Ordinary Wolves (40 page)

Wolves travel down the river, spread out and hunting, taking apart the darkness with their consummate senses. The pack halts and swings south, catching the scent of a cow moose crossing the ice. The tall animal nears the shore. They circle, biting at her flanks and butt. In the willow thickets on the bank, the moose backs against a cornice and for hours holds off the terror with her black hooves. Ice fog forms in a long low cloud overhead. The snow packs down pink and finally red. Wolves lie and rest on the snowdrift while others lunge at the moose's hocks and nose. As dawn twinges in the south, the moose goes to her knees, and in their trenches the wolves move forward and tear mouthfuls. The moose
rises again and then is down, kicking life away while the tired hunters open their feast.

 

 

THE PACK IS FULL AND STIFF,
and the circles they melt in the snow are bloody. The oldest wolves, the leaders of the pack, raise their heads and stand as a black dot bounds down their trail. They turn and flee into willows. Their swollen stomachs drag in the snow. A wolf runs west along the hard snowdrift. Three scatter east and into willows. A young wolf stands—and drops as if clubbed from the sky.

The machine skims across the snow. The remaining pack runs. Booms stab across the ice, and a second wolf drops, biting at its back. A third collapses. The machine races past the moose kill, past the dead wolf and the dying ones. Wolves wallow in the deep snow and willows, the machine yards behind, pushing their fear-torn muscles, drowning their senses in its gnashing stink.

And then there's silence.

Tearing lungs. Booming hearts. At the trees, the running wolves glance back, their tongues lolling. The hunter unfolds and stands on the machine, clawing and chipping at its brown stick, its mouth small, its face flat on the front, eyes like an owl. The trees close behind them. The wolves weave and plod their way into the morning.

TWENTY-SIX

IN THE DROWSY
June afternoon, distant Canada goose honks mixed with a Honda four-wheeler engine. On the tundra the last of the mating geese silenced their disagreement, in ecstasy or bad luck. I sat on the porch of Woody's government house, sharpening my knife. It had a wire edge.

Charley Casket sauntered over, yawning. “Thought you were that white guy.”

I shrugged at the moot compliment.

The teacher, Delbert, had hired me as soon as I stepped out of Abe's old
qayaq
among the Breakup icebergs stacked in front of Takunak. He hired me to “watch” the house he rented from Woody, and feed the cat. Delbert was lanky and balding and had ranted about fetal alcohol syndrome. “Half the town's refried,” he said, twirling his finger beside his ear. “My graduates aren't making it. Even the dogs here are loony. Some of the elders are truly great people.” He shook his head. “It's the younger ones that haven't gotten to experience consequences because of the government
squirting money on everything.” His wife was pale and pretty with candy-green eyes. She smiled apologetically.

Iris was in Fairbanks visiting Jerry. “Watching” meant I would be between here and her cabin for two weeks keeping their pupils from breaking in and ransacking the houses. Delbert and his wife owned a blender and a microwave, a washer and dryer, cable TV, a SaladShooter. I was catching up on
Cheers,
and Dan Rather. The tundra was out there, the bull caribou fattening; but in this house I might as well have been in Sacramento, shooting salad.

I had put word out and gotten a short job. Billy Feathers was the current mayor and when Napoleon Skuq Jr. came home from Anaktuvuk, he had brought Billy four grams of weed, besides his personal stash, of course. Billy hired him to be cop. Nippy drove the cop van past the dump road and a long way over the tundra with two jugs and two high school girls. He showed them the size and extent of the law and also got the van stuck in a lake. I got paid to winch it out and make it run again, since he wasn't interested in the job without the vehicle.

“Adii,
too hot, huh?” Charley held out an arrowhead. “Tom Standle was been looking for you.”

The obsidian point was perfect—and shiny new. I'd seen one like it in Anchorage. A flint knapper from California had made it behind his carport.

“You get this at Kmart?”

“I find it,” he turned, pointed at nothing in particular in the distance, “downriver. Quite a ways, alright.” He seemed short now, from a generation before all these tall steroid-beef-fed schoolkids. Charley, lately, had sometimes been under the influence of Jesus, sometimes his old self, a quiet sampler of NyQuil, Old Spice, vanilla. He picked at a pink lake of frostbite scars on his cheek. “You sell that tusk?”

“Yeah, to a Fairbanks fella.”

“How much?

“Thirty a pound.”

Charley waited.

“Twenty-six hundred dollars,” I said.

I'd made a list and mail-ordered supplies: a roll of Visqueen leaned inside, and axe handles, Coleman lanterns, dog harness webbing, ammo, rope, nails, four-and-a-half-inch whitefish netting, dried apricots, rice, salt. Chocolate to take up to Franklin, books, an outboard water pump impeller for Abe. I didn't tell Charley that I'd spent Breakup watching caribou and migratory birds return, and snowshoeing between patches of melting-out earth and songbird territories, alone with too many Abelike thoughts talking me into the idea that actions—as small as a bird's song, as big as nuclear stockpiling—spread love and disturbance rippling through the earth, through all creatures. I didn't tell him that Enuk Wolfglove had once given me a mammoth-ivory carving, or where he with his sharp eyes and persistence could probably unearth it. I didn't tell him that I often questioned if I should have left the mammoth tusk right where I found it, or that I was saving all the money from it to buy Dawna Wolfglove something—when I figured out what.

“. . . forty-five bucks,” Charley mumbled, offering the arrowhead. Charley's merchandise—always a perfect barometer of the black market—was available today for the Takunak price of a gram of marijuana. I thought, I would have asked fifty, get some munchies in the deal.
You're hearing your honky genes, Cutuk.

I wrinkled my nose,
no.
“What Mr. Standle want?”

“I dunno.”

I walked with Charley toward the post office. The town was deserted, nearly everyone asleep until afternoon. Above the gym an electric sign read H ME OF T E TAKUN K WOLV S. Swallows clicked and chortled, mating up on the telephone wires. We moved slowly. Moving fast—especially in the heat of day—was a non-shareholder attribute. We passed in front of four satellite dishes anchored to the packed dust. They pointed at a low angle, taking a long time to lift their aim off the ground, Takunak's brand-new ears cocked south, listening to blips that spelled how to be a generic American village. Takunak didn't listen very well. Not listening brought more government grants, and most people wanted to be jobless when the caribou were fat and the berries ripe. The river flowed down below, blue and lazy, and across was the leafy wilderness,
turning green and growing baby ptarmigan, moose, caribou. Baby butterflies and blueberries.

There was a letter from Dawna, and one from Cheryl. “Photo, Please Do Not Bend,” Cheryl had written on the envelope.

“I gonna wait here today,” Charlie said importantly. He leaned on the steps of the post office. “In case my unemployment check come.” His hand wandered into his pocket.

Unemployment? Had Charley ever had a job?

I read Dawna's letter as I walked on. She had quit her job. She'd be in Uktu in August, then planned to fly home to Takunak. She sent a wild rose petal. Apparently, they were blooming where she was or had been.

Under glowing young aspens at the edge of town, Mable Feathers lived in her government house, and the Standles rented the drafty old cabin her husband had built overlooking the river. Piles of naily boards, wrecked snowgos, outboard motor lower units, and broken basket sleds littered the yard between the houses—a sign of wealth, longevity, and prudence. No one knew when they might need a washtub of busted snowgo undercarriage springs. Tom Standle led me into their single room. “Got that favor to ask,” he said. A TV was on. The air smelled of Tide and herbal tea—apple cinnamon, the kind that smelled better than pie and tasted like sock water. “Like you to take an
Alaska
magazine writer down to meet Crazy Joe next week. Use my jonboat. Can you do it?”

I raised my eyebrows.

Aluminum foil and blankets were stapled over the windows to keep the pesky sun out at midnight. In the middle of the floor Sally Standle was washing clothes in a rectangular yellow Hoover washing machine. She offered Coke or tea. I didn't remember her so fat, triple chins and an axe handle across the sweat pants. A tall dour man sat cross-legged at the table.

“Oh, excuse me,” Tom scowled. “Cutuk. James.” We shook hands. Something about Tom's face wasn't pleased, and I wondered if he'd told the man that I hadn't “made it.”

An orange cat strolled out, hunched forward, and licked its butthole. “Company's coming!” Sally shouted. She hollered that whenever her cat
licked its ass. The way the ass pointed had to do with the direction the company came from,
guuq.
“Did you find a job?” she asked.

She was jovial and enjoyed pranks, so I told her I'd decided to go to Russia for work. “I heard you can support yourself over there selling condoms.” I grinned down at my hands. They rested on a huge Bible. Hastily, I moved them. Jesus peered out of a circle in the cover. Bibles were strewn on the table.

James murmured, “Mrs. Standle, do you wish to make a purchase today?”
A Bible salesman? In Takunak?
The cat must have been licking its butt for weeks. Sally Standle's eyes twinkled. “The Rainbow Vacuum Cleaner salesman beat you by a month,” she told James. “He sold seventeen-hundred-dollar machines to half the houses in Takunak. On credit, poor fool. No one even has carpet!” she wailed. “He put on quite the demonstration. Cutuk, you might enjoy incorporating that into your condom sales. Company's coming!”

The tea was scalding. Nothing that would be possible to swallow and escape. I had to laugh, talk about engines, and wait for it to cool—probably Mr. Standle's secret to sanity. Certainly Takunak's cure for summer.

 

 

IT WAS LATE EVEVING,
and sunny down by the river. Homemade wooden and new aluminum boats were anchored to the shore. Flies buzzed around piles of rotting sheefish. The river water had dropped and cleared up, and sandbars and mosquitoes were out. The writer, Alice Burne, was nowhere around. I leaned my rifle and a bag of apples against Melt's jade boulder. The ice had shifted the boulder a few yards downstream, and sand half-buried it. I sat and reread Cheryl's letter. A picture of her was folded in the letter. She wore yellow Helly Hansen rain pants, the suspenders forcing her breasts together, and yellow fishing wristlets; her hair was wild and her smile big and happy. She was in Naknek, set-netting for salmon, three months pregnant, and no longer with the father of her baby. Pregnancy made her feel great, she wrote, and already made her skin extra smooth and her hair thick.

My chest ached. She was stunning, and fishing!
But she's white and blond.
Quickly, I chided myself for my capsized racism, and for letting this amazing woman slip away. My thoughts leapt from her to Dawna and back. A self-deprecatory smile played across my mouth. I thought of the flight attendant on the jet to Anchorage, and those sweet and salty almonds, and for a few minutes I stared at the current going past, just to get time started again and not drown under my mistakes.

A cloud of mosquitoes swarmed out of the willows, sinking a hundred bites into my arms. Four-wheelers passed, drenching me in dust. Absently, I put a mosquito in my mouth, tasted the sweet tundra pollen on her body, spat her out, and tasted more.

“Aiy,
you honky!” A group of kids passed, taunting a black boy, the Bureau of Land Management surveyor's son. The man was here for part of the summer, paid by the government to survey native allotments. Kids shoved and hit the small boy. He cowered, bewildered and scared, but not fleeing. I lunged to my feet, fists raised to smash small skulls.
“Hey!
Treat him”—I halted. They all stared.

The boy dusted himself off, smiled cautiously, and showed me his Swiss Army knife. The other kids stood beside him now, eyeing the scissors and tiny saw. “Hi Cutuk.” A little five-year-old dropped his bike; dust puffed. “Hey, you always chew snuff? Want some?” The boy held out a round tin. “Have a dip. Got vitamin E—for Eskimo! It'll make you tough.” I laughed loud, the way Lance would, though with no idea what to say.

Alice still had not appeared. I wandered over to the old Wolfglove shack. Gray boards had been pried loose, and in a tangle of Janet's handmade fish seine, unskinned caribou legs had been tugged through the crack and mauled by puppies. The old Mr. Coffee was upside down in the dust, shattered, its electric cord gone. I saw the cord tied in as part of the clothesline.

In Janet's doorway I paused, no fat meat or furs to carry in. What were these inconsequential jobs of mine? What did I want here in this techno-outpost in the wilderness? I was no tour guide. No drunk. No
displaced factory worker on the Dan Rather show. I was an ex-hunter, trained on need, no longer needed.

Janet beamed. “Hi, Cutuk!” She wore a calico
atikłuk,
and sat on the floor beside an electric fan. She was splitting a willow for the rim of a birchbark basket. Whitney-Houston sat beside her. Tony, Stevie's four-year-old son, sat on a coffee can in the back corner, his shoulders tense, blasting away at video karate killers. He ran over and kicked my leg, showed me his muscle, and ran back to the controls. Daisy stood with her hand on Janet's shoulder, naked except for a clean pink Pamper and a wet strip of bark in her mouth. The fan blew her black hair back and made her small eyes squint. Janet pushed aside her rolls of birchbark, groaned, and hoisted herself to her feet. “You eat today?”