Ordinary Wolves (2 page)

Once we had a mom. She wasn't coming back. That's what Iris said she told Jerry the day she flew away. She had a twelve-string guitar and apparently liked music more than caribou and bears and a moss roof that leaked. She'd left us alone with none of those thousand warm things children with mothers don't count. Abe never talked about it. He never painted it. Her leaving was the back wall of my memory.

Iris scraped at the ice on the window with her fingernails inside her sleeve. Her bony elbows stuck out of her shirt. “They're chaining below the willows so the drifts won't bury his dogs.” She flitted away to hang our parkas on pegs over the wood box, push
mukluks
and clothes tighter into the corners and under our bunks. Caribou hairs clung to all our clothes. She whisked hair and Abe's plane shavings and sawdust into dirt corners with a goose wing.

The north wind swept the open tundra and howled into the spruce on the bank where our sod home was buried in the permafrost. The skylight shuddered. Snow laced over the riverbank. The gray wool of moving snow hid the horizons. Overhead the frozen sky purpled with night, and above the wind and frantic branches clung watery stars. Out under the ice, the wide Kuguruk River flowed past the door, through the arctic part of Alaska that our mail-order schoolbooks called
barren icy desert.
That shamed me, that quick, throwaway description flung from the far rich East, printed in the black-and-white validation of a textbook. My protests only made Abe shrug.

The homemade Visqueen window shivered and whacked. The men chopped a frozen caribou for the dogs. The dogs ripped the skin off the meat and swallowed chunks. They guarded the skin, pinning it down with their claws. When the last bone and meat crystal was sniffed off the
snow, they chewed the hair off the skin, ate the skin. Then they curled up to protect their faces and feet.

We heard the men trudging through the drift, up on the eave, down into the trench to the door. The snow squeaked as Abe shoveled, then pounded on the skin door. “Chop the ice along the bottom! Hear me?” Jerry scrambled for the hatchet. “Now get back!” Torn by wind and muffled by the skins, his voice came in mad. I hid behind the water barrel. Abe and Enuk surged in out of the swirling snow. Ovals of frozen skin and drifted-on ice whitened their faces. I stared, longing for frostbite, the scars of heroes. Abe pulled his hood back and his curly yellow hair sprang out; his turquoise eyes shone above his bearded face. “Windy.”

“Alappaa
tat wind.” Enuk was a few inches shorter than Abe. His wide face was stiff, his goatee iced. The men grinned and shook snow off their parkas and whipped snow off their
mukluks.
They eased ice off their whiskers. Iris danced barefoot between them, smiling and scooping up snow to throw in the slop bucket. I wished I could move like her, light and smiling. Behind the water barrel I stood on the dirt and the damp mouse turds, excited at having company.

Enuk's gaze swung and pinned me down. “Hi Yellow-Hair! Getting big! How old?” His face was dark and cold-swollen.

Travelers all carried names for me, like the first-class mail. None were the ones I wanted. I inched out beside the blasting stove, my eyes down. “Five.” It was hard to look at Enuk—or any traveler—in the eyes after seeing no people for weeks. It was hard to speak and not run and hide again. Enuk's frost-scarred face betrayed mysteries and romantic hard times that drew a five-year-old boy with swollen dreams. He was muscled in the forearms in the way of a skinned wolverine. He didn't eat most store-bought food, except Nabob boysenberry jam. When he was out hunting with his dog team and snowshoes he carried a can of jam. He'd chop it open and—after dried meat, or frozen meat, or cooked meat—around his campfire he'd suck on chips of frozen jam. He also carried his little moosehide pouch. Inside were secrets; once he'd let us hold gold nuggets, lumpy, the diameter of dimes. We handed them back and they disappeared in the folds of leather. The day I turned old I was going to
be Enuk. Small discrepancies left footprints in my faith, such as the fact that he was Eskimo and I seemed to be staying
naluaġmiu.
But years lined up ahead, promising time for a cure.

Our last human visitor had been Woodrow Washington, a month before. Woodrow had a mustache and one tooth on the bottom, one on top. They didn't line up. Not near. His closest worldly ties were with the bottle, and that left him narrow and shaky. Though he hunted like everyone, his concentration and shots tended to stray. When he showed up, Jerry always hid the vanilla. Sober, he was nice and extra polite. “Tat Feathers boy, he suicide.” Woodrow had brought news and stayed only long enough for warmed-up breakfast coffee. “He use double-barrel, backa their outhouse. You got fifty dollar? I sure need, alright?” Abe gave him the money. Abe leaned on his workbench and rubbed his ears. Harry Feathers was—or had been—a shambling teenager with blinky eyes and acne. He talked to Abe when Abe was snacking our sled dogs in front of Feathers's post office. It seemed as if maybe nobody else listened to Harry.

Woodrow had been disappointing company. We had only what money was in the Hills Bros can, but I blamed him more for not spending the night. And not bringing our first class.

Jerry served boiled caribou pelvis, in the cannibal pot, and pilot crackers, salmon berries,
qusrimmaq,
and the margarine that travelers had left—without the coloring added. Abe didn't allow something for nothing; yellow dye was poison; the color of food was nothing. We all carried sharp sheath knives forged out of old chisels and files and used them to cut at the fat and meat on the pelvis bone. Afterward, for a while I forgot my shameful blue eyes and yellow hair when Enuk leaned back on the bearskin couch. He hooked his thumb under his chin. His gaze slid away, beyond the leaning logs of the back wall. His pleasant face might have said
aarigaa taikuu,
but what he did say was, “Tat time it blowing same like tis, up Jesus Crick I kill my dowgs.” I wiped my greasy hands on my pants and climbed onto his words as if they were a long team to pull me away to the land of strength and adultness.

He whittled a toothpick out of a splinter of kindling. He let the chips spin into the darkness under the table to mix with the caribou hairs and
black mouse turds that carpeted our hewn floorboards. Eskimos weren't like Franklin and Crazy Joe or other
naluaġmius
who occasionally came upriver; Enuk's story was just to fill the night and he wasn't afraid to let silence happen between words. Time was one bend of open water to him and he hunched comfortable on the bank, enjoying what the current carried.

With the stick, Enuk picked his teeth. He had most of his teeth, he said, because he never liked “shigger” or “booze.” I didn't know what booze meant and was scared to ask, vaguely convinced it might be something frilly that city women ordered out of the first half of the Sears catalog. I sat on the chopping-block stump and stared up into his face.

Abe threw a log into the stove. Sparks hissed red trails up around his shaggy head and flicked into darkness against the low ceiling poles. The poles around the five-gallon-can safety hung with dust tendrils from past smoke. Smoke and the oily odor of flame spread in the room. Abe filled a kettle, making hot water for tea. Mice and shrews rattled spoons on the kitchen boards.

“Wind blow plen'y hard tat night I get lost. Freeze you gonna like nothing.” Enuk nodded at our bellied-in plastic sheeting windows behind his head, white and hard with drifted snow. A dwindling line of black night showed at the top. “My lead dowg, he been bite my dowgs. Al'uv'em tangle in'a willows. I leave 'em, let'um bury. I sleep in ta sled, on
qaatchiaq.
Tat night I never sleep much.”

He chuckled and glared. “You listen, Yellow-Hair? Can't see only nothing too much wind.” Enuk's bottom lip was thick and dark and permanently thrust out. I laughed, shy, and slapped my grubby red feet on the cold floor and tried to push out my too-thin lip.

In the corner on Abe's spruce-slab bed, Jerry and Iris lay on his caribou-hide
qaatchiaq
playing checkers. “Rabies,” Jerry murmured. “His story's going to have rabies.”

She pinched him. “It's your turn.” A shrew ran on the floor. Enuk's black eyes followed it. He picked up the block of kindling and waited. Behind the wood box shrews whistled.

Jerry dragged a moose-antler checker over her pieces. The tops of his were marking-penned black, Iris's red. “'Kay then. King me.” They wore
corduroy pants. The corduroy ridges were eroded off the knees, thighs, and butts. Iris had two belt loops cinched together with twine to keep her too-big pants up. Abe didn't encourage us to change clothes more than once a month. More than twice a month put a burden on everybody. He wouldn't say no, but the house was low and one room—the only place to get out of the weather for miles—and the faintest disapproval could hang in the air.

The corner posts of Abe's bed were weather-silvered logs, the tops bowled from use as chiseling blocks and ashtrays. Above the foot of his bed, his workbench was messy with empty rifle brass, pieces of antler and bone, rusty bolts, wood chips, and abandoned paintings, the canvas and paper bent and ripped by his chisels and heavy planes. Abe Hawcly was a left-handed artist. He was also our dad. But we kids didn't know to call him anything generic or fatherly, only Abe. Travelers called him that. By the time we realized what normal people did, years had hardened into history. Calling him Dad felt worse than shaking hands.

“Enuk. Here.” Abe slid a mug across the uneven boards to the middle of the table. He rubbed his sore knee and sat and rolled himself a cigarette with one hand. “Kids, don't worry about schoolwork tonight.” He waved his match out. Two joints of his ring finger had been swallowed by a whaling winch in Barrow. His hands were thick and red, paint dried in the cracks. They carved faces on scraps of firewood and drew whole valleys lurking with animals on cardboard boxes.

“Ah,
taikuu.”
Enuk slurped the scalding tea that would have seared a kid's mouth into mealy blisters. “My dowgs be funny tat night. Lotta growl.”

Another night passed in his story.

“How old were you?” My words tumbled away like a fool's gloves bouncing downwind. Blood stung my cheeks. Interrupting seemed worse than pissing your pants in front of the village schoolhouse.

“Hush, Cutuk,” Jerry said. Iris giggled and pretended to bite her nails, both hands at once. Abe had a piece of caribou-sinew string in his fingers, and he began pulling loops through loops. A lead dog formed. He turned the wick down on the lamp. Storytelling shadows stretched farther out
from the moldy corners. The wind gusted. The door was half buried. I pictured those yellow metal nuggets. Wondered if they were in Enuk's pocket, and how young he'd been when he found the first one.

Enuk sipped. “Cutuk, you gonna be hunter?” He flicked my arm, unaware of the stinging power of his thick fingers. Tears flooded my eyes. “Tat's good. You got one 'hol life. Tat's plen'y. Gonna you be tired if you alla time try hurry.”

Abe smiled. He pulled a string. In his hands the lead dog vanished.

I shrank low and twisted broken threads in the knees of my pants. At least he'd used my Eskimo name. Clayton was my white name—a mushy gray one. I had taught my ears not to hear it, until people learned it didn't work.
Cutuk
meant fall. Not fall when the berries were ripe and the bears were fat enough—fall like dropping down out of a tree without planning. Except in Iñupiaq it was spelled
katak;
but none of us or Enuk had known the spelling. The way Iris sounded it out had stuck. It was no first-pick name, misspelled and not even easy to say, but Enuk bestowed it on me before I could campaign for a better one. So I justified it into greatness by pretending it had special come-from-behind potential.

“Night time, still snowing I hear lotta growl. First light gonna I dig t'em dowgs. Right there, blood in'a snow. When I fin' my leader, tat one try bite.” He ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. One of his ears had a hole up near the top as small as a goose's windpipe. Gray hairs curled through. “Five dowgs. Good size dowg team back then time, not much food on ta country. Not like now gonna t'em white guy dowgfed in'a bag. I shoot three before it turn dark. Right there I know tat gonna be real bat. Tat was nineteen . . . nineteen thirty-something, before Kennedy and Hitler fight. Could be I'm twenty-five tat time.

“Cutuk. Peoples got not much shells tat time not like now. I got jus' only one shell. I go 'head shoot t'em last two dowgs.”

The glory of Enuk's words melted under a warm spell of reality. I pictured my pup Ponoc, grinning his sloppy puppy grin—he collapsed under the boom of a rifle. Blood sprayed Ponoc's silver face and ran out a red hole, steaming into the snow like the last rabid fox Abe had shot. The corners of my throat grew wet and needed to swallow.

“How many nights I wait. Even I make spear from spruce. Then I see hills. Right there,” Enuk shrugged, grinned, and gestured, his huge fingers cutting straight across his other palm, angling up, “I take off on snowshoe. No dowgs. Could be they already let me gonna crazy. I see wolv'reen. Right there. Real close. No ammo in ta pocket. Long time ago gonna plenty hard time we always have. No ammo in ta pocket.”

Enuk sat for a minute, then shuffled over and dumped his coffee grounds in the slop bucket by the door. The grounds plopped on the dishwater frozen in the bottom. He reached up to a peg behind the stove for his parka and
mukluks.
Reminiscence no longer softened his face; the telling was over—the story, like old stories I'd heard at the Wolfgloves' house in Takunak, started in the middle and ended somewhere along where the storyteller grew tired.