Ordinary Wolves (37 page)

I poked in the blackened coffee can and knifed a piece of back out of the soup. The broth smelled sharp and pitchy. I shook salt on the tender meat. Abe had left salt and sketches and stiff coils of homemade
babiche
hanging on nails, tobacco tins of bent spikes, charcoal stubs, matches. On the warped boards above the kitchen counter he had left pepper, a Ziploc of dried chives, a half inch of Worcestershire in a brown bottle. The vanilla bottle lay on the floor, empty, the cap flung away by thirsty intruders. Abe—trusting and curious—liked to leave chunks of memories hanging behind. He often said that was the reason some Eskimos left trash on the country—for the memories, and not to feel lonesome. You couldn't understand, he said, until you had been lost for days on the country
without
seeing a single sign of a human; then trash could look pretty darn good.

“Melt gave a baby porcupine to Jerry when he was a kid,” I commented.

“Melt? He give somebody something?”

We chuckled, not looking up from chewing.

“That porcupine ate my mom's guitar. Now I guess we're eating its great-grandson.” Something about it was too funny for us, and we
dropped the bones and laughed until our foreheads touched the table. We couldn't look at each other without choking and had to sit shielding our faces from each other.

The stove crackled, heat spread slowly, and grainy snow on the floor didn't melt. We had thrown the porcupine hide into the fire, to burn the quills, to save foxes from slow deaths.

“Guitar soup. And here I sure was thought bear.” Treason glanced around. Every movement he made was precise. He wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants under his black nylon ski pants. He leaned back and pulled a toothpick out of his pocket. “I'd camp in wall tent.” He grinned. “For this winter. If you stay here, you better not go town. Everybody gonna laugh how you smell. Them girls wear perfumes, Cutuk. Takunak is nothing but new everything now'days.”

“Like in that commercial—that woman says you better smell good or ‘it's a turn-off'? You been to Anchorage, right?”

“Oh yeah. Lotta times. Three times. Always can't do nothing, only follow the road. Real nice to drink beer, though.” He dipped his fingers into the can and pulled out the heart. He bit it in half. “Want some?” Warm soupy air came across the table. I took the heart from his fingers. The meat was black and pasty.

He peered out at the river. Out by the shovel, a pair of gray jays pecked feverish mouthfuls off the porcupine gut pile. Treason slid a .22 Magnum out of his jacket and rested it on the door frame and fired. The bird slumped out of sight behind a block of snow; its mate flew off. Treason breathed deep. Downy gray wisps of feather floated on the air. “Nice out. How much gas in your snowgo? Let's go home through tundra. Maybe find wolf tracks.”

 

 

OFF JESUS CREEK,
the open water had frozen. We snowgoed up the drifted bank below the mouth. My Arctic Cat still ran; Janet hadn't let anyone touch it. It steered loose and crooked—since the accident, and worse after Stevie's one adventure with it, drunk driving the weekend
Janet flew to Crotch Spit for a hospital checkup. “That same time Treason wash how many wolf and foxes in my Maytag.” Janet had laughed. “Anyways, let'um, you're all my boys.”

I glanced over the willows and up the creek. How many water holes had Jerry and Iris and I rechipped to avoid the brown water eddying up from this creek mouth? How many moose had we watched in these willows? How many foxes faded into these thickets? Iris had almost drowned here. And now Ted Brown, apparently, had found a trace of gold dust at the mouth, and would be back. I felt a rush of trespass and concern, knowing he would be back, with friends and big engines.

The snow stretched away, huge and rolling, the scoured drifts hard white waves. Mountains leaned against the back of the sky. Frostbite twinged my nose, cheeks, and forehead, and water spread and froze along my eyelids. Wolves reigned over whole valleys in those mountains, the way it was supposed to be. Take away metal, I thought, and humans were hardly different from animals, regardless of all the obsession over smells and body hair; substitute back fat and cached bones for 401(k) accounts, fleet-footed prey for fast food. Wolves were smart. They cared about their kids. Sometimes they ran out of places to run, made mistakes, and died.

And Enuk, what mistakes had he made? Did he know something mysterious and powerful from the last vestiges of the shaman days? The shamans—people in 1969 believed—had walked on the moon habitually, while the white men maybe only made up photographs of it. Had Enuk found a trail that science, the church, and the rest of us couldn't see?

 

 

AFTER HALF AN HOUR
Treason stopped his Polaris. I stopped beside him. He melted his face and was silent for a minute the way you were supposed to be. He carefully opened a pack of cigarettes and let the cellophane blow out of his hand on the cold breeze. It crankled once, unfolding on the snow. He put a cigarette in his lips and flicked his lighter. “Couple springs back I lose black wolf in them mountains. Want to check it out?”

I stepped aside to piss, a smoking string in the miles of rolling snow. I stepped close enough to bend and scoop up the plastic. It was a distressingly white thing to do, and I didn't want to interfere with Treason's happiness. I wanted him to carry prestige home to the village, to Janet and the elders, but today I didn't want to see Marlboro wrappers on this snow.

“Fellas been going to work at Red Dog,” he commented.

“Red Dog Mine?”

“Yeah, like Prudhoe, bywhere Dawna works, except it's lead mine. Biggest in the world.”

“Lead? Doesn't that make your brain shrink?”

“Could be. Lotta fellas around here that won't hurt nothing.” Treason exhaled and scanned the tundra. “Woody came home for R and R with brand-new snowgo. He's got a radio scanner. He heard a mail plane pilot talking about eight wolves downriver from town. He jumped on his Indy six-fifty, went and got 'em all like nothing.”

I glanced at my black snowgo. The old bionic seat. “Does anyone ever snowgo north to Barrow?”

“Never, that I heard about anyways. Too far to carry gas. Enuk an'em walked there in old days,
guuq.
You should charter airplane if you gonna go Prudhoe to find Dawna. Could be five hundred miles, open country. She'll might be gone if you get there.”

“Guess I need good money.”

“You just now learn?” He grinned. “Your ivory, that'll buy you plane fare, round-trip to Disney Land even.” His wrist flicked, rope-starting his machine.

He led me north, to the Dog Die Mountains, up into steep foothills timbered with memories, along a rocky cliff protecting a ravine where I'd found the wolf den. Unhappily, I parked and peered over. It was getting dark, the short day falling into the Darkness. The birch tree that had devoured a green rope was down there somewhere. Everything looked different—the ice level was lower, the big winter wind drifts hadn't matured yet, the creek was still open in places, flowing, black against the gray snow. I hurried back to my machine and followed his trail down onto the tundra. Treason circled and roared into a patch of spruce. He drove
as if the skis were his flesh. His eyes took in a wolverine's tracks, probed timber thickets, watched a raven's hooded glances. He braked, touched the wolverine footprints, and raced away, faster than ever, his machine growling, chewing through brush. He was scared of nothing, not trees or drop offs or sinkholes in the ice. I'd forgotten—never realized how different it was Outside—here death was an accepted part of life, and fretting over the future as pointless as a dictionary.

His Romanian AK-47 hung loose across his chest. His eyes had a cheetah's stare, the fearsome focus of a predator. I struggled to keep up, suddenly knowing he
was
a predator, and an athlete, too. The Michael Jordan of the sport of hunting wolves and wolverine, moving in sync with ten thousand years of honed Eskimo blood and a hundred years of white technology.

I gave up following, and swung up the canyon. I fought the machine through new loose drifts. The snowgo tilted into the creek. I gunned across shallow open water, weaving back and forth across shelf ice. The ice buckled, a swift current tilted pans and they disappeared under the fast ice. Finally, I braked on the snow-covered rocks. The canyon walls blocked out the sky. A few yards away stood the little birch tree, and I walked in a circle, my hands shaking, the accident with Iris pounding in my chest. I felt sick, and questioned if I could make it back to the open tundra without sinking. In the distance came four shots, and I wished I could scream across the tundra like Treason and kill. If only it were that easy.

The green rope was gone. One of the forked limbs of the birch had snapped in a wind, and it lay partially buried. A huge black scar marked where someone had gouged out a wedge. Quickly I peeled back bark, tree scab, and pith. There was a narrow diamond-shaped scar in the crotch of the tree, a shape reminiscent of a dog-harness toggle.
Walking Charley?

After a short while, I realized Treason might be searching for me. I roared out of the canyon, made it to the tundra, and circled the top of a small rise. His headlight appeared, flicking up and down, bounding closer. His beaver hat was off. His hair was frozen, his ears and nose frozen. His windshield was in shards. A spruce pole was lashed between his skis, holding them aligned. A cigarette hung in his lips and wind had
burned perforations in the paper until it looked like a miniature machine gun barrel. I thought about the Marlboro Man; what a mannequin he was compared to an Eskimo hunter. Treason smiled big.

The wolverine was black and looked small tied behind the vinyl seat, frozen bloodcicles dangling from her mouth. We admired the thick fur and checked its length in our fists and combed the white circle above the rump. Rear claws to rear claws, a wolverine was one woman's ruff; front claws to front claws, one man's ruff; the rest parka trim. Treason was pleased. I didn't say anything about the rain falling inside me. He would worry; he'd think I'd caught Animal-Loverness in the city. A traitorous thing.

Barehanded he cleaned snow out of his cowling.

I toed the knotted-on tree.

“Busted my one-side steering. I lost him while I patched it. That tree throw lotta snow.” He grinned, ignoring a grease smear frosting his knuckles. “Sure iced up my carbs. I had to melt 'em with thermos. Coffee never finish, though, if you want a shot?”

 

 

WE ANGLED AWAY
from the mountains, west and circling beyond Takunak. The tundra beckoned, a thousand square miles of welcome. Shadows and snow stretched in shades of blue and gray and the Kuguruk River was an unshaven squiggle down in the flat tundra. We plowed across buried tributaries, awakening moose in the willows. They lumbered in the deep snow, tall walls of brown shoulders and silver scar-streaked flanks from the hungry wolf winter.

We angled across the fresh tracks of two snowgos. Treason grinned back and mouthed,
“NaluaÄ¡miu
tracks!” I peered at the snowmobile trail. How could he tell? How could Treason so instantaneously read tracks that I should know how to read but hadn't a clue?

Across the river from Takunak, on the high tundra ridge running south toward Uktu, Treason sped up and roared at a yellow stake sticking up out of the snow. He grinned back. The fiberglass stake snapped in
front of his machine—and whipped back upright. We stopped. My gas tank read E. In the headlight, I walked to the stake. GOVERNMENT EASEMENT. DO NOT LEAVE TRAIL. Yellow reflective stakes traversed the tundra toward Uktu, into the dim distance, a line so straight and forever.

I shut off my engine. Treason killed his and walked over, bundled in his beaver hat, icy and face badly frosted again from the flung snow and lack of a windshield. The light was nearly gone. “Government an'em paid us good. Twenty-five bucks an hour. Twenty-four something anyways. Real good job, putting them things. Better than
Exxon Valdez
even. What's
easement
mean?” He spat and melted his checks.

Iris's bright eyes flashed into my mind. “It's short for ‘easier to bring pavement.'”

“Huh.”

“This strip of land already belongs to somebody's road. They'll pay you to build it.”

“Ha, they think me and you gonna could stay on that skinny line?”

Suddenly I understood how he'd so effortlessly read the snowgo trail we'd passed—the second driver followed
exactly
in the tracks of the first—the drivers concerned, out of their element, scared of the land.

Around our feet lay the beautiful land, enchanted in the twilight's weakening glow, cold, silent, unprepared. Suddenly the past was over. It would never come back to protect us. We'd been pretending as well any actors. The chasm between legends around the fire and surround-sound TV, snowshoed dog trails and Yamaha V-Max snowmobiles was too overwhelming, and no hunting, no tears, no federal dollars could take us back across. I felt an avalanche of grief, and momentarily thought I'd lost Abe, and Janet, too.

I pulled the rope starter, squeezed the throttle. My gas was gone. I couldn't make it home. I turned toward Takunak and hit the yellow stakes as fast as my machine would go. Progress against progress. Whatever progress really was. Maybe it was only the wind of going fast. The good frostbite seared my face. Beside me raced Treason, a best friend. Inside I burped porcupine. Sixty miles an hour. Sixty-five. Seventy. Numbers.
Leftover lavender from the horizon behind faintly lighted the land. In front the closest thing to my hometown squatted, beside gleaming white satellite dishes, in Pampers, on Pepsi, drunk, stoned, desperately addicted to dollars. I whacked another yellow stake. And another. One shattered and missed my eyes. And another. The rest lurched upright, perfectly upright, whipping like laughter.