Ordinary Wolves (7 page)

THREE

THE MOON IS BEHIND THE LAND,
narrow and nothing to hunt by.
The pack moves south in the dark, spread out in pairs and alone, toward the kill. Tension is in the pack, a missing sibling, and quick snarls. A wolf noses through a line of willows. Pale light ripples overhead. He drops onto a lake. Three big pups trail him. They stop often to nose each other and sniff mouse tunnels. On the lake they stand, their long gazes pointed at a dancing orange hole in the night, and the scent of smoke and blood and man and dog. The wolves circle. A fox streaks past. The pups give chase in the dark.

The pack halts out of the flick of firelight. They sniff the man's sweaty fear and the charred bones. They hear his quick breathing. The large wolf tastes something else, a scent sealed into his puppyhood and the loss of his mother. The scent makes him yawn in apprehension. After a time he leads the pack away from the danger of this kill. Past their own kill with man's scent there now, too. Away into mountains.

FOUR

BRUCE LEE ARRIVED
in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. Mr. Lee's style of instant gratification leapt the language barrier and left John Wayne piddling in the dust. He was an overwhelming success—the movie took in two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat.

A week later, when, unaware, we mushed into the village, I felt the ramifications of Lee's acceptance into Iñupiaq culture.

We traveled to town two or three times each winter to deliver Abe's artwork—furniture and paintings—and to pick up mail and gossip, gunpowder, powdered milk, and mail-ordered vanilla extract for snow ice cream. Necessities. We tied our door shut, iced the runners, and hitched
up the dogs. We got on the trail as the first twinges of morning twilight painted the Shield Mountains. “Take your mittens off a minute,” Abe suggested, reminding us to go barehanded until our hands went numb, to shock the blood into flowing hot in our fingers for the day.

Two bends west, the river was deep with fresh snow that wind hadn't shifted and settled. Jerry, Iris, and I took turns spelling Abe. Two of us snowshoed in front of the team, breaking trail. The other ran behind. Only one of us got to ride on the runners, and often that person had to run, too. Frost whitened our furs and the dogs' faces. I froze my face as much as possible, getting ready to look tough and hunterly in town. At dark the first evening, we cut a dead sapling for a ridgepole and green saplings for spruce boughs to sleep on, and pitched our wall tent where the winter trail abandons the river for three bends. Thoughtfully, Abe pressed the faded canvas of the tent between his thumb and finger. Iris leaned against my shoulder smiling. “He'll be boiling bone glue, brushing size and ground on our tent,” she whispered. “It'll only be a matter of time until he needs canvas and cuts it up to paint.”

Jerry set up the five-gallon-can stove and pipe. We spread out caribou skins and ate blocks of pemmican and melted snow and threw dried whitefish to the dogs.

The following afternoon, amid the clamor of hundreds of barking dogs, we slid into Takunak, hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and
mukluks,
black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners, wool long underwear and balaclavas. Log cabins and a few plywood houses hunkered along the north shore. Fish racks were pitched along the shore, half buried and glinting with tin coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the
high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers' bad reputations.

He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers's house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some
paniqtuq.”
He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.

The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.

“Maybe the Jafco catalog came.”

“Maybe.” I toed a splintered board, nails up on the packed snow. We felt sliced by hidden eyes behind cabin windows. Behind a cache—and heaped sleds, machines, caribou hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq's. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington's upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn't know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we'd arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.

Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You'll have to write and thank him.”

I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe's, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather's? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?

“Abe!”
Iris moaned. “Don't you know we're embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”

“Salvation
Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose-
babiche
sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it's supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”

“Yeah! Let's!” Iris and I said.

“Wait. There'll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”

I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.

“Some kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”

 

 

WE SLEDDED TO
the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail, letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers' handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.

“Do well?” Abe asked.

Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of
paniqtuq.
Abe's blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.

“All As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”

“C in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn't yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn't argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought
instead
of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he'd thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris's second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.

I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school grade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.

“Better off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don't let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.

“There!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They're coming!”

Who would
they
be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.

“Hi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said
hi
and someone's name, all as one word.

“Hi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas' mom?” a small boy asked.

“When you go around here?” another boy interrupted.

“Today.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The
kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn't a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived out in what they called “camp”—but few knew even from what direction we appeared. Out of town simply meant out of touch, out of money, the opposite of lucky. No family from Takunak lived in “camp.”

My cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don't get chilled.”

“You wanna fight?” asked Elvis Skuq Jr. “I'll let you cry.” He had permanent residence in my earliest memories of town. From the time he'd been a small boy he'd enjoyed packing my face with snow and whipping my mittens off with a stick, laughing at my smarting red fingers. A scar ran from his lip up under his nose and, I'd long thought, on up to his brain. He was sixteen and towered over me.

The plane banked and lined up with the airfield. “From where you come?” Elvis repeated.

“Upriver,” Jerry mumbled. I spat out caribou hairs that had wandered out of my hood and collected in my mouth. The plane wheels touched the snow. As it swept down on us, Iris and I jumped behind the sled.

“Aiy,
sure
iqsi.”
Kids jeered and dark-eyed adults smiled at our naïveté. A kid whipped my ear with a piece of knotted rope. Laughter came from behind us. A snowball dissolved against my neck. The props roared, warbling with power as the pilots adjusted the pitch. The turning plane flung a wall of snow over the crowd. Around me villagers faded like ghosts. The props whined to a halt. Everyone surged forward. Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove waved. I stood, a member of a group, all of us united in anticipation.

Woodrow Jr. slapped me on the back. He was in his twenties and carried his son on his shoulders. “How's the trail from your-guys' camp? You come to town to fin' Eskimo girlfriend?” Beside him a pretty woman smiled, her brown face and dusky lashes shining inside her white fox ruff. “I sure want your eyes, Cutuk,” she said. “You should go be my son.” People laughed. I
examined the ground, shifted nervously, pictured myself belaying Woodrow Washington down Feathers's outhouse to salvage my education.

The airplane doors swung open. The pilots stepped down, white-faced and cold-looking with their radio earmuffs, aluminum notebooks, and Colt .45s on their belts. Villagers unloaded the boxes and mail bags.

Dawna stepped close. She smiled. “Hi, Cutuk. When you come?”

“While ago.” I looked at my mittens. Dawna had a heart-shaped face. Her wide eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question no one had heard. Her hands were bare and pulled into the sleeves of her white nylon jacket. She wore faded jeans, perfectly frayed around the bell-bottoms. Dawna was fourteen and had recently changed in ways that I found embarrassing to snag my eyes on, and impossible not to. Before last year I had thought she was dumb—the pastime she enjoyed most was cutting up Sears catalogs to make collages, and looking at the photographs in women's magazines, wishing about cities far from Alaska. Sometimes she looked at the pictures upside down. Her dad, Melt, got mad when he caught her doing that. He ripped the magazines out of her fingers, cuffed her head, and threw her collages into the stove. “Don't always sometimes try to think you're something else,” he shouted.