Let the little girl dance

The little girl stands inside the circle, waiting for the hand that will soon pull her back into the fiddle dance.

Surely, that hand will come soon - won't it?

It looks like it's coming... or is it reaching for someone else?

This time, it must surely be coming for her...

Yes, it is! The little girl is back in the dance! But won't she get too hot, wearing that jacket while dancing with such vigor and energy?

Yes, but it is a simple thing to remove a jacket.

And then she takes a run into the cool midnight-air outside.

She is back. She is in the dance and she is smiling.

I did ask her name afterward and she did tell me - but her voice was soft and shy and the music and laughter was loud. I could not quite make it out.

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Update: Eliza Hutchinson, a former school teacher in Fort Yukon who returned for the gathering, has identified the little girl as sweet Patience Tackett, one of her former students. 

Slide show: Fiddle dancing, Gwich'in style

When Harold Frost was about six years old, his grandfather came to his family house in Old Crow, Yukon Territory, for a visit and brought his fiddle with him. When early trappers introduced the fiddle and the dances that go with it into the Yukon and Mackenzie River country of Alaska and the Yukon and Northwest Territories, the Gwich'in and their other Athabascan relatives picked up the instrument and made both their own. Harold's grandfather was a master of the instrument.

He took great care of his instrument and did not want to risk damage to it by having a child pick it up and have a mishap. So Harold's grandfather placed his fiddle near the bed and ordered all the children to stay far away from it and leave it alone.

It's not that Harold was a disobedient child, but that fiddle tempted him. "No! Grandpa said not to touch it," his sister warned him when she saw him reaching up for it.

Harold touched it anyway. He ran his fingers over the wood and along the strings. He loved the feel of it, he loved even just the little sounds that the touch of his fingers brought from the instrument. He loved it and he did no damage to it.

Harold got his first fiddle when he was about 11. Playing came natural to him. He did not know how to read a note of music, but it didn't matter because when he picked up the fiddle, the music flowed naturally from his heart through his fingers into and then out of instrument. Later, he would teach himself to read music.

Not many years later, Harold picked up another form of entertainment, one that comes in a bottle in the form of alcohol. He and the woman that he married would drink together, but when he was still in his early 20's, Harold could see the damage that alcohol abuse was bringing to people that he knew and loved.

So he talked to his wife and told her that he was not going to drink anymore. "I've been sober for 22 years now," Harold told me. His wife has stayed sober with him.

People who came to Fort Yukon - Gwichyaa Zhee - dance to the tune of Harold's fiddle, backed up up by guitars, base, drums and vocals. They are gathered at the tribal hall.

This time, perhaps, I have overdone it, for I have included 36 pictures in the slide show that readers can find either by clicking on the link below or on either of the above two photos. For those who were there, I don't think 36 will be too many, although I do worry that some might have long waits due to slow village internet connections if they wish to view them all.

For those who were not there, I hope 36 images is not too much and that you enjoy them anyway.

You will find jigs, square and other fun dances. To save me time, I have not tried to put things in order, but, with a couple of small exceptions, pretty much display them in the order that the computer dropped them into my slide show.

The final two images are of young people, leaving the dance late at night by four-wheeler and bicycle. In summertime Alaska, particularly as you go north, people, young and old alike, have a tendency to stay up nearly all night - especially when they get together for any kind of gathering, Gwich'in or otherwise.

Even with this many images, I plan to put up one more, shorter, fiddle dance picture story which I will title, "Let the Little Girl Dance." You will understand the title when you see it.

Click here or on photo to view the full slide show

Go to Harold's site to hear music samples

A pocket camera glimpse back at the gathering before I get going for real; roadside scenes while on coffee break in Wasilla: Baby Jobe in green

That's Harold Frost of Old Crow, Yukon Territory, playing fiddle on the left and Chester Fields of Fort Yukon on base. Yesterday, I stated that today I would begin posting my Gwich'in Gathering images in earnest, but I am not yet ready to do that.

I was very lazy yesterday and it was the only day this week that I would have Margie home with me. I did not even begin to transfer the 360 gigabytes or so of high resolution, RAW images from my big pro cameras from the portable hard drive I took to Fort Yukon into what for the moment is my big working harddrive attached to my desktop computer, until about 8:00 PM.

Those images were still transferring when I went to bed about 12:30 AM. Now I must put them in my photo editing program and start the task of editing and processing and I feel completely overwhelmed. It feels like a task that would take a month to do right.

The very thought makes me feel like I just want to go back to bed and sleep for a year or two.

That's another thing that I really like about my tiny pocket camera - the Canon s90. Not only is it tiny and light, but there is no way to shoot pictures fast with it, so you don't get that many. The ones that you do get have nowhere near the resolution of those taken with my pro cameras, so they do not bog the editing program down and they are quick and easy to work with.

I didn't use the pocket camera much in Fort Yukon, but I did keep it in my pocket at all times and every now and then I did pull it out and shoot a frame or two - such as in this case.

There was a table in front of the fiddle player. I wanted to get a shot from under the table but there were speakers and other gear beneath it, so it was a whole lot easier just to reach under there with my pocket camera, frame it in the LCD and take a snap than it would have been to have crawled under with all that stuff with my big gear and then let rip with bunch of frames.

So for today, I am just going to use  the few scenes associated with the gathering that I did with the pocket camera. Once I get some editing done, you will see Harold and Chester again, along with a whole lot of other folks.

Harold did not come to the home of Ben and Carrie Stevens, my hosts, with his fiddle, but when we all gathered there we could still hear the fiddle music in our heads.

Little two-and-a-half-year old Alex, "Sunshine," must have heard the music very clearly and he remembered well how people had jigged to that music. So the sound and the memory went down to his feet, took hold of them and suddenly he began to jig in the kitchen. Soon, Sunshine had three women dancing with him.

I wish I could dance like that.

This is Jessica Black, who served as Miss World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in 2000. Jessica also spent part of the gathering camped out in the Stevens home in the room across the hall from mine. We became friends, just like that.

She received the scarf tied as a band around her head at a give-away held in honor of a deceased baby boy. After she put it on, she did a short dance, Gwich'in style.

My host, Ben Stevens, preparing moose-rib soup to feed to those gathered at the gathering. Mighty tasty. Excellent ribs. I wish I could have some now. I can't, so maybe I will go to Taco Bell instead.

Ben had to leave early to return to his fish camp far down river, near Stevens Village, his original home.

Just to remind you that I am now back home:

Yes, I am in Wasilla and yesterday after stopping in at Metro to say "hi" to Scott, Carmen and Sashanna, I drove away with an Americano and then took a short drive to drink it. Along the way, I saw this car, parked with its lights on at a corner.

And I saw that someone had rebuilt the memorial for the young woman and her unborn child who had been killed in a collision at Church Road and Schrock. Two crosses used to rise from this memorial, but vandals broke them and messed up the scene.

Now it had been put back together, but without the crosses.

On my last day home before I left for Fort Yukon, I took Margie to Metro and as we waited in the drive-through, a succession of police cars and emergency vehicles screamed by, red lights flashing. A bit later, on our drive, we had just turned off Schrock Road onto Lucille Street when we saw that the road was blocked ahead and red lights were flashing.

We detoured elsewhere through the neighborhood to avoid the scene and then I forgot about it. I did not know what had happened. I never thought about it again until yesterday, when I drove past it for the first time since my return. This is what I saw.

Given the location, my immediate thought was that it had probably been a four-wheeler accident and that the person who had died had been young.

I looked it up online after I got home. Indeed, 17 year-old Cheyanne Jorge had died after rolling her four-wheeler. Her passenger, also 17, was treated at the hospital and released.

Horrible.

Early this morning, I drove Margie into Anchorage so that she can spend the rest of the week babysitting Jobe. Here he is, dressed to match the bathroom colors.

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