Читать книгу Ordinary Wolves - Seth Kantner - Страница 8

ONE

IN THE BAD MOUSE YEAR—two years after magazines claimed a white man hoofed on the moon—Enuk Wolfglove materialized one day in front of our house in the blowing snow and twilight of no-sun winter. His dog team vanished and reappeared in the storm. Abe stood suddenly at the window like a bear catching a scent. “Travelers!” He squeezed out his half-smoked cigarette, flicked it to the workbench, wiped ashy fingers on his sealskin overpants. We kids eyed the cigarette’s arc—we could smoke it later, behind the drifts, pretend we were artists like him.

“Poke up the fire?” Abe grinned like an older brother, our best friend, no dad at all. “And hide the vanilla.” His head and broad shoulders disappeared as he squirmed into his shedding caribou-calfskin parka. He banged the door to break the caribou-skin stripping loose and jumped into the storm.

Jerry pocketed the cigarette. He glanced up through his eyelashes. “I’ll share,” he mumbled. Iris and I paced the floorboards, excited about travelers. We were barefoot and red toed. It was getting dark, and stormy, or we’d all have dressed in parkas and hurried outside. Jerry lowered a log into the barrel stove. He got the second log stuck and had to wrench it back out, sparky and smoking. “Goddamn son of a biscuit!” he said, practicing with Abe absent. He was tall and ten—twice my age—and had the good black hair. Also, he remembered cities and cars and lawns, red apples on trees—if that stuff was true. Jerry left the draft open until flames licked the pipe red and smoke leaked out the cracks. He tracked down each spark, wet his finger, and drowned it. He wiped his finger on a log, peered at it, and wet it again. Abe was spanking-strict about fire. That, and no whining.

“It’s Enuk Wolfglove!” Iris said. “Only one traveler!” Through the flapping Visqueen window we watched Abe and the man hunching against the wind, chaining the dogs in the willows near our team. Enuk lived west, downriver in Takunak village, but like wind he came off the land each time from a different direction. Iris squinted, myopically counting his dogs. Abe would be too generous, offering too much fish and caribou off our dogfood pile that needed to last until Breakup. Iris felt bad if our dogs got narrow and had to eat their shit. She was eight now, black hair too, and with blue eyes—but they were weak. She had gotten snowblind, the spring before last when she didn’t wear her Army goggles on the sled back from the Dog Die Mountains. Someday, Abe meant to mailorder glasses.

I broke a chunk of thin ice off the inside of the window and sucked it. “How come they hitchin’ ’em there?” The ice tasted like frozen breath and wet caribou hair.

Jerry peered over our shoulders. “You’re talking Village English. Company isn’t even off the ice.” His voice was tight. People made him nervous. People made all of us nervous, except Iris. Our family lived out on the tundra. Abe had dug a pit, old Eskimo style, and built our igloo out of logs and poles, before I even grew a memory. Eskimos wouldn’t live that way anymore, but for some reason we did. The single room was large, sixteen by sixteen, and buried to the eaves in the protective ground. In the back, over our beds, trees reached into the soil on the roof, and in the storms we heard their roots groaning, fighting for their lives out in the wind. Our walls and roof Abe insulated with blocks of pond sod. In the sod, mice and shrews rustled and fought and chewed and built their own homes, siphoning off warmth and mouthfuls of our food and winnowing it down to tiny black shits. Abe had escaped something, roads and rules possibly. Little things didn’t bother him; Abe liked his meat dried, cooked, raw, or frozen. He didn’t mind fly eggs on it—as long as the tiny maggots weren’t moving.

Once we had a mom. She wasn’t coming back. That’s what Iris said she told Jerry the day she flew away. She had a twelve-string guitar and apparently liked music more than caribou and bears and a moss roof that leaked. She’d left us alone with none of those thousand warm things children with mothers don’t count. Abe never talked about it. He never painted it. Her leaving was the back wall of my memory.

Iris scraped at the ice on the window with her fingernails inside her sleeve. Her bony elbows stuck out of her shirt. “They’re chaining below the willows so the drifts won’t bury his dogs.” She flitted away to hang our parkas on pegs over the wood box, push mukluks and clothes tighter into the corners and under our bunks. Caribou hairs clung to all our clothes. She whisked hair and Abe’s plane shavings and sawdust into dirt corners with a goose wing.

The north wind swept the open tundra and howled into the spruce on the bank where our sod home was buried in the permafrost. The skylight shuddered. Snow laced over the riverbank. The gray wool of moving snow hid the horizons. Overhead the frozen sky purpled with night, and above the wind and frantic branches clung watery stars. Out under the ice, the wide Kuguruk River flowed past the door, through the arctic part of Alaska that our mail-order schoolbooks called barren icy desert. That shamed me, that quick, throwaway description flung from the far rich East, printed in the black-and-white validation of a textbook. My protests only made Abe shrug.

The homemade Visqueen window shivered and whacked. The men chopped a frozen caribou for the dogs. The dogs ripped the skin off the meat and swallowed chunks. They guarded the skin, pinning it down with their claws. When the last bone and meat crystal was sniffed off the snow, they chewed the hair off the skin, ate the skin. Then they curled up to protect their faces and feet.

We heard the men trudging through the drift, up on the eave, down into the trench to the door. The snow squeaked as Abe shoveled, then pounded on the skin door. “Chop the ice along the bottom! Hear me?” Jerry scrambled for the hatchet. “Now get back!” Torn by wind and muffled by the skins, his voice came in mad. I hid behind the water barrel. Abe and Enuk surged in out of the swirling snow. Ovals of frozen skin and drifted-on ice whitened their faces. I stared, longing for frostbite, the scars of heroes. Abe pulled his hood back and his curly yellow hair sprang out; his turquoise eyes shone above his bearded face. “Windy.”

“Alappaa tat wind.” Enuk was a few inches shorter than Abe. His wide face was stiff, his goatee iced. The men grinned and shook snow off their parkas and whipped snow off their mukluks. They eased ice off their whiskers. Iris danced barefoot between them, smiling and scooping up snow to throw in the slop bucket. I wished I could move like her, light and smiling. Behind the water barrel I stood on the dirt and the damp mouse turds, excited at having company.

Enuk’s gaze swung and pinned me down. “Hi Yellow-Hair! Getting big! How old?” His face was dark and cold-swollen.

Travelers all carried names for me, like the first-class mail. None were the ones I wanted. I inched out beside the blasting stove, my eyes down. “Five.” It was hard to look at Enuk—or any traveler—in the eyes after seeing no people for weeks. It was hard to speak and not run and hide again. Enuk’s frost-scarred face betrayed mysteries and romantic hard times that drew a five-year-old boy with swollen dreams. He was muscled in the forearms in the way of a skinned wolverine. He didn’t eat most store-bought food, except Nabob boysenberry jam. When he was out hunting with his dog team and snowshoes he carried a can of jam. He’d chop it open and—after dried meat, or frozen meat, or cooked meat—around his campfire he’d suck on chips of frozen jam. He also carried his little moosehide pouch. Inside were secrets; once he’d let us hold gold nuggets, lumpy, the diameter of dimes. We handed them back and they disappeared in the folds of leather. The day I turned old I was going to be Enuk. Small discrepancies left footprints in my faith, such as the fact that he was Eskimo and I seemed to be staying naluaġmiu. But years lined up ahead, promising time for a cure.

Our last human visitor had been Woodrow Washington, a month before. Woodrow had a mustache and one tooth on the bottom, one on top. They didn’t line up. Not near. His closest worldly ties were with the bottle, and that left him narrow and shaky. Though he hunted like everyone, his concentration and shots tended to stray. When he showed up, Jerry always hid the vanilla. Sober, he was nice and extra polite. “Tat Feathers boy, he suicide.” Woodrow had brought news and stayed only long enough for warmed-up breakfast coffee. “He use double-barrel, backa their outhouse. You got fifty dollar? I sure need, alright?” Abe gave him the money. Abe leaned on his workbench and rubbed his ears. Harry Feathers was—or had been—a shambling teenager with blinky eyes and acne. He talked to Abe when Abe was snacking our sled dogs in front of Feathers’s post office. It seemed as if maybe nobody else listened to Harry.

Woodrow had been disappointing company. We had only what money was in the Hills Bros can, but I blamed him more for not spending the night. And not bringing our first class.

Jerry served boiled caribou pelvis, in the cannibal pot, and pilot crackers, salmon berries, qusrimmaq, and the margarine that travelers had left—without the coloring added. Abe didn’t allow something for nothing; yellow dye was poison; the color of food was nothing. We all carried sharp sheath knives forged out of old chisels and files and used them to cut at the fat and meat on the pelvis bone. Afterward, for a while I forgot my shameful blue eyes and yellow hair when Enuk leaned back on the bearskin couch. He hooked his thumb under his chin. His gaze slid away, beyond the leaning logs of the back wall. His pleasant face might have said aarigaa taikuu, but what he did say was, “Tat time it blowing same like tis, up Jesus Crick I kill my dowgs.” I wiped my greasy hands on my pants and climbed onto his words as if they were a long team to pull me away to the land of strength and adultness.

He whittled a toothpick out of a splinter of kindling. He let the chips spin into the darkness under the table to mix with the caribou hairs and black mouse turds that carpeted our hewn floorboards. Eskimos weren’t like Franklin and Crazy Joe or other naluaġmius who occasionally came upriver; Enuk’s story was just to fill the night and he wasn’t afraid to let silence happen between words. Time was one bend of open water to him and he hunched comfortable on the bank, enjoying what the current carried.

With the stick, Enuk picked his teeth. He had most of his teeth, he said, because he never liked “shigger” or “booze.” I didn’t know what booze meant and was scared to ask, vaguely convinced it might be something frilly that city women ordered out of the first half of the Sears catalog. I sat on the chopping-block stump and stared up into his face.

Abe threw a log into the stove. Sparks hissed red trails up around his shaggy head and flicked into darkness against the low ceiling poles. The poles around the five-gallon-can safety hung with dust tendrils from past smoke. Smoke and the oily odor of flame spread in the room. Abe filled a kettle, making hot water for tea. Mice and shrews rattled spoons on the kitchen boards.

“Wind blow plen’y hard tat night I get lost. Freeze you gonna like nothing.” Enuk nodded at our bellied-in plastic sheeting windows behind his head, white and hard with drifted snow. A dwindling line of black night showed at the top. “My lead dowg, he been bite my dowgs. Al’uv’em tangle in’a willows. I leave ’em, let’um bury. I sleep in ta sled, on qaatchiaq. Tat night I never sleep much.”

He chuckled and glared. “You listen, Yellow-Hair? Can’t see only nothing too much wind.” Enuk’s bottom lip was thick and dark and permanently thrust out. I laughed, shy, and slapped my grubby red feet on the cold floor and tried to push out my too-thin lip.

In the corner on Abe’s spruce-slab bed, Jerry and Iris lay on his caribou-hide qaatchiaq playing checkers. “Rabies,” Jerry murmured. “His story’s going to have rabies.”

She pinched him. “It’s your turn.” A shrew ran on the floor. Enuk’s black eyes followed it. He picked up the block of kindling and waited. Behind the wood box shrews whistled.

Jerry dragged a moose-antler checker over her pieces. The tops of his were marking-penned black, Iris’s red. “’Kay then. King me.” They wore corduroy pants. The corduroy ridges were eroded off the knees, thighs, and butts. Iris had two belt loops cinched together with twine to keep her too-big pants up. Abe didn’t encourage us to change clothes more than once a month. More than twice a month put a burden on everybody. He wouldn’t say no, but the house was low and one room—the only place to get out of the weather for miles—and the faintest disapproval could hang in the air.

The corner posts of Abe’s bed were weather-silvered logs, the tops bowled from use as chiseling blocks and ashtrays. Above the foot of his bed, his workbench was messy with empty rifle brass, pieces of antler and bone, rusty bolts, wood chips, and abandoned paintings, the canvas and paper bent and ripped by his chisels and heavy planes. Abe Hawcly was a left-handed artist. He was also our dad. But we kids didn’t know to call him anything generic or fatherly, only Abe. Travelers called him that. By the time we realized what normal people did, years had hardened into history. Calling him Dad felt worse than shaking hands.

“Enuk. Here.” Abe slid a mug across the uneven boards to the middle of the table. He rubbed his sore knee and sat and rolled himself a cigarette with one hand. “Kids, don’t worry about schoolwork tonight.” He waved his match out. Two joints of his ring finger had been swallowed by a whaling winch in Barrow. His hands were thick and red, paint dried in the cracks. They carved faces on scraps of firewood and drew whole valleys lurking with animals on cardboard boxes.

“Ah, taikuu.” Enuk slurped the scalding tea that would have seared a kid’s mouth into mealy blisters. “My dowgs be funny tat night. Lotta growl.”

Another night passed in his story.

“How old were you?” My words tumbled away like a fool’s gloves bouncing downwind. Blood stung my cheeks. Interrupting seemed worse than pissing your pants in front of the village schoolhouse.

“Hush, Cutuk,” Jerry said. Iris giggled and pretended to bite her nails, both hands at once. Abe had a piece of caribou-sinew string in his fingers, and he began pulling loops through loops. A lead dog formed. He turned the wick down on the lamp. Storytelling shadows stretched farther out from the moldy corners. The wind gusted. The door was half buried. I pictured those yellow metal nuggets. Wondered if they were in Enuk’s pocket, and how young he’d been when he found the first one.

Enuk sipped. “Cutuk, you gonna be hunter?” He flicked my arm, unaware of the stinging power of his thick fingers. Tears flooded my eyes. “Tat’s good. You got one ’hol life. Tat’s plen’y. Gonna you be tired if you alla time try hurry.”

Abe smiled. He pulled a string. In his hands the lead dog vanished.

I shrank low and twisted broken threads in the knees of my pants. At least he’d used my Eskimo name. Clayton was my white name—a mushy gray one. I had taught my ears not to hear it, until people learned it didn’t work. Cutuk meant fall. Not fall when the berries were ripe and the bears were fat enough—fall like dropping down out of a tree without planning. Except in Iñupiaq it was spelled katak; but none of us or Enuk had known the spelling. The way Iris sounded it out had stuck. It was no first-pick name, misspelled and not even easy to say, but Enuk bestowed it on me before I could campaign for a better one. So I justified it into greatness by pretending it had special come-from-behind potential.

“Night time, still snowing I hear lotta growl. First light gonna I dig t’em dowgs. Right there, blood in’a snow. When I fin’ my leader, tat one try bite.” He ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. One of his ears had a hole up near the top as small as a goose’s windpipe. Gray hairs curled through. “Five dowgs. Good size dowg team back then time, not much food on ta country. Not like now gonna t’em white guy dowgfed in’a bag. I shoot three before it turn dark. Right there I know tat gonna be real bat. Tat was nineteen . . . nineteen thirty-something, before Kennedy and Hitler fight. Could be I’m twenty-five tat time.

“Cutuk. Peoples got not much shells tat time not like now. I got jus’ only one shell. I go ’head shoot t’em last two dowgs.”

The glory of Enuk’s words melted under a warm spell of reality. I pictured my pup Ponoc, grinning his sloppy puppy grin—he collapsed under the boom of a rifle. Blood sprayed Ponoc’s silver face and ran out a red hole, steaming into the snow like the last rabid fox Abe had shot. The corners of my throat grew wet and needed to swallow.

“How many nights I wait. Even I make spear from spruce. Then I see hills. Right there,” Enuk shrugged, grinned, and gestured, his huge fingers cutting straight across his other palm, angling up, “I take off on snowshoe. No dowgs. Could be they already let me gonna crazy. I see wolv’reen. Right there. Real close. No ammo in ta pocket. Long time ago gonna plenty hard time we always have. No ammo in ta pocket.”

Enuk sat for a minute, then shuffled over and dumped his coffee grounds in the slop bucket by the door. The grounds plopped on the dishwater frozen in the bottom. He reached up to a peg behind the stove for his parka and mukluks. Reminiscence no longer softened his face; the telling was over—the story, like old stories I’d heard at the Wolfgloves’ house in Takunak, started in the middle and ended somewhere along where the storyteller grew tired.

Enuk shook water droplets out of his wolf ruff. I tried to contemplate the way I knew grown-ups did, to poke at his words with sharpened thoughts. I wondered if he’d restart the tale the following night—or in a year. I felt I should comprehend something profound about shooting dogs, but I couldn’t get past thinking that the books on the shelf over Abe’s bunk, the soapy dishwater and coffee grounds in the slop bucket—and our team sleeping buried down by the river—all were blatant proof that we owned too much, lived too comfortably. I needed tougher times to turn me Eskimo.

Our low door was built from split spruce poles, insulated with thick fall-time bull caribou hides nailed skin-out on both sides. The hinges were ugruk skin. “Better chop the bottom loose,” Abe suggested. He reached in the wood box for the hatchet. Enuk pounded with his big fists until the condensation ice crumbled. He yanked inward. The wind and swirling snow roared, a hole into a howling world; the wind shuddered the lamp flame. A smooth waist-high white mirror of the door stood in his way. Chilled air rolled across the floor. Enuk leapt up and vanished over the drift into the night gusts.

Chunks of snow tumbled down. I had a flash of memory—summertime, green leaves. Enuk, and a strange man. The man had combed hair. And a space between his teeth that he smiled around and showed us how to spit through. He cradled an animal in calico cloth. A baby porcupine! The man seemed to be Enuk’s son Melt. But how could that be? Melt was mean and smiled like indigestion. Mixed up behind my eyes was that baby porcupine dead in a cotton flour sack, a ski plane taking off, and me crying, unable to convey the tragedy of my blue Lego spiraling to the bottom of the outhouse. These memories seemed valuable, as unreplaceable as that Lego had been, but the roar of the wind sucked my concentration into the dark.

Abe scratched snow aside trying to close the door again. “Need to use the pot?” he asked.

Iris did and I did, and we hurried. There was nowhere to hide—it was how Abe had first explained the word vulnerable—with Enuk coming back momentarily. Breaking trail to the outhouse would have involved digging out the door, getting all dressed in overpants and parkas, finding our way, digging out the outhouse door, trying not to crap on our heavy clothes. Then tracking snow in the house; wet furs; trying to get the door closed again; firing up the stove. Abe didn’t encourage any of it. Embarrassment counted as nothing. It mattered to him as much as the color of margarine.

Abe slammed the door, and again. His hair and the collar of his flannel shirt were floured with snow. He grinned. “Glad I don’t have to go to work in the morning.”

“What he gonna do?” I asked, instantly ashamed of the excess of Village English in my voice.

“Check the dogs.” Jerry clacked checkers together, matter-of-factly. “Abe, can an animal catch rabies and get those symptoms in one night?”

“Maybe not. That virus takes a couple weeks to infect your nervous system.” Abe picked up the book he’d been reading that morning—The Prophet—turned it over, peered at the spine thoughtfully, and put it back down. Abe eyed his thumbnail and bit it. “I had to shoot a rabid moose that charged in the team, long time ago, in the Helpmejack Hills.”

“Does a person forget their friends?”

Iris crossed her eyes. “Jerry’ll never skin another fox’s face.”

“I bonked that rabid one that scared you,” Jerry growled, “chewing the door. You were going to stay inside until Abe got home.”

A second rabid fox had screamed insults to our sled dogs and snarled in the window at his warped reflection. After that incident my imagination encountered them all winter, during the bad-mouse year, foam dripping off their narrow black lips. Nights mice and shrews streaked across my pillow and gnawed at my caribou-hide qaatchiaq, and I lay awake doubly frightened that something as invisible and unaccredited as mouse spit could carry such consequences.

Jerry chewed his cheeks, cataloging Abe’s answers. Jerry remembered poems, songs, definitions. I believed that he wanted to be the healthiest, the smartest, and the best, in case our mom came back. He was all that, and had black hair—things that I thought should come to him with smiles.

Iris’s eyes flashed. “Guys, I say that’s what happened six years ago. Abe caught rabies! He thought he was walking to the store in Chicago to buy tobacco, next thing he noticed a new baby, lots of snow, and us kids gathering masru. He’s maybe still got ’em.”

I looked down, ashamed; I hadn’t seen a city. Jerry didn’t smile. “You win.” He rolled up the birchbark checkerboard, with every other square peeled to make the board pale white and brown. Under the dull roar of the wind, in the leftover silence, I had a sudden flash—Jerry was thinking our mother may have caught rabies.

A gust shook the stovepipe. Abe shut the draft on the fire, lit a candle to place by his bed. He pissed in the slop bucket. He rubbed his knee. “One of you kids lay Enuk out a qaatchiaq.” Steam rose out of the bucket. I stood up, rattling the lamp on the table, disturbing the shadows.

The door burst open. Enuk jumped in. A thought startled me: Would a person tell if he had been bitten? People might run away. Someone would stand across a valley and sink a bullet in your head. What if a dog bit me and died later; would I have the courage to tell? Enuk rubbed his hands together close to the stove. He grabbed my neck from behind. He laughed near my ear. “What you’re laying out qaatchiaq for, Yellow-Hair? You gonna nallaq? Nice night, le’s go hunt!”

TWO DAYS PASSED. The wind fell away and Abe shoveled out the door entrance. We climbed up the snow trench into a motionless thirty-below day. The old marred snowdrifts had been repaired and repainted. A scalloped white land stretched to the riverbanks, across the tundra to the orange horizon. The cold sky seemed crystalline, dark blue glass, in reach and ready for one thrown iceball to bring it shattering down.

In our parkas and mukluks, we kids ran back and forth examining the new high drifts and sliding off cornices. Abe helped Enuk find his sled and they dug at it. The snow was hard, and it chipped and squeaked under their shovels. They iced the sled runners with a strip of brown bear fur dipped in a pan of warm water. They were careful not to get any water on their mukluks. Iris and I stood together while Abe and Enuk harnessed his seven dogs. Jerry stayed in the safety of our dog yard. He mistrusted strange dogs. Often they snapped at him, though he never lost his temper and clubbed dogs with shovels or rifle stocks the way other people did. I vowed when I grew big enough to handle huskies I wouldn’t miss a chance to help a traveler hitch up.

Enuk stood on the runners with one foot on the steel claw brake, his hands in his wolf mittens holding the toprails. The dogs lunged against their towlines, yelping to run. Our dogs barked and scratched the snow. There was little room left in the yowling for last words with company. Enuk said something and nodded north. We stepped close. “Next time, Cutuk? Be good on ta country.” He swept away, furrowing snow to dust with his brake.

We hurried out on the river to watch him become a black speck and disappear far off downriver. Dark spruce lined the far riverbank. In my mind I could see the village and barking dogs and the people there, and Enuk’s grandchildren, Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove, with their mother, Janet, to kiss them and make caribou soup with yellow seashell noodles.

Jerry kicked snow. Abe put his hand awkwardly across my shoulder. I flinched. Abe and Jerry and I didn’t touch—unless it was rough, tickling or king-of-the-hill wrestling over a cornice. Abe turned toward the house. “If the trail stays firm . . .” He wiped his nose. He liked us to be happy, and we usually stayed that way for him. “Maybe next month if the trail’s okay, we’ll go to town? Nice to have a traveler, wasn’t it?”

I tried to ignore the splinters of comfort at the thought of people. I was going to be a hunter; the toughest hunters traveled alone. I kept my mouth shut and broke the tiny tears off my eyelashes. Abe hated whining. He believed that excess comfort was damaging, that whininess was contagious. Stern lines would gather at his mouth and grooves would form above the bridge of his nose. “You an Everything-Wanter now?” he’d growl. And then I would wish for my mother with her black hair and flashing eyes.

But the truth that made me squirm?—she’d left me few memories. All I was certain I remembered of her was that man January Thompson, a fat Outsider, a wolf bounty hunter with a blue and gold airplane on skis, bouncing on the ice, lurching into the sky. I pretended a memory but in the tiny honest slice of my mind I knew I had cannibalized whole hindquarters off Jerry’s stories. Jerry was almost five when they left the lower States. “We came in Abe’s blue truck,” he’d say. “The license plates said North to the Future. You were almost three, Iris. ’Member?” That was all. But it stung. That history didn’t include me. The Hawcly past before the Arctic was another planet, a sunny place of Sunkist lemons and green grapes drying into raisins—instead of meat drying into meat—a place that I’d never walked and couldn’t put roots to even in memory.

Jerry once told how my mother had a yellow car, with a built-in radio. I wondered why so many of the stories had cars. Did all the cars have radios? When he related these things, Iris and I squeezed together on the bearskin couch, curious about that stranger down in the States who wasn’t coming back, but somewhere still lived. It was all strange, but seemed normal, too, the way she was a fairy tale that kept fogging over, while Enuk, even vanished downriver, stood in my life as sharp as a raven in the blue sky.

Abe and Jerry and Iris tramped up to the house. I lingered in the dog yard, playing with Ponoc and the others. They stared downriver, howling occasionally, forlorn and dejected about not following Enuk’s team. It was a chance to play with the dogs without getting scratched and licked off my feet. I ruined it by slipping Ponoc a stray chip of frozen moose off the snow near the dogfood pile. Sled dog brains kept to narrow, well-packed trails of thought, and food lay at the end of all the trails. They howled and gestured with their noses, wagging and protesting the inequitable feeding. My heart grew huge for them, my happy-go-lucky friends, always delighted to see me, prancing and tripping over their chains. How endless the land would be without their companionship.

Suddenly I saw the dog yard empty, the strewn gnawed bones, the yellow pissicles and the round melted sleeping circles, all drifted white; only the chain stakes remained stabbing out of the snow like gray grave markers. A mouse ran out from under the meat pile, dropped a turd, and disappeared down a round hole. I backed away from the lunging dogs. Maybe they were already infected.

Ponoc bit a wad of caribou hair off his stomped yard and tossed it playfully in the air. His pink tongue flicked between his teeth, his mouth muddy with hairs. I spat between my teeth. Maybe in my huge future I would have to shoot a whole team of my own dogs. The thought of the years ahead flooded hot in my chest. I raced up to our igloo, to my brother and sister and father, there eating paniqtuq and seal oil and red jam. Food that would make me Eskimo.