Ordinary Wolves (9 page)

Sled dogs barked and howled all over town. Our dogs raised their
muzzles to inhale the sweet scents of love, food, and fights. Their tail sinews tightened; their eyes gleamed in the corners. They yanked sideways on the necklines, sniffing stupidly into other dog yards. Loose dogs ran out and held lightning skirmishes and growling matches with our confused team. Our dogs didn't know how to calmly pass another team or loose dogs, or even how to run past another dog yard. At the Wolfgloves' house, Abe smacked George and Figment with the axe handle and the team hunkered down while we chained them to willows.

Janet Wolfglove leaned out the door. “Praise Lord!” she shouted. “Go in!” She was a heavy gray-haired woman, always at home cooking and sewing and ready with a warm, squishy, motherly hug. It mortified me when she hugged me, but I liked her to do it. “Go in!” she shouted again, waving us into the messy, good-smelling kitchen. “When you fellas come?” She was wearing a heavy sweater and a silver cross, her face close to mine. I smelled scented soap, the kind that hurt your nose and told animals exactly where your traps were set under the snow.

“Today,” I said. “Before the plane came.” Two hours ago, I realized, startled at how minutes of pain and people formed mountain ranges across my past, memory peaks that normally took months to rise.

Melt, Janet's husband, spoke in Iñupiaq though he knew well that even his children couldn't understand most of the words.
Naluaġmiu
peppered his guttural complaints. We kids stood beside the stove, eyes lowered, chewing pieces of Iris's gum. Trying to avoid any
naluaġmiu-
like movements.

“Adii,
you kids chewing loud!” he shouted.

Our jaws stopped. We all swallowed. The barrel stove glowed red, searing our overpants. The fling of warmth wasn't enough to thaw ice on the floor in the corners. Piles of socks, gloves, and clothes—and leaning guns—were frozen fast to the frosty walls. The temperature at the ceiling was breathtaking, fifty or sixty degrees warmer than the floor.

“Enuk go check his snares,” Janet said, catching my searching glance. I nodded, too discouraged with my luck on this long-anticipated town trip to ask if he might return that night.

Stevie and Dawna surged in the door, laughing at a joke they'd left
outside. Tommy Reason followed. Everyone called him Treason. He was curly-haired, a boy Janet had taken in when his mother burned in the plane crash at Uktu. His dad had run off, long gone back to the States, maybe dead. Once when Lumpy pinched a strip of his skin off with a vise grips Treason cried for a long time, more than a vise grips' worth. Treason didn't tease about us being
naluaġmiu,
or anything about hair.

My face was hot with shame. Places with people always came with this—the reminder that my family was different from people. We didn't say
hi
correctly, or stand right, chew properly—especially we didn't know enough about
fighting.
And there were so many people, and names, and faces impossible to remember. I dropped my eyes and vanished into fantasy where I'd created Elvis Jr.'s lip scar by hitting him so hard that newspapers out in Fairbanks printed the account.

Stevie dragged me into the corner. He kicked clothes piles out of our way. He nudged his glasses up. He was big-boned and stocky. His coal-black hair swept back, thick and wavy. Beside his family I knew I looked like a diseased seagull among glossy ravens. Stevie had been born thirty-eight days before me, but for most of my life I'd felt older than both him and Dawna—maybe because Janet enjoyed babies. Abe had strongly suggested we skip the “whining years.” He had sewn the sleeves of our first caribou parkas shut so he didn't have to hear or worry about lost mittens.

“Junior fight you?” Stevie didn't ask who won. Stevie was like Janet. He had a way of smiling, unconcerned as a shrug. Kids who had wanted to fight him would ask if they could help feed his dogs.

“Yeah.” I covered my lip. Dawna's mirror hung on a nail in the dark corner. Fly specks freckled my reflection. Worried blue eyes stared back.

Dawna giggled. “You fellas get your vanilla and nuts?”

Treason stood next to us. “Ever'body been try fight lots since that good movie.”

“Which one was that?”

“Ninja one,” Stevie explained.

I nodded, mystified.

“Cutuk, you want to see our new kinda snowgo?”

“What? You guys got a new snowgo?” I tried to clamp my expression, but the suddenness of the information smeared jealousy across my face. I wanted to hide behind the woodpile. Never in a hundred years would
we
have a motorized snowmobile. Abe didn't like engines. Maybe they reminded him of his dad's Super Cub. Not so many years ago only privileged people had snowmobiles: schoolteachers, Tommy Feathers, and a few others.

Stevie and I ran out without parkas. Stevie peeked in the window, cautious, making sure Melt wasn't looking out. It paid to be careful around Melt. Stevie led me behind the house. He flung aside a canvas tarp. He rubbed his hands. The snowgo crouched, silver blue in the sleek moonlight, a rocket waiting to burn across the tundra. He traced the name POLARIS on the cowling with his fingers.

“Not like that old Chaparral,” he said in awe. “This new one always go fast.” His breath rose in fat clouds. “It was have windshield, but Lumpy let it come off on tree. Dad sure wanna tie him to post and whip him. Only thing he's too big now.”

A jagged crack ran down the front. I touched the glassy cowling and jerked my hand back. “I got a splinter!” A dot of blood darkened my finger.

Stevie gripped my hand. “That's fiberglass. Try see. Wait! We'll be blood brothers!” He poked his finger and squeezed it to mine. “Wish for snowgos,
bart.
Lumpy gonna try get Pipeline job an' buy one. Lotta people going Prudhoe.”

Lust cramped my hands. I saw my long-wished-for equalizer, a mechanical creation that would transform me into a great hunter and an Eskimo. “We gotta go Prudhoe? What's Prudhoe anyways?”

“You drive snowgo before?”

I accosted my memory, attempting to adjust the truth—and avoid a lie. “No. Not yet.”

“That's okay. You will sometimes. It go faster than any kinda dog, wolf, caribous.” He shook his head. “Nothing can win it. Dad get wolf. He run right over it.” We stared at the machine. Then he covered it and showed me the wolf skin draped frozen over the clothesline. It was
skinned poorly; there were slashed holes and the lower legs and claws had been left behind with the carcass.

“We see lotta wolves up home, whole packs,” I bragged in the dark, “but Abe never try kill 'em. Coupla' winters ago he left me one time to watch a moose we killed, and wolves—”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“Why Abe never always shoot 'em?” Stevie pulled at his eyebrow.

“He likes them.”

“What he always like 'em for?”

“I dunno. I—I think he just likes 'em.”

“Huh.” Stevie shrugged and flashed me a baffled look as he opened the door. In that moment it seemed preposterous that at home Abe's reasoning could have held its knots. Why couldn't he be normal and shoot whole clotheslines full?

 

 

THAT NIGHT WE HAD STEW
that wasn't caribou or bear or lynx or anything ordinary; it came out of a big can that Melt brought when he wandered home from slumping around the Native Cache stove. Melt was short and well padded with a square head, perfectly adapted for sitting in the rocking chair Abe had made for him, while Janet cooked, skinned animals, cut up meat, and sewed. Whiskey had melted the teeth out of Melt's head and left a sinkhole of his lips. He dunked pilot crackers in his coffee and stuffed them in. He liked to preach sometimes at the church, when there was no pastor in town. He was grumpy except when he shared advice, weather prophecies, or his hunting stories—those things brought out a generosity in him. It was clear that they were better than any another person might own.

He was proud to serve that canned soup made from States cows. Anybody who didn't see the Dinty Moore label would have assumed from the way he hollered at Janet and opened the can himself that he'd
journeyed down to Baltimore, Illinois, or Park Place and hunted those cows all himself.

Abe didn't like the soup. But he raised his eyebrows politely. “Salty,” he mumbled as if all beef by definition was salty. The meat smashed under my teeth, same as the potatoes. I wondered what a beef did to get its meat large-grained like moose and still mushy as boiled ground squirrel.

My cut lip stung. I set the bowl on the floor to cool. Stevie and I practiced setting his new Conibear trap, made to snap on an ermine's head and kill it instantly. We forgot we were old and began trying to snap Dawna and Iris, since they seemed to be having more fun than we were, reading a magazine and whispering over the pictures. Jerry sat with the adults, hunched to one side, holding his soup over a Sears order blank he was filling out for
Aana
Skuq
.
People came in the door steadily, when we were in town, to have Abe make out Sears orders for them, or explain unemployment papers or taxes. Jerry did it now, relieved to have something to do that made sense to him.

Stevie snapped the trap on Dawna's foot. She screamed. “Stevie, you dumb thing!” She whacked his head with a rolled-up magazine, hard.
“Adii,
Mom. Stevie always bother.”

“Ah shuck, you!” Melt hollered. “You kids go play out!” He pointed at the door. I couldn't tell if he meant it. In the village, people yelled and swore equally at kids and dogs, and neither obeyed. That strange memory flashed, of Melt, young, quiet, friendly, cradling a baby porcupine in our doorway. With a space between his teeth that there was no longer any way of verifying. Had it been a dream? People didn't change that much, did they?

Stevie sat on the bed with his face turned away, chuckling. Dawna stared at me, her eyes beautiful under black lashes. She wobbled the small mole on her cheek. She wore a pink hooded sweatshirt. The collar was torn around the eyelets. Her neck was smooth and brown. Her gaze looked laughy, but different somehow. I wanted her to be the first person I ever kissed—after I learned how.

She shook her magazine. A square white magazine-seed dropped out.
She wrote on it and let the paper fall near my knee. The writing was upside down. I turned it around. Now it was backwards, inside out. I flipped it over and read where the pen had pressed through like braille.
Cutuk, don't listen to that
kinnaq
thing. You're my friend and I wish you were my honey.
The words were curly and small, unbelievably valuable. I hid the paper in my pocket to read a thousand times upriver.

I didn't want to go outside in the dark; I slinked back to my stew. It had frozen along the edges. Janet giggled and brushed my arm. “Shh.” She dumped it back in the pot and gave me a warm bowlful.

Abe unpacked our sleeping bags to warm by the stove and got out the lynx skin he'd brought for Janet. Lynx prices had risen to two hundred and fifty dollars at Seattle Fur Exchange, for rich women's coats, and when Abe got an envelope with a check for four skins he pulled his big traps. We still mailed in fox and rare marten skins, but now if he accidentally caught a lynx he gave it to Janet to use in mitten liners or to let Melt sell. When I was a baby he had traded Janet furs for sewing warm clothes for us, before she taught us to tan skins and sew, before she took us in.

Janet lit another Coleman lamp. It flamed and sputtered. She flipped the generator lever and pumped it rapidly. The mantle glowed, hissing out harsh shadows. “Look,
Bun,”
she told Dawna. “Abe bring.
Aarigaa.”
Dawna smiled fleetingly, not even pretending she cared. She stared at Abe, not the lynx. She and Iris went back to admiring skinny white girls in the magazine.

Janet was known all the way to the coast for the
mukluks,
beaver hats, and mittens she sewed. People paid more than one hundred and fifty dollars for a pair of her
ugruk-
bottom
mukluks.
Melt often took two or three pairs to Crotch Spit when he went to get drunk for a few days. Her creations were beautiful, the skin tanned white with sourdough or red with fermented alder bark. Her stitches were tiny, the garments sometimes sparkling with beads. I wondered if my mother could sew. In my stray fantasies where Mom found us and brought presents, there was no great amount of sewing. Probably she was one of the rich women now. Maybe that was why Abe didn't send out lynx anymore. I wished Janet would
be my mother. My imagination loaded a full-color picture: Melt, out on the ice. Suddenly he plunged through and the black current swept him from view.

“Janet! Make fresh coffee!” Melt shouted, still alive, sounding as if he were hollering at a dog about to piss on his rifle.

Treason came in, then Lumpy stomped in from roaming the town. He smelled of factory cigarettes. Woodrow Washington Jr., Lumpy's young uncle, slipped in with him. He stood by the door.

“Washingtons need caribou,” Lumpy told Melt. Lumpy was taller and thicker than Melt now. He stomped snow off his boots. Melt had always reminded people that Lumpy was Janet's son, not his. Now Lumpy was reminding him who was bigger.

A moment later, out in the night, the church bell rang curfew. Janet flung Lumpy a look. “Mom, I'm hungry,” he said, ignoring her stern eye. He pushed my head. “Hi Cutuk.” The soup was gone; Lumpy stirred up a glass of hot Jell-O. It was one of Janet's new glass glasses; at home we had only mugs, and broken-handled mugs for glasses. Lumpy said nothing about me being kicked. He didn't offer a sip of the sweet Jell-O.

“See that door?” Lumpy whispered. “We got real door, not homemade Kool-Aid kind like you fellas.” I stared, as surprised as the time he ate a tube of Pepsodent when the town was all out of pop and candy.