Читать книгу Ordinary Wolves - Seth Kantner - Страница 9

TWO

WHEN I WAS TEN, on a night shortly after the sun returned, a pack of wolves raided our peoplefood pile. Along the bank to the east, beyond our pole cache, the wolves worked over it all except one frozen caribou—a skinny carcass that we too were leaving till last. Our dogs howled and barked in the dark. By first light at ten o’clock the pack had vanished, leaving a pawed circle of meat dust and cracked bone chips in the reddened snow, and tracks leading in too many directions onto the windblown tundra.

The faint scent of clean dog hung in the clawed holes. Abe hunched down, kneading his yellow beard, happier than if he’d discovered gold in the gravel at the bottom of our water hole. Snow clung behind his knees to the creases of his overpants. He examined a wolf turd, long and gray with twisted caribou hair. In his hand the shit looked as capable of magic as a tube of Van Gogh Basic White.

“Should have come out to check the barking,” he muttered. “Like to have the scene in my mind.” He stood and stared off north, spraying a square of his powerful imagination against the sky. He often leaned against trees, absorbed in the pastel glow of evening. “Been years since the wolves took much from us. Usually too wary. Hope we don’t get people-company next couple days.”

A raven flew overhead, heading north. We eyed it.

“We’re low on meat.” Jerry melted his cheek with a bare hand. Black hairs were sprouting on his jaw. I itched with distress when his hand wandered to the icicles on his downy mustache. “Wolves’re always coming by. Why’s it a big deal?”

I kicked the snow ground, embarrassed for both of them. I was ten years old, behind schedule on shooting my first wolf. “Let’s go after ’em.”

Abe didn’t hear.

For the next two weeks Abe read on his bed. Suddenly his book would drop and he’d rise, practically walking through us to his easel. He worked in oil. The turpentine fumes left us breathless and lightheaded. Tubes of his paint had frosted to the wall under his workbench, and he swore. He glared over his shoulder at the dim light, paced, peered, his mouth puckered. At night he tossed on his qaatchiaq, lit candles, rose to sigh at his work, and one night he tore the canvas free and stuffed it in the stove.

The second painting became a staked dog team, witnessing a pack of wolves borrowing caribou. Each dog’s face held a different expression. Some merely whined, sitting, suffering the thievery patiently. Others stood on their sinewy back legs, lunging against their chains. Their mouths were outraged barks. None of the dogs were of our team—they lived in Abe’s past or in his imagination. A black dog closest to the wolves jumped so hard his chain flipped him upside down, and Abe painted his curled claws, hinted at the wiry gray hair between his toes. Nine wolves leaned over the meat, cracking bones in their triangle molars. The painting had a dark silvery feel, a feeling that the wolves were friends, with each other, and with the night. I thought Abe’s paintings of wolves were better than his other paintings.

During those weeks the fire in the barrel stove often burnt down to ashes. The cold waiting beyond the door and walls hurried in. Our last caribou shrank to a backbone, neck, and one shoulder. We peeled the back sinew—for thread for sewing—and made frymeat out of the backstraps before boiling the backbones. Abe didn’t care what was for dinner. He sipped his tea and answered some of our questions, not all of them. We asked few. He was in a place for artists; we didn’t know the language. We kids simply knew Abe wouldn’t hunt and kill meat until something changed. We were allowed the few .22 cartridges to shoot ptarmigan and rabbits and foxes—if we could find any—but not allowed to take the big rifle or its ammo.

Jerry and Iris and I sling-shot mice gnawing in the food shelves, and split wood and chipped five feet through the river ice and hauled buckets of water. We heated water on the stove and scrubbed our gray laundry in the galvanized washtub, mopping with a shirt at water that came out the leaks. The two windows steamed up. The black water we hauled outside and poured down the slop hole. Steam rose and the ice popped and crackled. The second week we splurged and hauled extra buckets and took baths in the washtub. It was my turn to use the water first. That meant I had less to kneel in because we kept the last kettle boiling to add as the tub cooled. Abe squatted in the tub last. His fingers and forearms were smeared with paint. The surface of the water grew oily. He stood naked by the fire and dried.

We studied our schoolbooks, administered exams to each other: spelling, phonics, math, English, biology. With his hands floury from making bread, Jerry drew circles, explaining cells and cell walls, mitochondria and osmosis. On the bearskin couch we read books out of the library box and flipped through Harper’s magazines, scrutinizing glossy pictures advertising giraffe-legged women smoking cigarettes and sleek gray automobiles called Cougars.

“Someday I’m going to have a Chevy truck,” Jerry declared.

“Don’t be boring!” Iris bent his fingers off the page. “I’ll have an ocean-blue convertible. And smoke Virginia Slims!”

“You never seen ocean. Except in Crotch Spit. That was frozen. It doesn’t count.”

I kept quiet. I was the one born in the native hospital in Crotch Spit. I’d never seen a real car—only the dead red jeep where kids in Takunak played tag and bounced on the burnt seat springs.

We put the magazines up and scraped caribou hides with the ichuun. You always scraped with another hide underneath, to pad the skin and keep the ichuun from tearing holes. We then spread on sourdough, folded the hides skin to skin, put them under Abe’s qaatchiaq to let the sourdough soak in overnight, and later dried and scraped the skins again to finish tanning. The windows dripped condensation. Outside in the twilight, big snowflakes fell. We hauled in wood and kicked the door shut tight and stuffed a jacket at the base of the door to keep cold air out. Abe lit the Coleman light. He pumped it and hung the hissing lamp from a nail on the ridgepole. Shadows twirled and came to rest. We got out an early-fall hide that Iris had sourdoughed earlier. The hair was short, thinner, and soft. We scraped it and worked the skin in our hands until it was tanned and white. Jerry traced new insoles for all of our soft-bottom and ugruk-bottom mukluks. Iris cut them with Abe’s razor. In silence we sewed ourselves caribou socks, then swept up the hairs. Abe hunched over his easel, silent. Caribou hairs clung to his sweater. Outside, the snow piled up.

“Should I boil meat?” Jerry murmured. Iris and I soundlessly raised our eyebrows, yes in Iñupiaq.

Jerry put leg bones and water into the cannibal pot. While it simmered, we used Abe’s powder scale to measure 4832 gunpowder, and reload .30-06 ammo with the Lee Loader. Iris sighted down a completed cartridge. “Boy, fresh moose heart would be good, wouldn’t it?” She covered a grin, swinging her gaze to Abe.

“Look!” Jerry said. “You forgot to prime this one. You’re wasting!” We glanced at Abe. Wasting was the baddest word in our family. Jerry bit the lead. He pried the bullet out and dumped the gunpowder back in the scale. The bullet copper was dented but would still be good enough for finishing off a caribou if it was too alive to get with a knife. “Here! You’re not supposed to get the inside of the primer sweaty, ’kay?”

I crossed my arms, checked my muscle. Actually, we had plenty of food: seasonings and sugar and fifty-pound sacks of flour, powdered milk, rice, and beans. Jars of rendered bear fat for shortening. Most of a quart of vanilla. And there was a keg of salted salmon bellies, and piles of quaq in the dogfood cache. We could eat that. It was good with seal oil, and in the seal oil were our prized masru and pink tinnik berries. We wouldn’t go hungry.

IN LATE JANUARY, Abe took his rifle off the peg behind the stove. We kids scattered for overpants and parkas. He blew dust off the bolt and scraped his thumbnail along the stock where frozen snot or dog spit had dried. His hair and beard were unruly. His turquiose eyes squinted with a grin. “Iris? Feel like coming along?” He nodded and laid the gun on the floor across his parka and mittens. Jerry and I slumped. Abe boiled water, filled his thermos, and slid it into the caribou-hide insulating tube. We fidgeted, out of the way, while Iris got bundled and ready.

They hitched the team and went east, hunting for an acquiescent moose to contribute both dog food and people food. The caribou herds were far south in their wintering grounds. It was cold—cold enough that the kerosene had jelled and wouldn’t pour into the lamp—and the dogs did not lunge to run.

Afterward, Jerry wandered back inside to rewrite a letter to his pen pal in New Zealand, romancing her long distance. Mice rustled and scurried on the floor. His pen rustled the paper. He liked to write letters and poems. And his diary, too. I figured he was faking talent. We kids didn’t say it—that would be bad luck—but we hoped we’d inherited a little of Abe’s specialness. We grew up watching our dad; for months on end he was the only one to watch, to teach us about our world, and tidbits of the city world. We watched his left hand, the one with good genes, hoping to recognize the first twinges in our own hands.

I hauled armloads of wood. Jerry went out to cut meat for dinner. The house was quiet. The table and chairs and floorboards seemed gray, dingy, and bare with no one about. Curiosity pushed my honor aside—I slid a thumbnail in where the edges of his diary’s pages were smudged. My eyes scrambled over the words . . . only you who watched mothers fly away, after the cold will be my sisters and brothers . . . I dropped the book. Quickly I placed it back on the table. I laced my mukluks. Fumbled into my parka. Hurried out behind the woodpile and pretended to scan the tundra for life.

Jerry hung the bow saw on a nail. His mukluks squeaked on the snow. He carried sawed caribou ribs inside. They were skinny ribs, thin and with signs of wolf lips and shrew turds on them. He came outside, no jacket. His brown eyes looked rolled back like a village dog held down by its last six inches of iced-in chain. “That’s mine.” There was red meat sawdust between his fingers. Jerry’s big square fist swung. My face seemed to crack open. Behind a snowbank I leaned over. Blood hung in coagulating red icicles off my nose. I tried to forget the words in the diary. And the jealousy that Jerry might have what I didn’t—a share of Abe’s gift.

Iris, too, had something. Something completely different, though. It wasn’t something you could talk about. One spring a white-lady social worker skied down the river towing a plastic sled. She was from the distant big city of Anchorage, and how she got upriver we didn’t know. She wore bright blue windbreakers and windpants, and had a black backpack, an orange aluminum foil space blanket, and dehydrated space meals and Swiss chocolate bars. She was very beautiful and had heaps of wavy brown hair and didn’t seem to get cold. Her name was Wax Tiera, and we adored her though we suspected her of being an alien. The odd thing was, the day before she showed, Iris cleaned the entire igloo in a way we had never before done. She swept away caribou hair and dust, washed the floorboards with steaming soapy rags, organized Abe’s paints, used the splitting maul to knock down the spike that froze in the outhouse. She had scrubbed all day, washing the outsides of mason jars, laughing excitedly, squinting nearsightedly into corners.

Another time, two falls ago, before Freezeup, Napoleon Skuq Sr. came upriver in his spruce-plank boat. Nippy had a big eighteen-horse Evinrude. He was proud of it. He boated up every couple of years, his fall trip. Sometimes he brought a cousin, sometimes his sons, Junior and Caleb. Nippy wore a leather skullcap. His eyes around the edges were bumpy and yellow. He arrived drunk, spent the evening telling Abe how to hunt and trap, and traveled on in the morning. Within a few days he came back downriver, his prop dinged, the boat weaving slow in the first ice pans. Caribou legs poked over the gunnels of his boat. He spent the night again, and this time Nippy’s hands had a tremor as he pulled his Bible out of a cotton sugar sack. He spread it soft and sagging on his thigh and under the wick lamp preached about Jesus and sin and a bush that you couldn’t put out from burning. Then he told Abe some more of his hunting stories. He bragged about his son graduating from Mt. Edgecombe boarding school in Sitka.

“I thought your son died,” Iris said softly. Nippy swung his wet eyes on her. “Maybe you thinking somebody else.” He was sitting on the bearskin couch, on the shoulder end, where the hair had worn the least. He glanced into the soup pot, served himself the tenderest fat short brisket bones. He scooped a plop of cranberry sauce on his plate. Iris stood up from the Standard Oil Co. wooden Blazo-box seat that pinched your butt and squeaked. She scraped her gnawed bones into the dog pot and went to fill kettles on the stove to heat water for dishes. After Freezeup, when the ice was thick enough to travel, word came that Caleb Skuq had been stabbed behind a bar in Juneau and died. No one told the whole story in front of Iris, though everyone in Takunak knew it, and they glanced at her differently.

ABE HAD LEFT the unruly puppies, Plato and Figment. They were interested in my bloody nose. I hung around the dog yard, chopping out pissed-in chains and the third-of-a-drum dogfood cooker. The top was sharp and rusty where Abe had cut it with a sledgehammer and his piece of sharpened spring-steel. I ignored the bite of the cold and wandered in a fantasy of myself shooting a charging moose. Jerry’s pen pal wish-girl lay shrieking in the trail. Broken leg. He couldn’t get to her. Calmly I shot. The girl blurred into the dark-haired woman on the front of the JCPenney catalog and had no difficulty jumping up to kiss me repeatedly.

Suddenly Plato sniffed. She barked, and with a worried tail stared north. A flock of redpolls shrilled up in the birch branches and vanished in a gust of small wings. Off the high tundra west of Jesus Creek slid the elongated black speck of a dog team. Travelers! It didn’t matter who, if we knew them or not, what they looked like. Or how much they ate, snored, farted—even if they spoke only Iñupiaq, or Russian. Only that they would talk and be company!

The speck separated into seven dogs and came across what we called Outnorth Lake or Luck-a-Luck Lake or The Lake, depending on the season and the conversation. Enuk mushed up the knife ridge that formed a narrow bank separating the lake from the Kuguruk River. He kicked his snow hook into an ice-hard drift. His dogs flopped down, panting. I sank my hatchet into a dog stake and ran to his sled, gripping the toprails.

“Hi, Enuk!”

He gazed stiffly out of the frosty silver circle of his wolf ruff. He broke ice off his gray mustache and eyelashes. Then he grinned, as if trying earlier might have pulled hairs. He smelled of campfire and coffee. He took off his rifle and hung it carefully off the handlebar of his sled. His gaze flicked over the tracks left by Abe’s team. I stayed respectfully silent while he rubbed the frosted faces of his dogs and bit the iceballs off from between their hairy toes. It was annoying and white to talk too much or ask questions, especially when a traveler first arrived. Shaking hands, also, was a sign of being an Outsider. Enuk wore new tan store-bought overpants. On one hem was the red chalk of frozen blood. His sled tarp was lashed down, too tight for me to poke under without being nosy. Sled tarps had always held secrets, brought packages, presents, fresh meat, store-bought cookies. Old and ratty didn’t matter—sled tarps were the biggest wrapping paper of all.

“When you leavin’, Enuk?” I asked finally.

“Pretty quick.”

“How come? Spend the night.”

Staring north, he pursed his lips thoughtfully. He nodded. “Maybe gonna I spen’a night.”

“I wish!”

“If I know, I woulda’ bring you-fellas’ first class.” His squinted eyes roamed the snow-covered river, willows, and tundra, probing for the tiniest movement of life. He swung back to me. “Anytime they could get you.” I eyed his sled. What was he talking about? Bears? Spirits? “If they want you they get you, anytime.” He noticed my eyes on his tarp. “Ha ha, Yellow-Hair!” He kicked a fast mukluk at me.

He unlashed the tarp and spread it open. “I get lucky.” He nodded toward the mountains. “T’em wolves kill moose young one. Not too far.” I didn’t follow his eyes. The wolf was silver-gray and huge, twice the size of Enuk’s huskies, its hair long and black-tipped. I petted the animal in wonder, feeling splinters of blood frozen deep in the fur. I recognized the clean dog odor. Broken ribs shone in a large bullet hole in the side of his chest. I saw the wolf stumbling, hearing his own bones grating, panting against death pouring into his lungs.

I shook my head to dislodge the pictures.

“Coulda have more, alright. Only thing, smart one in’a bunch. He let t’em others run.” He looped his stringed overmitts behind his back. Barehanded, wary of the blood, he kneaded the wolf’s thin lower legs. “Alappaa! Freeze. Hard gonna for tat way ta skin. I bring tis wolf inside. Wait for your old man.”

ABE AND IRIS RETURNED without meat. We ate the skinny ribs Jerry had boiled. Skinny meat was a sign of a poor provider, but Enuk ate with relish. Afterward he skinned the wolf. When he finished, he folded the skin fur-out. On our floor the naked wolf grinned permanently in the weak lamplight, his teeth and tendons white against dark red muscles. The stomach was hard, and fetid smells were beginning to come out. Enuk had only a little blood on his fingertips. There was a slit in the wolf’s throat. “Let his spirit go other wolf,” Enuk said. “Gotta respect.”

“Do you like wolves?” I asked.

Iris and Jerry peered over the tops of their schoolbooks. Their papers were spread on the wooden Blazo boxes that we made into desks—and also cupboards, shelves, seats, muskrat-stretching boards, and more.

“They got fam’ly. Smart. Careful. I like ’em best than all’a animal. Your dad know. He make tat good picture. Gonna ta white ladies buy tat one more than any kinda wolf skin. Ha! Ha!” Enuk opened the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He flung the carcass into the dark. The furless animal slapped on the packed snow out under the chipped eyes of the stars. In the dog yard one of Enuk’s dogs barked nervously at the thump in the still night. An echo rolled back lonesome from the timber across the river, and the dog challenged it with three quick barks.

“Yep, Yellow-Hair. Tomorrow you take your old man.” Enuk grinned. “Go out back way, hunt moose.” His eyes flicked to his knife, and I wondered what else he was thinking about and whether it was killing more wolves.

“We might.” Abe smiled and looked shy about something. He wiped blood drips off the floor with a holey sock rag. His cheeks and nose burnt with red ovals from frostbite that day on the trail. Iris’s face was marked red, too. They hadn’t seen the right moose—a barren cow, a moose that would have fat meat and its hide fair for snowshoe babiche, sled washers, cold-weather mukluk bottoms.

“We might look again tomorrow.” Abe folded the cardboard he had laid out for Enuk to work on. “You do a real nice job, Enuk.” Abe sounded as if he would have an impossible time skinning even a caribou legging. Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes, perfectly—better than any fox I’d ever seen skinned in Takunak. Their pelt was papery, difficult not to tear with the sharpened metal tube ichuun, difficult not to tear when turning the dried skin back fur-out. And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect to the animal whose life we’d taken.

Often, Abe helped me make birch and babiche snowshoes that few in Takunak remembered how to make. Or one time he helped write a letter to the substitute president, Gerald Ford. But he would never pick up an axe like he was tough. Never talk or hold a gun that way. Never brag, “I’m goin’ after bear.” Any bear we got walked up on its own and still Abe didn’t want to kill it. Around travelers, Abe’s modesty trimmed off too much of the fat. Apparently things started getting out of balance back with his dad. Tom Hawcly had been a sport hunter, a menacing species to have in any food chain. He left our grandmother in Chicago and roamed off to Barrow to be a pilot, the owner of two Super Cub airplanes, and a guide for polar bear hunters. The story was exciting enough, and romantic—up to the part where they found him smeared dead on the sea ice. People along the Kuguruk River hated sport hunters and guides as much as they did schoolteachers. Frequently they were one and the same. I was thankful that Barrow was a long way north. And that people thought of white people as having no relatives.

Enuk finished skinning out the paws. He talked of shooting his first wolf when he was ten. His dad had taken him to check a tiktaaliq fish trap. A lone wolf was there on the ice gnawing yesterday’s frozen fish blood. The wind was behind the wolf. Enuk’s father handed him the rifle.

I listened to Enuk’s low voice and lusted to gun down a whole pack, to stockpile prestige. Somehow, I had to learn to stop worrying about wolf pain. Abe had to stop molding me into an unhero.

Abe slapped his pants, fumbled in his big pockets for tobacco and papers. He glanced over the table and workbench, and eventually gave up. To Iris he said, “Otter, boil water? When Enuk’s washed up maybe you’ll make a splash of tea?”

Iris set her math book on the wood box. She smiled at Enuk. The frostbite was pretty across her cheeks and nose. “Nine times eight, Cutuk!”

“Huh? Seventy-two.”

“Twenty-one times eleven.”

“Two hundred and thirty-one.” My thoughts softened; I pictured happy otters playing, sliding along day-old ice, stopping to nuzzle each other.

Iris dripped the dipper on my head as she danced barefoot toward the water barrel. She peered close, to focus out of her weak eyes. “Cutuk? Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”

I flicked her leg. The religious poster—the one Abe tacked out in the outhouse, the one the Gospel Trippers had left when they passed through last winter—said a family was supposed to say it: “I love you,” I whispered, at my hands, too softly, the only time in my life. Iris, with her black hair and surprising blue eyes, full of smiles where I had storms, she never heard. She was in her own thoughts. What were they? I should have asked, but kissing, saying the word love, and talking about feelings weren’t what Hawclys did, and I was embarrassed and went outside for a few minutes in the dark, to stand barefoot on the snow and listen to the night beside the naked wolf.

THE STOVE DRAFT FLICKERED orange lights on the peeled poles of the ceiling. The orange melted through my eyelids to clutter my dreams with flames. Pitch smoldered, sweet and resinous on top of the stove.

Enuk lay on his qaatchiaq. His legs stretched out of sight under the table. Iris’s black hair curled across my face. I brushed it aside and pulled our pants and shirts under the covers to warm them. I gripped the corner of the sleeping bag tight to keep the chilly morning out. For years Abe had promised to order me my own sleeping bag. Like Iris’s glasses, it was another thing we’d have to go out into the world and find for ourselves. Iris took up more room this winter. She was bigger. Her breasts were growing, disconcerting to me when I accidentally brushed them.

“You elbowed me really hard in the eye last night.” Her voice was sleepy. She wore one of Abe’s flannel shirts, faded and thin. She smelled of flannel, candle wax, and soft skin.

Jerry’s bed was head to head with ours along the back wall. I wasn’t sure if he was awake on his caribou skin. It was dark in the room, except for firelight. Abe banged the coffeepot on a round of firewood. He swore softly when a chunk of frozen grounds crumbled on the floor. He toed the grounds against the wood box. Iris leaned her chin on her wrists. “Daddy slobbest. What will he do without us?” Her words made me shiver. Firelight glowed on his broad white chest and arms. He crumpled a painting, stuffed it into the stove. The stiff paper caught and flared. For cash Abe made furniture to sell in Takunak, and occasionally he mailed one of his paintings to Anchorage. Never his best. I lay fantasizing; he was an outlaw artist with a notorious past, his name would be legend in the places I traveled.

His bare feet rasped on the cold boards. Outside darkness painted the windows black. The roar of the stove grew, and frost in the safety dripped and hissed. Kettles began to whine. Enuk yawned and rose. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. His body was stout and muscular. The sun had never seen it, and his skin was smooth and pearly brown as a young man’s, except on his thick hands and face where weather and time had stained their stories.

They sipped coffee. Abe lit the lamp. He took the cannibal pot off the stove and put it on the table. We knifed out hot meat and gravy and ate it with bread and the frozen sliced canned jam that Enuk brought. A fly buzzed, one wing frozen to the ice on the inside of the window. The door was frosty around the edges. It was still dark outside. The dogs howled.

Enuk put down his cup. “Today I get old.”

Iris pattered her fingers on his shoulder, as unconcerned as if he were a shelf. “Are you a hundred?”

I watched her hand. Jerry was watching, too.

“Jan’wary twenty-one, nineteen hunnert an five. How many tat gonna? Seventy?”

“Seventy-one!”

“Not so many. I still hunt best than my son.”

“My birthday was the fourth,” I said, thinking how perfect it would have been to be born seventeen days later, on Enuk’s birthday. “We’re not sure we celebrated on the right day. That day was warm and it snowed sticky; you remember, was that the fourth?” I trailed off. The mouthful of numbers felt white.

Enuk ignored me and retrieved his frozen wolf skin from outside the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He eyed the skin for shrew chews. His leather pouch lay beside his mug on the table. It had sounded heavy when he plunked it down. “You fellas have tat.” He nodded at the can of jam. “Cutuk, t’em mooses waiting. You gonna hunt?”

I studied Abe’s face for a sign.

“It could be cold.” He sharpened his knife, three flicks on the pot, three flicks back. “Real cold.”

“I’ll put my face under the tarp when it freezes.”

“Tat a boy!” Enuk said.

DOWN AT THE RIVER it was minus a lot. My nose kept freezing shut on one side. The dogs uncurled and shook frost off their faces. They stood on three legs, melting one pad at a time while the other three quickly froze. Abe’s leader, Farmer, stayed tight in a ball, melted into the packed snow. Her wide brown eyes peered out from under her tail. The hair on her feet was stained reddish brown. She was a gentle dog. I coaxed her to the front of the team where she shivered with her back arched, tail under her belly and pads freezing. Abe and Jerry harnessed the big, hard-to-handle dogs. The snaps were frozen. The harnesses were stiff and icy and hard to force into dog shapes. Our dogs weren’t accustomed to company; even cold, they showed off to Enuk’s dogs, tugging and barking, tangling the lines.

A quarter mile downriver, Abe waved a big wave good-bye to Enuk. Abe geed the dogs north, up the bank below the mouth of Jesus Creek. The snow on the tundra was ice hard, scooped and gouged into waves by wind. It creaked under the runners. Morning twilight bruised the southern sky. Shivers wandered my skin. I yanked off a mitten and warmed frozen patches on my cheeks. The cold burnt inside my nose. My fingers started to freeze. I wondered what thoughts walked in Abe’s mind. I felt as cumbersome and alone as a moon traveler, peering out the fur tunnel of my caribou hood, beaver hat, and wolf ruff.

Farmer led toward the Dog Die Mountains. They were steep mountains, the spawning grounds of brown bears, storms, and spirits. They beckoned like five giants, snowed in to their chins. Occasionally we crossed a line of willows that marked a buried slough or a pond shore, and a dog or two would heave against his neckline and mark a willow, claiming any stray females in the last ten thousand acres.

“Is that a moose?” I said.

The dogs glanced over their shoulders, faces frosty and alarmed at my shout.

“Might be a tree,” Abe said softly.

My moose mutated into one of the lone low dark trees that grip the tundra, hunkered like a troll, gnarled arms thrust downwind. Abe had more careful eyes than I did; they grabbed details, touched textures, took apart colors. I slumped, cold on my caribou skin, stabbed by love for my dad. He didn’t have to say “might be a tree” when he knew. Plenty of the dads in the village would holler, “Shudup. You try’na scare everything again?”

On a ridge, Abe whoa’d the dogs. He took out tobacco and papers. His bared hands tightened and turned red. I looked away, pretending for him that they were brown. He was too naive to know that red fingers were not the kind to have. The smoke smelled sharp in the smell-robbed air, comforting. The southern horizon glowed pink and for a few minutes a chunk of the sun flamed red through a dent in the Shield Mountains, like a giant flashlight with dying batteries. The snow glowed incandescent. I sprinted back and forth, melting fingers and toes. Abe glassed the land.

“Hmm. There she is.”

Through the binoculars the moose stood silhouetted, black as open water. We mushed closer. A deep moan floated on the air. Abe braked the sled. He shushed the dogs. They held their breath, listening. Then the pups yowled and tugged, the scent stirring their blood.

“Must be that cow missing her calf,” Abe said.

“They can sound like that?” I’d heard loons laughing manically, the woman-screams of lynx, ghoulish whimpering from porcupine, but I hadn’t heard a mourning moose. I was proud of Abe, proud of his omniscient knowledge of the land.

“Never heard anything like it before,” he said, pleased.

We jounced on.

“Abe, why do you think greatness is bad?” My question startled both of us. I stiffened, mortified. He snapped ice off his mustache. “I mean—. Burning your best paintings. And acting like you don’t know how to hunt when travelers are bragging.”

When Abe spoke, he used his historical-problems-with-the-world voice. He had a degree in art and history; Iris often teased that his degree was history. “This book I’m reading, the author argues that our heroes aren’t heroes at all and have traditionally—”

I stopped listening and watched frost-laden twigs pass. Abe liked to mull things over until he got them complicated. A discussion with him was like rolling a log uphill in sticky snow. Ideas glommed on. I started to offer ten-year-old facts, but the dogs sped up and we dropped into a slough and lost the trail of the conversation when the team piled up on the leftovers of the calf moose. Backbone, hair, hooves, and the head with the nose and eyes chewed down, all scattered in a red circle. Fine wolf trails and deep moose trenches mapped out the battle.

The dogs bit at the frozen blood and woody stomach contents. Abe bent, careful not to let go of the sled handlebar. He touched a clean wolf paw print. “Soft,” he mused. “Been back to finish her up.”

The dogs raced west, up a narrow slough. “Abe,” I whispered, “should we maybe not shoot that ma moose? She’s had enough bad luck. Didn’t you want to shoot a barren cow, to be fatter?”

I wanted to get out of the overhanging willows before she charged. The snow was soft and deep. Anyone knew moose were more dangerous than bears. Especially on a dog team. As a child, I had been petrified during the night with fear of a moose dropping in our ground-level skylight. The thrashing black hooves would crack our skulls. The wind would sift the igloo full of snow. Shrews would tunnel under our skin and hollow us out, and when travelers found our bodies we’d be weightless as dried seagulls. Abe nourished the nightmare, shrugging, conveying the impression that, sure, given time, my prophecy was bound to come true. Abe was that way. Realistic, he called it.

He ran behind the runners, dodging willows that tried to slap his eyes. He panted over my hood. “Might be the only moose in fifty miles that doesn’t care either way.”

I knew I could argue with him, and he’d leave the animal. He’d welcome the discussion—and the chance not to kill. I shut my stiff lips. Willows whipped past. Abe climbed on the runners and rode. He cleared his throat and whistled encouragements to the dogs. I squinted in frustration, thinking, Now I’m definitely not going to get to shoot.

“My parents split up after the war,” Abe said. “People didn’t do that back then. That-a-girl, Farmer. Haw. Haw over. I was thirteen then.”

In the sled I stared at my mukluks. Shocked—not that his parents divorced, but that he was telling me. His past was always as distant as the cities.

“I came home from school one day, in trouble with Sister Abigail for saying I trusted animals more than people. Dad’s flannel shirts were all gone from the floor and the backs of chairs. I knew without those shirts, he was gone. He went off hunting fame or fortune, I guess.” Abe sounded like he was telling himself the story, too. I stayed silent, pretending indifference. Those seemed to be the manners I’d been taught; I just couldn’t remember learning them.

“Even in Barrow, I usually drew animals instead of shooting them. I would’ve liked to be a hero. Of course I wanted to be one. It just felt . . . phony. Wearing the clothes. Strutting and flexing. Shooting some poor creature. It just wasn’t me.”

Had he told Iris this yesterday? Probably not; she didn’t have my mouth that had always wanted to know how to be someone else.

“I propped the Super Cub for my dad, the day he crashed. Kind of a heroic thing to do?”

Willows slapped my face and the crook of his arm. Snow sifted down my neck.

“The engine sounded funny. I could have said something but Dad would have hollered to stand clear. Guess life’s like shooting a caribou, huh? You want a fat one, but if you end up with a skinny one, you don’t waste it.”

“People leave a skinny caribou, Abe. Or feed it to the dogs and shoot a sledload more.”

“You kids!”

We plowed out of the willows, onto a lake. I saw her across the ice; she stood on long graceful legs, huge black shoulders. The backs of her ankles were pale yellow; along her flank stretched a white gash in the hair. Figment hollered and lunged, cheering the other dogs on. The moose cantered into low brush. The brake ripped furrows in the snow. The sled slid across the ice.

“Stand on the snow hook!”

I jumped out with the hook. It bit into the packed snow. I held it down with knees and palms. The moose waded in deep snow, disappearing into the willows. Abe raised the gun and shot. The moose went down, and WHOMP—the bullet hit sounded like an air-dropped box of nails. Fresh meat! I forgot my frozen cheeks. But not that I wanted to be the one to shoot. Abe wasn’t going to change. He didn’t believe it made any difference which hunter pulled the trigger. Since he was already an expert, of course he always shot.

A FEW YARDS FROM THE DOGS, I stood beside the steaming gut pile. Under the snow, the lake was solid six feet down, and I pictured lethargic pike and whitefish squeezed in the dark silence between mud and ice, waiting with cold-blooded thoughts for winter to go away. I felt strong withstanding the cold.

Up close the moose was alarmingly big. Abe and I loaded the huge hindquarters and butt on the basket sled. He hurried off to break willows, the springy sticks shattering like glass in the cold.

“Making stick towers to scare the ravens?”

“Get dry wood. I’ll start a fire.”

I discovered with dismay that one of us was staying with the remaining meat. Abe stepped away from the newborn fire and cut snow to clean his bloody knife.

I pretended to break the ice off my eyelashes. I peered about nervously. A couple of the dogs whined and tugged at the anchored sled, their feet and noses freezing, their hearts anxious to run toward home and dinner. The rest had curled up, conserving warmth. I longed to go, tented between the companionship of my father behind on the runners and the huskies panting faithful in front.

“I’ll try to make it back ’fore too late.” Abe planted the .30-06 stock-first in the snow. He stepped carefully, keeping his moosehide-bottom mukluks out of the circle of blood around the kill. “At home I’ll have to lash on the gee-pole. And my skis.” The gee-pole tied onto the front of the sled and Abe skied behind the wheel dogs—in front of the sled—and used the pole to steer when the load was heavy or the trail deep. I hefted the gun. The weight was powerful. The cold steel seared my bloody fingers and I knelt and thawed them in the pool of blood coagulated in the moose’s chest. I wiped my hands on the coarse fur, slid my mittens on.

Suddenly all the dogs held their breath. Nine pairs of ears swiveled north. Abe and I turned. Across the distance floated shivers of sound: wolves howling. Abe straightened up bareheaded. His hair, aged gray with frost, slapped me with a glimpse of the future. We scanned the horizons. Finally, he took off his mittens and cinched the sled rope. Abe hated loose loads the way he hated whiny kids. “Nice to hear the wolves,” he murmured. “Country’s poor without them. Cutuk, it means there’s other animals around.”

I shifted, uncomfortable with him using my name. Abe had heard and seen hundreds of wolves over the years since he’d been a teenager in Barrow. He didn’t shoot them; why did he care so much to see more?

Plato raised her muzzle and poured a perfect howl into the frozen sky. The other dogs joined in a cacophony of yips and howls that swelled out over the tundra. “Shudup!” Abe growled. He whipped the billowy gut pile with a willow. It made a hollow crack. We’d empty the rumen and take it and the fat intestines home for dog food, second load. We’d leave the lungs, windpipe, stomach contents, and some blood that the dogs didn’t gnaw off the snow. The team sat, rolling their eyes apologetically.

“Don’t hurry,” I mumbled, casual. I glanced down at the gun. Already loneliness was settling like outer space pushing down the sky. The arctic twilight would fade and Abe would be under the stars before he slid into our dog yard.

He threw a caribou skin to me to lie on. Handed over dried meat and a chunk of pemmican with currants, dried cranberries, and caribou fat. “You don’t need to shoot any wolves. You hear? We still have a piece of a wolf skin in the cache.” His face twitched with sudden guilt for leaving. I opened my mouth to encourage the feeling, but he’d stridden back to the runners.

“Okay! Getup there! Hike!” Away they went, the sled heavy and the dogs heaving with their hips out to the sides and their tails stiff with effort. In minutes they had disappeared to a black dot on the tundra, silhouetted by the orange horizon that lay along the south pretending the sun had been up half the day and burnt that strip of fire.

I held my breath. Listened to the silence. The land at cold temperatures waited in molecular stillness; sound traveled far, though very little of it lived here anymore. My heart boomed. My ears filled with a waterfall of ringing. The land’s thousand eyes watched. I knelt and tried to concentrate on the fire and the smoke, sweet with the smell of warmth and company. A noise startled me.

From a lone spruce on the far side of the lake a raven cawed. “Caaawk,” I answered. I glanced behind. The watchful bird cawed again, urging me to leave the fat meat to him. I saw him standing on my face, feasting on my eyes. I saw him on Abe’s face and I hummed quickly and fed the fire.

THE PASTEL SKY HAD DARKENED. In the south a last strip of orange and greenish blue lingered. The walls of blackness grew and leaned close over my head and joined. An icy east breeze thinned the smoke. The night cold was a monster now, merciless, pinching my face with pliers, sneaking fingers under my parka. It didn’t seem possible to keep my cheeks thawed, and they froze over and over again. The flames sizzled the two-foot-long moose ribs I speared on a stick, burning the crisp fat while the ends froze. In the flickering light my pile of dry willow shrank. I scratched my neck to steal glances behind. The raven had gone.

When the ribs were nicely burnt, I gnawed on the meat pressed between my mittens. I worked a bone clean, tossed it into the dark. Back home it was Jerry’s day to bake bread; probably he was sliding loaves out of our oven box in the bottom of the barrel stove, rapping the brown bottoms to hear the hollow done sound. I wished for a hot slice, and walls behind my shoulders, and Iris’s teasing squeezes.

Jaws crunched a bone.

I dropped the rib and snatched the rifle. The dark was made of dots, walls of eyes. A scream tore the night.

A fox! Was it rabid? I hissed out a hoarse fox bark. Silence rang back. I barked again. To the left I heard a soft thump. Then running feet and the quick sounds of a chase. My stomach tightened. The wolves had come!

If the fox was crippled the wolves would eat him. I wished bad luck on him until I remembered that Enuk would say he could wish the same on me. Above, aurora wavered, green smoke ghosting in the dark, quick pale brush strokes, the bottoms tinted pink, twinging up in the black. The fire had sunk, hissing and steaming down on the lake ice. I knelt forward to salvage some coals. Smoke stung my eyes. Snow squeaked. The darkness moved into shapes. Slowly, I turned my head. Behind stood more.

The chik-chunk of the rifle loading sounded as loud as river ice booming. I aimed over the dark shaking sights. My thoughts scattered down terrified trails. The pack couldn’t have forgotten that a man had shot one of them yesterday. Now I would never get to be Eskimo, or see a 747, or know for how many years President Nixon had to go to jail. I tried to place myself in a future story to milk heroism out of my bad luck, but all I saw were clumps of bones and yellow hair. A voice I hadn’t heard whispered, “Shoot! Shoot!” I gripped the gun. I was ten. My chance to be Enuk! People in the village would know it the next time they teased, “Catch any weasel in your trap, Cutuk?”

The steel trigger froze through my fox mitten liner. I yanked back. The gun lurched. The black wolf I’d aimed at sniffed his paw.

The safety. I flipped the lever. Now Abe’s disappointed face floated in the way. I looked over the barrel, tried to aim. The northern lights had dimmed. It was harder to make out shapes. Abe wouldn’t cuss or even kick things around. He would help skin the wolf. That was the thing about Abe, he’d help someone else before he helped himself. The thing about me was I couldn’t accept that all people were not like that. I saw Abe as a boy, searching for his dad’s shirts. I clicked the safety back. The wolf lifted his nose and howled. The pack joined.

Fear and elation skated on my skin. Were they cheering? Or voting? I felt cruel for lusting to kill one. I had eaten; I had a warm wolf ruff on my hood—but the gnawing inside was jittery and big, a hunger to kill and be great for it. It wasn’t good, it was mean, but it felt glued all over inside me.

The harmony ceased. The wolves stood, listening. Finally, miles east, upwind, across the tundra, I heard the snap of branches, and fainter still, runners squeaking on cold snow; eventually came a low mumble that I knew as Abe’s encouraging “Atta boys. Good girl, Farmer. Haw over now. Haw over.”

The wolves circled, their claws tacking the hard snow. I aimed, barehanded now, my fingers burning on the metal. Under the green luminescence from the sky the wolf pack fanned out north across the lake. The animals I’d wanted to kill mingled and faded. That wolf—how many miles and years had he walked under this smoky green light? Walked cold, hungry in storms, wet under summer rain; walking on this land I’d always called my home. He knew every mountain, every trail along every knoll so much better than I ever would. And the wolf, I only knew him dead. I didn’t want to be an Outsider. Not here, too. How was it that I’d never considered carefully that an animal would know infinitely more about something than I could?

The whisper of their feet disappeared under the sounds of the coming dog team. Two people pitched and clawed inside me. One whispered in awe: “They were so close.” The other mocked: “You dummy! Ten years old, same age as Enuk, and you didn’t shoot.” My fingers screamed in the pain of warming. I hunched over them, humming to hide the anguish. Abe had said to watch, but he was a painter. He read books and watched the sky too much. Enuk said to respect the wolves, but he’d have shot as many as he could. Even the last one. Under my skin, so well I knew, in the village “could have” meant nothing without the mantle of a dead animal. I wanted the stars to drop some silver stranger, an alluring alien like Wax Tiera, to tell me what I should think. But there was only the dark, the cold, the miles and miles of snow.