Word: tlingit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...buying to keep the price down, have loaded their camels and saddled up. Minor dealers hover for scraps. "The closer you get to the sale, the worse the piece you want looks," says one. "You have to ignore your doubts." He looks doubtful, but he spends $250 on a Tlingit basket that he can almost certainly resell for $400. Withington knocks himself out to move a large wooden cheese box for an outrageous $300, and with a final handclap -- one clever scamp applauding himself -- his performance and his 1,884th auction is over...
...destructive torrent of silty water about 20 times its present volume, unfit for salmon and fishermen. "In another 500 to 1,000 years," says Mayo, "Hubbard Glacier could fill Yakutat Bay, as it did in about 1130." Susie Abraham, 85, a silver-haired elder of Yakutat's native Tlingit Indian tribe, is fatalistic. "This place where we sit," she says, "belongs to the great glacier...
...itself. But speed may be essential. Says Powell: "We're just now entering the rainy season, and at the rate it's filling, the lake could be ready to make its jump by the end of this year." Experts say, however, it will take a year or two. The Tlingit elders are contemplating another solution, one they say worked for their ancestors the last time that ice covered Yakutat Bay, nearly nine centuries ago: sacrificing a dog at the glacier's leading edge...
...third and best novel, Robert F. Jones tracks the elemental grandeur of Alaska from feral Eden to pipeline ruination. In 1950 Bush-Pilot Buddies Jack Slade and Sam Healey are forced to land their aging C-47 in the icy outback. Charlie Blue, a Tlingit Indian shaman, appears and assists them through a surpassingly beautiful valley to rescue. The pilots promise to return, but before they can, Healey leaves Slade holding a smoking pistol and a murder rap in the wake of a saloon brawl. End of partnership. Slade settles down to homestead the secret valley. Thirty years later Healey...
...spirit, a man with "an eye used to sighting down a fence line and the barrel of a shotgun." But Erks is also a thoughtful man for whom yellowfish begin as a commodity to be hauled for pay and end as tragic figures on a par with the vanishing Tlingit and those galloping gourmets of the Donner Party...