Ordinary Wolves (44 page)

The tips of my fingers could touch the first depression inside the den and I scooped glovefuls, winnowing chewed branches, turds, and hair. Chips of ancient bone and heavy pebbles lay between my fingers. The eyes of a huge porcupine watched from the depths of the den. I glanced into a handful. Two dull yellow nuggets lay in my palm. I sifted heaps faster, raked out handfuls and prodded the stones and bones. My hands bled, burned from the quills, but no moosehide, or jade or ivory or more gold pebbles, appeared.

Finally, I knelt on the rock outcropping, brushed snow aside to sit. I held the gold rocks in my hands. “Well, Enuk.” I pressed the gold against my lips. It was cold and stank of porcupine. My stiff cheeks lifted in a smile. “I missed you for a while there. I didn't know how to be alone.”

Caribou passed below. I sat for a time. In the distance I thought I saw wolves, but it was only the dogs, returning unsuccessful from another chase, undaunted. I squeezed the rocks again quickly, as if I didn't want even my dogs to see their color, and flicked them into the dirt tunnel. “Here you go, porcupine. You be good on the country, too. Eat the whole tree for a change, don't just girdle it.”

The dogs stared up from below. They raced up the narrow path, panting and cheerful, sniffing my hands, questioning what I'd found. I reached into my pack and pulled out a dried
siulik
and cut each a small piece. They swallowed their shares and wagged tails and tilted their heads
for more. I chewed, and paused, listening. A howl echoed in the canyon. “Ssst.” The dogs held their breaths. I pointed with my knife, across the canyon. High on the rocks a wolf stood. A second howl pierced the canyon, ringing off the rock walls, rising and falling away. The wolf paced on the outcropping, sniffed, and sauntered up the shale, moving higher, over a skyline and disappearing into a fold of the mountain.

Far across the tundra a dark thread of spruce marked a bend in Jesus Creek, near home. The sun was cooling in the west, dropping into a steely cloud bank. We were going to be heading away from it. The night would come and we would sleep somewhere. And the next day we would be at the igloo, and the tall grasses and fireweed would swish in the evening, and the snow would crunch under our feet. The fall air would be dense and cool, the light from the windows small and yellow in the huge blackness. I would throw
quaq
fish to the dogs. They would press noses out of the dark and tear the fish. Inside, the lamplight would be warm, while the stove sparked and the tea kettles sang. Maybe Dawna would see it, hear it, and love it. Maybe she would go as far away as airplanes could fly.

I handed Magnum PI the fish skin that I hadn't eaten, stuffed a Snickers wrapper into the pack, and lashed on the cow's hindquarters. I picked up the rifle and we started across the tundra.

TWENTY-NINE

A HOWL RISES
up the mountain, echoing in rocks, floating back down the slope to fade into the tundra.
The land stretches, vast crimson pastures, south to the river and beyond. East and west the land runs to the timbered terraces of the mountains. Caribou dot the tundra like lines of weathered quartz. A brown bear and her cubs are dark knobs in the distance, eating blueberries. They stop to wrestle, lying back on bushes in mock battle, their lips and tongues purple. The caribou wait, anxious, and then split into small herds and pour away. Ravens caw over the distance. A lone golden eagle tours the wind, patrolling the gravel porches of ground squirrels. In the willows of a creek, a cow moose and twin calves snap off the summer's fresh growth and swallow pale green branches. Far up the stone horizon, cut against the dizzy blue, a wolf pours her howl over the valley.

The air is cool and still. A line of gray in the west says snow, winter on its way. The caribou are too far out on the tundra to hear the wolf. The
moose calves nose their mother's neck. The wolf stands, with lead in her shoulder, broken fangs in her jaw. Her guard hairs have fallen out from old age, left her white as a polar bear, and her yellow eyes stare on her offspring scattered below, and farther below, the human and its companions retreating into the land.

ACKNOWLEDEMENTS

WRITERS, MANY OF THEM
, are people who might have been old Iñupiat—they have a generosity that doesn't make sense at times. They've helped me, and I don't remember half of their names. Peggy Shumaker was a beautiful professor at the University of Alaska, fresh from teaching convicts in Arizona, I think, when she complimented some feeble stories of mine and steered me toward Montana. There at the University of Montana, Kate Gadbow, Bill Kittridge, Peter Stark, and others offered help. At the UM journalism school, I was helped by cruel and excellent professors, ready to destroy a poor dyslexic student's grade for simply misplacing a comma. Dennis Swibold, Sharon Barrett, Nathaniel Blumberg, and all the rest—writers with fierce ethics, regardless of what the world thinks of journalists. I thank you now for the red on my sentences. And thank you, Adina, for traveling that road in my vicinity.

Thanks to John Weston and microbreweries—in that order—for my survival in Oregon. Frank Soos and Leonard Kamerling in Fairbanks . . .
and plenty more I should be able to recall. Thanks to Mary Williams for understanding as each season I arrive with less fat meat and more questions, to Chris Todd for reading the manuscript when he could have been running his dog team, and to Jim Dau and Cynthia Meyers for years of storing my computer discs in their sock drawer.

Thanks to Ruthie Sampson and Harriet Blair for their linguistic abilities and expertise with Iñupiaq translations. Any errors, intended or otherwise, are mine alone.

And, finally, those who come first. Thanks to my wife, Stacey, librarian extraordinaire and editor of all my writing, who even when our tent was cold during chilly summers and we were burning romance paper-backs never once requested that the manuscript be shoved in the stove where it could have been useful. Thanks to Emilie Buchwald, publisher and editor, the one person truly responsible for rescuing this story from sock drawer and stove. Emilie stepped out of somewhere when I needed her most, with the gift to blend the right recipe of encouragement with her masterful editing. And thanks to Sydelle Kramer and the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Sydelle, my unwavering, wise, and always there agent who has never even met me. She is what I have in mind when I speak of generosity, support, and encouragement.

SETH KANTNER
was born and raised in the wilderness of northern Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism. He has worked as a trapper, fisherman, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder, wild-life photographer, and adjunct professor. His writing and photographs have appeared in
Outside, Alaska Geographic, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, Switch!, Reader's Digest,
and other anthologies and publications. His work reflects his devotion to the land and the animals who live on it, and his belief in the importance of wildness left wild. He lives with his wife and daughter in northwest Alaska.

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

© 2004, Text by Seth Kantner

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of
this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the
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Minnesota 55415.
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Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges support from Emilie and Henry Buchwald; Bush Foundation; Cargill Foundation; Timothy and Tara Clark Family Charitable Fund; DeL Corazón Family Fund; Dougherty Family Foundation; Ecolab Foundation; Joe B. Foster Family Foundation; General Mills Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Kathleen Jones; Constance B. Kunin; D. K. Light; Chris and Ann Malecek; McKnight Foundation; a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; Sheila C. Morgan; Laura Jane Musser Fund; National Endowment for the Arts; Navarre Corporation; Kate and Stuart Nielsen; Outagamie Charitable Foundation; Qwest Foundation; Debbie Reynolds; St. Paul Companies, Inc., Foundation; Ellen and Sheldon Sturgis; Surdna Foundation; Target, Marshall Field's, and Mervyn's with support from the Target Foundation; Gertrude Sexton Thompson Charitable Trust; James R. Thorpe Foundation; Toro Foundation; Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation; and Xcel Energy Foundation.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kantner, Seth, 1965-

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-571-31802-2

1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Rejection (Psychology)—Fiction.

3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Wilderness areas—Fiction.

5. Arctic regions—Fiction. 6. Inupiat—Fiction. 7. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.A55O73 2004

813'.6—dc22

2003024025

 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.