I'm Joe Riley and this is Likely Stories.
The story is set in the northeastern interior of Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle, long before the arrival of Western culture. The people who lived there - Gwich'in Athabaskans - were nomadic, setting up camp where they predicted the hunting or fishing would be best, depending on the season. Many years, food was plentiful. But sometimes the winters could be especially harsh, with long periods of extreme cold - 40 or 50 degrees below zero. Moving about was hard, both for the people and the game they relied on. Many would die of starvation. Tribal leaders had to make hard decisions for the good of their people - sometimes this meant leaving the weak behind.
Early in the 20th century, the Gwich'in people began to settle in permanent villages as Western culture and trade filtered into the area. But subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering remains an important part of life there. This is the culture Velma Wallis grew up in. She was born into a traditional Athabaskan family in 1960, one of thirteen children. When she was 13 years old, her father died, and Velma left school to help her mother care for her younger siblings. Later she would move to her father's trapping cabin, twelve miles from the village, where she spent several years learning traditional ways of hunting and trapping. And reading - she was an avid reader, which led to writing. Her first project was the retelling of a traditional story she had learned from her mother.
In the introduction to Two Old Women, Wallis writes, "Each day after cutting wood we would sit and talk in our small tent on the bank at the mouth of the Porcupine River, near where it flows into the Yukon. We would always end with Mom telling me a story. (There I was, long past my youth, and my mother still told me bedtime stories!) One night it was a story I heard for the first time - a story about two old women and their journey through hardship.
The women of this story were 75 and 80 years old and cared for by the tribe - given wood and water and shelter and food - and who tanned hides for those who helped them. They had fallen into the habit of complaining about their aches and pains, carrying walking sticks as proof. Then one very cold winter, the chief made a hard decision: these women must be left behind. What follows is the story of their struggle to survive.
Believe it or not, it's a heart-warming story in the end. Wallis writes, "Stories are gifts given by an elder to a younger person." Two Old Women is certainly a gift, even to older people like me. It's a quick, compelling story - I read the whole book in an afternoon, and for those few hours I completely forgot about the Texas heat.
This episode of Likely Stories was produced by KWBU Summer intern Scarlett Ucci.
