English words which came randomly
into her mouth, probably swear words she'd heard from the oil drilling
crews last winter. The jailer was an Eskimo, but he would not speak
Yupik to her. She had watched people in the other cells; when they
spoke to him in Yupik he ignored them until they spoke English.

He came and stared at her. She didn't know if he understood what she
was telling him until he glanced behind her at the small high window.
He looked at the sun, and turned and walked away. She could hear the
buckles on his heavy snowmobile boots jingle as he walked to the front
of the building.

It was like the other buildings that white people, the Gussucks,
brought with them: BIA and school buildings, portable buildings that
arrived sliced in halves, on barges coming up the river. Squares of metal
panelling bulged out with the layers of insulation stuffed inside. She had
asked once what it was and someone told her it was to keep out the
cold. She had not laughed then, but she did now. She walked over to
the small double-pane window and she laughed out loud. They thought
they could keep out the cold with stringy yellow wadding. Look at the
sun. It wasn't moving; it was frozen, caught in the middle of the sky.
Look at the sky, solid as the river with ice which had trapped the sun. It
had not moved for a long time; in a few more hours it would be weak,
and heavy frost would begin to appear on the edges and spread across
the face of the sun like a mask. Its light was pale yellow, worn thin by
the winter.

She could see people walking down the snow-packed roads, their
breath steaming out from their parka hoods, faces hidden and protected
by deep ruffs of fur. There were no cars or snowmobiles that day so she
calculated it was fifty below zero, the temperature which silenced their
machines. The metal froze; it split and shattered. Oil hardened and
moving parts jammed solidly. She had seen it happen to their big yellow
machines and the giant drill last winter when they came to drill their test
holes. The cold stopped them, and they were helpless against it.

Her village was many miles upriver from this town, but in her mind
she could see it clearly. Their house was not near the village houses. It

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