by Seth Kantner
“Wind blow plen’y hard tat night I get lost. Freeze you gonna like nothing.” Enuk nodded at our bellied-in plastic sheeting windows behind his head, white and hard with drifted snow. A dwindling line of black night showed at the top. “My lead dowg, he been bite my dowgs. Al’uv’em tangle in’a willows. I leave ’em, let’um bury. I sleep in ta sled, on qaatchiaq. Tat night I never sleep much.”
He chuckled and glared. “You listen, Yellow-Hair? Can’t see only nothing too much wind.” Enuk’s bottom lip was thick and dark and permanently thrust out. I laughed, shy, and slapped my grubby red feet on the cold floor and tried to push out my too-thin lip.
In the corner on Abe’s spruce-slab bed, Jerry and Iris lay on his caribou-hide qaatchiaq playing checkers. “Rabies,” Jerry murmured. “His story’s going to have rabies.”
She pinched him. “It’s your turn.” A shrew ran on the floor. Enuk’s black eyes followed it. He picked up the block of kindling and waited. Behind the wood box shrews whistled.
Jerry dragged a moose-antler checker over her pieces. The tops of his were marking-penned black, Iris’s red. “’Kay then. King me.” They wore corduroy pants. The corduroy ridges were eroded off the knees, thighs, and butts. Iris had two belt loops cinched together with twine to keep her too-big pants up. Abe didn’t encourage us to change clothes more than once a month. More than twice a month put a burden on everybody. He wouldn’t say no, but the house was low and one room—the only place to get out of the weather for miles—and the faintest disapproval could hang in the air.
The corner posts of Abe’s bed were weather-silvered logs, the tops bowled from use as chiseling blocks and ashtrays. Above the foot of his bed, his workbench was messy with empty rifle brass, pieces of antler and bone, rusty bolts, wood chips, and abandoned paintings, the canvas and paper bent and ripped by his chisels and heavy planes. Abe Hawcly was a left-handed artist. He was also our dad. But we kids didn’t know to call him anything generic or fatherly, only Abe. Travelers called him that. By the time we realized what normal people did, years had hardened into history. Calling him Dad felt worse than shaking hands.
“Enuk. Here.” Abe slid a mug across the uneven boards to the middle of the table. He rubbed his sore knee and sat and rolled himself a cigarette with one hand. “Kids, don’t worry about schoolwork tonight.” He waved his match out. Two joints of his ring finger had been swallowed by a whaling winch in Barrow. His hands were thick and red, paint dried in the cracks. They carved faces on scraps of firewood and drew whole valleys lurking with animals on cardboard boxes.
“Ah, taikuu.” Enuk slurped the scalding tea that would have seared a kid’s mouth into mealy blisters. “My dowgs be funny tat night. Lotta growl.”
Another night passed in his story.
“How old were you?” My words tumbled away like a fool’s gloves bouncing downwind. Blood stung my cheeks. Interrupting seemed worse than pissing your pants in front of the village schoolhouse.
“Hush, Cutuk,” Jerry said. Iris giggled and pretended to bite her nails, both hands at once. Abe had a piece of caribou-sinew string in his fingers, and he began pulling loops through loops. A lead dog formed. He turned the wick down on the lamp. Storytelling shadows stretched farther out from the moldy corners. The wind gusted. The door was half buried. I pictured those yellow metal nuggets. Wondered if they were in Enuk’s pocket, and how young he’d been when he found the first one.
Enuk sipped. “Cutuk, you gonna be hunter?” He flicked my arm, unaware of the stinging power of his thick fingers. Tears flooded my eyes. “Tat’s good. You got one ’hol life. Tat’s plen’y. Gonna you be tired if you alla time try hurry.”
Abe smiled. He pulled a string. In his hands the lead dog vanished.
I shrank low and twisted broken threads in the knees of my pants. At least he’d used my Eskimo name. Clayton was my white name—a mushy gray one. I had taught my ears not to hear it, until people learned it didn’t work. Cutuk meant fall. Not fall when the berries were ripe and the bears were fat enough—fall like dropping down out of a tree without planning. Except in Iñupiaq it was spelled katak; but none of us or Enuk had known the spelling. The way Iris sounded it out had stuck. It was no first-pick name, misspelled and not even easy to say, but Enuk bestowed it on me before I could campaign for a better one. So I justified it into greatness by pretending it had special come-from-behind potential.
“Night time, still snowing I hear lotta growl. First light gonna I dig t’em dowgs. Right there, blood in’a snow. When I fin’ my leader, tat one try bite.” He ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. One of his ears had a hole up near the top as small as a goose’s windpipe. Gray hairs curled through. “Five dowgs. Good size dowg team back then time, not much food on ta country. Not like now gonna t’em white guy dowgfed in’a bag. I shoot three before it turn dark. Right there I know tat gonna be real bat. Tat was nineteen . . . nineteen thirty-something, before Kennedy and Hitler fight. Could be I’m twenty-five tat time.
“Cutuk. Peoples got not much shells tat time not like now. I got jus’ only one shell. I go ’head shoot t’em last two dowgs.”
The glory of Enuk’s words melted under a warm spell of reality. I pictured my pup Ponoc, grinning his sloppy puppy grin—he collapsed under the boom of a rifle. Blood sprayed Ponoc’s silver face and ran out a red hole, steaming into the snow like the last rabid fox Abe had shot. The corners of my throat grew wet and needed to swallow.
“How many nights I wait. Even I make spear from spruce. Then I see hills. Right there,” Enuk shrugged, grinned, and gestured, his huge fingers cutting straight across his other palm, angling up, “I take off on snowshoe. No dowgs. Could be they already let me gonna crazy. I see wolv’reen. Right there. Real close. No ammo in ta pocket. Long time ago gonna plenty hard time we always have. No ammo in ta pocket.”
Enuk sat for a minute, then shuffled over and dumped his coffee grounds in the slop bucket by the door. The grounds plopped on the dishwater frozen in the bottom. He reached up to a peg behind the stove for his parka and mukluks. Reminiscence no longer softened his face; the telling was over—the story, like old stories I’d heard at the Wolfgloves’ house in Takunak, started in the middle and ended somewhere along where the storyteller grew tired.
Enuk shook water droplets out of his wolf ruff. I tried to contemplate the way I knew grown-ups did, to poke at his words with sharpened thoughts. I wondered if he’d restart the tale the following night—or in a year. I felt I should comprehend something profound about shooting dogs, but I couldn’t get past thinking that the books on the shelf over Abe’s bunk, the soapy dishwater and coffee grounds in the slop bucket—and our team sleeping buried down by the river—all were blatant proof that we owned too much, lived too comfortably. I needed tougher times to turn me Eskimo.
Our low door was built from split spruce poles, insulated with thick fall-time bull caribou hides nailed skin-out on both sides. The hinges were ugruk skin. “Better chop the bottom loose,” Abe suggested. He reached in the wood box for the hatchet. Enuk pounded with his big fists until the condensation ice crumbled. He yanked inward. The wind and swirling snow roared, a hole into a howling world; the wind shuddered the lamp flame. A smooth waist-high white mirror of the door stood in his way. Chilled air rolled across the floor. Enuk leapt up and vanished over the drift into the night gusts.
Chunks of snow tumbled down. I had a flash of memory—summertime, green leaves. Enuk, and a strange man. The man had combed hair. And a space between his teeth that he smiled around and showed us how to spit through. He cradled an animal in calico cloth. A baby porcupine! The man seemed to be Enuk’s son Melt. But how could that be? Melt was mean and smiled like indigestion. Mixed up behind my eyes was that baby porcupine dead in a cotton flour sack, a ski plane taking off, and me crying, unable to convey the tragedy of my blue Lego spiraling to the bottom of the outhouse. These memories seemed valuable, as unreplaceable as that Lego had been, but the roar of the wind sucked my concentration i
nto the dark.
Abe scratched snow aside trying to close the door again. “Need to use the pot?” he asked.
Iris did and I did, and we hurried. There was nowhere to hide—it was how Abe had first explained the word vulnerable—with Enuk coming back momentarily. Breaking trail to the outhouse would have involved digging out the door, getting all dressed in overpants and parkas, finding our way, digging out the outhouse door, trying not to crap on our heavy clothes. Then tracking snow in the house; wet furs; trying to get the door closed again; firing up the stove. Abe didn’t encourage any of it. Embarrassment counted as nothing. It mattered to him as much as the color of margarine.
Abe slammed the door, and again. His hair and the collar of his flannel shirt were floured with snow. He grinned. “Glad I don’t have to go to work in the morning.”
“What he gonna do?” I asked, instantly ashamed of the excess of Village English in my voice.
“Check the dogs.” Jerry clacked checkers together, matter-of-factly. “Abe, can an animal catch rabies and get those symptoms in one night?”
“Maybe not. That virus takes a couple weeks to infect your nervous system.” Abe picked up the book he’d been reading that morning—The Prophet—turned it over, peered at the spine thoughtfully, and put it back down. Abe eyed his thumbnail and bit it. “I had to shoot a rabid moose that charged in the team, long time ago, in the Helpmejack Hills.”
“Does a person forget their friends?”
Iris crossed her eyes. “Jerry’ll never skin another fox’s face.”
“I bonked that rabid one that scared you,” Jerry growled, “chewing the door. You were going to stay inside until Abe got home.”
A second rabid fox had screamed insults to our sled dogs and snarled in the window at his warped reflection. After that incident my imagination encountered them all winter, during the bad-mouse year, foam dripping off their narrow black lips. Nights mice and shrews streaked across my pillow and gnawed at my caribou-hide qaatchiaq, and I lay awake doubly frightened that something as invisible and unaccredited as mouse spit could carry such consequences.
Jerry chewed his cheeks, cataloging Abe’s answers. Jerry remembered poems, songs, definitions. I believed that he wanted to be the healthiest, the smartest, and the best, in case our mom came back. He was all that, and had black hair—things that I thought should come to him with smiles.
Iris’s eyes flashed. “Guys, I say that’s what happened six years ago. Abe caught rabies! He thought he was walking to the store in Chicago to buy tobacco, next thing he noticed a new baby, lots of snow, and us kids gathering masru. He’s maybe still got ’em.”
I looked down, ashamed; I hadn’t seen a city. Jerry didn’t smile. “You win.” He rolled up the birchbark checkerboard, with every other square peeled to make the board pale white and brown. Under the dull roar of the wind, in the leftover silence, I had a sudden flash—Jerry was thinking our mother may have caught rabies.
A gust shook the stovepipe. Abe shut the draft on the fire, lit a candle to place by his bed. He pissed in the slop bucket. He rubbed his knee. “One of you kids lay Enuk out a qaatchiaq.” Steam rose out of the bucket. I stood up, rattling the lamp on the table, disturbing the shadows.
The door burst open. Enuk jumped in. A thought startled me: Would a person tell if he had been bitten? People might run away. Someone would stand across a valley and sink a bullet in your head. What if a dog bit me and died later; would I have the courage to tell? Enuk rubbed his hands together close to the stove. He grabbed my neck from behind. He laughed near my ear. “What you’re laying out qaatchiaq for, Yellow-Hair? You gonna nallaq? Nice night, le’s go hunt!”
TWO DAYS PASSED. The wind fell away and Abe shoveled out the door entrance. We climbed up the snow trench into a motionless thirty-below day. The old marred snowdrifts had been repaired and repainted. A scalloped white land stretched to the riverbanks, across the tundra to the orange horizon. The cold sky seemed crystalline, dark blue glass, in reach and ready for one thrown iceball to bring it shattering down.
In our parkas and mukluks, we kids ran back and forth examining the new high drifts and sliding off cornices. Abe helped Enuk find his sled and they dug at it. The snow was hard, and it chipped and squeaked under their shovels. They iced the sled runners with a strip of brown bear fur dipped in a pan of warm water. They were careful not to get any water on their mukluks. Iris and I stood together while Abe and Enuk harnessed his seven dogs. Jerry stayed in the safety of our dog yard. He mistrusted strange dogs. Often they snapped at him, though he never lost his temper and clubbed dogs with shovels or rifle stocks the way other people did. I vowed when I grew big enough to handle huskies I wouldn’t miss a chance to help a traveler hitch up.
Enuk stood on the runners with one foot on the steel claw brake, his hands in his wolf mittens holding the toprails. The dogs lunged against their towlines, yelping to run. Our dogs barked and scratched the snow. There was little room left in the yowling for last words with company. Enuk said something and nodded north. We stepped close. “Next time, Cutuk? Be good on ta country.” He swept away, furrowing snow to dust with his brake.
We hurried out on the river to watch him become a black speck and disappear far off downriver. Dark spruce lined the far riverbank. In my mind I could see the village and barking dogs and the people there, and Enuk’s grandchildren, Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove, with their mother, Janet, to kiss them and make caribou soup with yellow seashell noodles.
Jerry kicked snow. Abe put his hand awkwardly across my shoulder. I flinched. Abe and Jerry and I didn’t touch—unless it was rough, tickling or king-of-the-hill wrestling over a cornice. Abe turned toward the house. “If the trail stays firm . . .” He wiped his nose. He liked us to be happy, and we usually stayed that way for him. “Maybe next month if the trail’s okay, we’ll go to town? Nice to have a traveler, wasn’t it?”
I tried to ignore the splinters of comfort at the thought of people. I was going to be a hunter; the toughest hunters traveled alone. I kept my mouth shut and broke the tiny tears off my eyelashes. Abe hated whining. He believed that excess comfort was damaging, that whininess was contagious. Stern lines would gather at his mouth and grooves would form above the bridge of his nose. “You an Everything-Wanter now?” he’d growl. And then I would wish for my mother with her black hair and flashing eyes.
But the truth that made me squirm?—she’d left me few memories. All I was certain I remembered of her was that man January Thompson, a fat Outsider, a wolf bounty hunter with a blue and gold airplane on skis, bouncing on the ice, lurching into the sky. I pretended a memory but in the tiny honest slice of my mind I knew I had cannibalized whole hindquarters off Jerry’s stories. Jerry was almost five when they left the lower States. “We came in Abe’s blue truck,” he’d say. “The license plates said North to the Future. You were almost three, Iris. ’Member?” That was all. But it stung. That history didn’t include me. The Hawcly past before the Arctic was another planet, a sunny place of Sunkist lemons and green grapes drying into raisins—instead of meat drying into meat—a place that I’d never walked and couldn’t put roots to even in memory.
Jerry once told how my mother had a yellow car, with a built-in radio. I wondered why so many of the stories had cars. Did all the cars have radios? When he related these things, Iris and I squeezed together on the bearskin couch, curious about that stranger down in the States who wasn’t coming back, but somewhere still lived. It was all strange, but seemed normal, too, the way she was a fairy tale that kept fogging over, while Enuk, even vanished downriver, stood in my life as sharp as a raven in the blue sky.
Abe and Jerry and Iris tramped up to the house. I lingered in the dog yard, playing with Ponoc and the others. They stared downriver, howling occasionally, forlorn and dejected about not following Enuk’s team. It was a chance to play with the dogs without getting scratched and licked off my feet. I ruined it by slipping Ponoc a stray chip of frozen moose off the snow near the dogfood pil
e. Sled dog brains kept to narrow, well-packed trails of thought, and food lay at the end of all the trails. They howled and gestured with their noses, wagging and protesting the inequitable feeding. My heart grew huge for them, my happy-go-lucky friends, always delighted to see me, prancing and tripping over their chains. How endless the land would be without their companionship.
Suddenly I saw the dog yard empty, the strewn gnawed bones, the yellow pissicles and the round melted sleeping circles, all drifted white; only the chain stakes remained stabbing out of the snow like gray grave markers. A mouse ran out from under the meat pile, dropped a turd, and disappeared down a round hole. I backed away from the lunging dogs. Maybe they were already infected.
Ponoc bit a wad of caribou hair off his stomped yard and tossed it playfully in the air. His pink tongue flicked between his teeth, his mouth muddy with hairs. I spat between my teeth. Maybe in my huge future I would have to shoot a whole team of my own dogs. The thought of the years ahead flooded hot in my chest. I raced up to our igloo, to my brother and sister and father, there eating paniqtuq and seal oil and red jam. Food that would make me Eskimo.
TWO
WHEN I WAS TEN, on a night shortly after the sun returned, a pack of wolves raided our peoplefood pile. Along the bank to the east, beyond our pole cache, the wolves worked over it all except one frozen caribou—a skinny carcass that we too were leaving till last. Our dogs howled and barked in the dark. By first light at ten o’clock the pack had vanished, leaving a pawed circle of meat dust and cracked bone chips in the reddened snow, and tracks leading in too many directions onto the windblown tundra.
The faint scent of clean dog hung in the clawed holes. Abe hunched down, kneading his yellow beard, happier than if he’d discovered gold in the gravel at the bottom of our water hole. Snow clung behind his knees to the creases of his overpants. He examined a wolf turd, long and gray with twisted caribou hair. In his hand the shit looked as capable of magic as a tube of Van Gogh Basic White.
