Ordinary Wolves

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

TO MY MOTHER, WHO WAS THERE

IÑUPIAQ GLOSSARY

PROLOGUE

ON THE DRIFTED SNOW
of a lake in the tundra a wolf lies dying. Blood splotches her trail down a bluff, out onto the lake. Her punched tracks zigzag. She lies on her side, panting, one eye open to the sky. A ski plane soars against the blue. It swoops low, a giant buzzing eagle coming to pluck the wolf away. The tundra glares brighter and brighter in the wolf's eye until land and sky have no detail, and then a wing slides to a stop over her. Its shadow is black. The buzzing is insane now, a tiny angry blizzard, drifting snow. It stutters to silence. In the silence the wolf hears her pups of the spring, their howls yipping mournful and confused, across the land, and the distance of death.

Two humans bend over her. The larger one is dressed in down overpants. A down parka spans his barrel chest and stomach. A wolf ruff is sewn on his hood. Moosehide mittens hang from wool strings around his neck. The female beside him wears caribou
mukluks
with
ugruk
bottoms, and she too has a strip of wolf fur on her parka. She is skinny, her hair
black and her face gaunt. Her eyes shift and water, and flick south to the orange horizon, impatient to climb back into the sky, to escape to lands the sun doesn't abandon.

The man leans and touches the wolf's eye. “She's dead.” The eye doesn't blink but the man wonders if she can still see out. He's wondered about other wolves, hundreds. He scratches his throat. He pulls a down engine cover from the fuselage and toggles it over the cowling. “Long flight ahead. Don't got room for you and this hundred-twenty-pound animal. Best skin her.” His glance runs along the skyline, and then over at the woman. He flicks open a knife. “Coupla' more days, sun will be gone. Then the damn Darkness.” He bends and slits the wolf from front foot to elbow and across the chest.

The woman turns away, uninterested in him or his commentary. She thinks it ironic that this man named for the coldest month of the year, with a home at the northern tip of a free country, should complain about winter. She's shivering. She jogs across the lake to keep from freezing while he skins. Her steps crunch in the snow. She hates snow. She pulls back her hood, holds her breath, listens a last time—she hopes—to the tundra.

To her surprise, she hears wolves. She sees specks, running and stopping. Young wolves, waiting for their mother. A sob catches her unaware. Her heartbeat roars in her head. She runs, back toward the dot of the ski plane, her only doorway to civilization here on a planet of wilderness, cold, and encroaching night. She hums, to keep from hearing their cries, and, instinctively, to protect the wolves from the pilot. Far away the narrow shapes turn north and run.

PART I

THE LAND

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.