Lone Wolves (9 page)

11

T'aede kae tikaani t'uuts'

The Girl with the Black Wolf

I
t seemed like everyone in the village had read that newspaper story about Denny. During English, Ms. Stevens enthusiastically announced her idea that the class could create a blog site about Denny on which they, and anyone who was interested, could track her progress during the race.

“Imagine,” she said, “anyone in the world could go to our blog to read how Denny's doing and see any photos that we post. She could email us on the trail whenever she's at a village with Internet access to tell us any news and what she's thinking or feeling.”

Everyone agreed it was a good idea. Besides, it beat using classroom time to learn about adverbs and prepositions. After using the entire period to discuss how to create the site and what should go on it, Ms. Stevens pulled out a digital camera from her desk drawer and handed it to Silas.

“During lunch, go with Denny to her house and take a picture of each dog. We'll post each one with its name. And make sure to take some close-ups.”

Later, while Silas was taking the pictures, Denny went inside the house to get a photo of her grandfather.

“We'll scan this and put it on the site, too,” she said, showing Silas the photograph.

Silas nodded.

“Let's get a picture of you hugging one of the dogs,” he said.

After taking a couple pictures, Denny and Silas walked back to school.

“Are you nervous?” asked Silas, while they were walking past several ravens raiding a garbage can.

“About what?”

“The race, dummy. What else do you think I'm talking about?”

“Not really,” replied Denny. “I know my grandpa's spirit will be with me.”

“You mean his ghost?”

“No. Not like that,” laughed Denny. “Here, in my
ciz'aani
—in my heart.”

That afternoon, Denny nearly tripped over two large boxes when she walked through the door to her house after school.

“What's this?” she asked her mother.

“It's your grandfather's clothes. I convinced your grandma that it's time to get rid of them.”

“Why'd you do that?” asked Denny.

“It was making her sad every time she opened her closet and saw his things hanging there.”

Denny looked down at one of the boxes. Her grandfather's favorite flannel shirt was folded on top, the one he always wore when the two of them were out on the trail. He had been wearing it the day he died. Denny picked it up, held it to her face, and breathed in.

It smelled like her grandfather's aftershave and campfire smoke.

“What's Grandma gonna do with these?” she said looking at both boxes.

“We're going to donate them. I was just going to load them in the truck.”

“I'm keeping this,” said Denny, clutching the flannel shirt to her chest.

“It's a man's shirt.”

“I don't care.”

“It's too big for you.”

“I don't care.”

“Suit yourself,” said her mother, realizing that she had no choice but to agree or get into a big argument.

While her mother and grandmother were delivering the boxes of clothes, Denny darned a small rip in the sleeve of her grandfather's shirt. She found his wristwatch in the pocket, left there by her grandfather since the last time he had worn the shirt. Though it was maybe fifty years old, it wasn't a particularly expensive watch. The black leather band was falling apart. She carefully pulled the stem and wound it, careful not to over-wind it. The second hand began to move.

She put it on.

It was hers now.

That weekend, Denny ran the dogs up to the small cabin in the hills, the one where she had first seen the wolf. As she had hoped, Tazlina emerged from the trees just outside of the village and followed her up the trail. When she arrived at the cabin, Denny ran a tether line between two trees and tied each dog to the line, spacing them, as always, far enough apart to avoid conflicts over food. Afterward, she went inside and built a fire in the stove. When she looked out the window, she could see the wolf lying in the snow near her tethered dogs.

None of the dogs was barking or growling at their natural enemy, having grown accustomed to his presence.

After warming water on the stove, Denny fed the dogs while Tazlina watched with great interest. He could smell their food. While the dogs ate, Denny made a special bowl just for Taz. To the dry dog food mixed with warm water, she added some leftovers from home, which included bits of bacon, and a couple chunks of caribou and beaver meat.

With the warm bowl in her hands, Denny slowly approached Taz, speaking softly.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I made this special, just for you.”

Twice Tazlina stood and turned to flee. But both times he resisted the natural urge and stood his ground, his belly winning over his instincts.

When she was less than ten feet away, Denny reached into the bowl and gently tossed one of the chunks of meat to him. He quickly gobbled it.

By now all the dogs had finished eating and were watching the spectacle, pricking their ears when they saw the piece of meat in Denny's hand.

“Did you like that? Wasn't that good?”

Tazlina licked his lips, his eyes fixed on the stainless steel bowl in her hand.

Slowly, Denny took two more steps, until she was only about five feet from the wolf. She squatted, holding out the bowl in her hand and placing it on the ground.

But she didn't move away.

“If you want it, you'll have to come get it,” she said, realizing the torment the wolf must be going through, torn between instinctive fear and hunger.

But finally, Tazlina inched his way on his belly to the bowl and ate, stopping at moments to look at her, their eyes locked. When he finished, Denny held out a piece of moose meat, which she had saved specially for this moment.

“Look what I have,” she almost sang, holding the tantalizing piece of meat on the palm of her hand.

“Come get it,” she said, shoving her hand toward him.

Tazlina whined and worked his mouth noiselessly, as if trying to tell her to give it to him. Ever so slowly, he stretched as far as he could without taking a step and gently took the food from her hand. Denny stood up slowly, and the wolf did not run away.

That night, before Denny went to bed, she heard a faint scratching sound at the door. Looking out the window, she saw Tazlina standing in the small square of light cast by the oil lamp on the table. She slowly opened the door just a crack, the light and warmth pouring into the cold and darkness outside.

She stepped back and waited.

The wolf stuck his head through the door, but came in no further.

Denny took the last bit of a biscuit she had been eating as a bedtime snack and set it in the middle of the floor, about eight or nine feet away from the door.

“You'll have to come inside if you want it,” she said softly, while taking a seat at the table.

For several minutes Tazlina just stood in the doorway, but finally, he crept inside with his tail between his legs, a sign of uneasiness or submission. After eating the biscuit, he bravely explored the room, sniffing everything, even the wood stove.

“Hot,” said Denny, as the wolf backed away, furrowing his eyebrows, and without burning his black nose.

Finally, Tazlina turned in a circle, curled up on the plywood floor, sighed, and closed his eyes.

Denny quietly closed the door, stoked the fire, adding a split log, and climbed up the ladder to sleep in the loft, leaving a lit candle on the small table below.

“Good night,” she said, hanging her head over the edge and looking down.

Taz opened his eyes, looked up at her, sighed heavily, and went back to sleep.

Sometime during the night, as the fire burned down and the cabin cooled, a noise awoke Denny. She crept from her sleeping bag and peered over the edge to see the wolf whimpering and twitching and kicking his legs in his sleep, as if he were having a nightmare.

The quiet dawn was shattered by a ruckus outside. The dogs were frantically yelping and barking unlike anything Denny had ever heard before. Taz was scratching at the door and whining excitedly.

Denny knew that something was terribly wrong.

She climbed down the ladder from the loft, jumping to the floor when she was halfway, and ran to the window to look outside. In the half-light of early morning, she saw a pack of wolves surrounding her dogs. Tied up as they were, the dogs were unable to run away or to defend themselves.

Denny grabbed her parka and the loaded rifle leaning against a wall. When she opened the door, Taz bolted toward the wolves, running straight for the alpha male, a large gray-and-white wolf, and crashing into him with so much force that he bowled over the larger wolf. But the alpha was quick to his feet and launched into Taz with all his fury. Both wolves moved as fast as lightning, bearing their long, white fangs, each trying to get hold of the other's neck.

The valley rang with terrible noise.

Both dogs and wolves anxiously awaited the outcome of the contest, the wolves wondering if they would have a new leader, the dogs wondering if they would be eaten by their wild cousins. Denny wondered if this was the same pack that had killed the schoolteacher, or if this was Taz's old pack and the alpha the leader who had expelled him, banishing him to his lonely existence.

It was soon apparent to Denny that Taz was losing.

Three times from the porch she raised the rifle to shoot the gray-and-white wolf, but she couldn't be sure that she wouldn't hit Taz instead. Finally, convinced that the alpha might kill Taz, she aimed the rifle above their heads and fired two shots. Instantly, the pack ran into the trees.

After the dogs settled down and after Denny was certain that the wolves weren't returning, she helped Taz back into the warm cabin where she cleaned his wounds, which weren't all that bad considering the ferociousness of the fray. Taz licked her hand more than once as she cleaned his wounds. Afterward, Denny made a pot of coffee and shared a breakfast of caribou sausage and biscuits with him.

By late morning, Deneena emerged from the little log cabin with smoke billowing from its chimney. The hungry dogs all stood up and began to bark for their breakfast. Denny stood on the porch looking out over the white valley surrounded by mountains, the wind blowing her hair into her blue eyes, with one hand resting on the shoulders of the black wolf standing at her side.

12

Unen tah

On the Face of Things

W
ith the race just weeks away, Deneena had to train Taz quickly. She did this in between school and homework, earning money, and running her team on the trail. Sometimes, she skipped school to give herself more time, calling in sick. The teachers knew what she was doing, but they said nothing because Denny was an excellent student with excellent marks. Besides, they were proud of her. Missing a day or two here and there wasn't going to affect her grades. They understood that things would return to normal after the race.

“Gee!” Denny would say clearly, using little bits of meat to teach the wolf that the word meant to go right.

“Haw!” she would say to teach him to go left.

After Taz mastered the basic commands, Denny added two more commands to his repertoire: “Come gee” and “Come haw,” showing him to turn completely around right or left.

Little by little, Denny replaced the meat rewards with praise and petting. Taz was extremely intelligent, and he learned quickly. Sometimes, Denny swore she could see in his expression that he was trying to figure things out in his mind. The hardest part was harnessing him to the sled. Tazlina didn't like being manhandled or tied up. He hated his collar. At first he resisted so furiously—trying to wriggle free, especially when she would try to connect him to the tow line—that his behavior frightened her a little. But the wolf never once snapped at her or at the other dogs, all of whom seemed to accept him as one of them.

Sometimes, after school or on the weekends, Silas watched the training, standing at a safe distance, marveling at the extraordinary relationship between wolf and Denny. While Taz accepted Denny, allowing her to hug him and drag him into position on the line, he wasn't so trusting or friendly with other humans.

More than once, Taz growled when Silas came too near. At such times, Silas would back away while Denny chastised the wolf.

“Taz! No! Be nice.”

Day after day, Denny taught Tazlina every command he needed to know as a lead dog. Most importantly, she taught him the word to go and the word to stop. She taught him that “Line out!” meant to pull just hard enough so that the dogs behind him could be hooked or unhooked from the main line. She even taught him that the word “Trail!” meant to move the rest of the team off the trail to allow another team to pass.

The process was neither easy nor even.

Once, while on the trail, Taz tore out after a moose he saw, leading the team off the main trail and entangling lines and dogs in the woods. It took Denny half an hour to straighten out the mess.

Some habits are hard to break, she thought.

With only days to spare before the Great Race, Denny allowed herself to hope that Tazlina had learned what he needed to know to lead the team. With his added strength and endurance, Denny could feel that the sled was faster than ever. Taz was the match, if maybe more, of Kilana. Perhaps, if she had had Taz as lead dog during the race before Christmas, she might have won first place instead of third. When she stopped for a break on the river, Denny wondered what her grandfather would think. Would he be happy that she had entered the race? Would he approve of her continued training and the new addition to her team?

She decided he'd be proud of her.

While sitting around campfires, Denny also thought about the wolf, wondering why he was alone. Her grandfather had told her that wolves always run in packs.

“Strength in numbers,” he had said. “That the only way to kill a moose or caribou.”

Her grandpa had said that only outcasts wandered alone and generally only until they found another pack to join. After much contemplation, Denny decided that Tazlina must have been kicked out of a pack for some reason.

Perhaps,
she thought,
he had challenged the alpha male and lost.

Denny didn't like to think that Tazlina might have been part of the pack that had killed the school teacher in the neighboring village, but the thought had crossed her mind. Judging from the way the wolf allowed her to become part of his life, Denny decided that he couldn't have hurt anyone. But there were moments when she questioned what she was doing, questioned her own safety.

Once, after taking a lunch break on the trail, Denny was collecting the empty dog dishes. She didn't notice that there was still a tiny bit of food left at the bottom of Taz's bowl. When she reached to take it, the wolf turned on her viciously, baring his fangs with his ears held flat against his head. Denny saw a terrible fierceness in his eyes, primal and untamable, like wildfire. She dropped the dish and backed away with one hand on her knife sheath, her whole body tense with fear, her mouth as dry as a sandbar. Taz licked the bowl clean and then sat down and waited, the savageness once again suppressed. But it took a while before Denny could muster enough courage to approach him and take the dish.

She would later write in her journal, “Sometimes I'm terrified of him . . . of what he
could
do to me if I forget what he is even for a minute.”

That night after supper, Denny walked over to Agnes Isaac's house. At 80 years old, Agnes lived alone in her small cabin ever since her husband died six years earlier. She was the only woman in the village who still practiced the ancient traditional custom of facial tattooing. In all of Alaska, very few Native women had facial tattoos, mostly the very old. Denny's own grandmother did not have one. In fact, aside from Agnes, no other woman within three villages up or down the river had one.

“I want
uyida' neltats'
,” announced Denny in Indian when the old woman opened the door. “I can pay.”

The old woman motioned for her to come inside the cabin.

“Close the door hard,” she said. “Otherwise the cold creeps in.”

While the old woman poured herself a cup of tea made from a local plant called Labrador tea, she asked, “So, you want a chin tattoo, eh? It not like getting one in the city nowadays, you know. I do it the old way.”

Denny had never heard anyone describe the tattooing process used by the old women.

“How do you do it?”

Agnes sat down at her rickety table and sipped her hot tea.

“I gonna coat bear grease all over a piece of thread. Then I gonna put charcoal all over that thread and stitch your skin with it.”

“Is it going to hurt?” Denny asked.

The old woman smiled. She was missing several teeth.

“It make even a tough man cry.”

Denny cringed at the thought of the old woman shoving a sewing needle through her skin.

“What do you want?” asked Agnes.

“I already told you,” said Denny. “I want it on my
uyida'
, on my chin, just like yours.”

The old woman looked into the eyes of the 16-year-old girl, searching for something, a sign of strength, perhaps . . . or doubt.

“Okay. I think you ready. Bring me that box,” she said, pointing at a cigar box on a bookshelf.

Denny fetched the colorful box.

Inside were thread, needles, a small vial of grayish bear grease, and another vial containing charcoal made from a special kind of wood. Denny watched nervously as Agnes coated a long piece of thread with grease and then worked the thread into a small mound of charcoal, making sure that the thread was thoroughly coated. Then she held a needle over a candle. When it had cooled, she asked Denny to help her thread the eye of the needle.

For the next fifteen minutes, Denny gripped the base of her wooden chair and grimaced as Agnes stitched three vertical lines into her chin, each about an inch long and evenly spaced close together. When each line had been sewn properly, the old woman cut the thread near the skin and began the next one, stopping only long enough to dab away blood with a clean rag.

“Leave those in for a week,” said Agnes, putting away her tools when she was finished. “They gonna turn your skin black on the inside. It gonna itch like crazy, but don't scratch. I take them out when you come back.”

Denny looked at her face in a mirror, bending close to the glass and touching her chin with a finger, feeling the thread beneath the raised skin.

She smiled.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching into a pocket for money.

“Nothing,” replied Agnes. “You the only young person ever ask me to do this. It important part of who we are as women. Maybe someday you do it for another woman and keep it alive. I teach you how.”

Denny promised she would learn.

When she returned home, her mother and grandmother were already asleep. Denny was glad for that. She knew that her mother would be mad about the tattoo, and she wanted to avoid an argument, at least for the time being.

That night, undoubtedly influenced by all her recent hard work training Tazlina, Denny had a vivid dream in which she was a wolf running with a pack of wolves. The dream seemed so real and it seemed to last for a long time. Entire seasons came and went. When she woke up in the middle of the night, disappointed that the dream was over, she wrote a poem about it in her journal, giving it a title only after completing it, fully aware that she was borrowing it from a far greater writer than she.

The Call of the Wild

Once, I was a wolf living among wolves

on the stunted backbone of tundra and forests

where we hunted moose and caribou all winter

in deep, drifted snow, without escape—

where only the deep silence of the north

listened as we howled at the moon

and ran the glacial earth until I awoke.

On some still nights I hear them waiting

above the rim of this valley,

calling to me from shadows

like a visitor who comes to my home

and knocks on the door with both fists.

“What the hell did you do to your face?” Delia screeched when she saw the tattoo in the morning.

For half an hour, Denny's mother, livid, berated her daughter, saying things like, “You've ruined your life! No one will ever take you seriously! You'll never get a job looking like that!” and, several times over, “What were you thinking?”

Denny's only defense was, “It's my life” and “You don't understand me at all,” the universal hymn of misunderstood teens everywhere, to which her mother shouted the universal parental response.

“You look ridiculous!”

Finally, Denny's grandmother put down her sewing.

“What would you say to me?” she asked, defiantly.

“What?” Delia snapped, turning to look at her.

“If I had a tattoo like that on my face . . . would you say those things about me?”

“Don't be ridiculous, Mom,” replied Delia, crossing her arms in defiance and tightening her jaw. “You wouldn't be caught dead with something so stupid on your face.”

“I wanted one just like that when I was her age.”

On hearing these words, Denny sat down on the sofa beside her grandmother and held her hand.

“What do you mean, Grandma?”

“Back when I was a little girl, all Indian women had a tattoo on their face. Some had many. It was a proud mark of beauty, a way of telling the world we had reached adulthood. My mother had one, as did my grandmother and all my aunts. I grew up waiting for the day I would get one, too.”

Delia had never before heard any of this from her mother.

“You wanted a tattoo like that?” she asked, uncrossing her arms and loosening her jaw. “You never told me anything about that. Why didn't you get one?”

“When I was only ten, I was sent away to a school where they taught us Indian children that things like that, even our language and the potlatch, are silly and superstitious. They said our language was nonsense and babbling. Some teachers said it sounded like a dog barking. I remember the principal called it gobbledygook, whatever that means. I was locked up in the basement many times for speaking our language. Because I was at that school, I never got my face tattooed. None of us girls who went there ever got one. We all felt ashamed. I regret it all my life.”

The old woman looked into her granddaughter's blue eyes and caressed her cheek with a wrinkled hand.

“I'm proud of you,” she said.

They both began to weep.

“Thank you, Grandma,” Denny said, hugging her grandmother, smelling wood smoke in her long, gray hair.

Delia stood watching the embrace from afar, the way people watch stars from billions and billions of miles away.

Ten minutes before she had to leave for school, Denny sat down at the table to write in her diary, while her mother was in the back room washing up.

Dear Nellie:

I got a tattoo last night. Agnes Isaac did it the old way. I knew Mother would have a cow, that's why I didn't ask her first. I was right. She always puts down everything about our heritage, like being Indian is something to be ashamed of. But Grandma stood up for me, which really surprised me. We've lost so much of our past; I just want to hold on to whatever's left. I wish Mom could see that. When the last of our old ways is gone, what will we be then? Who will we be? Doesn't anyone care? Change of subject. The race is in a few days. My team is ready. I have enough money for the flight and the food . . . but barely. I don't know how this is all going to end. I don't know how I'm going to get home. I don't even know where I'm going to stay the night before the race. Sometimes you have to follow your heart and believe in yourself and in your dreams. When you risk nothing, you risk losing even more. Everyone thinks I'm so strong, but I'm not. I'm scared. Let's keep that a secret between us.

Denny

When she finished writing, Denny laid the notebook on her bed, meaning to hide it in its secret place before she left for school. But in her hurry to get ready, searching madly for her gloves, Denny forgot, and the journal sat propped against a pillow like a heart laid open for the whole world to read.

When Denny came home from school that afternoon, she found a white envelope stuck to the front door with a piece of gray duct tape, binder of the world. Her name was scrawled on the outside of the envelope. She pulled it from the door and opened it. Inside was one hundred dollars in cash with a handwritten note that read: