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Apa was my running coach. He told me, Get legs high in the air—tink of leaping caribou, tink of the high kick, tink of the spirit dancers floating off to the sky.

I ran with all my might, lacking the conviction of one such as my grandfather. I ran through my childhood in the 1990s without a destination in mind. I ran as if the ground beneath me formed an endless Earth, roaming mindlessly round and round the sun. I stashed no dreams when it came to pushing my legs across the snowy tundra that formed the track outside in the dark of a winter night, dark though it were day.

You run fine, but got no heart in it, Apa complained.

Apa ran fast as caribou, they say. A man needing to get fast to the hunting grounds. An angun with a lot to run from. For he is the one-armed man who died three times: First in the Vietnam War when his arm got shot off. Then, in a boat accident, where he drowned. Then, in a plane where the Cessna crashed, carrying his body back to us for his funeral. His body descended to an icy depth in Atigan Mountain Pass, craggy and already spirit-filled by the dead. He surely also died a fourth time of mortification from knowing no one occupied the wolfskin blanket on his burial platform high on sticks in the tundra, his finale denied him.

---

“It’s as though he knew his fate,” I tell my love, Estelle. “And he vowed to outrun it. No trees grow near Apa’s grave, none anywhere on the tundra. Nor does sun alight its frost-heaved state, nor do many birds flit, nor do curious folks pass by. No mountains overlook in gloating white ice. To see this place in your mind, think of absence and draw with your mental pencil in black and white.” 

“You say this, Jenny,” Estelle tells me as we sit on my bed in my family cabin. I love her, a philosophy major to my biology concentration, a sweet girl with longish red hair and Cleopatra eyes to my restless bobbed yen for my own gender, even if she’s not from my Yup’ik race. I’ve brought her home to Tuntulik village after Christmas. Am I trying to impress her with the gore of my family history? “But…surely there’s got to be some color to your grandfather’s empty grave.”

“No.” I shake my head. “I will show you…” 

I want her to see what is there in memory of my Apa’s name. For that’s all there is now left of him. His name stands instead of bones: “Gunther” Iliuqnuk Kanek Flour. I want to show Estelle all I can of the rising sun that sleeps past eleven o’clock in the north, of the Little People no doubt gossiping about us, two nukalpiat with queer White Girl Ways. I want to show her inside my heart, its pumping veins and beating mechanisms. I’m nearly breathless as I race to do all this in a single week, visiting Tuntulik. 

I start with my grandfather’s death. For he is the tungelquq of my own spirit and soul, the spirit of my spirit. To give her me, I must give her him. 

---

The day is dry snow. Little mismatched footprints march helter for shelter. 

“The snowshoe hare,” I explain for Estelle’s unanswered question. “Maybe some voles. Maybe even the Little People.”

Estelle grins. “Tough friggin’ critters.” 

We’re covered head to toe in the thickest clothing we own. We walk holding mittened hands, her bold red cashmere enclosing my patched blues. We are happy, though this is a solemn adventure toward the grave, where Apa is forever missing from the plot. We turn away from the Kuskokwim River, now a thick foot or more of ice locking away river bottoms and all its fish, mostly sheefish, impervious to the cold waters. Trees lining the riverbanks disappear as we head inland. Tiny evergreen leaves poke through the snowpack where wind has shimmied a polished path.

We step on the tiny greens.

That, and the fermented red cranberries freezing in place, nestled in the evergreens, all the better for bears to root and eat and fall inebriated in the springtime. No trees, no mountains, only flat, cold Earth extending miles in every direction except where the river braids into many icy strands. Even without sun, the persistent white snow blinds.

“Wouldn’t seem out of place to see a skeleton sticking up from the ground, half-eaten by cannibals,” Estelle says. 

For a moment, we part hands at so callous a remark. 

“The truth is, tundra melts—the permafrost ain’t so permanent. Graves once thought buried won’t stay buried…. But none of us are cannibals.”  

Yet, I reclaim her bold red hand. I won’t abide unforgiveness at such a wooing time. I’ve brought Estelle home! 

“See?” I say in satisfaction. “Doesn’t your memory want to scrawl all this out in pencil on white paper?”

“Charcoal!” says she. “Let’s write our names in the snowy ground…”

“No!” I shiver at the notion. To write your own name in a graveyard surely invites punishment for hubris or stupidity. 

That conversation strand cuts off abruptly. Suddenly, we are there. 

A gravestone protrudes from the sparse landscape. Not just one but many, scattered all across the tundra, for Apa is memorialized amongst his ancestors from long ago who died in flu epidemics and mishaps, like his wife, Gram Walking Bear, who died in the teeth of her namesake before I was born.

Another of many times I labor to explain feelings at hand to Estella: “It’s an eerie place, a desolate place, a…how do I even say it?”

But her slanted blue eyes in a pale, frosted face remain unmoved by the scene. A blankness mirrors the tundra in those eyes. Unwilling—unable?—to envision what lies beneath.

She turns to leave before I am ready. I haven’t yet paid respect to Apa’s grave. No flowers can I lay there. Only my awareness, my memory, cast upon the stony snow. And now I wish I didn’t bring Estella home with me. She doesn’t understand at all.

I must push my way, rather than let my soul open and expand, observing Apa’s spirit tungelquq ellam iinga, at the end of his life. I bow my head alone in the emptiness. 

And it’s then the urge to run strikes me. I should run far as fast as my legs can carry me.

---

The village is awake now, tardy with the rising sun that only hitches so far into the northern sky. We’re noticed by eyes hidden behind curtains. I wish I could say we smiled and laughed or enjoyed our running jaunt back to my empty family cabin from the graveyard. 

There’s Gram Eluska’s toothless grin from next door, waving. There are two little girls racing one another as they head toward candy in the village grocery. There’s the post office wagging its bedraggled American flag in the subzero breeze. And there’s my haven, my clapboard brown home that won’t feel so much like that now. Not with Estelle, after the pall cast at the cemetery. 

“Where are your parents,” she asked when we first arrived here. Then, her curiosity shone through, her excitement. 

“In Anchorage—they don’t live here in winter. No jobs,” I explained.

“If your parents were here, would they like me?” Estelle wondered.

“Who could help it?” I kissed her, and she kept me tight in our embrace.

Now, her spirit’s flagging so much, I doubt she can ask me a question with sincere interest.

“Whew, cold in here!” she exclaims, shivering as she removes her heavy gray city coat, rubbing her hands together afterward.

I kneel to attend the stove, adding new wood before even removing my two ragged village coats. “Won’t take long now,” I assure her.

We still nap together on the quilted bed in my room. We still co-cook the foods we intend to eat, and even share the wine we brought with us, generously poured into two delicate glasses whose toast occupies the heated air. 

“To Apa,” she says pointed-like. “To a long line of people who ran for their lives.”

It dawns on me that she’s one wanting to run, too. 

---

A one-armed man and a child haunt my dreams. The pair is off in the big country, in the flat expanse of snow so cold it burns bare fingertips and noses. The ghosts descend when I’m stricken by fever and flu two days before we are to fly out. 

“Might be the muktuk you ate,” Estelle chides me. “How can whale skin and fat be meant for human consumption?”

But her voice registers muffled and echoey, like in a cave. Women hang out in the curious edges of the dream, egging me in discouragement. “You can’t do it. Not you, a half-human!” 

Where did that come from? I’ll analyze later. I do consider myself half of things, half woman, half man, half of the white world, half of the Yup’ik world. But not half human. 

I’m not sure what I’m trying to do in the dream, but I see a girl trying to hang herself using fishing twine. 

The girl’s agony stretches beyond my reach… 

One woman, her flat face and fairy black eyes, is so short I’m afraid for my ankles to be standing in her vicinity for fear she’ll chomp or pinch. Where’s Papa and my Yup’ik uma? They are supposed to be near me. A blaze overheats our house, and in some distant corner of my mind, I realize it’s my skin that’s burning hot. I shove off covers. I need to walk outside, need to go out the door.

“You can’t!” 

Estelle brings me back to awareness of the simple living room, a wooden door with a plank that crosses it for locking.  

My hand’s on the plank.

“I’m going outside. Can’t breathe in here.”

Estelle indulges me. “But first, your slippers.”

We hold hands in the outer world, where stars dot cobalt skies. 

I collapse in the snow. I feel my knees buckle, then bury themselves in fresh fallen snow. I’m crying, unhinged from the Earth that rotates. My body craves this icy cold. I always crave it, I realize. Yes, I will come back to its death, its life, every chance. I will return to the cold.

“There, there…” Estelle whispers in my ear.

Soon I’m back in bed, surrounded by the spirits that dog my dreams. Peopled by frenzied actions, pointing fingers, and laughing tongues hanging out of mouths. The Little People, the big people, the dead people, and those alive—I’m surrounded until oblivion reaches for me.

When I wake a day or so later, Estelle has news.

Prisilla, a girl in the village, hung herself the night before. 

“Sixteen years old, what did she know about whether life is worth living or not?” 

Estelle is indignant.

---

The day our plane is supposed to take us out of the village to the city where we can catch a jet back to Seattle, it’s a snowy blizzard outside. 

The girl who committed suicide is being mourned in a village wake at St. Innocent Catholic Church. We watch from behind the curtain as people make their pilgrimage to the church. 

Finally, it is time to walk in the opposite direction, to the airfield, each carrying our suitcases.

“I can take your bags, but no planes landing in this weather,” says George, the Penn Air agent in charge of us at the airfield. “Go ahead, back home. I’ll alert you first ting when the ceiling lifts.”

I’m still not one hundred percent. The illness lingers in a cramped stomach and a light head. The walk to the airfield saps my strength. Back in the cabin, Estelle takes a seat on the bed while I lie down. 

“There’s death in my town of Tacoma, too,” she tells me. “But not like here. So much death. I’ll be glad to get back to our dorm. How long do you think it will take to get out of here?”

Panic underlines her wording. 

“Soon,” I lie to her, and close my eyes.

When we get back to the U of Washington, she’ll drop me like a frozen potato. Like a pound of rotten meat. Tears leak from the corners of my eyes. 

“It’s not that death is more in Tuntulik than in Tacoma,” I tell Estelle. “It’s that you have more people shuttered from each other in a big city. How do you know a girl named Prisilla didn’t commit suicide down the street from you? Who’d tell you if they did?”

“I get your point.” Estelle’s golden brows meet. “But it’s like death is in the root system here. You all carry it in your very veins even while you try to live your lives…. Plato saw death as belonging to its own realm, not ours.”

“Yes—are we so different?”

Estelle doesn’t answer. 

I answer my own question: “I suppose so. But where death is keenly acknowledged, there is life. Did you know our word for man, angun, can be used for a woman? And nukalpiaq, for woman, can carry wisdom and caregiving that applies to a man as well? Have I told you in the Yup’ik worldview, death is not seen as a final rest, but as a transition of the spirit—tungelquq—into another realm? Apa described death as returning to the earth or the universe—ella—emphasizing continuity rather than loss. He used to sing songs about the journey, the end of daylight, or the quieting of breath, to speak of death.”

“Oh,” Estelle says, eyeing her hands now, then the window where snow keeps falling down.

Now comes my turn to give her comfort. 

“So, for Apa, he could be running races in the After World that’s right here on Earth, about now. See?” And I smile into her Cleopatra eyes. 

She avoids eye contact.

I grow impatient with feeling sick. I’ve never been good at it. 

“As for Prisilla,” I tell her as I get off the bed. “I need to pay my respects. Would you like to go with me?”

Estelle shakes her head vigorously. Yet she relents as she sees me getting my coats and boots on. Perhaps she doesn’t want to be alone now. Even this cabin is permeated by deathly spirits, invited here by our discussion.

At the little church, we bow our heads upon entering and lower our eyes. I’ve briefed Estelle on this custom. 

We take seats in a pew near the middle. The church is nearly full. On the altar, Prisilla’s earthly remains inhabit a closed, homemade coffin likely built by George, who doubles as a coffin maker when he’s not meeting the village planes. 

I close my eyes. “Apa,” I whisper. “Take care of this girl. Help her soul find peace…”

“Why did she do it?” Estelle whispers to me. “Did you know her?”

“Yes, as a child. I used to be a teacher’s aide when I was in high school for the younger grades. A quiet, pretty girl. She kicked the ball for the high jump at ten years old—won a medal or two at Native Olympics. Very smart…. She lost her mom last year in a four-wheeler accident.”

Others are whispering too in the church. This is the way it goes. Everyone has something to say to the one sitting next to them. Some scrawl messages on papers and cards that will be inserted into the girl’s coffin. Estelle observes this and asks, “Where can I find something to write on?”

After paper and pen are found near the entrance, I watch as Estelle scrawls these words: 

May you find peace now, dancing in the After World of ella. Kick those balls sky high there, too. Love and mercy, Estelle.

The plane doesn’t come that day or the next. 

The night after sitting in the cold church for an hour or so with the other villagers, we make frenzied love for the first time since our visit to Apa’s grave. The cabin is warm, our dinner of moose stew filled with carrots and potatoes that pleased Estelle’s taste. And as if by some urgent need, we come together as two bodies greedy—no, hungry—for all that life could yield for us, all that we could grab from one another, and it, too. Afterwards, elixir fills my veins. Not death. 

“Tell me true,” I whisper to her in the dark as we lie clasped in one another’s arms. “Were you thinking of dumping me when we get back to the university?”

Estelle snorts. “Sure, as fast as the taxi could land us on campus! No, you silly angun, old man. I was thinking you’d run from me.”

“But we are so different.”

“Maybe our differences weave us whole.”

We fall quiet. Wood sizzles and cracks, and a water pot atop the stove steams. This is our world, I realize. To create it anew. Do it the way we damn well please. 

“You know, I would not be surprised if Apa had something to do with the snowstorm locking us here in the village a while longer.”

“Think so? Why would he do that?”

“To help me see myself. To better see you.”

---

As we finally walk toward a landed plane, the clear sky allows a bent sun to shine through. We walk hand-in-hand, not caring what villagers think. Now we go to a different home, a campus full of seekers of another kind and meaning. 

“Your other side,” Estelle called it late last night. “We all have more than one, of course, like a pie or a Venn diagram—pieces locked together.” We’d been watching stars in the cold night sky outside the cabin’s window.

George laughs at us as we climb the wing to enter the Cessna. 

“You girls going back to where life is harder, right? You’ll miss your lazy village life then…”

Estelle and I glance at each other in silent questioning: Which life is harder? The village or the university? 

That answer eludes me for now. But I’ll want to know Estelle’s answer, later, on campus, when our visit here is but a dream. 

As we take off, I swear I can see Apa’s grave from above. I wave with both arms. I see him waving back, raising his one good arm.

 

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NAOMI KLOUDA was raised in Alaska and earned a BA in Journalism from Gonzaga University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her writings often invoke the language and culture of Yup’ik and Alutiiq cultures, after living with those cultures through marriage and giving birth to her children. She is the mother of three children and the grandmother of five. She studied the Yup’ik language under Yup’ik speaker John Active, and the Alutiiq language under Philomena Knecht. Her various writings have been accepted by fifteen publications during 2025-2026. She is the author of Anna’s Whale, The Alaska Glacier Dictionary, and The Octopus Murders. She lives in Homer, Alaska.

Featured image by Marc Eggert, courtesy of Unsplash.