Ordinary Wolves (10 page)

“Woody an'em need meat!”

Iris and I flung each other corner-eyed glances. Jerry peered up and focused back into the catalogs. Woody Jr. shifted by the door. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Alappaa
that east wind,” he said, and finally, “Melt, where's your cigarette?”

Abe patted his pockets. “Here you go.” He drew out his tobacco pouch. Woody moved uneasily away from the door toward the different kind of tobacco.

Melt had stayed molded comfortably in his chair, tuned in to his shortwave radio. We kids dreamed of music and never heard any at home; Iris had been ready to ask Melt if he'd turn it up so the faint songs would reach us. He grumbled, flipped the radio off, handed over a pack of Marlboros. He found one boot. He kicked at the piles behind the stove,
hunching over stiffly, searching for the boot's mate. “You kids! You lose my one-side!”

I hunkered low, discovering interesting aberrations in my thumbnail. Janet slapped Woody on the shoulder. “Cigarette, that's your food, huh?” She grinned with Abe, took a meat saw off the nail over the kitchen counter, and went out to cut a hindquarter off a frozen caribou.

Melt settled back into his chair. He tossed the boot back into a heap of clothes. “Goddamn kids.”

When Janet came back in her eyes were bright and watery from the cold and she smiled radiantly.
“Alappaa!”
She handed Woody the unskinned leg. Loose caribou hairs clumped on the fresh cut. “Enough?” He nodded. “Nice-out night!” she told him. “I'm glad you let me go out.”

 

 

WE WERE ALL ASLEEP,
stretched like mossed-in logs, when the door creaked open. Janet had left the lantern burning on the floor beside the slop bucket; it cast a hissing circle of light. Enuk Wolfglove's frost-whitened form materialized out of a cloud of condensation that rolled in. He was dressed in furs and held a stiff red fox under his arm. The animal's frozen eyes squinted in death. I blinked awake and lifted my head off my ropey jeans-and-shirt pillow. It was cold on the floor. My bag had a rim of frost around the opening. I could feel cold air going into my lungs. I watched Enuk in awe, knowing with conviction what I wanted to be if I managed to grow up.

He pulled his parka over his head and opened the door and put it out in the
qanisaq
the way elders did. He cracked the ice around his eyes and mustache and stared down in the weak light. “Hello, Cutuk. Welcome to big city. How's your luck?”

“I got a marten last week,” I whispered. “Finally,” I added, remembering the importance of a hunter's humility.

Enuk nodded in generous respect, elevating me above droll twelve-year-oldness. The bridge of his nose was black, a huge frostbite scab. His
cheeks were scarred black.
“Yuay.
Tat's good. I get only fox.” He laid the rock-hard animal on the floor beside the woodpile, careful not to snap the tail off. He slipped outside and got the head half of a
quaq
trout.

“You want coffee?” Janet murmured from her and Melt's bed.

“Let'um. Naw.” Enuk cut chunks of the raw fermented fish and dipped them in seal oil. They were so cold they smoked on the table.
“Aarigaa.”
Enuk sighed and grinned. Janet sat up. They spoke softly in Iñupiaq. Melt grumbled and rolled over toward the wall. Enuk squinted at him and down at his fish.

“A wolv'reen almost gonna eat that fox. Enuk snowshoeing
tupak
it,” Janet explained to me. “It climb tree, alright. His gun have ice and can't work.” Enuk asked a question and she spoke again in Iñupiaq. I heard my name and wondered, were they discussing my bruised lip—or only talking about something that had fallen?

Enuk cleared his throat, switched to English. “One time gonna I'm young man, I live in'a mountains. In igloo, like you fellas, Cutuk. Good place same like your camp. Lotta wolf, wolv'reen, link, any kinda animal. Only thing,
iñugaqałłigauraq
be there. They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even. Let me
tupak,
gonna all'a time.” He chewed a piece of
quaq.
“I can't leave till I get white wolf. Tat one got face jus' like moon. He look inside you. Gonna anytime. Tat one, he hide easy, gonna see you.”

Abe stirred in his sleeping bag. I glanced into the far corner. Dawna's eyes were open and dark, asking for answers to questions that weren't in the room. She hugged her small stained pillow under her chin. It was a store-bought pillow, without a pillowcase, and it leaked chopped yellow foam. Behind her on the wall was a taped and torn poster of the beautiful Wonder Woman. Dents in the shiny paper caught light. The eyes had been colored in with ink and stared, detached from the small perfect smile. I wished I could loop my fingers around Dawna's little finger, kiss her wrists; but I didn't know how to kiss and the distance across the shack was too exposed and cluttered with sleeping people who knew everything else about me.

“One night moon shining, I chop hole for water.” Enuk held his hand two feet off the floor, measuring. His fingers were huge and dark, puffy from seventy-three years of freezing and thawing. “Not so thick ice. My fry pan have bad taste an' I gonna washing it. Something grab me. Right on'a neck. I'm plenty strong tat time. Almos' gonna I take t'em hands off.” Enuk clenched his hands. His words twinged me with envy. Some Eskimos—like Enuk—inherited the not-too-distant survival days kind of muscles. Much stronger, it seemed, than white-man muscles.

His eyes had gone serious behind the black pools of shadow. His words draped shivers across my shoulders. I dreaded leaving the noisy safety of town and returning home to wilderness nights, vast silence peopled with prowlings in the dark.

“Tat thing let me never breathe. Then it give up. No tracks on ta snow. Tat's spirit. He fight me cus he's lost, travel long way from home. Maybe spirit same gonna like us. Mad when they mixed up inside.”

He rubbed his neck and after a minute he grinned, letting the somberness flow out of the room. “Tat time I lose my fry pan.”

“How come you never hook it, Enuk?” I murmured. My chin was on my wrists, the bag clenched tight. Enuk sat up where it was warm. His story seemed pointless; I felt dumb and slightly angry for not understanding why he'd kept me awake.

“I never try hook it,” he said patiently. “Now I been gonna hunt tat place sometimes fifty year;
iññuqun,
spirit,
iñugaqałłigauraq,
they never always try bother. You tell me if you see white wolf. Your dad maybe he gonna try forget again.” Enuk and Janet laughed. Enuk leaned back from the table.
“Aarigaa taikuu.”

I lay my head down and struggled to keep my eyes open. Enuk's words sifted down in my sleepy mind. The day of cold air on the trail had left me exhausted, and being around so many people—most who knew us and we didn't know back—took so much energy. Just trying to talk right, not chew loud or get kicked; it made sense why Abe had left Chicago.

Enuk dug in his moosehide pouch and the light glinted among his treasures. My eyelids fell closed. An instant later he dropped a cold lump in my hand. A brown bear figurine, carved out of ancient mammoth
ivory, stood on its hind legs, nose up, whiffing worlds off the wind. How old it must be! It meant so much, and I pulled it into my sleeping bag and held it that way, like it was alive, deserving of eternal respect. With its enchantment, and in the cast of Enuk's warm eyes, mean things and people could not harm me.

FIVE

ON THE FLATS
between river drainages, wolves span out over a mile of tundra and leafy green willow thickets.
The pups play and bite each other's legs. The wolves work west, bruised and hungry after spending the recent night—bright and starless as day—testing a cow moose and her young calf. The calf had appeared small and helpless, eligible to be eaten. It struggled, staying close under its mother's flank during the final battle. In the end, the cow's berserk defense of her young left a wolf wounded, stomped in the willows. The pack had closed on the wolf, killed it, and left the creekbed. The famished calf nursed.

Now the wolves turn across the tundra toward their den. They recognize each moose in their territory, test each regularly for weaknesses and vulnerable new offspring. Four of the pack are pups. Playful and only a couple months old, the pups are insatiable. Since May, the black male and gray female have claimed most of the available food for themselves
and their litter. They are fat. The young adults in the pack are skinny and starved. Two have left to hunt alone.

Today a third wolf rests, lets the family go on. She stops, trots north, and rests again. Finally she travels, a hundred miles northwest in the first week. The sun never sets. The days are hot and flies buzz around her nose. The sunny nights trill with the call of nesting sparrows and waterfowl. Beaver move out into lakes to evade her. Muskrats dive and disappear. The wolf catches a ground squirrel, a few flightless warblers, a ptarmigan. Everything warm-blooded wanders under the canopy of swarming mosquitoes.

The young wolf swims wide rivers, climbs mountain passes, crosses green valleys ashimmer with cotton grass. In the lee of twin peaks she comes to a snowfield. Seventy thousand caribou stand crammed on the snow, nearly insane and forsaking graze to elude a portion of the insatiable mosquitoes. The wolf catches a slow calf and eats, yards from the mass of animals.

Her stomach is distended and tight. She moves sleepily into the alders of a nearby creek. When she awakes, the brush teems with wolves. The young gray wolf rolls on her back, shows her throat to the unfamiliar pack, makes obsequious sounds left over from her puppyhood.

The wolves growl, stand over her with their heads high. The young wolf is skinny, the marrow in her bones dark red. For lack of threat, luck, reasons unknowable—the pack does not kill the intruder. The group moves toward the caribou. Thousands of animals race and mill. The wolves down a limping bull with swollen joints and soft black velvet antlers. The herd accepts the cost, swells back on the snow to await wind. At the kill there are growls. Suddenly a fight erupts.

By the first snow the caribou's and the female wolf's bones are clean, almost white.

SIX

SPRING WAS MY FAVORITE
time of year, and it took extra energy to stay in a bad mood. The sun came home to the Arctic and shone tirelessly on the shimmering world of snow. Midwinter diminished into memory and the Darkness of next winter seemed inconceivable. Warm smells rose from the black soil of exposed cutbanks; birds shrieked and carelessly tossed leftover seeds down out of the birches. It was a season of adventure calling from the melting-out mountains, of geese honking after a continent-crossing journey, of caribou herds parading thousands long on their way north to the calving grounds, sap running and every arctic plant set to burst into frenzied procreation. Spring was the land smiling, and I couldn't imagine my life without that smile.

But I was sixteen and stunningly lonesome. Iris and Jerry were gone. Iris's last correspondence-school course lay behind her in the untarnished trail of As. She waited only for paperwork to be officially free. The Rural Student Vocational Program had sent a plane ticket for her to travel to
Fairbanks, to apprentice for two weeks, as a teacher. A year ago Jerry had moved there; he lived with a girlfriend named Callie. To me it seemed ironically unfair—since I was eight and first read about Frank, the elder Hardy Boy,
I
had wanted a girlfriend named Callie. Jerry had probably found the only one in Alaska.

For weeks the April sun lengthened and then Iris returned—transformed—a joyous goddess with black hair curled in a “permanent” that apparently wasn't, but would last long enough. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a happier blue than ever, with three-hundred-and-sixty-seven-dollar contact lenses focusing them. For the first time in more than a decade she could see needles on the spruce. I greeted her the way I had greeted sixteen, with a practiced impassive shrug borrowed from Treason and a safe smile. Her face glowed with jubilation and the wonder of the Outside; mine was dark and hard with snow tan and a grip on leaking uncertainty.

“Fairbanks has eight-story skyscrapers at the university,” she exclaimed.

We were out near the middle of the river chipping a new water hole in the ice. The water in the old one near shore had grown brown with tundra water eddying up from the mouth of Jesus Creek. The ice froze all the way down to the sand in places and we hoped we weren't working over one of those places. A moose stood in the willows, below the dog yard, breaking down branches, chewing the tips, leaving carnage. Iris wore an aqua nylon jacket she'd bought in Fairbanks and she looked as pretty as Dawna Wolfglove.

“One night we borrowed a master key from a junior. We sneaked up on the roof and dropped the ice cubes out of our root beers. Down on the concrete. My friend Robin found a five-dollar bill in the elevator.”

I rested while Abe shoveled the loose ice out of the four-foot-deep hole. The moose plodded out on the river, crossing toward the far shore. Two more moose stood over there on the bank, long-legged, big ears up, and watchful.

“Oh,” she saw my expression, “a master key opens any door at the university.”

“Yeah? What's an ice
cube?”

“They make ice in freezers, to put in soda pop, Cutuk. They sell it, too, in bags.”

Store-bought
ice?
I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You'll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about
naluaġmius
starving his family, stealing food out of his children's mouths. We had sat around inside waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we'd always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn't bought myself a few Cokes.