Ordinary Wolves (43 page)

I glanced at the gauges. Twenty-nine hundred feet.
The mixture!
I leaned it out until the rpm rose and started to fall again. Down below a herd of caribou fanned out, like hundreds of tiny grains of rice racing across the tundra, and I realized how much I loved the ground.

 

 

ON THE NORTH SHORE
below the convergence of the Uktu and Kutny Rivers, Uktu squatted like a flyspeck in the vast wilderness. Government houses stood on metal legs in neat rows. The dump was behind the village and wind had blown plastic bags and trash in huge swathes across the tundra. The cemetery perched on a knoll half a mile from the dump. The airstrip lay on a bulldozed island in front of the village. A bridge spanned the narrow river channel between the island and shore.

I swept Uktu from the north. Dogs pointed their muzzles up and howled. I laid the wing over, skated around, and eased the throttle back. At
twenty-one hundred rpm the plane floated. I played with the flaps to bring the tail up. I didn't know this village—where would Dawna be? Men and women and kids stood on porches, on the caked streets, and in boats.

Keep your nose down,
January said.
Power is your friend.

At full throttle I came in over the stovepipes. Houses and wires and faces ripped under the wheels. Nothing had ever felt so deadly and alive. I buzzed the length of the town. I could become addicted up here, swooping and diving until the dentist's gas was gone.

I lined up on the airfield. Confidence moved my hands. They pulled the flaps, eased the throttle. Willows flashed under the nose, and the plane wobbled and yawed, the tires touched and bounced. The plane veered, then the tail lowered and the rear tire dragged. The cowling blocked my view. I steered carefully onto the gravel ramp and leaned the mixture until the engine stuttered and died.

In the sudden silence, the ground and my thoughts felt distant and hazy. I pictured January and Abe landing on the ice in front of Takunak, meeting Enuk, thirty-five years ago, freighting in the future, whether they wished to or not.

Four-wheelers approached. I swung out on the gravel. People recognized me, shook my hand. A chubby boy grinned out of a small version of Lumpy's face. Dawna pushed through the circle. Her hair was short and fashionable looking, tinted with a hint of copper. Her cheeks had filled out. She was missing half of a front tooth. “I s-saw you driving a plane like a nuthead!” Tears flooded her eyes. “I thought you were going to crash and I'd never see you again.”

I started to hand her the box, but then set it down and lifted her off the ground in an embrace. “Hi!” We laughed in each other's faces. “I miss you. What are you doing in this town?” I picked the camera box up and shoved it into her hands. “Here.”

Her eyes squinted like Enuk's. She'd always been able to read secrets off my face. “Say, Yellow-Hair! Just like you fit your skin better, or something.” She held the box as if it were merely a parcel I'd asked her to hold. “When you leaving?”

“I have to get this plane back. Now, actually.” I climbed back in the
front seat. People stepped away from in front of the prop. I paused, not wanting to leave her. “How'd your tooth come off?”

“My cousin.” She touched it with the pink tip of her tongue, shrugged, and grinned. “That dumb
utchuk!
We were hunting ducks and she let her four-ten barrel bump my teeth. I have to get it fixed.”

“I have to return this airplane. I stole it to come see you.”

Surprise flooded her face. “I'll
malik!
Let me get my bag.”

Landing with Dawna had not been anything I'd let into my mind—I pictured red and white wreckage strewn on the sand.
Double murder by stupidity.
I shook my head. “I'm not planning on haunting Janet, trying to explain killing you.”

She wrinkled her nose and stood on one foot on the step and peered at the controls and gauges and the green plexiglass roof. “I dream about driving this kind.” We locked gazes for a long second.

I pressed the starter. Wind gusted her hair. Slowly she stepped down, and I reached out and held the edge of her hand. “See you in Takunak, after Freezeup. 'Bye, Dawna.”

“Maybe I'll steal a plane and come see
you!”

I folded the door closed. Dawna waved and pouted with a smile.

 

 

AN EAST BREEZE
rippled the Kuguruk River. I'd wanted to land west, to make fewer tracks—the irrational rationale of a groundlubber about to crash. The breeze would help, probably more than my inexperienced hands. If I landed without wrecking, and still felt the need, I could erase every track on the bar with a leafy branch.

I set the flaps and came in low over the water, raising and lowering the throttle, feeling the plane settle and the controls go mushy. I came around again. My arms were hard. Along the shore a gust rolled the willow leaves, pale sides up. A wisp of smoke stretched from the igloo stovepipe. I banked again, the stick clammy in my hand, and water raced under the prop. Then sand. A quarter of the strip was gone. I cut the throttle. The tires struck and the plane lurched into the air. The brown mouth of Jesus
Creek rushed closer. A tire hit. We bounced and rolled on both tires. January's voice said,
Christ, don't flip! Pull back!
The wheels gouged in the sand. A huge hand lifted the tail as I rammed the throttle and hauled the stick back. The prop roared. The nose dipped—and rose. I quickly lowered the throttle and taxied, wobbling and jouncing, back to where the plane had sat three hours ago.

I folded the door open and got out.

The breeze filled my lungs. The dogs gathered around, their paws and jowls bloody, happy and full of moose meat. I took off my shoes. The sand came up between my toes.

“There you go, January,” I said. “Abe. Mom. Everybody, I fly.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

A STRAND OF
diluted sun fragmented to rainbows in my eyelashes. I'd been dreaming—Stevie and I were drifting downriver on a sheet of plywood, drinking hair spray that tasted like gin and tonic through tiny red double-barrel straws.

Outside the window, trees and branches and dead fireweed gleamed in thick morning frost. In the distance came the sporadic roar of ice grinding down the current. This was the fourth morning of Freezeup, the hunters had all fled back to their villages and towns and cities, and the animals had a few short days to sniff the blood of their wounded and dead before winter coldly filled in the season. Fall, with its leaves and insects, robins and liquid water, was hibernating. The land was folding its tarps, emptying its buckets for winter.

I lay on my back, staring at the aged beams and the spruce poles of the ceiling—a kid again, Yellow-Hair, rubbing his eyes, wondering at all these dreams he had had. The land hadn't changed, hadn't even blinked,
huge and endless and wild. Storms waited to bury the house. A moose tried to get on the roof for companionship. Red foxes screamed hoarsely. Weasels and shrews burrowed into the peoplefood pile. Maybe Enuk would thread across the back tundra today on his dog team, and bring jam and tell stories of where he had been.

I got up, knifed shavings, started a fire, and made coffee. I dumped blueberries into a bowl of sourdough and put the griddle on. “Should you put
suvaks
in your pancakes?” I asked aloud. “Or save them for
ittukpalak?”

After breakfast, I packed dried fish and crackers and candy bars, spare socks and matches and my Army sleeping bag. I carried my rifle over the pack. Ice pans swung down the channel. Gray jays chuckled and ferried mouthfuls from my caribou cache. A fox had left a winding trail in the frost on the shore ice. Mink tracks hopped along the bank between a brush pile and the fish rack. A lynx, too, had passed in the night, footprints as big and round as jam cans.

The dogs rose and stretched and sniffed the air, worried that they would be left home again today. I unsnapped their collars and they ripped back and forth, overjoyed to be free of chains, harnesses, and the sled. We dropped over the bank and crossed the booming ice of Outnorth Lake.

Jesus Creek was frozen in the wider, slower bends. I slid across on my stomach, gripping a sapling for safety. The dogs raced in front, slipping and falling, fearless and unaware. We picked through the tangled brush and climbed toward the high tundra. The tussocks were frozen heads, slippery with grass hair, the puddles between them hard. The Dog Die Mountains glowed dusty in the pale sun.

The tundra lifted to meet the mountains. Caribou herds grazed, endless lines of animals stretching into the distant north. They meandered south, their trenched trails forking dark across the mottled brown and white tundra.

 

 

AFTER SIX HOURS,
I stopped where Abe and I had camped. Our tent poles still leaned in the crook of a birch. The tree had worn calluses
where the poles rubbed in the wind. Silently, I apologized to the tree and lifted them and laid them on the ground. The flat rock we cooked on was clawed and cracked. I searched the ground, hoping to find a dropped spoon, a .30-06 cartridge, an Artista pastel. There were only the windblown cones, twigs, and snow, and sawdusty piles of old moose turds.

The dogs and I went on. Beside us the tundra of lichens and bushes and lone stunted spruce was still and silent. We came to big brown bear tracks, traveling the direction we were going. We climbed the first ridge of the mountain. Canyon walls dropped to willows, a partially frozen creek winding through the thickets. A moose towered down in the brush, his neck bent to the side, curious, and watchful, and I searched for a path down the rocks and descended to the creek.

Along the bank, snow had drifted in the hollows and rocks. Alders leaned over the ice, clawing at my hair, dropping seed clusters down my collar. That spring evening I had been five feet higher, walking up the drifts and pale green overflow ice, the frostbite scars not even beginning to season my face.

The creek curved. On the right it ran close against high slate cliffs. The bear had circled under the rocks. Cold air flowed off the shaded peaks. The dark den appeared above a clump of alders; a path wound around boulders and slate scree and on up to the entrance.

Caribou came down the valley, halting when they saw the dogs and moving up the rocks to go around. I took off my rifle and leaned it against a boulder. The dogs sniffed at it, and Mike started to lift his leg. “Agh! No!” He leapt away, cowering, then wagging nervously. I turned, intent on searching. The rocks were flat and slatey—heaps of them lay everywhere, shattered and shards, and across the narrow creek, near the broken birch tree, a lichened stick stuck out of the ground.

The dogs had disappeared, chasing caribou. Water glugged and percolated in openings in the ice. I shuffled onto the ice and worked my way down to a slower, deeper area to cross and investigate. The ice cracked and starred. I lay flat on my stomach, slithering toward the opposite shore. The ice was clear as glass, the air hushed, and I glanced up the canyon walls and at my rifle on the shore—if something wants to eat me, I thought, so
be it, I'm not doing anything more useful than being a meal. High on the mountain, pebbles rattled. I shielded my face to peer through, down into the water and bright rocks. Tiny white and gray bubbles were captured in the ice. The rocks of the creekbed were beautiful, a foot below.

Behind a stump, current had swirled silt into an oval. I chipped ice with my knife, took off my gloves, and raked slush out of the hole. I whipped off my jacket, pushed my sleeves up, reached into the burning water. From the sides, through the magnification of the water, I watched big fingers brush silt. A cloud obscured the water. The current carried it billowing downstream. Two curved mud-colored bones arched above the sediment. I pried and pulled, and lifted the skull an inch. The current tapped my red fingers against someone's old old cheekbones.

 

 

THE TRAIL UP
to the den was treacherous and steep. Rex leapt ahead, the other dogs pressed behind my heels, impatient but unable to squeeze past. Small gnarled spruce near the entrance had been gnawed dead by porcupine and quills littered the entrance to the den. A porcupine had chewed at the roots, dug an emergency exit, left heaps of wooden turds. The wolves had died, left, or been evicted.

The odor was reminiscent of the stink left by the porcupine in my house, and in disgust I called the dogs away and we went down beside the creek. Caribou clattered down the draw and halted, milling behind the lead cows. I shot a young cow, gutted it, fed the dogs, and built a fire. Gathering wood, I kicked a half-buried stick. A rotten and mossy bolt action .308 rifle rolled to the surface. Air flooded into my lungs.
Your gun! I found you, Enuk!
I peered out at the ice, toward the buried skull, and knelt in the snow, feeling curiously alone, suddenly eons from home—as if I'd roamed far into woolly mammoth territory. I cradled the rusted relic. The bolt was seized. The dogs hurried over, circling and curious, poking their bloodstained noses in my ears and face. “Hey, you have caribou-guts breath, get away from me.” The damp gun stock twisted off in my hands. “Agh! Get!” I dug at frozen leaves, scooping under roots and rocks—in a
clump of alders, a rusted tin can nicked my hand. I squeezed a few drops of blood onto the snow. The sky was growing dark. I listened. Faint foot-steps crunched upstream on the ice. The dogs woofed and stared behind me into the brush. I went back to the fire and sat and ate fat and meat and half of a candy bar, and finally slept fitfully with the dogs close.

 

 

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
I climbed again to the discouraging den. I reached in and felt around. Quills stuck in my wrists and in the prancing dogs' feet. They whined, ran down to the creek, fed off the carcass, growling and arguing, and disappeared after a herd of caribou.