by Seth Kantner
“. . . ’s gone missing before,” Franklin was saying.
Blood hissed in my ears, spreading anger. How could Franklin be so casual? I hadn’t seen Enuk in four years. He and Melt had a falling out, and Enuk hitched up his team and drove sixty miles south to Uktu to live with his daughter. Last winter he’d mushed here to visit. I’d been out camping with my dogs, traveling, not seeing anything except dozens of moose, admiring the country, bragging in my loud mind to Enuk. And missing him again.
I missed Enuk. I had whole books of conversations polished, ready for when he arrived. Now I’d shot caribou, my first wolverine, a bear, beavers, moose, swans. I needed his affirmation that being a hunter was enough. Enuk could live beyond mountains in the next river valley, he could be missing; he couldn’t be gone. Not without taking me.
“Winter was tough.” Franklin’s eyelids protruded, crinkly lean-tos above his gray eyes. “Every time I snowshoed in a trail it blew or snowed.” Abe nodded. Franklin nodded. “My meat ran out during that minus-sixty stretch. Might have been reading too much. Thought I’d have to eat piss and dirt like Crazy Joe.” He laughed a jerky laugh that made me think of Melt Wolfglove and hypothermia. “Fortunately, an old ladyfriend of mine sent a nine-pound block of chocolate.”
We all looked at his sled tarp.
“Ran out. Mao Tse-tung here and I lived off that for weeks. I’d hear his toenails on the boards at night, then him licking and gnawing. Seemed to sit well with him.”
Where could Enuk be? I walked over and petted our dogs. Nothing was new with Franklin. He sounded surprised, as if he couldn’t remember running out of meat every winter. In the fall he worried about global overpopulation, and shot only one caribou. He’d eat it down to the leg bones. By then the herds vanished far to the south and he’d be out hanging whitefish nets in the willows to catch ptarmigan. The old women in Takunak snared ptarmigan with picture-hanging wire Newt sold in rolls at the Native Cache. White people were the only ones weird enough to hang a fishnet in the willows. Villagers shook their heads—Crazy can’tlearn white guy. Gotta shoot lot!
“Wind and snow covered his tracks.” Franklin untied his load and pulled open the tarp. “Sun, too. Searchers found melted-out dog tracks. No one else in the village hunts with dogs anymore. But you know Enuk, who knows what he saw or what valley might have enticed him.” An orange paw stretched out of the tarp. Kuguruk dragged herself into the sun. Our twelve dogs rose on their chains.
Iris petted the soft cat. “You’d make a nice neck warmer.” She bent the cat’s wrists to see the thin clear claws extend.
The things in Franklin’s sled were small, rusty, and needed new rivets. He made Abe look like an Everything-Wanter. His tent was handsewn from Egyptian cotton, his stove Army surplus—“the Red Army,” Iris joked.
He dug in the load and glanced up. “Brought a letter from Jerry. I went ahead and read it.” Franklin bent and blew snot out one side of his nose. “I don’t know why he’d live in Fairbanks with the Pipeline going through there. You imagine waking up to the sound of trucks?”
After chaining and snacking Say-tongue we went inside and Abe offered Franklin a clean washrag and the basin. Franklin took off all his clothes and washed in the corner. When he was finished he stood naked by the fire and scratched, and they talked. I stood by the window, angry; they weren’t even talking about Enuk.
Franklin turned his underwear inside out. He climbed back into his wool pants, chamois shirt, and wool socks. Abe pulled the cannibal pot off the stove.
We feasted on pot-roasted lynx. Kuguruk knocked over Abe’s coffee can of turpentine; stepped in blue paint; roamed the dirt corners seeking the smells of a mouse that had died behind the slabs. I ate slowly, reading Jerry’s letter about buying a camera and working a union job pouring concrete. Pouring concrete seemed sinful. What would Abe think? Abe scratched under his beard, pleased with the blue tracks on the last floorboard behind the table.
Franklin had bad teeth. He chewed noisily. He spat a lump of gristle in his hand and plopped it beside his plate. “Crazy Joe says Enuk’s looking for white wolves. Said Enuk claimed he saw one. He just laughed when Joe tried to get him to tell where. He thinks Enuk wants to get into the pack before he’s too old. He said something interesting. Said certain minerals would make an animal’s guard hairs drop out, make a gray wolf look white.” Franklin peered over the table. “Pass the cranberry sauce, please?”
Abe’s face was red above his beard. He rubbed his ears.
Maybe Enuk had broken a leg or fallen in overflow. I itched to run down and hitch up and head to town that night, to help search. But Abe would say wait. The corners of the igloo went silvery black. I went out and slumped on a snowdrift. It was almost midnight, the sun low in the northwest. A spring chill was falling. I clenched my eyes, tried to reach Enuk telepathically. My head grew hot and the horizon spun. And then the snow was cool and black against my face.
An instant later I came digging up through grayness. My legs and arms were far down. I didn’t call out. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Maybe I had cancer, or some undiscovered congenital gutlessness. I ate a handful of snow and then quietly strolled back inside.
Abe glanced up. “Villagers will find him.” His voice was low, inky, the way it sounded only when he talked to Iris. “They don’t give up.” I looked away, uncomfortable with tenderness from him, angry at the way he forestalled any heroic action. He went to the kitchen counter and banged around more than he needed making coffee.
“What’s that flavor in this cranberry sauce?” Franklin asked. I’d made the sauce and sliced some nutmeg into it. It irritated me, him asking now. I sat on my bed along the back wall. Jerry’s old bed.
Iris zinged a rubber band into my shoulder and tossed her eyes. Kuguruk attacked the rubber band. “He put in a cup of fish eggs,” she said.
“Huh. Whitefish eggs? Have to remember that.”
I lay on my qaatchiaq and chewed back a grin. Iris was the best of us all. Dark and pretty, she could gut a caribou and talk to strangers, Eskimo or white. Or all of that at the same time. Somehow she knew how to move between worlds and find a trail that was broken. She was what I longed to be—laughter in a storm. But she was leaving this place of storms, trading it in on something. A constant supply of friends? Candy in every store? Fewer mouse turds in the oatmeal?
“. . . what they want to force on eastern Canada. Between the Sara Clubbers and the developers, we’re moving toward playground wilderness.” Abe and Franklin had been silent for a minute, possibly thinking about Enuk, but now were quickly warming themselves around their mutual favorite subject.
“Could be.” Abe got up and splashed their lukewarm coffee back in the pot and poured hot. He stretched on his bed, his elbow on his pillow, the coffee cup tucked near his ribs. “The world isn’t going to have room for any Hawclys or Franklins. Or Eskimos.”
They sipped their coffee. A newly arrived junco pecked in the moss outside the window. I felt envious of Jerry—not having to be here, hearing all this over and over again—and annoyed that they could so vigorously jump into the worn trench of their ecological prophecies when Enuk had been their friend all these years.
“Thing is, any cute furry creature will suffice.” The Blazo box under Franklin creaked. “Gadget-ridden lifestyles, and they find it titillating to fret about baby seals. Jesus, the aliens are going to be impressed when they find us.” They chuckled the chuckle of longtime friends who knew each other’s rants.
I twisted a wad of caribou hairs into a weak rope. We’d learned how to read on out-of-date CoEvolution magazines. No Dick and Jane or Little Red Riding Hood vilifying the wolves. Abe slipped them in the firestarter box. He weaned us on oil spills, deforestation, global spin air pollution. I’d grown up fearing the coming hordes of Everything-Wanters, daily expecting to see mutated two-headed caribou limping past, contaminated by nuclear fallout concentrated in their favorite lichens—Cladina rangiferina—passed to us and further conc
entrated.
“Goddamn Sara Club,” Franklin muttered, “’s a charade when they’re the developers’ best customers.”
Abe looked uncomfortable. “Well . . . I guess. Hickel and Reagan would put the blade down and drive to the North Pole.”
I lay on my caribou skin, as strong and useless and trapped as a teenager could feel. Abe was right, what could I find that the snowgoers couldn’t? My overpants and mukluks hung over the wood box. My gloves and beaver hat were on the floor behind Franklin. My whole body was a muscle that ached to escape. I pictured developers as huge leaping creatures, frog-colored, long and mean. They leapt like green fire across valleys, chewing tops off mountains, ripping up trees, flossing with cables. The Sara Clubbers were gnat people buzzing in clouds around them, clubbing persistently with their gnat checkbooks. Neither noticed Enuk, weak and wounded, as they swept over him.
When I did rise, the knots in my jaw silenced questions. I strode out with my hat in one hand, my rifle in the other. Iris followed. She stood barefoot on the snow steps. The evening air turned her toes and nose pink. She peered up and down the river.
“Which direction?” I begged. “You probably know! Just tell me!”
Her eyes went wide, pained. I looked away, ashamed of my meanness. Her eyes glistened, floating her contact lenses. She shook her head.
I stuffed huskies into harness and ordered my seven dogs south toward the Shield Mountains. Then west, along steep bear-den ridges and willowy creeks. I had only my gun and axe, some rope and matches. Try me! I swore at the sky. I wondered if I was greedy, only wanting to find Enuk to hear his compliments, to glean the past from him. Cutuk Hawcly, the secret Everything-Wanter.
A maze of melted and sublimated tracks pocked the snow. Caribou trails, the fine web of ptarmigan tracks, moose trenches, otter slides; wolf, bear, fox, and wolverine tracks softening into indistinguishable circles. My dogs left no tracks on the night crust, and huge trails in the heat of the following afternoon. A herd of caribou ran and stopped ahead of us. Quickly I yanked the rifle out of the scabbard. The boom lanced across the distance. I gutted the caribou, sliced her liver and tenderloins, and stuffed them in the rumen. I fed my dogs the intestines and backbone and blood-shot head, then ate the liver and meat that the stomach contents had partially cooked. I slept there, rolled in the fresh hide, hair side up on the bed slats of the sled.
The third morning I awoke and sat up. Something was wrong. Was it smoke?
Snowblind!
And I knew all chance of my finding Enuk had ended here on the tundra. The mountains were lost. My corneas were raw and chapped, my fingers smoky in front of my face. I felt my way up the line of dogs, toggling towlines to harnesses and untying Plato from the willow I’d used to keep the team lined out. The dogs wagged and pressed against my legs and licked my hands.
The sun had betrayed me. Maybe it had done the same to Enuk, though that seemed unlikely—he had the good dark eyes. The sun now was the only thing left to steer by. It seemed cooler today, and I kept it behind until Plato found the river in one of the portage bends, and then Franklin’s narrow trail meandering the north shore. I climbed dejectedly off the runners and into the basket of the sled. The dogs pulled me home with my head down in my gloves as the light through my lids grayed and snowflakes fell on the back of my neck.
COLD GRAY SKIES CAME BACK, and for three days snow fell soft and fluffy. Winter had returned; each flake buried whatever tiny trace the wind might have forgotten to paint over of Enuk’s tracks, whatever the sun had neglected to melt. Woodrow Washington Sr., Nippy Skuq Sr., and Tommy Feathers showed up on snowgos. Melt Wolfglove had gone west, they said, to his staked mining claim in the western mountains, to see if Enuk was there. People were talking, guuq—Melt wanted Enuk’s nuggets. Woodrow’s jaw thrust out in an underbite; he mixed ps and bs the way elders did, English not their first language, Iñupiaq having a sound in between the two sounds. “Tat Melt Wolfglove already try think Enuk’s ivory gonna pe hiss. Melt never always can’t find golt, only thing jade rock too pig can’t lift.” The men laughed, though less than usual, and swallowed coffee, asked about the condition of the upriver ice. And continued on.
The third stormy evening, Iris whipped up ice cream with the light snow, powdered milk, sugar, vanilla extract, and a dash of salt. She beat it until it was creamy and light. Franklin licked his spoon upside down, scraped it around his bowl, and licked it again. He set his bowl on a shelf to use again for breakfast. Kuguruk pointed her stubby face up and searched for a way to the shelf.
“Think I’ll stick around for Breakup,” Franklin announced.
Company had forever been a wish, but now with Enuk lost and the months Iris would be home slipping away, I felt cabin feverish about a permanent visitor in our igloo. He better not expect her to make ice cream every night. And wouldn’t it be nice if he cut those yellow toenails?
Franklin pitched his tent a quarter mile downriver. Most days he spent nearby, carving wood or filing an axe into a smaller axe, eyeing the file for a future knife, and mulling over the coming environmental disaster of the planet, as if by sheer power of worrying he would be granted an opportunity to bend the path of the developers.
Franklin told stories of living and traveling with hunters on the endless steppes of Mongolia, of dark-eyed girlfriends in foreign cities and eating bricks of chocolate while being a tank gunner in World War II. All were virtues that should have earned him permanent status as a hero, but doing chores he wore flat green gloves that fit either hand—he wrote MEAT on one side of the wrists, WOOD on the opposite—and because he didn’t shoot many animals, and ranted about the interconnected consciousness of trees shared between their roots, he was only a crazy white, forever ineligible to be a hero.
AFTER THE STORM, the warm May days slushed the new snow. I slept afternoons, dodging leaks in the roof. Late in the cool nights, when the snow crusted firm and solitude stretched out, I hitched up my team and searched. Mile after mile, tundra, mountains, sloughs, more tundra. The dogs relished running. I wouldn’t say what we searched for. That could bring a lack of luck. I wondered for the first time in my life at the uncertain cosmos ahead if I let go of this living-off-the-land.
The land glowed as smooth and hushed as I imagined a lover could be. I stood on the runners of my moving dogsled and sang softly, corny words that condensed in my head, about valleys and mountains and faraway girls and wind in the sky. The night sun slid orange pastels behind the jagged peaks of the Dog Dies. The scent of Labrador tea rose off the melting-out tundra. Chirping sparrows, robins, and snipes found the bare ground and rustled leaves with their mates, turning up sweet seeds and berries. What would he eat? Was he melting out somewhere like a wolf-gnawed moose skull?
Miles north, and west, in front of the center of the Dog Die Mountains, I whoa’d the dogs at a creek. The creek had swift open holes under cutbanks, and cave-ins that stayed thin and dangerous all winter. There were tracks. Something had walked along the edge of a stretch of overflow. Green ice showed where the pads had pressed through the snow. Quickly I anchored my team. The tracks ran for a hundred feet, soaked up and frozen in overflow ice. A few yards from the end were a couple of short crosswise drag marks, possibly made by a swinging neckline. The tracks were old and pointed toward Takunak. They could have been made in April, or last November. Trailing were two sets of larger, fresher tracks—wolf tracks. Or maybe all three were wolves.
Ponoc pissed on a willow. The other dogs sniffed each other’s butts and rolled, uninterested in the old prints. I walked the tracks again, unsure. I did know I was only sixteen, and white, and everyone in Takunak knew how to sneer at information from that direction.
The dogs got comfortable and pointed their noses south toward a thicket, listening. I sat on the bend of my sled and chewed a block of pemmican. It was made from crushed dried caribou, dried currants and cranberries, with caribou fat poured over. The fat had gotten too hot rendering. It was strong, and burned in the back of my th
roat. I ate snow, walked the tracks again. They weren’t enough. Not to tell Melt. Or anyone.
I roused the dogs. “Okay! Hike!” We went on.
IN THE LATE MORNING, as the lifting sun softened the snow, I pulled into our dog yard with two cow caribou on my sled. Warble larvae were knobby as marbles under the hair on the animals’ backs. Abe came down with a rolled cigarette burning carelessly close to the stub of his missing finger. He nodded. He put the cigarette in his lips and squeezed a warble as big as the end of his little finger out of the caribou hair.
“Barrow, old people used to eat these.” Abe held up the writhing larva. The warble was fat, slimy, and yellow with bellows sides and a biter mouth. “Explorers ate them for vitamin C. A forgotten health food snack. Try it?”
I shrugged, took it out of his fingers, and popped it in my mouth. It was soft, like eating someone else’s snot. Not salty though, sweet.
Abe grinned around his cigarette, pleased. His hands were messy with blue. His turquoise eyes caressed the caribou, counting and naming the shades of brown and gray in their shedding hair. “How’s the meat? Fat?”
“One. The other, around the bone.” Around the bone was our joke. It meant almost skinny. Iris often teased that if I ever got fat it would be around the bone.
“How’s the snow?”
“Overflow all the way across upriver. Holes bubbling by the bend.”
He looked out over the wide white river, forked with tongues of greenish overflow. “I’ll go to town. Check if Newt sold any of our chairs, and mail in that ptarmigan painting.” I knew he meant his spring trip, where he went by himself. As kids we had grown accustomed to his spring gone-spells. But the fear that an open hole in the ice or some drunk with a rifle in Takunak might snatch him from us—that dread kept us restless, pacing out to the riverbank in the night sun, watching the trail for our Abe.
