She is drunk and so she doesn't get any close up looks from tourists or townsfolk, passing by, the midnight sun, the thick blue river run of kings.
"The herd is sacred,' she slurs, and hasn't had a bath in awhile. 'They'll kill them, just so people can drive fast."
"Ha ha ha!' A fat man gut laughs as he walks a big dog on a chain, though I stay to listen. 'Crazy drunk bitch!"
She doesn't look at him, or me, though I'm standing near and listening. She is on the tundra, watching a herd of ancestors plunge into the ocean where the ice has come unhinged, coats full of mosquitoes. She is watching smokestack rigs shred across the land, the confusion of her elders.
"They want oil.' she grabs my arm, surprising me, strong, fixed, and I can't and don't pull away. She stares at me with her good eye, the one that doesn't wander. 'And they're taking it, and my people will die. Do you know this?"
I've heard as much, but it's so easy to forget words, intentions, ideas, especially the idle ones that occasionally waft up from a lost, black-eyed Eskimo with one heart pickled in a bottle, one day on a park bench, one last caribou herd to carry a culture, one congressional stamp all that decides life, or else an oil slick, genocide, burial. And a mocking throng, oblivious, passes by.