Ordinary Wolves (18 page)

Down below a man shuffles along the ice. He smells of smoke and dogs, seal oil, salmon, and himself. He comes without a machine, rare for a man. He carries no rifle. The wolf senses no hunt in his movements. She eases forward in her den, peers down. On the ice the man stops.
He seems to sense
her—
his stance says it. His stare swings, probing the rocks. Near her paw, a tiny chip shifts and a pebble bounces away. A puff of snow cascades down.

The man jumps. His eyes lift. For the first time in her life the wolf locks gazes with a human. She stands as still as only a predator will, life focused in her powerful stare. The man backs away. An instant of fear tightens the air between them, then he hurries down the pale green ice of the creek.

The wolf paces the ledge, whining, whiffing the air for her mate, gone hours hunting or, now, maybe hunted.

ELEVEN

OVER THE COURSE
of an hour the slice of moonlight eased across the floor and worked up the post of Abe's bed. The white light seemed to slide on celestial rails designed with infinite purpose, and just before it slivered to nothing it reached Abe's eyelid. He snapped awake. On Jerry's bunk I narrowed my eyes, let my breath run long, and for no conscious reason pretended to be asleep.

Abe knifed wood shavings. He stacked kindling in the barrel stove and it crackled to life. He stood naked, the match pinched in his fingers, and rustled in the shelves for a stash of camping coffee, trying to avoid a cold morning trip to the cache for a new can of Hills Bros. He grunted in success. The match flicked out. The stove draft danced orange shadows on the walls.

I groaned.

“Alappaa.
Got cold again,” Abe said cheerfully.

I rose and stood at our new glass window that Iris had sent. Cold air
played on my thighs. Outside the land sparkled under a million moth wings of frost. “Thirty-two below? Son-of-a-bitch!” Abe didn't appreciate cuss words. But I was twenty-one now and felt an infuriated need to prove
something.
“Guess I'll leave my snowgo home today. Plastic parts don't snap off the dogs.”

Abe slapped meat in the sizzling skillet. He scratched under his beard. “It'll warm up, when the sun comes around. I figure in a few weeks we could go spring camping. Back in the Dog Dies. Once you're done trapping.”

“I'm trying to catch one more lynx.”

I sat on the couch. It was soft and deep again with a new brown bear hide I had tanned with sourdough. I lit a candle and opened the automotive mechanics book to my weasel-tail bookmark—“Theory of Combustion”—where I'd been studying last night. The weasel tail was dried. The fur was black on one end, then pure white. The last few hairs were yellow, where they'd once attached to the ermine's pee-sack. The book was overdue. It needed to be mailed back to Fairbanks with the rest of the monthly library box. I wished I had a car to tinker on. I'd taken my snowgo apart to understand the needle valve, magneto, wrist pins.

Abe examined a half-completed birch snowshoe on his workbench. “Lynx are close to shedding, huh? Geese will be coming soon. We don't need the meat.” In the kitchen his fry pan started to smoke. He eyed his workmanship critically. The snowshoe was light, the wood pearly white with gray caribou
babiche
webbing shrinking tight as it dried. Somehow Abe memorized the intricate pattern for lacing the webbing.

“There's plenty of lynx,” I said. “Prices are high. Geez, I'll let him go if I get a shedding one.”

“Hmm.”

“Okay, I'll pull the number-four jump traps.”

Abe hurried back to the spattering pan, peered in, and forked the steaks. “You'd be surprised, if you quit going to town and buying plastics, you'd hardly need money. I think—”

“Everybody knows
what
you think, just nobody except maybe Franklin knows
why.”

I snaked my legs into my stiff jeans. Go for a long snowshoe, I told myself, or open a new water hole. Four more weeks and Iris would be home. Abe and I would get along again. We only needed to feel like a family. We hadn't seen Iris since last spring. If they hired her to teach in Takunak, I could jump on the snowgo or hitch up my dogs and go stay with her. Or walk to the village in the fall.
Qayaq
in the summer. Maybe she could teach me to dance. I had done the right thing, waiting here and not bolting to the rumor and intrigue of the city.

Now if only Dawna would return. The beat-up valentine had ceased to emit feeling; now I'd been using it for lynx bait. Lynx were curious creatures, and, dangling on a string, glinting and twirling, Dawna's valentine was too much to resist. The inside-out braille note on the magazineseed—from when I was twelve, before the Wolfgloves moved out of their shack—I'd wrapped in a plastic bag and buried under the moss and blueberry bushes behind the house. For years I'd searched and never been able to find where I'd buried it. Its disappearance seemed a bad omen. All my memories of Dawna were threadbare and didn't cause the undersides of my ribs to ache anymore.

Abe cleared his throat. “Ah, sorry if I was harping on you.”

“Huh?”

I couldn't remember Abe ever saying sorry. He didn't like the word. I glanced up. In the last years gray had mixed in with his hair; lines on his face had deepened to trenches. His thick neck was still red, but the skin was rougher and lines forked into each other. Two decades here, and more—one wife and two children leaving, a third roaming the hills like a porcupine-quill-filled brown bear. Abe hadn't complained. His eyes still twinkled. He found new things to run through his fingers, to paint and chuckle about.

I sat on a stump and untangled the dog harnesses that needed repair. They needed sewing often. When the dogs were excited, lunging to leave the dog yard, they chewed towlines, necklines, harnesses. We sawed new puppies' mouths with rope when we caught them chewing lines, and most learned from the terrible and excruciating lesson. The harnesses were greasy. One was store-bought, the rest sewn from yellow
cotton or red nylon webbing. My hands smelled of sweaty dog butthole. My throat felt raw.

“Abe, sometime I think you're like that Thoreau fella, living some back-to-the-wilderness dream. I'm not. It's like I'm a species of one. For me this is plain life, and most of the time I feel like I'm breaking trail.”

Abe grasped the frying pan and stopped. He looked at his hand for a second. He hurried over and lowered the frying pan on the table. I washed with hot soapy water in the basin. Dumped the brown water in the slop bucket. Abe had the head of the dogfood axe tilted near the stove, toasting out a stub of broken handle. The blade was nicked from chopping bones so the dogs could get at brains and
patiq.

We ate meat in silence. Abe bit grease off the backs of his thumbs. He sat on the wood box and took off his sock and searched for a splinter that was stabbing his ankle. The heel had been darned with navy blue yarn unraveled from the arms of his old sweater that he had remodeled into a vest.

“There were a bunch of reasons I brought you kids here.” He sighed and stared out the window. “Some kind of birds working out there. Crossbills?” His jaw moved. He started to speak a few times. “Pandora's box.” He chuckled. He glanced down at his rough swollen hands. “To the old Eskimos the land was everything. They
knew
the land.” His hands gripped each other. “I think I was thinking that there wasn't time left . . . to let you grow up and find your own wilderness. City,” he rubbed his ears. “It's everything about insulating you from the earth. I didn't want to work some job just to afford to get out to the wilderness once in a while. You can't have both. I like life close to the earth. It's alive. The city made me feel wrapped up and a long way from myself. Heck, maybe I've just been selfish!” He smiled his big beautiful straight-teeth smile. He worked his sock back on and folded the cuffs of his pants into his socks. I glanced away, faintly embarrassed—nobody since George Washington did that with their socks.

He rose and fiddled with the draft on the stove. “A part of you maybe is going to always be across the river from other people. You might be in for hard times. People believe in city. They call it ‘the real world.' Won't be surprised if you're not able to do that.” He sounded curious, not sorry.

In the crook of my thumb I pressed my nose flat. It didn't seem to be flattening. A thought flashed in my head:
Abe would cry if he knew what I was doing.

There was a pained look to his eyes and in the lines disappearing into his beard. A mouse rattled a spoon on the counter. Abe glanced at it. “My dad poached polar bears,” he chuckled, “his proximity to nature.”

He had never said “your grandpa.” As if he had always insulated us from that man.

“He landed his hunters and drove bears back to them. And he was certain no one loved the land more than he did.” Abe glanced into my eyes. It was hard to look into his powerful deep blue gaze. “To prove it, he took all sorts of pride in ignoring laws. Danger, too. That day, if I'd told him his engine sounded wrong, he'd have said, ‘Stand clear! Go play with your pansies.' That's what he called my pastels. Said, ‘You're gonna end up in Paris, painting pansies.'”

Abe laced his
mukluks.
They were soft-bottomed, cold-weather
mukluks
with black and red yarn ties at the top. Janet had four-braided the ties. “Pansies are tough flowers. They survive wind and being frozen. People don't give pansies credit.” Abe stood. Just like Enuk's, his story was over when he got tired of telling it. Or maybe he didn't know how to tell it. He was a painter. I played with my knife, breathless to know more, but under the weight of some childhood prohibition. Maybe when Iris came she'd be different; maybe she'd ask questions we'd been inured not to ask.

“Pansies,” I murmured softly.

Abe didn't say anything. Again the mouse rattled spoons. We glanced up and laughed together. In that moment, me hunched at the table finger-nailing the empty skillet, him squatted on a round of firewood, taking his
mukluk
off one more time to research his sock for a splinter, we were closer than we'd been in my lifetime and half of his. Maybe during the night I'd advanced into adulthood, like a deep bruise that finally turned black and blue after the hurt; maybe now at last we were two men, not a dad and a kid. Still, I felt like a boy inside. Would that ever fade? Or did people just stop seeing it from the outside?

In the kitchen we heard tiny frantic hopping. The mouse that had
been doing nightly turd dances on our bread had plopped into a mason jar. We grinned, thankful for the interruption. We peered down opposite sides into the glass at the furry face.

“You're going back outside.” Abe slid his calloused hand over the jar. “Back to that life before white man and bread. Or was it white bread and man?”

Abe wasn't going to dump the mouse in the slop bucket or bonk it with a piece of kindling. I realized that I wasn't going to, either.

 

 

THE COLD SPELL BROKE,
and in the last days of April our sod roof began leaking. We had dishpans and pots spread, pinging under the tea-colored drips. Iris had sent a wave of exhilaration in front of her arrival; we were lighthearted as we carried grub boxes and sleeping skins down to load on our sleds. Abe chuckled. “Drips, that's spring telling you to get outside. Bears will be getting the same message.” We laced on our
mamillaks.
They were skin-out
mukluks,
sticky and yellow-black with old seal oil. The grease waterproofed the seams and protected the caribou-skin tops and sealskin bottoms from being ruined by water and slush.

Down in the dog yard, the dogs stretched, trying to lick the oily skin. We hitched up after midnight. Abe examined his leader's feet. She often had foot problems. She had pink pads; racers now claimed that dogs with black pads were tougher. Abe walked up to the house and untied the rope on the door. He came out with medical tape and bacitracin and bear fat, and rubbed it on her pads and taped his old socks on her.

The icy night crust ran hard in all directions. Abe geed his dogs for the steep mountains in the northwest, and I let my team follow across the rasping snow. A red fox sat and watched us leave. They were unafraid in spring, mating, and often mistaken for being rabid. Three moose stood across the river, heads high, curious. Ptarmigan rattled in the willows. The air was rich with tundra smells, and peaceful, and half a mile of silence stretched out between Abe's team and mine. Caribou trails veined the tundra and herds poured out of draws and raced away in front of our
leaders. Ravens chuckled and echoed their secrets of death and food across the distances. My heart grew as the Dog Dies towered higher in the bright night. Somehow I forgot each time how much I loved mountains. They were friendly giants, transforming with the seasons, not a grain of judgment in them.

I ran only five dogs now. Ponoc, with his misspelled name, like mine, had died after a moose kicked him in the jaw, and last spring I'd had to shoot Figment. His testicles were pink and swollen from freezing for so many winters, and irritability kept him picking fights and growling through the nights. I walked him out on the tundra and he padded along, the same floppy-eared shambling dog whose only ambitions had been food and to slip his collar once in a while and maybe get laid or chase rabbits. Figment had never taken offense at getting drifted over at night or curling up in harness and waiting while I checked traps or snowshoed after caribou. Each sled dog developed a personality of its own, like a friend, and when I tied him to a tree he sat painfully, and patient, and when I pulled the trigger, all the memories of my friend flashed and cracked and the death in his eyes was that unearthly creature.