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Mukluks, moccasins, baby-size, that's what I wanted. I found some children's mukluks
but they were unlined and had bells on their toes. While I was looking for more, I found
ivory earrings and pendants carved into boat propellers for the bargain basement price of
$100, an ivory whale with his tail up, up, up for $105, and an ivory seal with baleen spots
for $150. There were kuspuks of every size and color, beaded gloves with furred cuffs, fur
coin purses, a moose skin gunstrap beaded with swans and trimmed with beaver, spruce
baskets from Southeast, rye grass baskets from the Aleutians, baleen baskets from North-
west.
Eva Bryant, from Chugiak by way of Eek, was selling tiny brown bears with articulated
limbs made of sealskin. Leonard Savage from Holy Cross had carved ivory into tiny indi-
vidual huskies. Maria Corwin of Tok gave a short course in Tlingit art and the differences
in the raven and the eagle figures in her gold jewelry (when I was in college in Fairbanks,
you could always tell Southeast girls by the beautiful silver bracelets they wore). Lela Ah-
gook of Anuktuvuk Pass was selling Anuktuvuk face masks, so well-made that each one
looked as if it was about to break into a smile or a song or a scowl or a curse.
“Slippers,” I said out loud, to the consternation of the lady from Ketchikan selling base-
ball caps reading 'Not Only Am I Perfect, I'm Haida, Too.' “Baby slippers. Concentrate,
Dana.” I marched forward with grim determination, and a table loaded with whalebone
and walrus tusks jumped out in front of me. A sign read “Herbert Noyukpuk.” Two of the
tusks had scenes of dog sled teams, one scrimshawed, the other carved, and on both the
dogs looked so real shouldering into the harness that they seemed about to run away with
the sleds and wreak havoc with the dance fans on the next table over.
I took a second look at the name, and at the face of the man sitting behind the table.
Herbert Noyukpuk? Herbie Noyukpuk? Herbie “the Shishmaref Cannonball” Noyukpuk?
One of the mushing heroes of my youth? No, it couldn't be, nobody is talented enough to
carve like that and be a world class dog sled musher, too.
But somebody is, and this was him, and I hovered in an agony of shyness, trying to
work up the courage to say I'd been a fan since I was a kid and how wonderful both his
mushing and his art was. Before I could half a dozen people braver than me crowded
around and I was elbowed to one side and the moment was lost. I hadn't felt that star-
struck since I stood behind George “the Huslia Hustler” Attla at the bank.
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