Ordinary Wolves (5 page)

I shook my head to dislodge the pictures.

“Coulda have more, alright. Only thing, smart one in'a bunch. He let t'em others run.” He looped his stringed overmitts behind his back. Barehanded, wary of the blood, he kneaded the wolf's thin lower legs.
“Alappaa!
Freeze. Hard gonna for tat way ta skin. I bring tis wolf inside. Wait for your old man.”

 

 

ABE AND IRIS RETURNED
without meat. We ate the skinny ribs Jerry had boiled. Skinny meat was a sign of a poor provider, but Enuk ate with relish. Afterward he skinned the wolf. When he finished, he folded the skin fur-out. On our floor the naked wolf grinned permanently in the weak lamplight, his teeth and tendons white against dark red muscles. The stomach was hard, and fetid smells were beginning to come out. Enuk had only a little blood on his fingertips. There was a slit in the wolf's throat. “Let his spirit go other wolf,” Enuk said. “Gotta respect.”

“Do you like wolves?” I asked.

Iris and Jerry peered over the tops of their schoolbooks. Their papers were spread on the wooden Blazo boxes that we made into desks—and also cupboards, shelves, seats, muskrat-stretching boards, and more.

“They got fam'ly. Smart. Careful. I like 'em best than all'a animal.
Your dad know. He make tat good picture. Gonna ta white ladies buy tat one more than any kinda wolf skin. Ha! Ha!” Enuk opened the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He flung the carcass into the dark. The furless animal slapped on the packed snow out under the chipped eyes of the stars. In the dog yard one of Enuk's dogs barked nervously at the thump in the still night. An echo rolled back lonesome from the timber across the river, and the dog challenged it with three quick barks.

“Yep, Yellow-Hair. Tomorrow you take your old man.” Enuk grinned. “Go out back way, hunt moose.” His eyes flicked to his knife, and I wondered what else he was thinking about and whether it was killing more wolves.

“We might.” Abe smiled and looked shy about something. He wiped blood drips off the floor with a holey sock rag. His cheeks and nose burnt with red ovals from frostbite that day on the trail. Iris's face was marked red, too. They hadn't seen the right moose—a barren cow, a moose that would have fat meat and its hide fair for snowshoe
babiche,
sled washers, cold-weather
mukluk
bottoms.

“We might look again tomorrow.” Abe folded the cardboard he had laid out for Enuk to work on. “You do a real nice job, Enuk.” Abe sounded as if he would have an impossible time skinning even a caribou legging. Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes, perfectly—better than any fox I'd ever seen skinned in Takunak. Their pelt was papery, difficult not to tear with the sharpened metal tube
ichuun,
difficult not to tear when turning the dried skin back fur-out. And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect to the animal whose life we'd taken.

Often, Abe helped me make birch and
babiche
snowshoes that few in Takunak remembered how to make. Or one time he helped write a letter to the substitute president, Gerald Ford. But he would never pick up an axe like he was tough. Never talk or hold a gun that way. Never brag, “I'm goin' after bear.” Any bear we got walked up on its own and still Abe didn't want to kill it. Around travelers, Abe's modesty trimmed off too much of the fat. Apparently things started getting out of balance back with his
dad. Tom Hawcly had been a sport hunter, a menacing species to have in any food chain. He left our grandmother in Chicago and roamed off to Barrow to be a pilot, the owner of two Super Cub airplanes, and a guide for polar bear hunters. The story was exciting enough, and romantic—up to the part where they found him smeared dead on the sea ice. People along the Kuguruk River hated sport hunters and guides as much as they did schoolteachers. Frequently they were one and the same. I was thankful that Barrow was a long way north. And that people thought of white people as having no relatives.

Enuk finished skinning out the paws. He talked of shooting his first wolf when he was ten. His dad had taken him to check a
tiktaaliq
fish trap. A lone wolf was there on the ice gnawing yesterday's frozen fish blood. The wind was behind the wolf. Enuk's father handed him the rifle.

I listened to Enuk's low voice and lusted to gun down a whole pack, to stockpile prestige. Somehow, I had to learn to stop worrying about wolf pain. Abe had to stop molding me into an unhero.

Abe slapped his pants, fumbled in his big pockets for tobacco and papers. He glanced over the table and workbench, and eventually gave up. To Iris he said, “Otter, boil water? When Enuk's washed up maybe you'll make a splash of tea?”

Iris set her math book on the wood box. She smiled at Enuk. The frostbite was pretty across her cheeks and nose. “Nine times eight, Cutuk!”

“Huh? Seventy-two.”

“Twenty-one times eleven.”

“Two hundred and thirty-one.” My thoughts softened; I pictured happy otters playing, sliding along day-old ice, stopping to nuzzle each other.

Iris dripped the dipper on my head as she danced barefoot toward the water barrel. She peered close, to focus out of her weak eyes. “Cutuk? Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”

I flicked her leg. The religious poster—the one Abe tacked out in the outhouse, the one the Gospel Trippers had left when they passed through last winter—said a family was supposed to say it: “I love you,”
I whispered, at my hands, too softly, the only time in my life. Iris, with her black hair and surprising blue eyes, full of smiles where I had storms, she never heard. She was in her own thoughts. What were they? I should have asked, but kissing, saying the word
love,
and talking about feelings weren't what Hawclys did, and I was embarrassed and went outside for a few minutes in the dark, to stand barefoot on the snow and listen to the night beside the naked wolf.

 

 

THE STOVE DRAFT FLICKERED
orange lights on the peeled poles of the ceiling. The orange melted through my eyelids to clutter my dreams with flames. Pitch smoldered, sweet and resinous on top of the stove.

Enuk lay on his
qaatchiaq.
His legs stretched out of sight under the table. Iris's black hair curled across my face. I brushed it aside and pulled our pants and shirts under the covers to warm them. I gripped the corner of the sleeping bag tight to keep the chilly morning out. For years Abe had promised to order me my own sleeping bag. Like Iris's glasses, it was another thing we'd have to go out into the world and find for ourselves. Iris took up more room this winter. She was bigger. Her breasts were growing, disconcerting to me when I accidentally brushed them.

“You elbowed me really hard in the eye last night.” Her voice was sleepy. She wore one of Abe's flannel shirts, faded and thin. She smelled of flannel, candle wax, and soft skin.

Jerry's bed was head to head with ours along the back wall. I wasn't sure if he was awake on his caribou skin. It was dark in the room, except for firelight. Abe banged the coffeepot on a round of firewood. He swore softly when a chunk of frozen grounds crumbled on the floor. He toed the grounds against the wood box. Iris leaned her chin on her wrists. “Daddy slobbest. What will he do without us?” Her words made me shiver. Firelight glowed on his broad white chest and arms. He crumpled a painting, stuffed it into the stove. The stiff paper caught and flared. For cash Abe made furniture to sell in Takunak, and occasionally he mailed one of his paintings to Anchorage. Never his best. I lay fantasizing; he
was an outlaw artist with a notorious past, his name would be legend in the places I traveled.

His bare feet rasped on the cold boards. Outside darkness painted the windows black. The roar of the stove grew, and frost in the safety dripped and hissed. Kettles began to whine. Enuk yawned and rose. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. His body was stout and muscular. The sun had never seen it, and his skin was smooth and pearly brown as a young man's, except on his thick hands and face where weather and time had stained their stories.

They sipped coffee. Abe lit the lamp. He took the cannibal pot off the stove and put it on the table. We knifed out hot meat and gravy and ate it with bread and the frozen sliced canned jam that Enuk brought. A fly buzzed, one wing frozen to the ice on the inside of the window. The door was frosty around the edges. It was still dark outside. The dogs howled.

Enuk put down his cup. “Today I get old.”

Iris pattered her fingers on his shoulder, as unconcerned as if he were a shelf. “Are you a hundred?”

I watched her hand. Jerry was watching, too.

“Jan'wary twenty-one, nineteen hunnert an five. How many tat gonna? Seventy?”

“Seventy-one!”

“Not so many. I still hunt best than my son.”

“My birthday was the fourth,” I said, thinking how perfect it would have been to be born seventeen days later, on Enuk's birthday. “We're not sure we celebrated on the right day. That day was warm and it snowed sticky; you remember, was that the fourth?” I trailed off. The mouthful of numbers felt white.

Enuk ignored me and retrieved his frozen wolf skin from outside the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He eyed the skin for shrew chews. His leather pouch lay beside his mug on the table. It had sounded heavy when he plunked it down. “You fellas have tat.” He nodded at the can of jam. “Cutuk, t'em mooses waiting. You gonna hunt?”

I studied Abe's face for a sign.

“It could be cold.” He sharpened his knife, three flicks on the pot, three flicks back. “Real cold.”

“I'll put my face under the tarp when it freezes.”

“Tat a boy!” Enuk said.

 

 

DOWN AT THE RIVER
it was minus a lot. My nose kept freezing shut on one side. The dogs uncurled and shook frost off their faces. They stood on three legs, melting one pad at a time while the other three quickly froze. Abe's leader, Farmer, stayed tight in a ball, melted into the packed snow. Her wide brown eyes peered out from under her tail. The hair on her feet was stained reddish brown. She was a gentle dog. I coaxed her to the front of the team where she shivered with her back arched, tail under her belly and pads freezing. Abe and Jerry harnessed the big, hard-to-handle dogs. The snaps were frozen. The harnesses were stiff and icy and hard to force into dog shapes. Our dogs weren't accustomed to company; even cold, they showed off to Enuk's dogs, tugging and barking, tangling the lines.

A quarter mile downriver, Abe waved a big wave good-bye to Enuk. Abe geed the dogs north, up the bank below the mouth of Jesus Creek. The snow on the tundra was ice hard, scooped and gouged into waves by wind. It creaked under the runners. Morning twilight bruised the southern sky. Shivers wandered my skin. I yanked off a mitten and warmed frozen patches on my cheeks. The cold burnt inside my nose. My fingers started to freeze. I wondered what thoughts walked in Abe's mind. I felt as cumbersome and alone as a moon traveler, peering out the fur tunnel of my caribou hood, beaver hat, and wolf ruff.

Farmer led toward the Dog Die Mountains. They were steep mountains, the spawning grounds of brown bears, storms, and spirits. They beckoned like five giants, snowed in to their chins. Occasionally we crossed a line of willows that marked a buried slough or a pond shore, and a dog or two would heave against his neckline and mark a willow, claiming any stray females in the last ten thousand acres.

“Is that a moose?” I said.

The dogs glanced over their shoulders, faces frosty and alarmed at my shout.

“Might be a tree,” Abe said softly.

My moose mutated into one of the lone low dark trees that grip the tundra, hunkered like a troll, gnarled arms thrust downwind. Abe had more careful eyes than I did; they grabbed details, touched textures, took apart colors. I slumped, cold on my caribou skin, stabbed by love for my dad. He didn't have to say “might be a tree” when he
knew.
Plenty of the dads in the village would holler, “Shudup. You try'na scare everything again?”

On a ridge, Abe whoa'd the dogs. He took out tobacco and papers. His bared hands tightened and turned red. I looked away, pretending for him that they were brown. He was too naive to know that red fingers were not the kind to have. The smoke smelled sharp in the smell-robbed air, comforting. The southern horizon glowed pink and for a few minutes a chunk of the sun flamed red through a dent in the Shield Mountains, like a giant flashlight with dying batteries. The snow glowed incandescent. I sprinted back and forth, melting fingers and toes. Abe glassed the land.

“Hmm. There she is.”

Through the binoculars the moose stood silhouetted, black as open water. We mushed closer. A deep moan floated on the air. Abe braked the sled. He shushed the dogs. They held their breath, listening. Then the pups yowled and tugged, the scent stirring their blood.

“Must be that cow missing her calf,” Abe said.

“They can sound like that?” I'd heard loons laughing manically, the woman-screams of lynx, ghoulish whimpering from porcupine, but I hadn't heard a mourning moose. I was proud of Abe, proud of his omniscient knowledge of the land.

“Never heard anything like it before,” he said, pleased.

We jounced on.

“Abe, why do you think greatness is bad?” My question startled both of us. I stiffened, mortified. He snapped ice off his mustache. “I mean—. Burning your best paintings. And acting like you don't know how to hunt when travelers are bragging.”

When Abe spoke, he used his historical-problems-with-the-world voice. He had a degree in art and history; Iris often teased that his degree
was
history. “This book I'm reading, the author argues that our heroes aren't heroes at all and have traditionally—”