by Seth Kantner
Enuk dug in his moosehide pouch and the light glinted among his treasures. My eyelids fell closed. An instant later he dropped a cold lump in my hand. A brown bear figurine, carved out of ancient mammoth ivory, stood on its hind legs, nose up, whiffing worlds off the wind. How old it must be! It meant so much, and I pulled it into my sleeping bag and held it that way, like it was alive, deserving of eternal respect. With its enchantment, and in the cast of Enuk’s warm eyes, mean things and people could not harm me.
FIVE
ON THE FLATS between river drainages, wolves span out over a mile of tundra and leafy green willow thickets. The pups play and bite each other’s legs. The wolves work west, bruised and hungry after spending the recent night—bright and starless as day—testing a cow moose and her young calf. The calf had appeared small and helpless, eligible to be eaten. It struggled, staying close under its mother’s flank during the final battle. In the end, the cow’s berserk defense of her young left a wolf wounded, stomped in the willows. The pack had closed on the wolf, killed it, and left the creekbed. The famished calf nursed.
Now the wolves turn across the tundra toward their den. They recognize each moose in their territory, test each regularly for weaknesses and vulnerable new offspring. Four of the pack are pups. Playful and only a couple months old, the pups are insatiable. Since May, the black male and gray female have claimed most of the available food for themselves and their litter. They are fat. The young adults in the pack are skinny and starved. Two have left to hunt alone.
Today a third wolf rests, lets the family go on. She stops, trots north, and rests again. Finally she travels, a hundred miles northwest in the first week. The sun never sets. The days are hot and flies buzz around her nose. The sunny nights trill with the call of nesting sparrows and waterfowl. Beaver move out into lakes to evade her. Muskrats dive and disappear. The wolf catches a ground squirrel, a few flightless warblers, a ptarmigan. Everything warm-blooded wanders under the canopy of swarming mosquitoes.
The young wolf swims wide rivers, climbs mountain passes, crosses green valleys ashimmer with cotton grass. In the lee of twin peaks she comes to a snowfield. Seventy thousand caribou stand crammed on the snow, nearly insane and forsaking graze to elude a portion of the insatiable mosquitoes. The wolf catches a slow calf and eats, yards from the mass of animals.
Her stomach is distended and tight. She moves sleepily into the alders of a nearby creek. When she awakes, the brush teems with wolves. The young gray wolf rolls on her back, shows her throat to the unfamiliar pack, makes obsequious sounds left over from her puppyhood.
The wolves growl, stand over her with their heads high. The young wolf is skinny, the marrow in her bones dark red. For lack of threat, luck, reasons unknowable—the pack does not kill the intruder. The group moves toward the caribou. Thousands of animals race and mill. The wolves down a limping bull with swollen joints and soft black velvet antlers. The herd accepts the cost, swells back on the snow to await wind. At the kill there are growls. Suddenly a fight erupts.
By the first snow the caribou’s and the female wolf’s bones are clean, almost white.
SIX
SPRING WAS MY FAVORITE time of year, and it took extra energy to stay in a bad mood. The sun came home to the Arctic and shone tirelessly on the shimmering world of snow. Midwinter diminished into memory and the Darkness of next winter seemed inconceivable. Warm smells rose from the black soil of exposed cutbanks; birds shrieked and carelessly tossed leftover seeds down out of the birches. It was a season of adventure calling from the melting-out mountains, of geese honking after a continent-crossing journey, of caribou herds parading thousands long on their way north to the calving grounds, sap running and every arctic plant set to burst into frenzied procreation. Spring was the land smiling, and I couldn’t imagine my life without that smile.
But I was sixteen and stunningly lonesome. Iris and Jerry were gone. Iris’s last correspondence-school course lay behind her in the untarnished trail of As. She waited only for paperwork to be officially free. The Rural Student Vocational Program had sent a plane ticket for her to travel to Fairbanks, to apprentice for two weeks, as a teacher. A year ago Jerry had moved there; he lived with a girlfriend named Callie. To me it seemed ironically unfair—since I was eight and first read about Frank, the elder Hardy Boy, I had wanted a girlfriend named Callie. Jerry had probably found the only one in Alaska.
For weeks the April sun lengthened and then Iris returned—transformed—a joyous goddess with black hair curled in a “permanent” that apparently wasn’t, but would last long enough. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a happier blue than ever, with three-hundred-and-sixty-seven-dollar contact lenses focusing them. For the first time in more than a decade she could see needles on the spruce. I greeted her the way I had greeted sixteen, with a practiced impassive shrug borrowed from Treason and a safe smile. Her face glowed with jubilation and the wonder of the Outside; mine was dark and hard with snow tan and a grip on leaking uncertainty.
“Fairbanks has eight-story skyscrapers at the university,” she exclaimed.
We were out near the middle of the river chipping a new water hole in the ice. The water in the old one near shore had grown brown with tundra water eddying up from the mouth of Jesus Creek. The ice froze all the way down to the sand in places and we hoped we weren’t working over one of those places. A moose stood in the willows, below the dog yard, breaking down branches, chewing the tips, leaving carnage. Iris wore an aqua nylon jacket she’d bought in Fairbanks and she looked as pretty as Dawna Wolfglove.
“One night we borrowed a master key from a junior. We sneaked up on the roof and dropped the ice cubes out of our root beers. Down on the concrete. My friend Robin found a five-dollar bill in the elevator.”
I rested while Abe shoveled the loose ice out of the four-foot-deep hole. The moose plodded out on the river, crossing toward the far shore. Two more moose stood over there on the bank, long-legged, big ears up, and watchful.
“Oh,” she saw my expression, “a master key opens any door at the university.”
“Yeah? What’s an ice cube?”
“They make ice in freezers, to put in soda pop, Cutuk. They sell it, too, in bags.”
Store-bought ice? I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluaġmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around inside waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.
Abe clattered the shovel around the ice walls of the water hole. He flung a last shovelful. “Go ’head.” Under his heavy mustache he had the faint curl to his lip that a person wouldn’t notice unless they knew him well. I wasn’t sure if his aversion was to the tall buildings, ice cubes, or this change in Iris.
I picked up the tuuq and checked for fresh rock nicks in the sharpened steel bar bolted to the end of the pole. I drove it down into the dark ice at the bottom of the hole, superstitious and reckless, promising if the chisel punched through it meant luck, meant I would never give up on the land, on my dog team, on a life where water came from holes in the ice. The chips remained powder dry in the shaft.
“Ice is thick.” Abe sat on a bucket and took off his beaver hat. His hair was sweaty and matted. Snow squeaked under the bucket. “Traveling might be good late this spring.”
“We went to a swimming pool. Kids teased me ’cause I can’t swim.” Iris claimed to have roller-skated, ridden buses, eaten pizza—things I had heard bits of from Jerry’s letters. Jerry was more impressed now with macro lenses and Buko
wski poetry. “Oh,” her voice dropped in mock gossip, “Jerry’s got another girlfriend.”
“Two of ’em?” I jumped into the hole and chipped at the bottom. Only my head stuck out the top, my shoulders level with the snow.
“No, no. He and Callie split up. Be careful, Cutuk!”
Split up: the words reverberated with romance.
“We went to a dance.”
A dance! While Iris was gone I’d mushed my dogs north, climbed a pass in the Dog Die Mountains. I tracked and shot a wolverine beyond treeline, beyond landmarks I’d never seen or heard stories of. I skinned it there, awed and humbled by the towering fling of white mountains, white valleys, white land that left me feeling small as dust, daring as an astronaut. Days later on the way home, in timber at the base of the Dog Dies, a brown bear charged out of alders. The team tugged forward. The bear stood in their midst. The dogs pulled against necklines, trying to scatter. I shot from the sled. The bear fell, rose, and bounded into the thickets. Cautious and alone, I snowshoed in after the wounded animal and took the bear’s meat home, fat bulging between the bed slats of my sled, me tingling with pride and hoping Dawna would be present when Enuk heard.
Now in the thud of one heartbeat it was nothing even worth telling. My first wolverine was a greasy pelt, the bear simply meat, jars of rendered lard for pie crusts and fat to store masru and tinnik in. As boring as breakfast. Iris had been dancing.
“Cutuk! Be careful! You’re almost through. It’s thin under you.” She leaned over the ice hole. Her voice was small, worried now about my feelings. Abe cleared his throat. He unlaced the top and bottom laces on his mukluks and pulled up his socks. The heels were gone. I remembered him unraveling our socks when our feet grew too big, crocheting larger pairs from the yarn. Abe was fast with his crochet hook. He never allowed us to throw a shirt, a pair of pants, a jacket away without unstitching the zippers and buttons.
“I bought a radio,” Iris said. “It’s for you, to listen to next winter. If Abe can stand it.”
I leapt out of the hole and cut my eyes up at her, squinting to hide the dread that rose in me like the water now boiling up the ice shaft. “Where are you going?”
“College. Next fall.” The water overflowed the ice, soaking blue into the snow. “I know we talked about trapping and raising dogs together. But I met friends! They’re all enrolling! If you come the year after, we could rent an apartment together.”
I chipped at the ice. My strong arms ached to drown these shadowy friends down our new water hole. They beckoned Iris to dance away, with no thought of our family coming apart. I pictured ripping those worn brass zippers out of rag jeans, the fling of dust, old lint, and snapping threads. Abe’s coffee can was full of used blue and gray and black zippers, the cloth edges curled and unraveling. We were never going to use all of them now.
“I’ve got to finish school. I’ve got seven dogs to feed. I can’t talk to people the way you do.”
Abe rubbed his sore knee. He pulled the tuuq out of my hands. Iris stomped off a few yards in frustration. She stood so unaware of her comeliness, her dark lashes leading the light into pale blue pools, her nose straight and sure, knifing through doubt. Allegedly, my sister.
Abe chipped methodically at the ice plug still in the bottom of the hole. His feet were planted far apart to keep the slush off his mukluks. Small winged bugs rose in the water and crawled out on the snow. Spring water bugs. They were part of the season, something to watch for and laugh about when we drank water or mixed up powdered milk. Abe’s face was wide and serene, open with listening, his eyes the color of the northern sky. Talking feelings in front of him felt jagged.
I mumbled to Iris. “I can’t even walk good when people are around. They act different every time.”
“So do caribou!”
“At least caribou make sense! Caribou don’t act like they’re all wonderful and better just because they got bell-bottoms or something.”
“The bulls do in October!”
For a second we grinned at each other. “Just because you’re good at hunting,” Iris said, “doesn’t mean you have to instantly be the best everywhere. You could learn.”
“To do what, be a truck driver? A dentist? What?” Anger and pride thickened my voice. “This is where I belong.”
“You sure that’s true?” Her question echoed in my head. Sure that’s true? That’s true?
“Ah, that broke it loose,” I heard Abe say. Suddenly the snow sparkled too bright in the hurtful magnification of tears. I scooped the buckets full and stumbled toward the house in the deep snow. Water sloshed against my overpants. My chained dogs, and Abe’s, climbed to their feet, wagging and whining for attention and food as they did every day of the year. Jerry, Iris—even Abe—now everyone knew how to be in that world of cars, music, and store-bought ice. Even Lumpy Wolfglove learned when he got sent to Nome for shooting his initials in the school roof.
I left the water buckets on the drift above the dog yard and ran north, across The Lake, along the Jesus Creek trail, toward what I knew I loved: wild mountains that were the bones of the land, mountains that might always be there and would never love me back.
THE SNOW MELTED SLOWLY as spring spread its warmth. We had dug snow steps down to the door and the caribou-skin weather stripping was damp and soggy; we were at the top of the drift enjoying the long light of evening when the dogs struck up howls. Abe glanced up from his easel. He’d just come out from warming his oils. White was spread in his cupped palm. His big hands were thrashed and old-looking, shiny and shot with deep grooves. He worked at a painting of a flock of ptarmigan coasting west in winter’s falling dusk. He should have been using water-colors, painting the spring evening. This air tasted and smelled bigger and better than winter, this was the alive time of year, but Abe was stubborn about exercising his imagination.
I ran down the snow steps, inside for my gun, not caring what the dogs had spotted. Iris surreptitiously studied her atlas, sitting on a high snowdrift on a caribou hide. With her new contact lenses she’d already spotted that a traveler was coming, not something for me to shoot and skin, and she’d slid her thumbnail into the atlas and drifted back into the current of her wish world.
I kicked blocks of snow, embarrassed at my panicked rush for my rifle and desire to kill. The dogs kept barking. My irritation jumped to the traveler for being so slow. A disfigured speck inched up the river. Eventually the speck turned into Franklin Tusso on snowshoes and his dog Say-tongue, together dragging their small sled built on wooden Army skis.
Abe and I walked down the bank and Iris followed. Franklin huffed into the dog yard. The sled creaked to a halt. Say-tongue lay down gratefully and bit ice balls off the hair between his toes.
Franklin wheezed and bent over at the waist and stretched to touch his white Bunny boots. He shuffled his feet to turn his butt toward us. “Hi, kids. How are you?” he asked upside down, peering between his knees. “Kids” might have included Abe. Franklin was twelve years older than Abe. Clothes hung off his body and knobs of him showed through. He was short and wiry, and the whitest man we knew—not in personality, but in skin and hair. Villagers had nicknamed him China-man. Sometimes he spoke Chinese to himself. Rumor said he’d once been a professor of Chinese linguistics from Hartford or Harvard. But nobody cared about that. He was famous because he had a cat.
Abe petted Say-tongue’s wide head and pulled the skin gently. The huge malamute squinted in pleasure. Abe and Franklin were good friends, and because of that a lot of things didn’t have to be said. Other things were repeated just because they were glad to see each other.
“Been slim for travelers.” Abe squatted on his heels in the soft spring snow. “How many days it take from your island?”
Franklin straightened. “Well . . . three? His mind seemed to be jumping over each patch of overflow along the way. He’d probably paused on the trail, sitting sideways on the load, meditating on what he could make out of bent spruce knees he passed, twisted alder
s, birch crotches. “I like crotches best,” he’d once admitted, oblivious to our grins.
“Enuk Wolfglove’s missing.”
“What?” I said. “Enuk’s back in Takunak?”
“He was. Melt Wolfglove and Tommy Feathers and others have been searching the Shield Mountains with snowmobiles. Janet thinks Enuk went hunting caribou. They want me to head back to town if you guys know anything.”
“I hope he never froze,” Iris whispered. We glanced at her. Iris worried about freezing. She had bad dreams and woke up sweating and gripping my neck like it was a log overhanging the river. One night when she was twelve she dreamed she had a baby. While she was skinning caribou leggings for mukluk skins, the baby slipped outside. It was storming out and Iris ran out with bloody hands and the knife and she found the baby frozen to the ice. Its eyes had frozen, turned opaque the way frozen irises do. Two days after that dream, Iris and I took dogs and sledded down the shore to check our tiktaaliq hooks set through the fast-ice. The dogs led us to a caribou calf that had worn itself out trying to climb out of the river onto jumbled ice. The calf’s front legs were frozen down, its fur coarse with ice. The stomach was soft, way inside. The eye was frozen, staring up. I started kicking it loose, to get for dog food. Abe had taught us, any scrap we found came home for dog food. But the dogs whined nervously. A few yards away, bear tracks as big as Abe’s mukluks were pressed into the snow. Iris shouted to the team to turn around. “Come-gee! Come-gee!” We glanced at the cold black current beyond the feathery ice. Up into the metal sky. Into willow thickets. Brown fur shifted back in the willows. We raced home.
