Ordinary Wolves (19 page)

I stood on the runners. Looked at pictures in my mind. How had Enuk shot all the dogs in his team in that storm how many lifetimes ago? Far ahead, Abe stopped in front of a towering slate outcropping, an island in the tundra just before the shore of the mountains. He stomped in his snow hook. When I pulled up, he'd already cut poles and laid down sweet-smelling green spruce boughs to keep our
qaatchiaqs
off the snow. He was tying knots that were quick to untie, pitching the white canvas wall tent, using a dead sapling for a ridgepole so pitch wouldn't mar the fabric. I chained out the dogs. Got a fire going. On sticks we roasted caribou leg bones that we'd boiled earlier. The sun came around the eastern summit and warmed the morning and our shoulders.

 

 

ABE SPENT THE DAY IN CAMP,
watching birds and sketching. I climbed the peak behind our tent and came down in the late afternoon,
bushed, damp, and chilled. I hunkered close to the fire, letting the frozen legs of my overpants steam. Abe moved around the sleds, tossing dried salmon to the dogs, checking their feet, patting their heads. He folded the sled tarps closed. Coiled the harnesses and lines on the bed slats. Picked up our axes in case of a surprise storm.

He came back yawning. “Shoot a caribou tomorrow for dog feed, feel like it?”

“'Kay.”

“I'm going to climb in.”

We'd been up for nearly forty hours.

I poked the coals. Abe had moved the campfire onto a slab of slate with green branches underneath to keep it from plummeting down through the snow. The smoke stung. Burning mushrooms, or lichens. Or flies hibernating between the layers of stone. I felt tired, dizzy, and the mountain kept locking in my eyes, almost as if I were stoned again.

“Make another pot of coffee, if you want to stay up and dry your stuff.” He knew I liked to push myself to see how long I could stay up in the endless day of spring. A chill was settling. A portion of my brain kept pitching over a cliff into sleep. I retrieved my stiff frozen gloves from a stump. Laced on snowshoes.

Behind the rocky mound where we camped, a canyon twisted up the narrow valley. I snowshoed into its mouth. I'd been here before, but something else felt familiar about this creek. I sniffed the air. A north breeze fell off the slopes and a bundle of alder seeds rasped across the hard snow, sailing behind the curled skeleton of a leaf. High on the precipitous walls, clumps of brush and a few wind-bitten spruce clung to the rocks like sentries.

The creek ice was firm walking, rippled with pearly frozen overflow and wet on the surface. I left my snowshoes wedged in a split fallen boulder. It wasn't wise to dampen the
babiche
by walking in water. Trenched caribou trails braided up the sides of the mountains. In the orange sun bowls high up toward the pass, I saw a string of dots—caribou, or possibly a pack of wolves—climbing north.

After half a mile the canyon narrowed and made a sharp bend. No
sun or wind found its way down here. The air was motionless. Seams of quartz protruded from the gray slate cliffs. Tundra moss draped the rim of the rock. I stood for a moment, listening to my heart boom. A shiver rolled over my skin. Suddenly I was awake. Far under the ice, water gurgled. I stepped a few paces toward the shore, in case the ice collapsed.

My hair rose. At the top of the rocks, in a fissure under an overhanging slab of slate, the hollow black eye of a den stared. I hadn't brought a rifle! A sensation breezed through me, a recognition of this as an exact location, here on the ice and tonight, where my trail might end. Creatures that my legs couldn't outrun, my hands couldn't scratch, lived on the land. Hunting food, and proximity to other very different and very wild hunters—maybe this was the “alive” that Abe spoke of. I loosened my sheath knife and in my pocket fingered Enuk's carved bear, as if it might offer protection. Enuk poured into my mind: thick laughter, thumb and finger pinching a chunk of boysenberry jam, teeth biting ice off his dogs' feet. I stared around, as if he might appear.

On a ledge at the entrance of the den a cornice of snow cracked. I crouched. Down it tumbled, a cloud of falling frost. In front of me lay the snowy heap. Up in the rocks, in the shadowed mouth of the den, I saw the eyes of a wolf.

For an instant my bones were liquid. I glanced behind and backed away. On the shore, grown into the crotch of a small twisted birch, hung a section of green rope. I walked over, still watching the wolf, and reached for it. The nylon parted, sun-shot, dusty, and destroyed. I hurried down the canyon.

 

 

ʺCUTUK!ʺ

I jolted awake, stiff and afraid.

Abe leaned in the tent flaps, a thumb in his suspendered overpants. Behind him a fire crackled. “Brown bear coming over. You like to see her before the dogs holler? She's got spring cubs.”

“Yeah. Bear. 'Kay.” I fumbled for my clothes and laced my
mamillaks,
glad nobody was asking me to spell my name.

Outside the tent, Abe nodded in the direction of the canyon mouth, not alerting the dogs by pointing. A hundred yards away, brown humped shoulders appeared. Suddenly a wide blond body stood. The bear's head swung, testing the air. Cubs bounced into view: one golden, one brown. Plato raised her muzzle to the east and sniffed. In the past year she'd cultivated a hearing loss, a combination of true deafness and old-dog obstinance. I picked up a stick. Plato swiveled west, still sniffing. Three dogs lunged up, barking. The other nine rose and only growled and whined.

“Shudup.” I hunkered down and advanced with the stick.

“Ssssst.” Abe hissed. He nodded, satisfied. “Never know with new pups, if they'll holler at a bear. Farmer was always good at letting us know one was around without going crazy.”

The cubs shimmered in the sun. They stood, curious, one supporting itself on its mom's massive rump, the other with its claws on its sibling's shoulder. The family stared, open-faced and curious.

Abe leaned against a melting-out rock, sketching with charcoal on a cardboard flap. His rifle hung in the crook of his arm. His face was tanned and content. The bears settled on all fours, turned, and ambled toward the canyon.

Watching the adult bear's fur ripple, I couldn't help thinking of how happy Janet would be to have some bear fat, and fresh bear meat. “Be fun to have a young'un,” I uttered.

“A kid, or a bear?”

“What? A kid?
No!
A bear cub.”

“Could be lot of trouble.” Abe shrugged. “You kids were fun.” He smiled at memories. “Hard to believe Iris is coming home from
college.”
His glance dropped to his sketch. The bears dipped from sight. I whipped the side of the tent a last time to remind the dogs to relax and be quiet. Abe poured coffee out of our blackened Hills Bros can hung with a wire bail. He sprawled on a caribou hide to enjoy the morning and his sketch. I melted snow in another can to make oatmeal. The air was warm, the snow softening. It was going to be a warm day, too hot to travel. We were stuck here until it cooled off. The first geese could fly over any time now. We'd watch with watering mouths and I might try a long shot with the
rifle. First Goose was the grandest season of the year, a change after hundreds of days of caribou meat.

“Makes the day feel good,” Abe commented, “seeing bear. Wonder where her den is?”

The night sprang up behind my eyes. I poked through images, trying to winnow out what I'd been scared of, trying to decide how to ask Abe how much he believed in spirits and other things not in my high school science books. I fingered scars on my hands, resolving to try to stop thinking about Dawna and people, and to learn more from Abe, more about the land, and my father. Something could befall us.

“You and Treason ever find that bear den you were looking for, below Takunak? Few Novembers back?”

I poked sticks into the fire and shoved my boiling oatmeal aside. I eyed the side of Abe's face. “No. I voted, though. We were in town that election day.”

“I always use absentee ballots. It's simpler.”

I stirred the pot. “Pretty simple in town. I voted for Reagan.”

Abe rumpled his sketch.

He flipped the cardboard at the fire. He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes. He looked old with his eyes closed. There were veins above his lids that no one ever saw. As the cardboard burned, the bears stood out for an instant, every tiny line deliberate, flawless, the bears' expressions curious as they turned silver black and curled to ash. What, I wondered, were you supposed to think when your dad could fling away on a piece of pilot cracker box more talent than you owned in all the cells of your body?

“I don't know how America can worship its Western myth and stomach that actor, again,” he said. “He would pave the last wilderness. And sell guns and Bibles along the roads. Without wilderness, what will all the gold and silver or uranium be worth? It'll be worth armloads of shit!”

Abe had never stated an opinion so indubitably. He'd been more an older brother—letting us feel and think and be whatever we chose. In the
silence the oats bubbled and spat. “Saw a wolf up the valley last night,” I offered. “In a den.”

“Could be a female. She'll be denning up to have pups. Any time now.” His eyes opened and sparked with interest. He leaned on his elbow. The sun was on his face. “Maybe we ought to move camp a little bit west?”

Around our fire lay a continent of wild land. I could speak any words I chose and Abe would listen because he was my best friend, but I was unsure of these questions inside. Dead-people spirits, intuition, and fears were another set of feelings Hawclys didn't talk about. And all I said was, “Maybe so.”

 

 

IRIS LEAPT DOWN
out of the Twin Beech. She wore a blue windbreaker over a heavy sweater and the color made her blue eyes glow. Her black hair was long and curly with a thin earband underneath. Her face was pale and red cheeked. She ran up and twisted her arms around my neck. “Cutuk! I decided you wouldn't be here. You can still travel? The trail's not melted? You brought your snowgo, not the dogs?” She messed my hair. “Quit smilin', boy,” she said in Village English. In the crowd around the plane people chuckled. Iris hadn't changed. “Say something!”

“Shuck. I'm glad to see you.”

“I know
that.”
She pointed out her luggage and thanked the pilot for the flight. “If you ever get weathered-in and need a place to stay, ask around. Probably I'll be living here.”

He struck up a conversation with her, enraptured, like everyone, by her cheer and bright beauty. I hauled her duffle bags to my sled and wrapped them in the tarp. She ran up behind. “This all? Okay to freeze?” My voice sounded too everydayish—I wanted Iris to know what her coming home meant.

I started the snowgo. She climbed on. In my ear she said, “I got the job.”

I kept my eyes on the trail. Strangely, I didn't feel anything in my
stomach, my place of thrill and anticipation. A quick twinge of fear yanked the bottom of my brisket. Fear for Iris, surviving the Darkness and the drinking of this village.

“I'll tell you the whole story at home.”

“I have stuff to tell you, too.”

We were pulling up to the Wolfgloves' house. Lumpy opened the door and strolled out, back from his most recent outing to jail. He had lost a front tooth. His arms and shoulders bulged from weight lifting. He was left-handed and the fingers of that hand were gnarled, like they had been taken apart and put back together wrong. An Arctic Cat primary clutch had done that for him. “Hi Iris.” He placed a cigarette between his lips. His eyes roamed her athletic body, his face empty of expression.

Charley Casket ambled around the corner of the old Wolfglove shack and adjusted his course our way. He shook hands. His hand was limp—the way Eskimos shook hands—but clammy, too. It dipped in his jacket pocket, came out palm open. “This was my
taata's.”
In his hand lay a coarse caribou antler lure, with heavy copper wire hooked through it. The copper gleamed, uncorroded, fresh out of its plastic insulation. “Hunnert bucks. That archaeologist fella say he gonna give me five or eight thousand.”

Iris squeezed my neck. She smiled. “This place was getting hard to believe.”

“You bring weed, Iris? How 'bout le's trade for pin joint?”

“Com'on, Charley.” Lumpy spat between his teeth, barely moving a muscle. “Get the fuck outta Cutuk an'em's way.”

Inside, Janet got out black
muktuk
she'd been saving in her freezer. “Long time you have no this kinda, huh?” She smiled at Iris. “We're so broud of you,” Janet said, confusing her
p
s and
b
s.

“I've been eating store-bought food for so long I'm surprised I don't look like a loaf of Wonder bread.”

“Maybe you're almost Wonder Woman.”

Everyone laughed.

“Arii,
you always let us laugh. You'll live with us if you start peing
schoolteacher. That way we'll see Cutuk,” Janet cuffed me fondly on the head, “'cause he sometimes always forget us for long time.”

Melt walked in. The room went silent. He nodded briefly at Iris. “You buy me salt?” Janet asked. Melt wrinkled his nose,
no
in Iñupiaq. Lumpy stood, dark and wary, staring out at the sunny day. He shrugged into his jacket, lackadaisically hefted his shotgun, and went out.

“I'm going Uktu!” Melt shouted.

“How come?”

“They're going over!” Melt put his arms in the sleeves of the fancy sealskin jacket Janet had sewn for him. He paused, grabbed two beaver hats she had just finished, and hurried out the door.