Julie of the Wolves (9 page)

Even on Nunivak there was no such wonderful day, for the sun appeared for a little while every day of the year.

“Bright sun, I missed you so,” Julie whispered, and her palms felt vibrant with life.

The little house in Barrow became home as Julie fitted into Nusan’s routine, and summer was upon the land before she knew it. Tourists arrived at the hotel every day; the research lab buzzed with activity. Julie stitched, sewed, and occasionally visited Pearl and her family.

Late one evening Nusan came back from the store. “Naka’s in jail,” she said angrily. “I’ve got to go get him. Finish these mukluks.” She pointed. “A man wants them tomorrow.” She hurried out the door and Julie picked up the boots. She was cutting a tiny black square to sew into the intricate band at the top when the door opened and Daniel came in.

She did not look up, for she knew his routine. He would fix himself a TV dinner, open a Coke, and sit on his cot listening to the radio.

“You!” he shouted. She looked up in surprise.

“You. You’re my wife.”

“Daniel, what’s wrong?”

“They’re laughing at me. That’s what’s wrong. They say, ‘Ha, ha. Dumb Daniel. He’s got a wife and he can’t mate her. Ha.’”

He pulled her to her feet and pressed his lips against her mouth. She pulled away.

“We don’t have to,” she cried.

“They’re laughin’,” he repeated, and tore her dress from her shoulder. She clutched it and pulled away. Daniel grew angry. He tripped her and followed her to the floor. His lips curled back and his tongue touched her mouth. Crushing her with his body, he twisted her down onto the floor. He was as frightened as she.

The room spun, and grew blurry. Daniel cursed, kicked violently, and lay still. Suddenly he got to his feet and ran out of the house. “Tomorrow, tomorrow I can, I can, can, can, ha ha,” he bleated piteously.

Julie rolled to her stomach and vomited. Slowly she got to her feet. “When fear seizes,” she whispered, “change what you are doing. You are doing something wrong.”

She got her red tights from a box on the shelf, slipped into a warm shirt, and put on her wedding parka and pants. Next she opened a box under the bed and picked out a pair of warm woolen socks. Shoving her feet into her boots she laced and knotted them. Daniel’s old pack was under his cot. She got that, then opened a cardboard box by the stove and took out her man’s knife and ulo which she had brought from Nunivak. Then she grabbed handfuls of wooden matches and dropped them into a moisture-proof cookie can.

She opened the door and walked calmly through the midnight light to Pearl’s house. Stealing quietly past her sleeping brothers and parents, she crept into Pearl’s room.

“Pearl, I’m leaving,” Julie whispered.

Almost instantly Pearl was awake. “Daniel?”

Julie nodded. “He is dumb. Everyone’s teasing him.”

Pearl slipped out of bed and together they crept to the kitchen. When the door was closed Pearl sat down.

“Where are you going?”

“I won’t tell you. Then they won’t bother you. I need food.”

Pearl glanced at the shelves above the stove and pushed a box under them; she took down bread, cheeses, dried fruits, meats, and a bag of oats and sugar.

“That’s fine,” Julie said. “I only need enough for a week or so. But I need to borrow a sleeping skin and ground cloth. I’ll mail them back when I get where I’m going.”

Pearl slipped out to the shed and came back with the sleeping skin and hide.

“They’re a wedding present.” She smiled. “You can keep them. No one uses these old-timers.”

“Some needles, please,” Julie said, “and that’ll be all.” Stuffing the sleeping skin into her pack, she tied the caribou hide to the bottom and shouldered her load.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Pearl asked.

“My father was a great hunter. He taught me much. If Nusan asks where I am, tell her you saw me walking out on the ice. She won’t look for me long after that.”

With a sob Julie threw her arms around Pearl, then stepped out the door and closed it quietly behind her. She walked to the beach, climbed onto the ice, and looked back. No one was on the street but a single tourist who was photographing the sun in the sky. His back was to her. Julie ducked below the ice rim and made her way along it on hands and feet until she was beyond the village and out of sight of the rooftops of Barrow. Then she stood up and looked at the ocean.

“Julie is gone,” she said. “I am Miyax now.”

She leaped lightly up the bank and onto the tundra. Her stride opened wider and wider, for she was on her way to San Francisco.

T
HE MEMORIES VANISHED.
T
HE WIND SCREAMED
oooooooooeeeeeeeeeee
. Miyax touched the lichens on the top of her frost heave.

“Amaroq,” she called again, then ran down the slope and climbed to the wolf den. The site was silent and eerie and the puppies’ playground was speckled with bleached bones like tombstones in a graveyard.

She picked one up and saw that it was jagged with the marks of little teeth. With some carving, it could be made into the comb she had been wanting. Glancing around, she saw the club-like base of an antler. “A weapon,” she said. “I may need it.”

A snowy owl floated past, turning his head as he peered down at her curiously.

“I’ll see you in San Francisco,” she called. He set his eyes on some distant goal, bowed his wings, and flew southward as silently as the shadow he cast.

The wind twisted a strand of her hair, and as she stood on the wolf hill she felt the presence of the great animals she had lived with: Amaroq, Nails, Silver, Kapu. She wondered if she would ever see them again. The wind gusted; she turned and walked slowly back home, trailing her fingers on the tips of the sedges and thinking about her departure. At the top of her frost heave, she froze in her tracks. Her house was crushed in and her sleeping skins were torn and strewn over the grass. The meat she had laid out on the grass was gone. Her icebox was opened and empty.

“Ayi!” she cried. “My food! My life! I’m dead!”

Running from broken house to dumped cooking pot to icebox, she felt needles of fear move up her spine, spread into her arms, and pierce her whole body. Who had done this? What bestial creature had taken her food? She looked desperately around and saw, crouched in the reeds almost beside her, the angry Jello. His tail was swishing slowly, his ears were forward. She understood his message and stepped back. Then she knew that was wrong; she must not give in. Hand tightening on the antler club, brandishing it, growling, she flung herself upon him and bit the top of his nose. His eyes widened, his ears and body drooped, and his tail went between his legs. He groveled on his belly and came up to her smiling, head lowered humbly.

Desperate, furious, she lunged at him. Jello rolled to his back and flashed the white hair of surrender. She did not strike; she could not strike a coward.

“Jello!” she cried. “Why? Why did you do it?”

Holding him in abeyance with the antler, she glanced around the ruins of her home and took stock of the damage. All the food in the cellar and on the ground was gone, and her pack was not in sight. Brandishing her weapon, growling at Jello, she backed toward the sod house, kicked back the ruins, and saw the pack under the crushed roof. It was intact. Jello had not found the meat in it. Her mind raced. She had a little food and Kapu had told her that the lemmings were coming back. She could yet make it.

“
Gnarlllllllllll
,” she snapped at Jello and lowered her club. He rolled over, stood up and, tail between his legs, fled into the twilight.

When he was gone she stood for a long time. Finally she picked up her sleeping skin and tore a fiber from the new hide. She got out her needle and, sitting with her legs out straight in the manner of Eskimo women, began to sew.

A lemming ran across a lichen patch. She stopped working and watched the little animal add a mouthful of grass to its round nest. A movement caught her eye and she glanced up to see a least weasel washing his belly on the other side of the knoll. New white fur was splotched across his gold back. He finished his toilet, and when he sat down he disappeared under the reindeer moss. “You are tiny,” she said and smiled. Another cycle was beginning. The animals who preyed on the lemmings were also coming back.

Miyax put her needle away, rolled her ground skin into a tight bundle, and tied it to the bottom of the pack. Then she got her pot and sleeping skin, her ulo and man’s knife, the bones and her flowers. She packed them, tied a thong to the new caribou skin so she could drag it behind her, and lined up her pointer stones with a distant frost heave.

“It’s time to go,” she said and walked away, not looking back.

Many hours later she opened her pack, spread her skins, and took out a strand of smoked meat. A snowshoe hare screamed and, recognizing the cry of death, Miyax picked up her club and ran off to take the rabbit from its killer. Rounding a clump of grass she came upon an enormous wolverine, the king of the Arctic weasel family. Slowly he lifted his head.

The wolverine was built low to the ground, and his powerful front feet were almost as big as a man’s hand. Utterly fearless, he looked her in the face.

“Shoooo,” she said and jumped at him. He left the rabbit and came toward her. She jumped back and raised her club. He leapt lightly to the side, snarled, and sauntered away. Gingerly she snatched the hare, turned, and fled back to camp. The wolverine’s fearlessness sent goose bumps up her spine. Hastily throwing the hare on the caribou skin she was dragging for just such a purpose, she walked on.

A tern floated past. She took out her sinew, held her arm under the bird, and singing aloud strode toward Point Hope.

At sunset the clouds were dark and soft-edged, like bears. They could dump a foot of snow or a sprinkle of snow. She dug a niche in the side of a heave with her man’s knife, folded her ground skin into an envelope, and pushed it into the cave. With deft hands she pressed her sleeping skin into the envelope, then undressed. The fur nestled her, and when each toe and finger was warm she peered solemnly out of her den. The sky darkened, the clouds lowered, and the wind blew like a charging buck. In less than a minute she could see no more than the fur around her face. The snow had come.

Buried in her skins like an animal in its lair, Miyax wondered about Amaroq and Kapu. Would they be curled in furry balls, or would they be running joyously through the first storm of the winter, following their noses to game?

When she awoke the sun was out, the sky was clear, and only a feathering of snow covered the tundra—just enough to make it winter. Before she had dressed, however, the crystals had melted—all but a few on the north sides of the slopes, that spoke of things to come.

Miyax pulled a snarl out of her hair with her fingers, then looked around. Someone was watching her. Running to the top of a low hill, she scanned the flatness. A dozen stout caribou, their white necks gleaming in the sunlight, browsed in the distance; but there was nothing else. She laughed at herself, went back to her camp, and ate a piece of smoked meat. Rolling her skins and shouldering her pack, she walked to her caribou skin to pick up the leads. It was empty. Someone had taken her rabbit in the night. A wolverine, she thought; but there was not a footstep to tell which way the thief had gone.

She spun around. Again she felt as if someone were watching her. Again there was no one; there was only a large flock of terns in the sky. Taking a bearing on them with her sinew and adjusting her pack, she gave the skin-drag a yank and walked on.

All day the birds moved overhead. She walked a straight line to the ocean, for the pools had frozen and she could follow her compass without deviating.

When the eerie feeling of being watched persisted, Miyax began to wonder if the vast nothingness was driving her mad, as it did many gussaks. To occupy her mind she sang as she gathered caribou droppings and put them on her drag:

Amaroq, wolf, my friend,

You are my adopted father.

My feet shall run because of you.

My heart shall heat because of you.

And I shall love because of you.

That evening she stopped early, built a bright fire and cooked a stew, adding to it a sweet-leather lichen from the tundra. While the pot simmered and the steam hung above it like a gray spirit, she took out a needle and thread and mended a hole in her old mitten.

The earth trembled. She glanced up to see two of the largest caribou she had ever beheld. She could tell by the massiveness of their antlers that they were males, for those of the females are more slender and shorter. As the two ran side by side, the gleam of their headpieces told her it was the breeding season of the caribou. When the last fuzzy antler-coating of summer is rubbed off and the horns glow and shimmer, the mating season begins—a season of bellowing and short tempers.

Suddenly the lead bull circled and came toward the other. Both lowered their heads and clashed antlers with a clanging crack that sounded like a shot. Neither was hurt. They shook their heads and stepped back, tossed their antlers, and bellowed. Colliding again, they pawed the ground and then peacefully trotted away. Miyax wondered who they were fighting over, for not a female was to be seen. All the bravado and glamour seemed lost on the grass and the sky.

Nevertheless, when she had eaten she picked up her pack, tugged on her cumbersome drag, and moved on; for the thundering animals told her she was along the migration path and she did not want to camp in the middle of a caribou love nest.

Far from the herd, she stopped by a pond and made her bed. She was not sleepy, so she took out the wolf-puppy bone and, holding the ulo between her knees, carved a tooth in the comb.

Orange and purple shadows crept over the land as the sun went down that night, and Miyax crawled into her sleeping skin noting that the days were growing shorter. She felt restless like the birds and mammals, and in the middle of the night she awakened and peered out at the sky. A star twinkled in the half-lit dome—the first of the year! She smiled, sat up, and hugged her knees.