Ordinary Wolves (29 page)

“You look so worried.” Her palms roamed gentle under my shirt, touching my nipples and the ridges of my stomach. “I won't hurt you.”

You would never know if you did.

And then we were kissing, and there was only the two of us and the faint smoky smell in her hair and the heat where her breasts pressed my skin. Something animal was in her movements now. Strangely, I understood this part of being human. We pulled open each other's shirts. Our jeans fell in faded piles. The sheets were cool, she, warm and voluptuous. I kissed her throat, breasts, and stomach, wanting to touch all of her skin with all of my skin. She surrounded me, confident hands, and waves and moans of desire swelling through her body. Me forgetting all, for the first time running, wading, swimming into the warm ocean.

 

 

ON A SUNDAY
I met her dad, Dennis, a man with big scarred ears and hands scratchy with calluses. He explained what granola was, chewing over our shoulders, dropping stray toasted oats, while she explained how to boot a computer, process words, move a mouse. Dennis said he liked
how I admitted the things I didn't understand, and offered me the use of his house while they were in Bristol Bay for the salmon season.

Later, Lance taught me more tricks to driving, and handed over extra jobs he couldn't take: repairing dishwashers, lawn mowers, Weedwackers. Clean, in overwashed “casual” clothes, I paused in coffee shops, eavesdropping, trying to emulate, acclimate, relate. I watched the caribou—the average people grazing through their days—men who griped about Tongass timber harvests while their engines idled; women with big dyed hair carrying Can't-Grows with shaved haircuts; homeless men asking for spare change and apologizing for needing it. Money moved through my hands. Most of it went under January's couch, though some bought parts for Dawna's car, nectarines, calls to Iris, and pouches of Drum tobacco. I lost the rolling papers and could buy more—the stores didn't ever run out. I let the faucet run when I washed my hands, and then felt guilty and dried them on my pants. It felt peculiar to be this rich. Lance showed me how to arrange my collar, how to shake hands like I meant it and didn't care at the same time. “Don't forget the strength in your thumb. Look people in the eyes. First impressions are how people decide who you are.
Details,
Scroat. That's the way the game goes. You wouldn't go to a job interview in your bathrobe, would you?”

“I don't know. I never had either of those.”

“Agh.” His lips covered his teeth. He twisted his neck back and forth impatiently.

But I had reason to believe he listened; he'd painted his truck glossy blue, stenciled in the name so it looked factory-made: CHEVY VIRUS. He parked it where he had a view of it and could chuckle when circumstances bored him.

Evenings, Cheryl and I met under the wings of my family plane that I would buy back from Uncle Sam for Uncle January. We unfolded the door, climbed in, and kissed until the windows were fog curtains. In the narrow back seat we removed and lifted enough clothes to soar the up-drafts. I saw the tracks of my life snap into place: down the gleaming rails I saw a job, a friend, a girlfriend; and city me, throwing all the wrappers
into one easy trash, no fire-starter box for the papers of my life, no dog pot for the meat and moldy bread scraps, no bucket for smashed peeled Nabob jam cans to be burned and buried. No Abe making me wash out used plastic bags.

Out under the wings, she held my hand and peered at the cable workings of the craft. The cable clamps were corroded and powdery. The aluminum prop was nicked, the fabric tattered. Suddenly I saw the plane wasn't even blue and gold anymore; it was closer to gray and dirty yellow. Cheryl went on explaining ailerons, ground effect, angle of attack—things I'd been studying in library books. She ran her hand along the trailing edge. Her fingers were long and strong. “Extended flaps,” she murmured.

“Is that better?”

“Less air spillage. It's for short takeoffs.”

For landing on wolves!

EIGHTEEN

THE TUNDRA SHIMMERS VAST
and white under the May sun.
The scent of caribou drifts provocatively on the air, whispering of a herd hurrying north, of calves and pregnant cows—of meat after three lean weeks since the last kill. In the north, mountains serrate the sky. The final timber before the arctic treeline beards their slopes, and higher the speckled rocks and snow reach against the blue.

The wolf drops out of a fluid trot and swings sideways to snatch stray sounds off the tundra. The wolf glows black as a hole in the day. In her blackness she has learned to walk warily and listen.

A mouse-sized clump of snow settles behind the bole of a lone stunted spruce. A raven out of sight to the east caws over a thing alive. A drone that might have been an airplane drifts from beyond the southern mountains. Another raven with a second and different voice speaks of the same life to the east. And the wolf trots again. In her stomach she feels the faint satisfied fullness of her young pressing under her diaphragm. The fullness is
an illusion that belies an increasing hunger in her. Now only her shrunken stomach cries for food. Before the next moon the cries will come from a circle of short-faced pups, looking to her for a share of life. In the steep mountains to the north, she and her mate have a good den, safe in the dirt above a slate cliff.

The scent of caribou grows until it swirls and titillates the fine membranes of her nose, giving the wolf energy, the scent a veritable food she can taste and draw strength from like the meat and blood to come. The instinct to hunt and kill rises in her. She breaks into a lope, swinging closer to the mountains with their narrow-walled tributaries and trees. This home is good; with the seasons the land ripens with game for those fast and hungry enough to kill. She moves in and understands the cycle of hunger and the hungry, always circling each other.

 

 

THE SURFACE OF THE SNOW
grows soft in the warm day. The wolf feels the heat on her already shedding black back and on her thin legs and nose. Behind her stretches a line of tracks shouting freshness to those who listen to the smallest whispers of smell. Her tracks on the white tundra shout also to all who hunt with eyes.

The hair on her shoulders shivers a tiny subconscious shiver. Again she stops to listen. The drone, which had sounded like one of the many new drones in the sky, has changed. It swells and shrinks behind her—the gnashing scream of a snowmobile tearing across the snow. She bolts for the mountains. At seven years old, still in her limber prime, the span between her front and back feet measures more than six feet. She has been chased by the machine-hunters three times before, always part of a scattering pack. The first time seven out of nine were killed. A bullet still rides, an aching cyst in her hip. The hunter had chased her over mountain ranges for hours before it gave up, to return the following day and search again. The second encounter, the pack lost none; the third, her mate had been shot.

The wolf's legs recognize fear.

One smooth mile from the timber it breaks over a rise behind her.
She begins weaving. None of her litter mates had known to zigzag. Or climb for the rocks. They didn't have a second chance to learn. Now the machine-hunter comes, an impossible creature moving twice the speed of any animal on the tundra. It screams past, striking her flank a glancing blow. It slides to a stop between her and the mountain. She flees left—toward a line of spruce marking a creek. A hundred yards short of the trees the machine catches her again.

She lunges sideways. Again it stands in front of her.

She runs for the mountain. In front of her, snow chips and sprays. Behind come fast popping and the wail of air being torn aside. A bullet pierces her neck, cutting through the flesh. The land tilts up and she reaches with the last strength in her for the mountain.

She reaches the peak of the mountain. Runs down the far slope. Up a second mountain. The snow on the south-facing slope sluffs soft and deep. Scattered spruce pluck shedding fur out of her sides. Again the machine-hunter comes, still untired. Bounding effortlessly up the slope. Smashing like an uphill avalanche through brush and small trees.

It hits her square, flipping her upside down, crushing her under the weight and blackness of its huge ripping foot. Sky and blood fill her retinas. She rolls to her feet, hurt, staggering upward. Suddenly a cliff drops away in front. She leaps into the freedom of air and death.

The steep angle of the landing saves her. Stunned, she tumbles down a ravine, bouncing off rocks and trees. At the bottom she regains her crippled feet and runs again while around her whacks the metal rain.

NINETEEN

SUMMER SLIPPED IN
under roily clouds from the sea. The geese had gone north without me. And Cheryl west, to Bristol Bay, helping her dad fish, and after the season, mending net and doing maintenance on their set-net boat. Lance went east to visit his mother in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I stayed, struggling not to be disappointed at my friends for leaving me in solvent, TV white noise, and the unsilence of Anchorage. One afternoon in August I stood scrubbing dishes in January's sink, my thoughts pacing, solvent fumes in my conscience—if I still had one.

Outside, Spenard Road growled with Lower Forty-Eight motor homes lurching into Gwenny's Restaurant, here to
do
the Last Frontier. A black Toyota with a steel rack pulled in beside January's truck, a pump shotgun in the back window, an eighteen-inch walrus
usruk
bone on the dash. The driver wore shorts. His legs and arms were tanned, his black hair sun-shot like a summer beaver's. An expensive-looking camera hung from a strap twisted around his hand. I raced out of the trailer, wiping
soap foam on my jeans. We stood eyeing each other like two sled dogs that might have once been litter mates. I hadn't seen Jerry in five years. We were related strangers.

“You're big.” He stood a couple inches taller still—six foot—and thicker in the arms and chest. He stood different, slack and rugged, though still wary. His chin was black stubbled. He looked like a man; he'd left looking like Jerry. “Iris told me you were here.” Jerry kicked a rock. His tennis shoe was cracked and leaked toes, his T-shirt faded. “She's a schoolteacher, isn't that funny?”

“They used to always be from the States, weren't they?”

“Got a job for you.”

“You're wearing shorts.” I discovered my bare foot, aiming at a spruce cone.

“Goddammit!” January's voice came from inside the trailer.

“He's heating goat's milk,” I explained. “To 116 degrees to make his yogurt. It must have cooled or boiled over. Acidophilus is going to protect him from Martian intestinal viruses that are going to make the planet shit itself,
guuq.”

Jerry smiled at the Eskimo word. “I remember that wolf bounty hunter.” He squinted through his camera, focusing on me, or maybe the front of the trailer. His lips scrunched, red. One eyebrow showed over the corner of the camera. “He landed right after Mom started crying and her guitar got chewed.”

“And he didn't come back?” I asked softly.

“He did. She went to buy a new guitar and go see her parents until the sun came back. Abe was supposed to take care of us. After the plane came back without her, I had to. Lucky we had a sod igloo. They're way warmer than a cabin when you're out of firewood.” He was nonchalant. The shutter clicked. The camera swung from his hand again. “Fairbanks is way smaller than Anchorage. Less people fresh from the States dragging along their Everything and lawsuits. Hey, I'm a contractor now.” His smile flashed and vanished. He hadn't forgotten the old way—humility's role in luck.

“I forgot how we used to talk. Remember, Jerry, we thought lawsuits were policeman clothes?”

He laughed, careful. Jerry had inherited Abe's closed-mouthness for the past.

Inside, January opened beers. We hunched forward, elbows on our knees, and pushed wet lines up the sweating cans. We talked about Abe, building a cabin farther upriver. Jerry cracked a third beer. I sipped my first, waiting for him to say something, something like:
How have you really been? Somebody show you how to talk City English carefully, so you don't say “I eat a lot of meat” or “I whacked my stick on a beaver”?

“Where'd you get the
usruk?”
I asked finally.

“A Yu'pik laborer on my crew borrowed a hundred bucks. He gave me that as collateral. He sells them to the Koreans.” He pushed his hair back. The top of his forehead was pale. A grin streaked across his face. “Don't they grind them up, January, for dick-hardeners?”

January snorted. “Now-a-days that's all them hunters chop off walrus, the three tusks. Whites ain't allowed to hunt seals anymore, no polar bears. Marine Mammal Protection Act. Kid, when I take you flying we'll head way up to the coast, you'll see headless walrus washed up for hundreds a miles. They look like blown-up rubber gloves. Thousand pounds each. Native politicians scream foul if you don't bow and call it subsistence. You boys ain't even allowed one seal for
mukluk
bottoms. Dammit, don't get me heated up.”

My fingers strayed to my
ugruk-
skin knife sheath.

Jerry smiled uncomfortably into his beer. “Want to go up to Fairbanks, work a month? The wages are close to Davis-Bacon.” He spoke casually, a boss asking an opinion. Sadness salted down. Weren't we supposed to turn out like brothers in the movie
Outsiders
?—teasing, arm wrestling, ready to cry and die for each other.

January stood and unwrapped the towel around his jar of warm gray milk. He nudged it. “Yog, you little friggers?” He slumped to the window at the end of the trailer, looked at the world outside, stooped and spat tobacco slime out the crack. Not all of it made it. “Gonna teach your brother to fly the Cub.”