Читать книгу Ordinary Wolves - Seth Kantner - Страница 11

FOUR

BRUCE LEE ARRIVED in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. Mr. Lee’s style of instant gratification leapt the language barrier and left John Wayne piddling in the dust. He was an overwhelming success—the movie took in two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat.

A week later, when, unaware, we mushed into the village, I felt the ramifications of Lee’s acceptance into Iñupiaq culture.

We traveled to town two or three times each winter to deliver Abe’s artwork—furniture and paintings—and to pick up mail and gossip, gunpowder, powdered milk, and mail-ordered vanilla extract for snow ice cream. Necessities. We tied our door shut, iced the runners, and hitched up the dogs. We got on the trail as the first twinges of morning twilight painted the Shield Mountains. “Take your mittens off a minute,” Abe suggested, reminding us to go barehanded until our hands went numb, to shock the blood into flowing hot in our fingers for the day.

Two bends west, the river was deep with fresh snow that wind hadn’t shifted and settled. Jerry, Iris, and I took turns spelling Abe. Two of us snowshoed in front of the team, breaking trail. The other ran behind. Only one of us got to ride on the runners, and often that person had to run, too. Frost whitened our furs and the dogs’ faces. I froze my face as much as possible, getting ready to look tough and hunterly in town. At dark the first evening, we cut a dead sapling for a ridgepole and green saplings for spruce boughs to sleep on, and pitched our wall tent where the winter trail abandons the river for three bends. Thoughtfully, Abe pressed the faded canvas of the tent between his thumb and finger. Iris leaned against my shoulder smiling. “He’ll be boiling bone glue, brushing size and ground on our tent,” she whispered. “It’ll only be a matter of time until he needs canvas and cuts it up to paint.”

Jerry set up the five-gallon-can stove and pipe. We spread out caribou skins and ate blocks of pemmican and melted snow and threw dried whitefish to the dogs.

The following afternoon, amid the clamor of hundreds of barking dogs, we slid into Takunak, hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners, wool long underwear and balaclavas. Log cabins and a few plywood houses hunkered along the north shore. Fish racks were pitched along the shore, half buried and glinting with tin coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers’ bad reputations.

He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers’s house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some paniqtuq.” He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.

The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.

“Maybe the Jafco catalog came.”

“Maybe.” I toed a splintered board, nails up on the packed snow. We felt sliced by hidden eyes behind cabin windows. Behind a cache—and heaped sleds, machines, caribou hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq’s. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington’s upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn’t know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we’d arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.

Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You’ll have to write and thank him.”

I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe’s, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather’s? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?

“Abe!” Iris moaned. “Don’t you know we’re embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”

“Salvation Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose-babiche sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it’s supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”

“Yeah! Let’s!” Iris and I said.

“Wait. There’ll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”

I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.

“Some kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”

WE SLEDDED TO the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail, letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers’ handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.

“Do well?” Abe asked.

Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of paniqtuq. Abe’s blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.

“All As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”

“C in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn’t yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn’t argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought instead of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he’d thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris’s second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.

I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school grade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.

“Better off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don’t let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.

“There!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They’re coming!”

Who would they be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.

“Hi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said hi and someone’s name, all as one word.

“Hi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas’ mom?” a small boy asked.

“When you go around here?” another boy interrupted.

“Today.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn’t a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived out in what they called “camp”—but few knew even from what direction we appeared. Out of town simply meant out of touch, out of money, the opposite of lucky. No family from Takunak lived in “camp.”

My cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don’t get chilled.”

“You wanna fight?” asked Elvis Skuq Jr. “I’ll let you cry.” He had permanent residence in my earliest memories of town. From the time he’d been a small boy he’d enjoyed packing my face with snow and whipping my mittens off with a stick, laughing at my smarting red fingers. A scar ran from his lip up under his nose and, I’d long thought, on up to his brain. He was sixteen and towered over me.

The plane banked and lined up with the airfield. “From where you come?” Elvis repeated.

“Upriver,” Jerry mumbled. I spat out caribou hairs that had wandered out of my hood and collected in my mouth. The plane wheels touched the snow. As it swept down on us, Iris and I jumped behind the sled.

“Aiy,sure iqsi.” Kids jeered and dark-eyed adults smiled at our naïveté. A kid whipped my ear with a piece of knotted rope. Laughter came from behind us. A snowball dissolved against my neck. The props roared, warbling with power as the pilots adjusted the pitch. The turning plane flung a wall of snow over the crowd. Around me villagers faded like ghosts. The props whined to a halt. Everyone surged forward. Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove waved. I stood, a member of a group, all of us united in anticipation.

Woodrow Jr. slapped me on the back. He was in his twenties and carried his son on his shoulders. “How’s the trail from your-guys’ camp? You come to town to fin’ Eskimo girlfriend?” Beside him a pretty woman smiled, her brown face and dusky lashes shining inside her white fox ruff. “I sure want your eyes, Cutuk,” she said. “You should go be my son.” People laughed. I examined the ground, shifted nervously, pictured myself belaying Woodrow Washington down Feathers’s outhouse to salvage my education.

The airplane doors swung open. The pilots stepped down, white-faced and cold-looking with their radio earmuffs, aluminum notebooks, and Colt .45s on their belts. Villagers unloaded the boxes and mail bags.

Dawna stepped close. She smiled. “Hi, Cutuk. When you come?”

“While ago.” I looked at my mittens. Dawna had a heart-shaped face. Her wide eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question no one had heard. Her hands were bare and pulled into the sleeves of her white nylon jacket. She wore faded jeans, perfectly frayed around the bell-bottoms. Dawna was fourteen and had recently changed in ways that I found embarrassing to snag my eyes on, and impossible not to. Before last year I had thought she was dumb—the pastime she enjoyed most was cutting up Sears catalogs to make collages, and looking at the photographs in women’s magazines, wishing about cities far from Alaska. Sometimes she looked at the pictures upside down. Her dad, Melt, got mad when he caught her doing that. He ripped the magazines out of her fingers, cuffed her head, and threw her collages into the stove. “Don’t always sometimes try to think you’re something else,” he shouted.

I figured that, being Enuk’s granddaughter, she should want to learn to scrape skins and sew.

She leaned forward and put her hands on the cold paper of the stack of brown boxes and peered past them into the interior of the Twin Otter. Her fingers were long and brown. One of her little fingernails was unusually wide, and she kept it tucked out of sight. I thought that one fingernail was the only imperfect thing about her whole person, all condensed into one point, a mere mosquito bite of badness, and I was jealous because my eyes felt wrong, my hair, my speech, my entire skin felt wrong.

Everyone inched closer to the plane. I fantasized that Abe would step forward and offer to start the airplane. Why wouldn’t he do such things? He must remember how. It would be so easy for him, and I would have friends after that. But Abe was kneeling, biting ice off Farmer’s feet, nodding attentively as twenty-four-year-old Charley Casket bragged how to shoot wolves with a .22 Magnum.

“You got any catalog orders coming?” Dawna whispered.

“Only what Abe ordered—things we need. Vanilla. Paints. Sled bolts.” Vanilla wasn’t sold in the store. People would buy all of it the first day and get drunk.

Dawna’s laughter pealed out. “Bolts? Like washers and stuff?”

People stared. Dawna didn’t flinch. She was the only one in the village—besides Abe—who didn’t seem to care all the time what everybody thought. Dawna’s gaze flicked the crowd and caressed the last mail handed from the plane. Commiseration flexed under my ribs, and I cherished the feeling that we had a desire in common. A longing, for something, too exotic even to know how to name. Something better than sled bolts and vanilla.

“You wanna try race?” asked a boy. He was my size and had the wide friendly features of a Washington. Kids stood expectantly. I glanced at Dawna, and across at Stevie, talking to Jerry beside our dog team.

“’Kay, then,” I said, trying to avoid two prominent town taboos—acting scared and sounding smart. We raced to the schoolhouse. The boy wore fast, light tennis shoes. “My mukluks are too slow,” I panted as we walked back. It had been close. I knew I could easily beat him if we traded shoes, but no kid here would be caught in mukluks.

“Aiy, try blame.”

A group of big kids surrounded me. “You wanna fight?” someone asked. Elvis and his younger brother. I sped up.

“You’re naluaġmiu, huh?” Elvis sneered.

“I dunno.” Naluaġmiu meant white person; the Eskimo dictionary didn’t list it as a dirty word but everyone knew better. All conversations with Elvis were to the point—usually that one.

“Aiy, kinnaq.”

That meant dumb. My face reddened.

“Sure try fool!” Kids jeered. “Aiy! He sure get red!”

“You wanna fight, honky?” A boy yanked my wool hat down over my eyes. I dragged it back up, but the elastic was old, stretched and saggy. Whatever honky meant, I must be one of those, too.

“What’s six times six?” asked Lumpy Wolfglove. I smiled, relieved to recognize him. Lumpy was seventeen and in eighth grade. There were three things about Lumpy: he was good at math, he was a great rifle shot, and he liked to torture puppies and mash their heads with hammers. He was Stevie and Dawna’s part-brother.

“Thirty-six.” Iris had taught me math for as long as I could remember in the winter evenings when it was too dark to do anything and Abe wouldn’t yet light the lamp because that would waste kerosene.

“Yuay! How ’bout seven times eight?”

“Fifty?” I glanced around for smiles and shifted toward the airfield.

“You always know ninja?” Elvis asked. The boys waited.

“I don’t know lotta Eskimo words.”

“Aiy! Not even. So dumb.”

“You’re some kinda kinnaq.”

Someone choked me in a headlock. I twisted his thumb. He grunted in pain and shoved me forward on my knees.

“Hi-yaa.” Elvis spun. His boot blurred. It slammed to a stop against my ear. I skidded behind a snowdrift, other boots in my back, neck, and face. In my head his stretched-out brag, “No fuggin’ problem.” My mouth tasted salty. This part of town I was familiar with—this was the part I wanted to get past. I couldn’t see the crowd and hoped none of the adults had seen.

A woman on the edge of the crowd shouted. “Hey, what you try let them boys do? Don’t always pick fight.” She turned back to the airplane. My eyes joined the laughing boys as they jogged away on the hard-packed snow.

AT THE NATIVE CACHE, Jerry offered to watch the dogs while Iris and I accompanied Abe into the store. For Jerry it was no great sacrifice—he knew shopping with Abe and without money had slim potential. And he was big and powerful and had the axe handle. Nobody would mess with him. Beside the door I rubbed snow on my swollen lip and flung the bloody slush under the steps. Jerry looked away. The storekeeper’s Can’t-Grow dog yapped from under the boards and gobbled the mouthfuls of my blood and snow. I growled and it ran yelping under the building. Inside the crowded cabin, a lit Coleman lantern hung from a nail on the ridgepole. Guns leaned behind the counter. The walls glittered with a miscellany of store-bought items: nylon jackets, Timex watches, fishing lures, sunglasses, aftershave. Carnation canned milk. Framed holograms of Jesus. Wolverine traps. In the center of the floor three men stood by the stove, talking, occasionally laughing at a joke kept behind the walls of Iñupiaq. I heard the word naluaġmiu and turned away from the fire.

In the back, two of Abe’s homemade birch tables were on consignment. One had sold. Abe picked out sparse supplies that we couldn’t order cheaper through the mail. He didn’t enjoy being in a store. He believed most of what was sold here to be unnecessary clutter blocking the view to life, and he suffered the task patiently only because he didn’t want to come back anytime soon. He was blind to the shiny watches and jackets that hooked Iris’s and my eyes. “Hello,” he said to the men by the fire. Abe liked them. He didn’t count it as any of his business that Nippy Skuq nearly killed his wife once or twice a month, drunk and beating her; that Melt Wolfglove talked about white people as if he were the Eskimo gestapo; that Tommy Feathers shot every bear he ever caught sign of—even when they were skinny or had cubs—and left them dead because a bear had once taken their dried fish when he was a kid and his family had to go without. For one night.

Iris and I carried our parkas under our arms and searched WASHINGTON boxes for apples. Not even their faint clean smell lingered on the blue tissues they had once curled in. Iris wet one of the tissues with her mouth. Her smile looked strange, like it did when she was picking blueberries and holding a bitter green berry under her tongue to keep from eating every other handful when we needed to be putting berries away for winter.

She dabbed at the blood on my lip. “Nobody can see to the inside of us. Nobody’s taking us apart like it feels, Cutuk. Smile. ’Kay? Think of that kaleidoscope Jerry made out of tomato paste cans. Remember the mouse turds he sneaked in with the beads? Think of a smile inside a kaleidoscope. Come on! Come on! Let’s check for oranges!”

Tommy Feathers leered at her and wiped his chin. Iris dropped the mud-died tissue back in the box. She found a last onion, composting in the papery brown skins in the bottom of a mesh sack. She led me to the counter.

“No apples?” she begged. She smiled prettily at Newt Clemens, the store-keeper. I wiped my lip on my fingers and stood awkward as bent wire.

“Arii. We got nothing. Sorry, Bun.” Newt’s wrist stub showed smooth in his sleeve. He only had one hand. His right arm was thick. It could hold a rifle, people said. Before he’d shot his hand off, he’d been a real bad drunk, guuq. Guuq in Eskimo meant “it is said,” a convenient word for passing gossip.

Newt glanced up. “You big boy small laugh. How come?”

I dropped my gaze and stood mute. What made a person shoot his hand off? Something bad. Maybe hate inside, but not enough to die? No one had picked Newt up off the bloody floor. He picked himself up and cinched a piece of fishing line around his blasted stump, guuq. Because of that pain, Abe said, Newt had stopped drinking and turned into a kind man. Abe said that pretty much showed Newt had been a kind man to begin with, otherwise he’d have gone the other way, like a dog that’s a biter.

Newt shook Abe’s hand. It was strange. A white thing to do. They grinned at each other like old friends. I decided they must have done things together, way in the past. They never hunted or camped now.

“Onion.” Abe nodded. “That’ll be good with fresh moose heart.”

Iris kicked my foot. “The season’s closed,” she whispered. “That poster on the back wall says all the rules. Only one brown bear every four years. And there’s a season on ptarmigan!”

“Yep. ’Sgood eating alright.” Newt paused, “Here’s your fifty for your table I sell. Then—” He hunched over the cast iron cash register, rubbed his chin with his round wrist end, and peered at the confusing numbers. Abe reached over the counter and put a Bit-O-Honey candy bar on our pile.

Iris lifted an eyebrow. “Cutuk. Something’s wrong with Dear-Old.”

I watched, wishing he’d grabbed a candy bar with nothing as natural as honey.

“Sixty-seven fifty, for tat grub.” Newt squinted. “You got change? No cash in town.” He had a stack of worn two-party checks in his powerful hand, ready to thumb them off for change if Abe had a bigger check.

Abe draped his arm on Iris’s shoulder as he counted up the prices. “Shush, Otter,” he said. “How much for the onion?”

“Le’s see,” Newt mused. “Little one. Dollar.” He smiled at Iris and slid a pack of spearmint gum across the counter and under her fingers.

Abe stuffed the onion down inside his warm parka. “Two dollars a gallon for kerosene? Do I owe you fifty-six?” Abe’s voice was slow, innocent, uncertain. Now that he’d added the figures and stated that, he wouldn’t argue if Newt said no, you owe eighty-one. It would mean we couldn’t order an extra case of apples in the fall, but Abe would not dispute. I ignored the exchange and read the tag on a silver-blue jacket. A realization was dawning on me, that this was a requirement to being cool and Eskimo: WALLS, Size M, shell and lining 100% nylon, $97. Woven into that manufactured material was a slippery secret to being Eskimo.

“Could be tat’s right, Abe.” Newt nodded. Pouches under his eyes wobbled.

Abe dug under his overpants, in pocket after pocket, to find his cash. The men by the fire watched. I locked eyes on the good jacket, pretending it meant nothing to me that white people weren’t allowed credit.

OUTSIDE, THE LONG TWILIGHT had faded to blue-black dusk in the north and stars twinkled as we ran the team down the hill to the Wolfgloves’. Their plank house stood near the buried riverbank. It was a cold shacky house, stifling in June. In Takunak we stayed there, or else with the Newtons, who were schoolteachers. The Newtons lived in school housing and owned a record player, an electric coffeepot, and a cake mixer and used paper towels as if they were free. Their boys, John and William, were the only boys in town with Whammo slingshots. Jerry said that people in the States had Mr. Coffee electric coffeepots. I took that to mean all States kids also had store-bought slingshots for shooting squirrels and camp robbers, and more importantly for surviving scary slingshot fights in their villages.

Occasionally we stayed downriver at Franklin’s island in his dark igloo with meaningless poems pinned to the posts, and one-pot suppers—rice and rabbit, or whitefish and rice, or boiled meat with rice—and the same for breakfast and lunch. No kids. No candy. Worse than staying home. Crazy Joe’s cabin was a mile farther downstream and the size of a tent. It had a square hole in the front you had to squeeze through, like a cache—Crazy Joe’s Birdhouse, Abe called it. Joe prospected, and never went anywhere without his rock hammer and magnifying glass. Joe drank a tablespoon of urine and ate a tablespoon of dirt every day to stay healthy and close to the land. It was handy; his floor was dirt. When he was in gold dust he spent his winters near the equator and with beautiful women who wore some kind of airy flat shoes where you could see their painted toes, guuq.

Occasionally in Takunak we stayed with the Spenholts, evangelical vegetarians from California who grew green alfalfa and mung bean sprouts under a purple battery-powered light. “The microEinsteins entering the window aren’t sufficient,” Larry Spenholt would explain. “Not as photosynthetically active radiation.” His dark hair was swept back, voice nasal, eyes piercing. The Spenholts had an eight-year-old daughter, Rose, who cried if she had to go outside. She didn’t let us play with her electric Legos. We were a waste of batteries.

The Spenholts were native-worshipers. Everything the villagers did was aboriginal. So special. But Larry and Song went silent if we mentioned skinning weasels or rendering moose kidney fat. They weren’t the only ones in the village who believed white people shouldn’t be allowed to hunt. The village council—depending on atmospheric conditions and cabin-fever epidemics—voted on random things that seemed a good idea to make illegal for white people to do: Own sled dogs. Haul firewood. Set under-ice nets. Build their own houses. The Spenholts were writing a book about living in the wilderness with the Iñupiat. Gossip said they’d be millionaires when the book got done. But they stayed inside a lot and didn’t eat patiq bones or seal oil, so no one counted them as living here, just visiting.

Sled dogs barked and howled all over town. Our dogs raised their muzzles to inhale the sweet scents of love, food, and fights. Their tail sinews tightened; their eyes gleamed in the corners. They yanked sideways on the necklines, sniffing stupidly into other dog yards. Loose dogs ran out and held lightning skirmishes and growling matches with our confused team. Our dogs didn’t know how to calmly pass another team or loose dogs, or even how to run past another dog yard. At the Wolfgloves’ house, Abe smacked George and Figment with the axe handle and the team hunkered down while we chained them to willows.

Janet Wolfglove leaned out the door. “Praise Lord!” she shouted. “Go in!” She was a heavy gray-haired woman, always at home cooking and sewing and ready with a warm, squishy, motherly hug. It mortified me when she hugged me, but I liked her to do it. “Go in!” she shouted again, waving us into the messy, good-smelling kitchen. “When you fellas come?” She was wearing a heavy sweater and a silver cross, her face close to mine. I smelled scented soap, the kind that hurt your nose and told animals exactly where your traps were set under the snow.

“Today,” I said. “Before the plane came.” Two hours ago, I realized, startled at how minutes of pain and people formed mountain ranges across my past, memory peaks that normally took months to rise.

Melt, Janet’s husband, spoke in Iñupiaq though he knew well that even his children couldn’t understand most of the words. Naluaġmiu peppered his guttural complaints. We kids stood beside the stove, eyes lowered, chewing pieces of Iris’s gum. Trying to avoid any naluaġmiu-like movements.

“Adii, you kids chewing loud!” he shouted.

Our jaws stopped. We all swallowed. The barrel stove glowed red, searing our overpants. The fling of warmth wasn’t enough to thaw ice on the floor in the corners. Piles of socks, gloves, and clothes—and leaning guns—were frozen fast to the frosty walls. The temperature at the ceiling was breathtaking, fifty or sixty degrees warmer than the floor.

“Enuk go check his snares,” Janet said, catching my searching glance. I nodded, too discouraged with my luck on this long-anticipated town trip to ask if he might return that night.

Stevie and Dawna surged in the door, laughing at a joke they’d left outside. Tommy Reason followed. Everyone called him Treason. He was curly-haired, a boy Janet had taken in when his mother burned in the plane crash at Uktu. His dad had run off, long gone back to the States, maybe dead. Once when Lumpy pinched a strip of his skin off with a vise grips Treason cried for a long time, more than a vise grips’ worth. Treason didn’t tease about us being naluaġmiu, or anything about hair.

My face was hot with shame. Places with people always came with this—the reminder that my family was different from people. We didn’t say hi correctly, or stand right, chew properly—especially we didn’t know enough about fighting. And there were so many people, and names, and faces impossible to remember. I dropped my eyes and vanished into fantasy where I’d created Elvis Jr.’s lip scar by hitting him so hard that newspapers out in Fairbanks printed the account.

Stevie dragged me into the corner. He kicked clothes piles out of our way. He nudged his glasses up. He was big-boned and stocky. His coal-black hair swept back, thick and wavy. Beside his family I knew I looked like a diseased seagull among glossy ravens. Stevie had been born thirty-eight days before me, but for most of my life I’d felt older than both him and Dawna—maybe because Janet enjoyed babies. Abe had strongly suggested we skip the “whining years.” He had sewn the sleeves of our first caribou parkas shut so he didn’t have to hear or worry about lost mittens.

“Junior fight you?” Stevie didn’t ask who won. Stevie was like Janet. He had a way of smiling, unconcerned as a shrug. Kids who had wanted to fight him would ask if they could help feed his dogs.

“Yeah.” I covered my lip. Dawna’s mirror hung on a nail in the dark corner. Fly specks freckled my reflection. Worried blue eyes stared back.

Dawna giggled. “You fellas get your vanilla and nuts?”

Treason stood next to us. “Ever’body been try fight lots since that good movie.”

“Which one was that?”

“Ninja one,” Stevie explained.

I nodded, mystified.

“Cutuk, you want to see our new kinda snowgo?”

“What? You guys got a new snowgo?” I tried to clamp my expression, but the suddenness of the information smeared jealousy across my face. I wanted to hide behind the woodpile. Never in a hundred years would we have a motorized snowmobile. Abe didn’t like engines. Maybe they reminded him of his dad’s Super Cub. Not so many years ago only privileged people had snowmobiles: schoolteachers, Tommy Feathers, and a few others.

Stevie and I ran out without parkas. Stevie peeked in the window, cautious, making sure Melt wasn’t looking out. It paid to be careful around Melt. Stevie led me behind the house. He flung aside a canvas tarp. He rubbed his hands. The snowgo crouched, silver blue in the sleek moonlight, a rocket waiting to burn across the tundra. He traced the name POLARIS on the cowling with his fingers.

“Not like that old Chaparral,” he said in awe. “This new one always go fast.” His breath rose in fat clouds. “It was have windshield, but Lumpy let it come off on tree. Dad sure wanna tie him to post and whip him. Only thing he’s too big now.”

A jagged crack ran down the front. I touched the glassy cowling and jerked my hand back. “I got a splinter!” A dot of blood darkened my finger.

Stevie gripped my hand. “That’s fiberglass. Try see. Wait! We’ll be blood brothers!” He poked his finger and squeezed it to mine. “Wish for snowgos, bart. Lumpy gonna try get Pipeline job an’ buy one. Lotta people going Prudhoe.”

Lust cramped my hands. I saw my long-wished-for equalizer, a mechanical creation that would transform me into a great hunter and an Eskimo. “We gotta go Prudhoe? What’s Prudhoe anyways?”

“You drive snowgo before?”

I accosted my memory, attempting to adjust the truth—and avoid a lie. “No. Not yet.”

“That’s okay. You will sometimes. It go faster than any kinda dog, wolf, caribous.” He shook his head. “Nothing can win it. Dad get wolf. He run right over it.” We stared at the machine. Then he covered it and showed me the wolf skin draped frozen over the clothesline. It was skinned poorly; there were slashed holes and the lower legs and claws had been left behind with the carcass.

“We see lotta wolves up home, whole packs,” I bragged in the dark, “but Abe never try kill ’em. Coupla’ winters ago he left me one time to watch a moose we killed, and wolves—”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“Why Abe never always shoot ’em?” Stevie pulled at his eyebrow.

“He likes them.”

“What he always like ’em for?”

“I dunno. I—I think he just likes ’em.”

“Huh.” Stevie shrugged and flashed me a baffled look as he opened the door. In that moment it seemed preposterous that at home Abe’s reasoning could have held its knots. Why couldn’t he be normal and shoot whole clotheslines full?

THAT NIGHT WE HAD STEW that wasn’t caribou or bear or lynx or anything ordinary; it came out of a big can that Melt brought when he wandered home from slumping around the Native Cache stove. Melt was short and well padded with a square head, perfectly adapted for sitting in the rocking chair Abe had made for him, while Janet cooked, skinned animals, cut up meat, and sewed. Whiskey had melted the teeth out of Melt’s head and left a sinkhole of his lips. He dunked pilot crackers in his coffee and stuffed them in. He liked to preach sometimes at the church, when there was no pastor in town. He was grumpy except when he shared advice, weather prophecies, or his hunting stories—those things brought out a generosity in him. It was clear that they were better than any another person might own.

He was proud to serve that canned soup made from States cows. Anybody who didn’t see the Dinty Moore label would have assumed from the way he hollered at Janet and opened the can himself that he’d journeyed down to Baltimore, Illinois, or Park Place and hunted those cows all himself.

Abe didn’t like the soup. But he raised his eyebrows politely. “Salty,” he mumbled as if all beef by definition was salty. The meat smashed under my teeth, same as the potatoes. I wondered what a beef did to get its meat large-grained like moose and still mushy as boiled ground squirrel.

My cut lip stung. I set the bowl on the floor to cool. Stevie and I practiced setting his new Conibear trap, made to snap on an ermine’s head and kill it instantly. We forgot we were old and began trying to snap Dawna and Iris, since they seemed to be having more fun than we were, reading a magazine and whispering over the pictures. Jerry sat with the adults, hunched to one side, holding his soup over a Sears order blank he was filling out for Aana Skuq. People came in the door steadily, when we were in town, to have Abe make out Sears orders for them, or explain unemployment papers or taxes. Jerry did it now, relieved to have something to do that made sense to him.

Stevie snapped the trap on Dawna’s foot. She screamed. “Stevie, you dumb thing!” She whacked his head with a rolled-up magazine, hard. “Adii, Mom. Stevie always bother.”

“Ah shuck, you!” Melt hollered. “You kids go play out!” He pointed at the door. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. In the village, people yelled and swore equally at kids and dogs, and neither obeyed. That strange memory flashed, of Melt, young, quiet, friendly, cradling a baby porcupine in our doorway. With a space between his teeth that there was no longer any way of verifying. Had it been a dream? People didn’t change that much, did they?

Stevie sat on the bed with his face turned away, chuckling. Dawna stared at me, her eyes beautiful under black lashes. She wobbled the small mole on her cheek. She wore a pink hooded sweatshirt. The collar was torn around the eyelets. Her neck was smooth and brown. Her gaze looked laughy, but different somehow. I wanted her to be the first person I ever kissed—after I learned how.

She shook her magazine. A square white magazine-seed dropped out. She wrote on it and let the paper fall near my knee. The writing was upside down. I turned it around. Now it was backwards, inside out. I flipped it over and read where the pen had pressed through like braille. Cutuk, don’t listen to that kinnaq thing. You’re my friend and I wish you were my honey. The words were curly and small, unbelievably valuable. I hid the paper in my pocket to read a thousand times upriver.

I didn’t want to go outside in the dark; I slinked back to my stew. It had frozen along the edges. Janet giggled and brushed my arm. “Shh.” She dumped it back in the pot and gave me a warm bowlful.

Abe unpacked our sleeping bags to warm by the stove and got out the lynx skin he’d brought for Janet. Lynx prices had risen to two hundred and fifty dollars at Seattle Fur Exchange, for rich women’s coats, and when Abe got an envelope with a check for four skins he pulled his big traps. We still mailed in fox and rare marten skins, but now if he accidentally caught a lynx he gave it to Janet to use in mitten liners or to let Melt sell. When I was a baby he had traded Janet furs for sewing warm clothes for us, before she taught us to tan skins and sew, before she took us in.

Janet lit another Coleman lamp. It flamed and sputtered. She flipped the generator lever and pumped it rapidly. The mantle glowed, hissing out harsh shadows. “Look, Bun,” she told Dawna. “Abe bring. Aarigaa.” Dawna smiled fleetingly, not even pretending she cared. She stared at Abe, not the lynx. She and Iris went back to admiring skinny white girls in the magazine.

Janet was known all the way to the coast for the mukluks, beaver hats, and mittens she sewed. People paid more than one hundred and fifty dollars for a pair of her ugruk-bottom mukluks. Melt often took two or three pairs to Crotch Spit when he went to get drunk for a few days. Her creations were beautiful, the skin tanned white with sourdough or red with fermented alder bark. Her stitches were tiny, the garments sometimes sparkling with beads. I wondered if my mother could sew. In my stray fantasies where Mom found us and brought presents, there was no great amount of sewing. Probably she was one of the rich women now. Maybe that was why Abe didn’t send out lynx anymore. I wished Janet would be my mother. My imagination loaded a full-color picture: Melt, out on the ice. Suddenly he plunged through and the black current swept him from view.

“Janet! Make fresh coffee!” Melt shouted, still alive, sounding as if he were hollering at a dog about to piss on his rifle.

Treason came in, then Lumpy stomped in from roaming the town. He smelled of factory cigarettes. Woodrow Washington Jr., Lumpy’s young uncle, slipped in with him. He stood by the door.

“Washingtons need caribou,” Lumpy told Melt. Lumpy was taller and thicker than Melt now. He stomped snow off his boots. Melt had always reminded people that Lumpy was Janet’s son, not his. Now Lumpy was reminding him who was bigger.

A moment later, out in the night, the church bell rang curfew. Janet flung Lumpy a look. “Mom, I’m hungry,” he said, ignoring her stern eye. He pushed my head. “Hi Cutuk.” The soup was gone; Lumpy stirred up a glass of hot Jell-O. It was one of Janet’s new glass glasses; at home we had only mugs, and broken-handled mugs for glasses. Lumpy said nothing about me being kicked. He didn’t offer a sip of the sweet Jell-O.

“See that door?” Lumpy whispered. “We got real door, not homemade Kool-Aid kind like you fellas.” I stared, as surprised as the time he ate a tube of Pepsodent when the town was all out of pop and candy.

“Woody an’em need meat!”

Iris and I flung each other corner-eyed glances. Jerry peered up and focused back into the catalogs. Woody Jr. shifted by the door. His eyes were bloodshot. “Alappaa that east wind,” he said, and finally, “Melt, where’s your cigarette?”

Abe patted his pockets. “Here you go.” He drew out his tobacco pouch. Woody moved uneasily away from the door toward the different kind of tobacco.

Melt had stayed molded comfortably in his chair, tuned in to his shortwave radio. We kids dreamed of music and never heard any at home; Iris had been ready to ask Melt if he’d turn it up so the faint songs would reach us. He grumbled, flipped the radio off, handed over a pack of Marlboros. He found one boot. He kicked at the piles behind the stove, hunching over stiffly, searching for the boot’s mate. “You kids! You lose my one-side!”

I hunkered low, discovering interesting aberrations in my thumbnail. Janet slapped Woody on the shoulder. “Cigarette, that’s your food, huh?” She grinned with Abe, took a meat saw off the nail over the kitchen counter, and went out to cut a hindquarter off a frozen caribou.

Melt settled back into his chair. He tossed the boot back into a heap of clothes. “Goddamn kids.”

When Janet came back in her eyes were bright and watery from the cold and she smiled radiantly. “Alappaa!” She handed Woody the unskinned leg. Loose caribou hairs clumped on the fresh cut. “Enough?” He nodded. “Nice-out night!” she told him. “I’m glad you let me go out.”

WE WERE ALL ASLEEP, stretched like mossed-in logs, when the door creaked open. Janet had left the lantern burning on the floor beside the slop bucket; it cast a hissing circle of light. Enuk Wolfglove’s frost-whitened form materialized out of a cloud of condensation that rolled in. He was dressed in furs and held a stiff red fox under his arm. The animal’s frozen eyes squinted in death. I blinked awake and lifted my head off my ropey jeans-and-shirt pillow. It was cold on the floor. My bag had a rim of frost around the opening. I could feel cold air going into my lungs. I watched Enuk in awe, knowing with conviction what I wanted to be if I managed to grow up.

He pulled his parka over his head and opened the door and put it out in the qanisaq the way elders did. He cracked the ice around his eyes and mustache and stared down in the weak light. “Hello, Cutuk. Welcome to big city. How’s your luck?”

“I got a marten last week,” I whispered. “Finally,” I added, remembering the importance of a hunter’s humility.

Enuk nodded in generous respect, elevating me above droll twelve-year-oldness. The bridge of his nose was black, a huge frostbite scab. His cheeks were scarred black. “Yuay. Tat’s good. I get only fox.” He laid the rock-hard animal on the floor beside the woodpile, careful not to snap the tail off. He slipped outside and got the head half of a quaq trout.

“You want coffee?” Janet murmured from her and Melt’s bed.

“Let’um. Naw.” Enuk cut chunks of the raw fermented fish and dipped them in seal oil. They were so cold they smoked on the table. “Aarigaa.” Enuk sighed and grinned. Janet sat up. They spoke softly in Iñupiaq. Melt grumbled and rolled over toward the wall. Enuk squinted at him and down at his fish.

“A wolv’reen almost gonna eat that fox. Enuk snowshoeing tupak it,” Janet explained to me. “It climb tree, alright. His gun have ice and can’t work.” Enuk asked a question and she spoke again in Iñupiaq. I heard my name and wondered, were they discussing my bruised lip—or only talking about something that had fallen?

Enuk cleared his throat, switched to English. “One time gonna I’m young man, I live in’a mountains. In igloo, like you fellas, Cutuk. Good place same like your camp. Lotta wolf, wolv’reen, link, any kinda animal. Only thing, iñugaqałłigauraq be there. They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even. Let me tupak, gonna all’a time.” He chewed a piece of quaq. “I can’t leave till I get white wolf. Tat one got face jus’ like moon. He look inside you. Gonna anytime. Tat one, he hide easy, gonna see you.”

Abe stirred in his sleeping bag. I glanced into the far corner. Dawna’s eyes were open and dark, asking for answers to questions that weren’t in the room. She hugged her small stained pillow under her chin. It was a store-bought pillow, without a pillowcase, and it leaked chopped yellow foam. Behind her on the wall was a taped and torn poster of the beautiful Wonder Woman. Dents in the shiny paper caught light. The eyes had been colored in with ink and stared, detached from the small perfect smile. I wished I could loop my fingers around Dawna’s little finger, kiss her wrists; but I didn’t know how to kiss and the distance across the shack was too exposed and cluttered with sleeping people who knew everything else about me.

“One night moon shining, I chop hole for water.” Enuk held his hand two feet off the floor, measuring. His fingers were huge and dark, puffy from seventy-three years of freezing and thawing. “Not so thick ice. My fry pan have bad taste an’ I gonna washing it. Something grab me. Right on’a neck. I’m plenty strong tat time. Almos’ gonna I take t’em hands off.” Enuk clenched his hands. His words twinged me with envy. Some Eskimos—like Enuk—inherited the not-too-distant survival days kind of muscles. Much stronger, it seemed, than white-man muscles.

His eyes had gone serious behind the black pools of shadow. His words draped shivers across my shoulders. I dreaded leaving the noisy safety of town and returning home to wilderness nights, vast silence peopled with prowlings in the dark.

“Tat thing let me never breathe. Then it give up. No tracks on ta snow. Tat’s spirit. He fight me cus he’s lost, travel long way from home. Maybe spirit same gonna like us. Mad when they mixed up inside.”

He rubbed his neck and after a minute he grinned, letting the somberness flow out of the room. “Tat time I lose my fry pan.”

“How come you never hook it, Enuk?” I murmured. My chin was on my wrists, the bag clenched tight. Enuk sat up where it was warm. His story seemed pointless; I felt dumb and slightly angry for not understanding why he’d kept me awake.

“I never try hook it,” he said patiently. “Now I been gonna hunt tat place sometimes fifty year; iññuqun, spirit, iñugaqałłigauraq, they never always try bother. You tell me if you see white wolf. Your dad maybe he gonna try forget again.” Enuk and Janet laughed. Enuk leaned back from the table. “Aarigaa taikuu.”

I lay my head down and struggled to keep my eyes open. Enuk’s words sifted down in my sleepy mind. The day of cold air on the trail had left me exhausted, and being around so many people—most who knew us and we didn’t know back—took so much energy. Just trying to talk right, not chew loud or get kicked; it made sense why Abe had left Chicago.

Enuk dug in his moosehide pouch and the light glinted among his treasures. My eyelids fell closed. An instant later he dropped a cold lump in my hand. A brown bear figurine, carved out of ancient mammoth ivory, stood on its hind legs, nose up, whiffing worlds off the wind. How old it must be! It meant so much, and I pulled it into my sleeping bag and held it that way, like it was alive, deserving of eternal respect. With its enchantment, and in the cast of Enuk’s warm eyes, mean things and people could not harm me.