Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  “Enuk go check his snares,” Janet said, catching my searching glance. I nodded, too discouraged with my luck on this long-anticipated town trip to ask if he might return that night.

  Stevie and Dawna surged in the door, laughing at a joke they’d left outside. Tommy Reason followed. Everyone called him Treason. He was curly-haired, a boy Janet had taken in when his mother burned in the plane crash at Uktu. His dad had run off, long gone back to the States, maybe dead. Once when Lumpy pinched a strip of his skin off with a vise grips Treason cried for a long time, more than a vise grips’ worth. Treason didn’t tease about us being naluaġmiu, or anything about hair.

  My face was hot with shame. Places with people always came with this—the reminder that my family was different from people. We didn’t say hi correctly, or stand right, chew properly—especially we didn’t know enough about fighting. And there were so many people, and names, and faces impossible to remember. I dropped my eyes and vanished into fantasy where I’d created Elvis Jr.’s lip scar by hitting him so hard that newspapers out in Fairbanks printed the account.

  Stevie dragged me into the corner. He kicked clothes piles out of our way. He nudged his glasses up. He was big-boned and stocky. His coal-black hair swept back, thick and wavy. Beside his family I knew I looked like a diseased seagull among glossy ravens. Stevie had been born thirty-eight days before me, but for most of my life I’d felt older than both him and Dawna—maybe because Janet enjoyed babies. Abe had strongly suggested we skip the “whining years.” He had sewn the sleeves of our first caribou parkas shut so he didn’t have to hear or worry about lost mittens.

  “Junior fight you?” Stevie didn’t ask who won. Stevie was like Janet. He had a way of smiling, unconcerned as a shrug. Kids who had wanted to fight him would ask if they could help feed his dogs.

  “Yeah.” I covered my lip. Dawna’s mirror hung on a nail in the dark corner. Fly specks freckled my reflection. Worried blue eyes stared back.

  Dawna giggled. “You fellas get your vanilla and nuts?”

  Treason stood next to us. “Ever’body been try fight lots since that good movie.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “Ninja one,” Stevie explained.

  I nodded, mystified.

  “Cutuk, you want to see our new kinda snowgo?”

  “What? You guys got a new snowgo?” I tried to clamp my expression, but the suddenness of the information smeared jealousy across my face. I wanted to hide behind the woodpile. Never in a hundred years would we have a motorized snowmobile. Abe didn’t like engines. Maybe they reminded him of his dad’s Super Cub. Not so many years ago only privileged people had snowmobiles: schoolteachers, Tommy Feathers, and a few others.

  Stevie and I ran out without parkas. Stevie peeked in the window, cautious, making sure Melt wasn’t looking out. It paid to be careful around Melt. Stevie led me behind the house. He flung aside a canvas tarp. He rubbed his hands. The snowgo crouched, silver blue in the sleek moonlight, a rocket waiting to burn across the tundra. He traced the name POLARIS on the cowling with his fingers.

  “Not like that old Chaparral,” he said in awe. “This new one always go fast.” His breath rose in fat clouds. “It was have windshield, but Lumpy let it come off on tree. Dad sure wanna tie him to post and whip him. Only thing he’s too big now.”

  A jagged crack ran down the front. I touched the glassy cowling and jerked my hand back. “I got a splinter!” A dot of blood darkened my finger.

  Stevie gripped my hand. “That’s fiberglass. Try see. Wait! We’ll be blood brothers!” He poked his finger and squeezed it to mine. “Wish for snowgos, bart. Lumpy gonna try get Pipeline job an’ buy one. Lotta people going Prudhoe.”

  Lust cramped my hands. I saw my long-wished-for equalizer, a mechanical creation that would transform me into a great hunter and an Eskimo. “We gotta go Prudhoe? What’s Prudhoe anyways?”

  “You drive snowgo before?”

  I accosted my memory, attempting to adjust the truth—and avoid a lie. “No. Not yet.”

  “That’s okay. You will sometimes. It go faster than any kinda dog, wolf, caribous.” He shook his head. “Nothing can win it. Dad get wolf. He run right over it.” We stared at the machine. Then he covered it and showed me the wolf skin draped frozen over the clothesline. It was skinned poorly; there were slashed holes and the lower legs and claws had been left behind with the carcass.

  “We see lotta wolves up home, whole packs,” I bragged in the dark, “but Abe never try kill ’em. Coupla’ winters ago he left me one time to watch a moose we killed, and wolves—”

  “How come?”

  “How come what?”

  “Why Abe never always shoot ’em?” Stevie pulled at his eyebrow.

  “He likes them.”

  “What he always like ’em for?”

  “I dunno. I—I think he just likes ’em.”

  “Huh.” Stevie shrugged and flashed me a baffled look as he opened the door. In that moment it seemed preposterous that at home Abe’s reasoning could have held its knots. Why couldn’t he be normal and shoot whole clotheslines full?

  THAT NIGHT WE HAD STEW that wasn’t caribou or bear or lynx or anything ordinary; it came out of a big can that Melt brought when he wandered home from slumping around the Native Cache stove. Melt was short and well padded with a square head, perfectly adapted for sitting in the rocking chair Abe had made for him, while Janet cooked, skinned animals, cut up meat, and sewed. Whiskey had melted the teeth out of Melt’s head and left a sinkhole of his lips. He dunked pilot crackers in his coffee and stuffed them in. He liked to preach sometimes at the church, when there was no pastor in town. He was grumpy except when he shared advice, weather prophecies, or his hunting stories—those things brought out a generosity in him. It was clear that they were better than any another person might own.

  He was proud to serve that canned soup made from States cows. Anybody who didn’t see the Dinty Moore label would have assumed from the way he hollered at Janet and opened the can himself that he’d journeyed down to Baltimore, Illinois, or Park Place and hunted those cows all himself.

  Abe didn’t like the soup. But he raised his eyebrows politely. “Salty,” he mumbled as if all beef by definition was salty. The meat smashed under my teeth, same as the potatoes. I wondered what a beef did to get its meat large-grained like moose and still mushy as boiled ground squirrel.

  My cut lip stung. I set the bowl on the floor to cool. Stevie and I practiced setting his new Conibear trap, made to snap on an ermine’s head and kill it instantly. We forgot we were old and began trying to snap Dawna and Iris, since they seemed to be having more fun than we were, reading a magazine and whispering over the pictures. Jerry sat with the adults, hunched to one side, holding his soup over a Sears order blank he was filling out for Aana Skuq. People came in the door steadily, when we were in town, to have Abe make out Sears orders for them, or explain unemployment papers or taxes. Jerry did it now, relieved to have something to do that made sense to him.

  Stevie snapped the trap on Dawna’s foot. She screamed. “Stevie, you dumb thing!” She whacked his head with a rolled-up magazine, hard. “Adii, Mom. Stevie always bother.”

  “Ah shuck, you!” Melt hollered. “You kids go play out!” He pointed at the door. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. In the village, people yelled and swore equally at kids and dogs, and neither obeyed. That strange memory flashed, of Melt, young, quiet, friendly, cradling a baby porcupine in our doorway. With a space between his teeth that there was no longer any way of verifying. Had it been a dream? People didn’t change that much, did they?

  Stevie sat on the bed with his face turned away, chuckling. Dawna stared at me, her eyes beautiful under black lashes. She wobbled the small mole on her cheek. She wore a pink hooded sweatshirt. The collar was torn around the eyelets. Her neck was smooth and brown. Her gaze looked laughy, but different somehow. I wanted her to be the first person I ever kissed—after I learned how.

  She sho
ok her magazine. A square white magazine-seed dropped out. She wrote on it and let the paper fall near my knee. The writing was upside down. I turned it around. Now it was backwards, inside out. I flipped it over and read where the pen had pressed through like braille. Cutuk, don’t listen to that kinnaq thing. You’re my friend and I wish you were my honey. The words were curly and small, unbelievably valuable. I hid the paper in my pocket to read a thousand times upriver.

  I didn’t want to go outside in the dark; I slinked back to my stew. It had frozen along the edges. Janet giggled and brushed my arm. “Shh.” She dumped it back in the pot and gave me a warm bowlful.

  Abe unpacked our sleeping bags to warm by the stove and got out the lynx skin he’d brought for Janet. Lynx prices had risen to two hundred and fifty dollars at Seattle Fur Exchange, for rich women’s coats, and when Abe got an envelope with a check for four skins he pulled his big traps. We still mailed in fox and rare marten skins, but now if he accidentally caught a lynx he gave it to Janet to use in mitten liners or to let Melt sell. When I was a baby he had traded Janet furs for sewing warm clothes for us, before she taught us to tan skins and sew, before she took us in.

  Janet lit another Coleman lamp. It flamed and sputtered. She flipped the generator lever and pumped it rapidly. The mantle glowed, hissing out harsh shadows. “Look, Bun,” she told Dawna. “Abe bring. Aarigaa.” Dawna smiled fleetingly, not even pretending she cared. She stared at Abe, not the lynx. She and Iris went back to admiring skinny white girls in the magazine.

  Janet was known all the way to the coast for the mukluks, beaver hats, and mittens she sewed. People paid more than one hundred and fifty dollars for a pair of her ugruk-bottom mukluks. Melt often took two or three pairs to Crotch Spit when he went to get drunk for a few days. Her creations were beautiful, the skin tanned white with sourdough or red with fermented alder bark. Her stitches were tiny, the garments sometimes sparkling with beads. I wondered if my mother could sew. In my stray fantasies where Mom found us and brought presents, there was no great amount of sewing. Probably she was one of the rich women now. Maybe that was why Abe didn’t send out lynx anymore. I wished Janet would be my mother. My imagination loaded a full-color picture: Melt, out on the ice. Suddenly he plunged through and the black current swept him from view.

  “Janet! Make fresh coffee!” Melt shouted, still alive, sounding as if he were hollering at a dog about to piss on his rifle.

  Treason came in, then Lumpy stomped in from roaming the town. He smelled of factory cigarettes. Woodrow Washington Jr., Lumpy’s young uncle, slipped in with him. He stood by the door.

  “Washingtons need caribou,” Lumpy told Melt. Lumpy was taller and thicker than Melt now. He stomped snow off his boots. Melt had always reminded people that Lumpy was Janet’s son, not his. Now Lumpy was reminding him who was bigger.

  A moment later, out in the night, the church bell rang curfew. Janet flung Lumpy a look. “Mom, I’m hungry,” he said, ignoring her stern eye. He pushed my head. “Hi Cutuk.” The soup was gone; Lumpy stirred up a glass of hot Jell-O. It was one of Janet’s new glass glasses; at home we had only mugs, and broken-handled mugs for glasses. Lumpy said nothing about me being kicked. He didn’t offer a sip of the sweet Jell-O.

  “See that door?” Lumpy whispered. “We got real door, not homemade Kool-Aid kind like you fellas.” I stared, as surprised as the time he ate a tube of Pepsodent when the town was all out of pop and candy.

  “Woody an’em need meat!”

  Iris and I flung each other corner-eyed glances. Jerry peered up and focused back into the catalogs. Woody Jr. shifted by the door. His eyes were bloodshot. “Alappaa that east wind,” he said, and finally, “Melt, where’s your cigarette?”

  Abe patted his pockets. “Here you go.” He drew out his tobacco pouch. Woody moved uneasily away from the door toward the different kind of tobacco.

  Melt had stayed molded comfortably in his chair, tuned in to his shortwave radio. We kids dreamed of music and never heard any at home; Iris had been ready to ask Melt if he’d turn it up so the faint songs would reach us. He grumbled, flipped the radio off, handed over a pack of Marlboros. He found one boot. He kicked at the piles behind the stove, hunching over stiffly, searching for the boot’s mate. “You kids! You lose my one-side!”

  I hunkered low, discovering interesting aberrations in my thumbnail. Janet slapped Woody on the shoulder. “Cigarette, that’s your food, huh?” She grinned with Abe, took a meat saw off the nail over the kitchen counter, and went out to cut a hindquarter off a frozen caribou.

  Melt settled back into his chair. He tossed the boot back into a heap of clothes. “Goddamn kids.”

  When Janet came back in her eyes were bright and watery from the cold and she smiled radiantly. “Alappaa!” She handed Woody the unskinned leg. Loose caribou hairs clumped on the fresh cut. “Enough?” He nodded. “Nice-out night!” she told him. “I’m glad you let me go out.”

  WE WERE ALL ASLEEP, stretched like mossed-in logs, when the door creaked open. Janet had left the lantern burning on the floor beside the slop bucket; it cast a hissing circle of light. Enuk Wolfglove’s frost-whitened form materialized out of a cloud of condensation that rolled in. He was dressed in furs and held a stiff red fox under his arm. The animal’s frozen eyes squinted in death. I blinked awake and lifted my head off my ropey jeans-and-shirt pillow. It was cold on the floor. My bag had a rim of frost around the opening. I could feel cold air going into my lungs. I watched Enuk in awe, knowing with conviction what I wanted to be if I managed to grow up.

  He pulled his parka over his head and opened the door and put it out in the qanisaq the way elders did. He cracked the ice around his eyes and mustache and stared down in the weak light. “Hello, Cutuk. Welcome to big city. How’s your luck?”

  “I got a marten last week,” I whispered. “Finally,” I added, remembering the importance of a hunter’s humility.

  Enuk nodded in generous respect, elevating me above droll twelve-year-oldness. The bridge of his nose was black, a huge frostbite scab. His cheeks were scarred black. “Yuay. Tat’s good. I get only fox.” He laid the rock-hard animal on the floor beside the woodpile, careful not to snap the tail off. He slipped outside and got the head half of a quaq trout.

  “You want coffee?” Janet murmured from her and Melt’s bed.

  “Let’um. Naw.” Enuk cut chunks of the raw fermented fish and dipped them in seal oil. They were so cold they smoked on the table. “Aarigaa.” Enuk sighed and grinned. Janet sat up. They spoke softly in Iñupiaq. Melt grumbled and rolled over toward the wall. Enuk squinted at him and down at his fish.

  “A wolv’reen almost gonna eat that fox. Enuk snowshoeing tupak it,” Janet explained to me. “It climb tree, alright. His gun have ice and can’t work.” Enuk asked a question and she spoke again in Iñupiaq. I heard my name and wondered, were they discussing my bruised lip—or only talking about something that had fallen?

  Enuk cleared his throat, switched to English. “One time gonna I’m young man, I live in’a mountains. In igloo, like you fellas, Cutuk. Good place same like your camp. Lotta wolf, wolv’reen, link, any kinda animal. Only thing, iñugaqałłigauraq be there. They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even. Let me tupak, gonna all’a time.” He chewed a piece of quaq. “I can’t leave till I get white wolf. Tat one got face jus’ like moon. He look inside you. Gonna anytime. Tat one, he hide easy, gonna see you.”

  Abe stirred in his sleeping bag. I glanced into the far corner. Dawna’s eyes were open and dark, asking for answers to questions that weren’t in the room. She hugged her small stained pillow under her chin. It was a store-bought pillow, without a pillowcase, and it leaked chopped yellow foam. Behind her on the wall was a taped and torn poster of the beautiful Wonder Woman. Dents in the shiny paper caught light. The eyes had been colored in with ink and stared, detached from the small perfect smile. I wished I could loop my fingers around Dawna’s little finger, kiss her wrists; but I didn’t know how to kiss and the d
istance across the shack was too exposed and cluttered with sleeping people who knew everything else about me.

  “One night moon shining, I chop hole for water.” Enuk held his hand two feet off the floor, measuring. His fingers were huge and dark, puffy from seventy-three years of freezing and thawing. “Not so thick ice. My fry pan have bad taste an’ I gonna washing it. Something grab me. Right on’a neck. I’m plenty strong tat time. Almos’ gonna I take t’em hands off.” Enuk clenched his hands. His words twinged me with envy. Some Eskimos—like Enuk—inherited the not-too-distant survival days kind of muscles. Much stronger, it seemed, than white-man muscles.

  His eyes had gone serious behind the black pools of shadow. His words draped shivers across my shoulders. I dreaded leaving the noisy safety of town and returning home to wilderness nights, vast silence peopled with prowlings in the dark.

  “Tat thing let me never breathe. Then it give up. No tracks on ta snow. Tat’s spirit. He fight me cus he’s lost, travel long way from home. Maybe spirit same gonna like us. Mad when they mixed up inside.”

  He rubbed his neck and after a minute he grinned, letting the somberness flow out of the room. “Tat time I lose my fry pan.”

  “How come you never hook it, Enuk?” I murmured. My chin was on my wrists, the bag clenched tight. Enuk sat up where it was warm. His story seemed pointless; I felt dumb and slightly angry for not understanding why he’d kept me awake.

  “I never try hook it,” he said patiently. “Now I been gonna hunt tat place sometimes fifty year; iññuqun, spirit, iñugaqałłigauraq, they never always try bother. You tell me if you see white wolf. Your dad maybe he gonna try forget again.” Enuk and Janet laughed. Enuk leaned back from the table. “Aarigaa taikuu.”

  I lay my head down and struggled to keep my eyes open. Enuk’s words sifted down in my sleepy mind. The day of cold air on the trail had left me exhausted, and being around so many people—most who knew us and we didn’t know back—took so much energy. Just trying to talk right, not chew loud or get kicked; it made sense why Abe had left Chicago.