Ordinary Wolves (16 page)

Janet opened the door. “Cutuk. Quit touching that snowgo. Go in and eat!” Sheepishly, I went in and sat down. “Take your jacket off.” Janet laughed. Melt wasn't around. Janet's kitchen was a sweet homey place when she was alone. She had flour on her hands and was thickening soup. “How much you pay?”

“Thousand.”

“Good. That's good then. How about that snowgo, is it good or is it funny?”

“I don't know. I need to learn. It goes faster than my dogs!”

“Way better, alright. But it gonna always pe pust.” She served soup. “Stevie, Lumpy, Treason, they let me puy parts everytime they go any-wheres. Melt teach 'em that way. She's worst,” Janet said, confusing male and female pronouns that didn't exist in Iñupiaq. “Thirty-four dollars for new belt. Over hunnert for ski. If they see fox or something they don't care about nothing. They pust up parts cost more than any kinda fox. I don't know how come. They always sometimes can't think.” Janet stared, serious, the way Enuk used to stare. She walked to the window and
watched a hunter on a snowgo speeding across the river. I liked sitting here with her. I wondered if she was looking into the past, if like me she tossed through the questions of what had become of Enuk. I wanted to ask, but she heard my spoon in the bottom of the soup bowl and turned to the stove.

Lumpy kicked open the door. His face had frozen patches. He shook his gloves off.

“What you do?” Janet cried. “You
alappaa?”

“My hands freeze!”

“Aachikaaŋ!”
She poured warm water out of a kettle into an aluminum basin. “Here!”

Lumpy knelt behind the stove and pushed his big hands in. After a few moments he withdrew them and hunched over, stiff with agony. He put his hands back in and withdrew them, over and over. Every once in a while a loud “Aaaaagh!” escaped him, strangely reminiscent of the pain sound from the black bear Jerry had once shot.

Stevie kicked the door open. He and Dawna burst in. Dawna pulled off her hat and shook her hair. “Hi, Cutuk!” She smiled. “I brought you a valentine: Will you shine and shine like the alpine timberline and no matter how I pine always be mine?”

I blinked. A purple and pink heart hung in her hand. She lowered her face in sudden embarrassment.

“What you do, Lumpy?”

He wiped his nose on his shoulder and didn't answer.

“Her hands,” Janet murmured.

Lumpy hunched lower.

“So cheap that Mr. Standle an'em,” Stevie growled. He held his glasses close to the stove, melting off the frost. “They let them put my name on gym list again. Now they gonna can't let me play basketball tonight. I should just quit school.”

Dawna pursed her lips at him and pantomimed a jump shot. Stevie blocked her in the shoulder. She screamed and flew backward into a pile of clothes behind Lumpy. I looked away. Everyone knew I couldn't play basketball. And even the elders believed that being a star on the court
atoned for any amount of stealing, nasty behavior, or jail time. The valentine crumpled and skidded under Dawna's elbow. She stared at it, and pulled. The paper tore. Angrily she dunked it into a bucket of dog scraps. She kicked the bucket.

“Arii!”
Janet said. “You kids! Cutuk, take Stevie, go hunt. Be careful.”

I glanced out the window, aching to be out on the land, away from the confusion of the village, basketball, and wrecked valentines. If only I could ask Dawna to go with me, and we could go to some distant knoll and talk and watch the evening colors pastel the sky. But in Takunak men hunted. They did not take women out alone to
talk.

“You bought Woody's Cougar, huh?” Stevie said. “Brakes can't work. It's good though. 'Kay then, le's go hunt.”

We dressed and got our rifles and went outside. It was cold, and snow sifted out of clear sky. Stevie was unhitching Melt's sled from his snowgo when up on the ridge Tommy Feathers shouted, “SCHEDULE!” Tommy lumbered east toward his house. He had a respectable stomach and no butt, and one of the big mysteries of Takunak was how he kept his pants up.

Melt ran loose-jointed down the hill. “Open the TV! Open the TV!”

Stevie dropped the wrench. He pried his watch out of his jacket sleeve. “SCHEDULE!” He bounded up the steps.

I untied my beaver hat, looked wistfully at the sun dropping in the west, and followed him. The list of the week's RATNET satellite TV programs replayed for half an hour before the first show. There was one channel. It played only in the evening. But everyone raced to watch the day of hissing blue snow fade and the first words appear on the television screen. For two years—since the satellite demonstration project arrived—almost no one had run dogs, hunted, or hauled wood after 5:00 P.M. Lumpy and Woody had let go a pack of eleven wolves that they had tracked beyond the Shield Mountains, and frostbit their faces black streaking full-throttle home, to catch the supreme hero of the Iñupiaq Nation—
The Six Million Dollar Man.

“Eight o'clock!” Melt bellowed. “Ducks of Hazard!” His breath smelled of cologne. He wasn't sober.

Dawna stood near me. “Not
Ducks.”

“Shudup you!”

I sat down, sweating in my parka. I glanced at the dog bucket. My first-ever valentine was still afloat. In my head the fast music played, when Bo and Luke Duke slithered stupidly in their car windows and Daisy swished her astonishing cutoff jeans. Everyone stared at the TV. I snatched the valentine from the slops and wiped off caribou soup grease. The side with sparkles and the pink heart was dry. Some of the sparkles had crumbled off where it bent. They glinted on the dog food. My
qaatchiaq
leaned in the corner. There was no hiding place for anything of mine in this house.
Mail it to Iris to keep.

“That's Thursday,” Janet said. “Coming is gonna be tonight.”

“Technical difficulties!” Everyone sighed.

“Tomorrow, too,” Stevie said.
“Adii,
so cheap that satellite junk.”

Dawna's wide eyes watched the words rise on the screen. Her fingers strayed to the ripped collar of her sweatshirt. She didn't see the screen or Janet's pop-can-ring chains draped above it, or the pictures of Washington cousins in National Guard uniforms on the walls. Nor the ice-rimmed windows. The town outside of scattered caribou leg bones, fish racks, and wind-shredded Hefty bags. She saw herself somewhere where no one knew the stench of unscraped hides and the terror of Melt. I knew; I transported myself away, too. I went east forty miles. She went somewhere a lot farther, and was braver because she'd never been where she was going.

“You want to go hunting with us?” I whispered.

She shook her head, not unglazing her eyes. I pulled my hat on, embarrassed for asking. Stevie and I went outside. The door hung on loose hinges and wouldn't shut. We chipped ice with my knife, quickly, before Melt hollered about the draft.

Stevie grinned and kicked my snowgo skis. He wore sharp-looking Sorel boots; me,
mukluks.
“'Bout time one Hawcly got snowgo. Fellas said you wouldn't. I knew you would.”

His words caught a loose stitch in my memory and unraveled the years, Jerry and Iris and I hunching beside the Wolfgloves' stove, me sneaking
glances at Dawna, Stevie leading us out, showing off Melt's new snowgo in the moonlight. I could see us standing close, the jagged crack down the cowling, the glint of the fiberglass splinter in my finger.
My blood brother!
But the picture seemed like a flash from a TV film of a stranger's life, not my own.

 

 

THE RED FEBRUARY SUN
was setting behind Stevie and me when we drove up a bluff west of Jesus Creek and crossed wolf tracks. I'd unconsciously angled homeward—maybe with the idea of cacheing the valentine folded in my pocket—and now far in the distance I saw Outnorth Lake and the thin bank between the lake and the river where our igloo hunkered in the ground. How could we be here so quickly? Takunak had been on the other side of the galaxy from our home. Driving a snowgo was like being God. I rode in a bubble of sound that fed my thoughts until they grew and wandered giantly, picking fights and jumping rivers. The land was smaller, as if I could touch the mountains. I wondered at how trivial the entire Kuguruk Valley must seem to sport hunters from Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Crotch Spit, peering down from their airplanes.

Above Takunak we'd driven beside Abe's meandering dog trail, taken fifty-mile-an-hour shortcuts out of bends in the river, up over willowy banks and tundra draws. Moose cantered out of our path. Alder twigs burned inside my engine cowling. I inhaled the sweet smoke. The world was a new place on a snowgo. I loved it. Abe would hate it.

Stevie shut off Melt's Polaris. He glanced at the gas gauge and then down at the wolf tracks. He toed them with his heavy boot. “Wolverine?” He melted gray frozen patches on his cheeks. Tomorrow the patches would be black, not reddish like mine.

“Could be wolf.” There were four distinct toes, the prints in a neat trot. The wolf ran silver in my mind. I laid my rifle on the seat and touched the snow in a print. It was powdery. “Fresh?”

Stevie shrugged. He wiped frost off his fogged glasses.

For years I'd listened to stories of men chasing down wolverine and
wolves and other animals with snowgos and airplanes. The villagers on snowgos despised the wealthy white men in the sky with ski planes. I'd thought all the high-speed chasing to be bad; Abe quietly loathed it. But now the picture had new color and I lusted to roar north, burning the trail.

Stevie wiped again at his fogged glasses. “Uktu fellas gonna come tonight.” He peered through the lenses and polished. “Play basketball. Have dance in town. Or maybe Uktu.” He grinned. Stevie wasn't a star at basketball, but he could always locate a jug, or a bucket of home brew, and keep a party going.

“They're gonna drive up, play ball, then go clear back sixty miles to Uktu to have a dance? Tonight?”

“Could be. I dunno. Uktu got good chicks. Better than Takunak.” His grin was flirty. He glanced at the tundra and spat between his teeth. “Pretty fun when there always be jugs. Seems like that's the only time peoples have fun. Some time I'm gonna have a store like Newt's. Only thing, I'll sell drinks, let everybody have a good time.” He chuckled. “Not Melt and some them fellas who don't know how to drink.”

Stevie didn't like fighting. He hid in the outhouse and read comics when Lumpy killed puppies and Melt was hitting. Now he walked around his machine, jumped on the bumper, and stepped back on the snow. He grinned at the ground. “Maybe you'll help me get store, same like Abe did with Newt.”

“What?”

“Huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom say Abe give Newt money. He help him make order first lotta times. You didn't know?”

“How could that be? Abe never had much money.”

Stevie shrugged and shoved my shoulder. “Shuck, maybe he did and he blow it up before you come around.” He laughed, then peered at the wolf tracks and spat again. “Go 'head. Keep going.”

“I thought—” I pictured Newt shaking Abe's hand. But this couldn't be true. White people weren't even allowed credit in the Native Cache the way normal people were. I glanced at the tracks, pretending more interest
than I had. Treason should have come. He was twenty-two, didn't talk much, and already had a reputation as a hunter. Villagers spoke in admiration,
He can't turn back, bad weather even.
I knew more about tracks, back fat, stomach contents of animals than Treason; I wished I could learn how to want to kill them as bad.

“Yeah, I'll keep going, little further.”

Stevie hunched over and peered at his gas gauge. “I got not much gas.”

“You have a plastic? We could dump some of my gas in your tank. Enough to make it to the mountains and home. You don't need to pay me back.” Newt waded into my mind. Maybe that was what Abe had said,
You don't need to pay me back.
Being generous felt good. And Abe did what felt good to him.

“Naw.” Stevie pried at his jacket sleeve and got a peek at his watch. “Anyways, gonna be dark. Go 'head, ride around.” He spun and roared away. But he steered back and idled. “You sure you'll never get lost?” I nodded, surprised at this unlocal show of care. “'Kay then. See you if you make it home
maatnugun.”

He vanished down our trail.

If
meant
when
in Village English. But I was conscious in the chill and falling twilight that
if
was a concept born of starvation and frozen hunters and very definitely also meant
if.
I listened to his snowgo until it was a hum mixing with the hums in my head. Dawna would go to the dance.

I headed north. My engine seemed to make new and uncertain rattles and pings. Evening painted the sky green and gold and orange in the south. Sitting, gripping the steel machine, my hands and feet and face kept freezing, and I had to stop to thaw them. The wolf tracks zigzagged toward the mountains. I plowed through the willows of a buried creek, spraying shattered brush in front of the skis. Moose stood and waded aside. The wolf tracks swung west, across a few miles of open tundra, followed a slough, and again crossed open tundra. Still they looked no fresher. Ptarmigan sleeping sly under the snow poked their heads up in alarm at my passing. Stars twinkled in the deep blue northern sky. I felt foolish for not turning back, but tonight I didn't want to ever go back to Takunak.

The machine bogged down in a creek, the track spraying snow and chewing a trench under the snowgo. The drive belt smoked. I stepped off the seat, sank up to my waist. The snow under the top layer was corn snow, as grainy and loose as rock salt. How could I not have thought to bring snowshoes! The huge twilit silence rang in my ears. Suddenly I realized how incompetent I was with a snowgo. I had no tools, no spare parts or even rope.