Ordinary Wolves (14 page)

Without hesitation she said, “First boat after Breakup.”

 

 

OVERFLOW SPREAD PALE STREAMS
over the ice. The tundra snow sluffed and the buried crumbs of winter poked out and formed a webby scum. Our roof leaked in a dozen places, pinging moss-tinted water into every spare can, pot, and dishpan. The dog yard collapsed, dropping us waist deep through the softening layers of sled-dog existence. We tapped birches and collected sap and boiled it into syrup. Bare ground spread as snow melted on the tundra behind the house and along the riverbank, and we picked the first fireweed and bluebell shoots and willow leaves and louseworts for fresh salad. We picked pussy willows to suck out the sweet nectar and lazed in the sun reflecting warmth off the snow. The new ground came alive with smells, and nights rang with songs of sparrows and robins hashing out territories and mates.
Kuukukiaq
roller-coastered high and invisible in the sky, the warbled howl of their wings in each dive claiming their nesting area, night and day sending out the call of spring. The water rose, and ice frozen to the bottom boomed free, cascading water like surfacing whales. Jesus Creek gushed in the night, cutting us off from downriver. We moved the dogs to the highest drift and watched expectantly as water surrounded our marker sticks. Open blue current sparkled. Suddenly summer was no longer a forgotten season.

One afternoon, silently at first, the whole river began moving. Inside we felt something in the air, maybe a dog pacing around his chain, maybe geese honking and lifting off as the ice pressed in, or that other sense we had never learned enough to name. We rushed out to watch. Breakup was all the holidays combined into one. We shouted and pointed and moved along the bank excitedly. Grinding, three-foot-thick ice pans peeled back snowbanks and crushed dog stakes and willows and trees. Ducks and geese flew the banks, landing in open leads and taking off again as
the leads closed. Below Jesus Creek the tops of tall spruce twitched and shook as trees fought to stand against the power of the ice. The day filled with sunshine and smells, bird calls and the roar and shudder of a new season being born.

And as quickly the river ground to a halt, jumbled, creaking, tinkling, a monster waiting for more water. Two days passed. The ice sheet broke free. It thundered past carrying torn-out trees, black sandy ice pans, glacier-blue upside-down chunks. The pans thinned by the following evening and the wide silty water dropped daily until one sunny night in early June the first maniacal laugh of the red-necked grebe carried over the tundra. It was almost too late then to collect arctic tern and seagull eggs, and soon the run of huge sheefish would come upriver to spawn, and salmon would follow. Green diamond leaves were coming out on sapling branches. The sun shone out of the north, shining on the wrong sides of the trees, making the spruce across the river glow separate and dusty green. Melting-out frogs rattled the ponds and awakening mosquitoes hummed at our ears. Sweet spring was dead and the hot boring summer here, an eternity trapped along the river under clouds of mosquitoes like a writhing skin, black and stinging. Me, painting rancid yellow seal oil on the dogs' faces and Figment's testicles, trying in vain to keep the mosquitoes from taking away their skin. Tall green grass and leafy trees. Fishing for dog food. Cutting fish, drying fish, cooking fish. Weeks and weeks of eating fish. The grebe could laugh in his red throat; he loved fish and had long forgotten if he'd ever watched a sister fly away.

SEVEN

HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUOOOOOO.

Whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooooo.

The voices carry themselves, floating on air, finally falling into timber, to echo and roll and fade like spirits. One downriver, two upriver, many across. Silence. Darkness. Moonlight lies on lines of river current, ponds, pools between tundra tussocks. Caribou step through dying sharp grass, splash shallow water, and stop. They listen, then trot along a sandbar. Hooves beat cold earth, drum under silver-touched night and the twin comfort and unease of that powerful pale eye.

A fish swirls; white ripples glint.

Whooooo. Whooooo. Whoo, whoo. Whooooo.

Mice carry seeds, squeak down tunnels.

Arrooooorrrooooooouuuuuuuuuuooooooooooooooo.

All hoof sounds cease as predators peel back river, leaping and swimming, crossing cold wide water fast. Hooves pound back up a sandbar,
thud a grassy bank; antlers thrash and crash through willows and darkness. Hundred-pound shadows pursue, flank, wait ahead—somewhere . . . seemingly everywhere.

A pike swirls and plunks, swallowing a swimming shrew.

Mice squeak.

A breezes stirs.
Naataq,
the great horned owl, glides across a valley.
Whooooo. Whooooo. Whoo, whoo. Whooooo.

EIGHT

THE MR. COFFEE MACHINE HISSED
and gurgled like a muskrat quietly drowning in the kitchen. The smell of fresh coffee lanced through the Wolfgloves' house, awakening me into memory mornings of a thousand campfires and home.

Most of the houses in town now had electricity from the diesel generators lowered by the Chinook helicopters. Janet didn't remember electricity every morning; I heard her sit up in their room, yawn, and fumble in the dark for her calico
atikłuk.
On my
qaatchiaq
on the floor I flipped the sleeping bag open to let the cool air tighten my skin. School. Iris had left a year and a half ago, and I had let that first winter slide away up at home, my correspondence books frozen to the poles under Abe's workbench. This winter, after Christmas, he'd asked: “What do you think about finishing school in town?” All Abe did was ask, curious. He didn't say please. He didn't ever say sorry. It was up to me to do whatever homework my dreams demanded. Now if I survived verbs and prepositions and
onomatopoeias of my last English grammar class I could break through the willows into wide-open life. Whatever that was. Mr. Standle, one of the new teachers, said any life I chose would need grammar, but he was a States person, and it sounded like they spent too much of their lives doing the paperwork, getting prepared to live.

Today would be another turbulent day. Yesterday Nippy Sr. had used his daughter's welfare check and his monthly Alaska Longevity Bonus to charter a Cessna 185 to Crotch Spit. He landed back in Takunak feeling good, the only other passengers on the plane three cases of whiskey and eight cases of Miller beers. Last night there had been scary-fast snowgos and rapid shooting beyond town in the dark—Nippy Jr.'s Mac-10—and a kung fu movie on the TV, with hundreds of people kicked somewhere in the vicinity of death. Today, between classes, there would be reenactments.

Enuk hadn't been found. Charley Casket found a moose skull in the fall when he was looking for bear dens. The skull had a .30-caliber bullet rattling inside—Enuk's caliber, and other people's, too. Charley, who walked creekbeds and cutbanks searching for mammoth ivory, teeth, and artifacts, also found a dog collar—sewed with sinew, that might have been off a dog of Enuk's—washed up downriver on a sandbar.

In whichever direction Enuk lay, it was a long way from Janet's shiny warm new HUD house. Abe wandered into my mind; what was he doing at this moment, light-years from this new world of mine, from Takunak, school, and NBC Night at the Movies? Likely he was kneeling naked, knifing kindling for the morning fire, or reading
The Iliad
or one of my leftover chemistry textbooks in front of a stubby candle. The wax would be running onto a coffee can lid that reflected the light, and, with the sides bent up, collected the wax so Abe could make a baby candle in tribute to his god of the Unwasters.

“Stevie,” Janet said. “Get up. It gonna be eight o'clock.”

“Adii.”
Stevie moaned.

“Don't always holler, Mom. Please.” Dawna's voice floated out of the darkness.

“Dawna, you shudup!” Melt roared from bed.

The doors were broken out of both bedrooms. The shouting reverberated out to where I lay. Melt was beginning a hangover, and still buzzing too, as the guys called it. “STEV-VIE! You getup and go school.” Melt sat up from where he'd slept fully clothed on top of the covers. Nowadays he was like a bad-toothed brown bear in a wet den. Treason had moved up the hill to Janet's brother's, Woodrow Washington Jr.'s, because of Melt. He only came down to use the flush toilet. Woodrow's grandkids had messed theirs up trying to flush caribou bones. Now it was just a shit basin, stinking up the house.

Melt despised having a
naluaġmiu
living under his roof. Janet was the only reason he couldn't boot me out. Melt leaned against a chair. He switched to slurred Iñupiaq, forgetting that I was learning a few words. I'd lived here a month; he was telling Janet something about me going
maatnugun.
The thing I'd heard around town about Melt Wolfglove,
guuq,
was
Tat was Enuk's only son. He let him be funny and never try teach him nothing. Enuk was been too much watch any kinda white guy.
Which, as far as teaching their kids, described many of the parents in Takunak. Which also translated to, Enuk liked white people. Which was a low thing to say about a dead elder, really.

Janet held a candle. She peered down and gripped my forearm in her fierce and tender grasp. She asked kindly, “You awake, Cutuk?”

“Yeah.”

“Coffee?”

I raised my eyebrows,
yes
in Iñupiaq, and she padded back with a steaming mug from the Mr. Coffee. My lips found the rim as she remembered the light switch and shattered the friendly darkness. I dressed into the distraction of a school morning, with stomach cramps from gulping Bisquick hot-cakes and Carnation canned milk in bitter coffee, rushed searches through the twisted heaps of clothes behind the stove for a missing one-side glove, missing homework papers—missing Iris and the land where no rules, no clock, only weather and the beautiful sky ruled my days.

Melt stood by the door. He shoved Dawna against the wall. The thin paneling bowed. He crushed her wrists in his hands. “You bring ta paycheck home tis time. Don't buy ta weed like t'em other girls. Mom and me
need money. We raised you up right from our pocket.” He let go of one of her wrists and wiped his mouth. He tilted and yanked himself straight, bruising her arm.

I faced the door, shaking, longing to loop a wolf snare over his head and pull all the slack out. Melt reached under his gut to tug at his hip pocket. “Right from our pocket we raised you up.” Dawna was inscrutable, only her eyes glittering. She tried to back away. A rifle leaning against the wall slid along the paneling and clattered to the floor.

“Aw shuck, you! You think you gonna be something else?”

“No!” Dawna's lips tightened out of sight. Each exhale shook her. Stevie and I had fists at the ends of our arms and no idea whether we were breathing.

Melt picked up the fallen rifle.

“Go!” Janet said.

The three of us lunged into the
qanisaq.

“GODDAMN RAISING YOU ALL, RIGHT FROM MY POCKET!”

Dawna slammed the door. I pulled my gloves on against the pinching cold, swallowed a laugh, picturing the three of us, an inch tall and trapped in Melt's unwashed pocket. My leader, Plato, and a few of my dogs whined softly but didn't uncurl from their melted ice circles. They were finally accustomed to me walking past them to school every morning—not coming out to run them.

We strolled up the hill toward school. Moose tracks crossed the hard-packed trail—a cow and calf had braved town. Dawna lagged farther and farther behind, heading to her morning job at the school office. Halfway up the ridge a big pretty husky lay frozen to the snow.

“Jus' like one of Newt's,” Stevie said, interested. “Nippy an' them fellas feeling high musta been shoot it.” He kicked the rock-hard dog, twice, to break it loose. The way his leg moved reminded me of Melt kicking boots behind the stove. Dogs, in Takunak, had the rights and privileges of damp firewood—and little use now that snowgos had come. Stevie flipped the dog over. It squeaked and sawed the snow. The legs stuck out stiff and straight. The bottom was perfectly flat, still a little soft, and white around
the edges with frost. We saw a bloody bullet hole in the chest, and a dark hole melted down into the snow. Behind my eyes lay the big silver wolf on Enuk's sled, long ago.

“Stevie, what did you fellas do with that silver wolf Enuk got?”

“Which one? He get lots. I dunno. Could be Mom sew it. Or mice wreck it up.”

“How about all his stuff?”

“He never been have much. Melt
pakik
everything. Mom use lotta skins to sew gifts for all the people who help search and cook.”

Our breath rose in white clouds. The brilliant new streetlight at the top of the ridge splintered the snow into shards of shadow and light. I looked toward the hidden Shield Mountains. Across the tundra, far out of the fling of electric light and its confusion, curled in comfortable uninterrupted morning blackness lay the world that would always be
real
to me. Foxes and wolves, mice, the cold trees and buried sedges, all ancient vital members of the land.

I shook my head to clear the Abe-ism.

Whack. Whack. Stevie twirled Lumpy's homemade broom handle numchuks, smacking the back of his nylon jacket. “I'm almost gonna be Bruce Lee!”

“You dream.” We laughed.

I glanced back at Dawna. Waited until she caught up, and shuffled beside her with my head down.
“Alappaa,
huh?” I pretended to warm my face with my hand, pressing my nose, trying to train it to flatten down and be wider. “He hurt you?” In the frozen morning air I bent close. “Dawna?”

“No.” Her smile bent. She pressed her face on my shoulder and walked leaning against me.

I moved slow across the snow, shocked to be touched, and not wanting to get anywhere nearer to school where she would not do this. In the distance a group of kids threw iceballs at crippled Timmy Feathers, warming up his day. Since Iris left, the summer before this last one, I'd longed for a woman to talk to. Young guys talked about snowgos, fights, girls, getting drunk; they imitated rifle discharges, bragged of caribou they'd
“nailed.” The talk was intoxicating, but what remained was the race to be tougher, no tranquil thoughts to get warm around.