Ordinary Wolves (3 page)

Enuk shook water droplets out of his wolf ruff. I tried to contemplate the way I knew grown-ups did, to poke at his words with sharpened thoughts. I wondered if he'd restart the tale the following night—or in a year. I felt I should comprehend something profound about shooting dogs, but I couldn't get past thinking that the books on the shelf over Abe's bunk, the soapy dishwater and coffee grounds in the slop bucket—and our team sleeping buried down by the river—all were blatant proof that we owned too much, lived too comfortably. I needed tougher times to turn me Eskimo.

Our low door was built from split spruce poles, insulated with thick fall-time bull caribou hides nailed skin-out on both sides. The hinges were
ugruk
skin. “Better chop the bottom loose,” Abe suggested. He reached in the wood box for the hatchet. Enuk pounded with his big fists until the condensation ice crumbled. He yanked inward. The wind and swirling snow roared, a hole into a howling world; the wind shuddered the lamp flame. A smooth waist-high white mirror of the door stood in his way. Chilled air rolled across the floor. Enuk leapt up and vanished over the drift into the night gusts.

Chunks of snow tumbled down. I had a flash of memory—summertime, green leaves. Enuk, and a strange man. The man had combed hair. And a space between his teeth that he smiled around and showed us how to spit through. He cradled an animal in calico cloth.
A baby porcupine!
The man
seemed to be Enuk's son Melt. But how could that be? Melt was mean and smiled like indigestion. Mixed up behind my eyes was that baby porcupine dead in a cotton flour sack, a ski plane taking off, and me crying, unable to convey the tragedy of my blue Lego spiraling to the bottom of the outhouse. These memories seemed valuable, as unreplaceable as that Lego had been, but the roar of the wind sucked my concentration into the dark.

Abe scratched snow aside trying to close the door again. “Need to use the pot?” he asked.

Iris did and I did, and we hurried. There was nowhere to hide—it was how Abe had first explained the word
vulnerable—
with Enuk coming back momentarily. Breaking trail to the outhouse would have involved digging out the door, getting all dressed in overpants and parkas, finding our way, digging out the outhouse door, trying not to crap on our heavy clothes. Then tracking snow in the house; wet furs; trying to get the door closed again; firing up the stove. Abe didn't encourage any of it. Embarrassment counted as nothing. It mattered to him as much as the color of margarine.

Abe slammed the door, and again. His hair and the collar of his flannel shirt were floured with snow. He grinned. “Glad I don't have to go to work in the morning.”

“What he gonna do?” I asked, instantly ashamed of the excess of Village English in my voice.

“Check the dogs.” Jerry clacked checkers together, matter-of-factly. “Abe, can an animal catch rabies and get those symptoms in one night?”

“Maybe not. That virus takes a couple weeks to infect your nervous system.” Abe picked up the book he'd been reading that morning
—The Prophet—
turned it over, peered at the spine thoughtfully, and put it back down. Abe eyed his thumbnail and bit it. “I had to shoot a rabid moose that charged in the team, long time ago, in the Helpmejack Hills.”

“Does a person forget their friends?”

Iris crossed her eyes. “Jerry'll never skin another fox's face.”

“I bonked that rabid one that scared you,” Jerry growled, “chewing the door. You were going to stay inside until Abe got home.”

A second rabid fox had screamed insults to our sled dogs and snarled in the window at his warped reflection. After that incident my imagination
encountered them all winter, during the bad-mouse year, foam dripping off their narrow black lips. Nights mice and shrews streaked across my pillow and gnawed at my caribou-hide
qaatchiaq,
and I lay awake doubly frightened that something as invisible and unaccredited as mouse spit could carry such consequences.

Jerry chewed his cheeks, cataloging Abe's answers. Jerry remembered poems, songs, definitions. I believed that he wanted to be the healthiest, the smartest, and the best, in case our mom came back. He was all that, and had black hair—things that I thought should come to him with smiles.

Iris's eyes flashed. “Guys, I say that's what happened six years ago. Abe caught rabies! He thought he was walking to the store in Chicago to buy tobacco, next thing he noticed a new baby, lots of snow, and us kids gathering
masru.
He's maybe still got 'em.”

I looked down, ashamed; I hadn't seen a city. Jerry didn't smile. “You win.” He rolled up the birchbark checkerboard, with every other square peeled to make the board pale white and brown. Under the dull roar of the wind, in the leftover silence, I had a sudden flash—Jerry was thinking our mother may have caught rabies.

A gust shook the stovepipe. Abe shut the draft on the fire, lit a candle to place by his bed. He pissed in the slop bucket. He rubbed his knee. “One of you kids lay Enuk out a
qaatchiaq.”
Steam rose out of the bucket. I stood up, rattling the lamp on the table, disturbing the shadows.

The door burst open. Enuk jumped in. A thought startled me:
Would a person tell if he had been bitten?
People might run away. Someone would stand across a valley and sink a bullet in your head. What if a dog bit me and died later; would I have the courage to tell? Enuk rubbed his hands together close to the stove. He grabbed my neck from behind. He laughed near my ear. “What you're laying out
qaatchiaq
for, Yellow-Hair? You gonna
nallaq?
Nice night, le's go hunt!”

 

 

TWO DAYS PASSED.
The wind fell away and Abe shoveled out the door entrance. We climbed up the snow trench into a motionless thirty-below
day. The old marred snowdrifts had been repaired and repainted. A scalloped white land stretched to the riverbanks, across the tundra to the orange horizon. The cold sky seemed crystalline, dark blue glass, in reach and ready for one thrown iceball to bring it shattering down.

In our parkas and
mukluks,
we kids ran back and forth examining the new high drifts and sliding off cornices. Abe helped Enuk find his sled and they dug at it. The snow was hard, and it chipped and squeaked under their shovels. They iced the sled runners with a strip of brown bear fur dipped in a pan of warm water. They were careful not to get any water on their
mukluks.
Iris and I stood together while Abe and Enuk harnessed his seven dogs. Jerry stayed in the safety of our dog yard. He mistrusted strange dogs. Often they snapped at him, though he never lost his temper and clubbed dogs with shovels or rifle stocks the way other people did. I vowed when I grew big enough to handle huskies I wouldn't miss a chance to help a traveler hitch up.

Enuk stood on the runners with one foot on the steel claw brake, his hands in his wolf mittens holding the toprails. The dogs lunged against their towlines, yelping to run. Our dogs barked and scratched the snow. There was little room left in the yowling for last words with company. Enuk said something and nodded north. We stepped close. “Next time, Cutuk? Be good on ta country.” He swept away, furrowing snow to dust with his brake.

We hurried out on the river to watch him become a black speck and disappear far off downriver. Dark spruce lined the far riverbank. In my mind I could see the village and barking dogs and the people there, and Enuk's grandchildren, Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove, with their mother, Janet, to kiss them and make caribou soup with yellow seashell noodles.

Jerry kicked snow. Abe put his hand awkwardly across my shoulder. I flinched. Abe and Jerry and I didn't touch—unless it was rough, tickling or king-of-the-hill wrestling over a cornice. Abe turned toward the house. “If the trail stays firm . . .” He wiped his nose. He liked us to be happy, and we usually stayed that way for him. “Maybe next month if the trail's okay, we'll go to town? Nice to have a traveler, wasn't it?”

I tried to ignore the splinters of comfort at the thought of people. I was
going to be a hunter; the toughest hunters traveled alone. I kept my mouth shut and broke the tiny tears off my eyelashes. Abe hated whining. He believed that excess comfort was damaging, that whininess was contagious. Stern lines would gather at his mouth and grooves would form above the bridge of his nose. “You an Everything-Wanter now?” he'd growl. And then I would wish for my mother with her black hair and flashing eyes.

But the truth that made me squirm?—she'd left me few memories. All I was certain I remembered of her was that man January Thompson, a fat Outsider, a wolf bounty hunter with a blue and gold airplane on skis, bouncing on the ice, lurching into the sky. I pretended a memory but in the tiny honest slice of my mind I knew I had cannibalized whole hindquarters off Jerry's stories. Jerry was almost five when they left the lower States. “We came in Abe's blue truck,” he'd say. “The license plates said North to the Future. You were almost three, Iris. 'Member?” That was all. But it stung. That history didn't include me. The Hawcly past before the Arctic was another planet, a sunny place of Sunkist lemons and green grapes drying into raisins—instead of meat drying into meat—a place that I'd never walked and couldn't put roots to even in memory.

Jerry once told how my mother had a yellow car, with a built-in radio. I wondered why so many of the stories had cars. Did all the cars have radios? When he related these things, Iris and I squeezed together on the bearskin couch, curious about that stranger down in the States who wasn't coming back, but somewhere still lived. It was all strange, but seemed normal, too, the way she was a fairy tale that kept fogging over, while Enuk, even vanished downriver, stood in my life as sharp as a raven in the blue sky.

Abe and Jerry and Iris tramped up to the house. I lingered in the dog yard, playing with Ponoc and the others. They stared downriver, howling occasionally, forlorn and dejected about not following Enuk's team. It was a chance to play with the dogs without getting scratched and licked off my feet. I ruined it by slipping Ponoc a stray chip of frozen moose off the snow near the dogfood pile. Sled dog brains kept to narrow, well-packed trails of thought, and food lay at the end of all the trails. They howled and gestured with their noses, wagging and protesting the inequitable
feeding. My heart grew huge for them, my happy-go-lucky friends, always delighted to see me, prancing and tripping over their chains. How endless the land would be without their companionship.

Suddenly I saw the dog yard empty, the strewn gnawed bones, the yellow pissicles and the round melted sleeping circles, all drifted white; only the chain stakes remained stabbing out of the snow like gray grave markers. A mouse ran out from under the meat pile, dropped a turd, and disappeared down a round hole. I backed away from the lunging dogs. Maybe they were already infected.

Ponoc bit a wad of caribou hair off his stomped yard and tossed it playfully in the air. His pink tongue flicked between his teeth, his mouth muddy with hairs. I spat between my teeth. Maybe in my huge future I would have to shoot a whole team of my own dogs. The thought of the years ahead flooded hot in my chest. I raced up to our igloo, to my brother and sister and father, there eating
paniqtuq
and seal oil and red jam. Food that would make me Eskimo.

TWO

WHEN I WAS TEN,
on a night shortly after the sun returned, a pack of wolves raided our peoplefood pile. Along the bank to the east, beyond our pole cache, the wolves worked over it all except one frozen caribou—a skinny carcass that we too were leaving till last. Our dogs howled and barked in the dark. By first light at ten o'clock the pack had vanished, leaving a pawed circle of meat dust and cracked bone chips in the reddened snow, and tracks leading in too many directions onto the windblown tundra.

The faint scent of clean dog hung in the clawed holes. Abe hunched down, kneading his yellow beard, happier than if he'd discovered gold in the gravel at the bottom of our water hole. Snow clung behind his knees to the creases of his overpants. He examined a wolf turd, long and gray with twisted caribou hair. In his hand the shit looked as capable of magic as a tube of Van Gogh Basic White.

“Should have come out to check the barking,” he muttered. “Like
to have the scene in my mind.” He stood and stared off north, spraying a square of his powerful imagination against the sky. He often leaned against trees, absorbed in the pastel glow of evening. “Been years since the wolves took much from us. Usually too wary. Hope we don't get people-company next couple days.”

A raven flew overhead, heading north. We eyed it.

“We're low on meat.” Jerry melted his cheek with a bare hand. Black hairs were sprouting on his jaw. I itched with distress when his hand wandered to the icicles on his downy mustache. “Wolves're always coming by. Why's it a big deal?”

I kicked the snow ground, embarrassed for both of them. I was ten years old, behind schedule on shooting my first wolf. “Let's go after 'em.”

Abe didn't hear.

For the next two weeks Abe read on his bed. Suddenly his book would drop and he'd rise, practically walking through us to his easel. He worked in oil. The turpentine fumes left us breathless and lightheaded. Tubes of his paint had frosted to the wall under his workbench, and he swore. He glared over his shoulder at the dim light, paced, peered, his mouth puckered. At night he tossed on his
qaatchiaq,
lit candles, rose to sigh at his work, and one night he tore the canvas free and stuffed it in the stove.

The second painting became a staked dog team, witnessing a pack of wolves borrowing caribou. Each dog's face held a different expression. Some merely whined, sitting, suffering the thievery patiently. Others stood on their sinewy back legs, lunging against their chains. Their mouths were outraged barks. None of the dogs were of our team—they lived in Abe's past or in his imagination. A black dog closest to the wolves jumped so hard his chain flipped him upside down, and Abe painted his curled claws, hinted at the wiry gray hair between his toes. Nine wolves leaned over the meat, cracking bones in their triangle molars. The painting had a dark silvery feel, a feeling that the wolves were friends, with each other, and with the night. I thought Abe's paintings of wolves were better than his other paintings.