Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  HE HITCHED UP AT MIDNIGHT. The air was cool, the sun sliding lines of orange and bluish light across the tundra to the northwest. “You kids take care of each other. Watch the stove.” Every year the caribou passed south, the sun went away, the caribou and the sun returned—and Abe said the same words. “You kids take care of each other. Watch the stove.”

  He slid his rifle into the scabbard. He knelt and pulled the hook. The dogs raced down the river, yipping, leaving only toenail tracks on the night crust. Iris and I listened as the rasp of the runners faded. Down at Franklin’s camp at the mouth of Jesus Creek, Say-tongue’s mournful howl floated in the trees.

  We went in and stoked the stove. I wondered what the news of Enuk would be. Maybe I’d been wasting time, and sadness. We swept the floor and the cracks between the boards and behind the stove with a goose wing. We banged the creosote out of the pipe to make sure it was safe, and put our sleeping bags out to air. Abe didn’t mean watch the stove, only to be careful of fire, but we’d developed the habit; years ago when the spring trip started and we were small and frightened and Jerry had to pretend to be big and brave, we sat and we watched that stove.

  Iris stirred cocoa in a pan.

  “It’ll be good to hear how Enuk made out,” I said, fishing for her to say something.

  She sipped. “I’ll make a cranberry pie when Abe comes home. We’ve got lots of bear fat for crust. Abe said that bear came after you. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  There had always been three of us during Abe’s gone-spells. Jerry had been here, solid and safe, his brown eyes shifting and uncertain and taking care of the worrying, his big hands cradling loaves of bread, bonking the rabid fox with a snowshoe, swinging a moose hindquarter onto his shoulder, his serious voice saying “You can have my half of the gum” or “You can have my slice of apple” or “Want my pillow? It’s nice and cold on the bottom.” Next year Iris would be gone. I opened the stove door and savaged the coals. “If Abe is so content with books and his harmony living, why does he drink and go mess around in town?”

  Iris’s face froze, stunned and desolate. “You can love something and still be lonely. I was having great fun in Fairbanks, but I missed you guys, too.”

  “When you leavin’?”

  She picked at the frayed knees of her corduroy pants. She’d been saving her one pair of blue jeans. “If I get enough scholarships, this summer. You know how buggy and boring summers are.” Iris turned, “Come too! You could finish high school down there. We’d have so much fun. Cutuk, kids there don’t stare and make fun every single second if you’re white. It’s amazing. They don’t try to beat you up. Girls don’t get pants’d regularly. They call that sexual assault and it’s even jail for that. Nobody on campus even acted like they wanted to fight me.”

  “We’ve got twelve dogs, ’cause of me. Abe’ll need help drying fish. If I leave”—my eyes cooked in the crackling heat from the spruce logs—“my whole life will seem like some old story Enuk told years ago. I want to hunt. And have a friend or two. Not to think about if there’s enough animals or is it bad to kill them or what is ‘living’ and what’s ‘polluting.’” Loneliness laminated my words and I spoke up, quick and hoarse. “Think the stove’ll smoke if we leave the door open?”

  Now all there was ahead to see was summer, and me, a lone teenager immured along the mosquitoey riverbank, staring across the flat current.

  We dragged the couch in front of the fire. Iris’s mouth was pursed and red. Our faces grew hot and glowed in the flames. Some time after the sun had come around to the east we leaned together. Slowly the tension melted out of our muscles. Even in sleep I was aware of Iris against my shoulder. The presence of my sister surrounded me. In my dream I was in love with Dawna Wolfglove. We walked in a city, our shoulders brushing each other absently, the way teenage friends did. She wore lipstick and her sleeves were rolled up her brown forearms. Buildings towered overhead. Iris trailed behind. My arm was around Dawna’s waist and she leaned close, closer to me than anyone had ever been. I realized with elation that somehow I had learned how to kiss!

  As I kissed Dawna, her face blurred in the dream and became Iris’s. Dawna stood on the other side of the street. “You kinnaq honky,” she screamed. “Now how can anyone love you?” Iris took off sunglasses and peered. “Too bad. Y-you fool!” she whispered. “Everybody knows people don’t kiss that way.” The joy evaporated. I stumbled onto river ice. Everyone was waiting: Iris, Jerry, Franklin, the Wolfgloves. Crazy Joe. All the villagers. Enuk in his furs. Where had Dawna gone? The ice sheet rumbled and a black fissure jagged across the white. Breakup! The ice broke into separate pans and people began plunging like net rock-sack sinkers into black water.

  I jolted awake, every hair follicle on my skin hurting and cold. Franklin clomped inside.

  “Ah! Good morning!” Kuguruk dropped out of his arm and rubbed against the wood box. Iris groaned, and I stood and sloshed my head in the cold water in the basin. The dream seemed plastered all over my face, emotions protruding like duck feathers out of a threadbare pillow.

  Franklin cleared his throat and cracked the shell on an idea he’d been incubating. “Let’s you two get a jump on your schoolwork! I’ll get breakfast going.”

  Iris pulled me outside on the drifts. “Geez!”

  For all our years of correspondence school we’d studied the lessons at night, after dinner, and only in the dark of winter, never after the sun turned back to yellow. And Iris was graduated.

  I pointed. A split whitefish lay on the chopping block. “Franklin chopped open a dogfood fish for suvaks.”

  “He’s putting them in the oatmeal!”

  We giggled suddenly. We held onto each other’s wrists. Iris was strong and I realized I was, too. The strength of youth washed briefly through my limbs. It felt wild and springy, and as we hunched over laughing I wondered could this be how other people felt all the time?

  TWO DAYS LATER Franklin was frying one of his tasteless flat pan breads we’d come to call Iron Toast. Smoke roped over the kitchen counter. Iris paced. She stood suddenly. Sled runners grated on the river. Iris and I whooped outside, sliding down the bank.

  Abe’s cheeks and forehead were burned painfully from the sun-shot trail, and his teeth flashed as he grinned. His hair was tousled and matted to his forehead. He squeezed Iris’s shoulder. “What’s the panic, Otter?”

  “We’re pleased to see you, Abe.”

  “How’s the trail? They find Enuk?”

  We stood on the runner, gripping the toprail. Abe had a load and the sun had melted ice to droplets on his sled tarp. A willow branch was caught in his brushbow. Somewhere he’d had to portage around water.

  His grin crooked to one side. “Nope. Been a month. You know how they don’t give up searching. But, Snowmelt—everybody’s slacking off until after Breakup.” Abe stomped in his snow hook. The dogs stopped rolling and flopped on their sides, panting.

  “They didn’t find even his rifle? No sled? No dogs came back?”

  “Sounds like he only took five dogs. There’s a lot of sloughs they could have tangled up in. Maybe hooked their collars on brush. Or killed each other . . . starved. Guys found a few tracks. Mostly rumors are going around. Some people say he was hunting wolves. Melt’s acting like Enuk went over toward Melt’s mining claim to be there when the snow melted off.”

  Franklin walked up, listening. He blew his nose, wiped his thumb on his pants. “How’s Janet?”

  Abe worked an icy knot in his sled rope. “Melt’s been out doing what you have to do on a search.” He straightened and glanced at the far shore. “Looking for sign of Enuk would occupy your mind better than seeing him in every fox bloodspot on the floor, don’t you think? And Janet was closer to Enuk.”

  He didn’t say more about Janet. We kicked snow, waiting for the tarp to open. Abe rubbed his knee. “When my dad crashed, the searching was a trip through hell.” He pronounced the word carefully, like he didn’t say it often, which was true. �
�It wasn’t good when we found him. The engine was under him. The wings crushed his back. But at least the searching was over.

  “Enuk, I’ve known him since January and I were forced down at Takunak in a storm.” Abe spoke in Franklin’s direction. They nodded at each other and turned to look out over the river. Maybe they were looking back through more years than Iris and I knew how to. Or more lost friends. We looked out over the river, waiting for his story. “We were flying the blue PA-18 up, for my dad. On skis. I was only nineteen. Enuk took us in.” Abe smiled at the ground and coiled the loops in his bare hands. “He was honest. I’ll always like to see his face. Even that time he moved in with us here for Freezeup and—. Well, anyways.”

  Abe yawned. He’d probably been up for days. “Pretty sky, isn’t it? Want to help unhitch?”

  Iris squeezed my sleeve. We turned the tired dogs and pulled the harnesses over their heads. They were gentle and hungry and visited my dogs and Say-tongue. Their feet were warm and some left bloody tracks. The snow had gone hard and crisp. A chill was falling. Maybe the last good traveling for five months.

  Abe had brought a library box and the last school lessons I’d mailed in to Juneau, scholarships for Iris, catalogs, and a box of used, ill-fitting clothes that I wished I didn’t have to wear—from January Thompson, the man Abe had been with, weathered down in a Takunak that was Takunak no more. I wished I knew the rest. Was there still a chance for my future to be so wild and romantic? How did Abe stay friends with this January slob who slaughtered wolves from an airplane—and flew my mother away? She’d only wanted a ride out, of course, but still. It seemed Abe liked something about everybody. He found that something and focused on it. I wondered what it could be about January Thompson.

  In town Abe had bought nails, flour, twine, baking soda, a sack of apples, an invented fruit called a nectarine. When we finished unhitching and feeding the dogs, we took off our gloves and gathered around. He cut the nectarine into quarters on the toprail. Where his knife cut it tasted like dirty penny and rancid seal-hide sheath; the rest didn’t taste real—it was that sweet and tangy. Later, I planted the big bumpy seed. Just in case.

  We took everything except the apples inside and poked at the haul like ravens around a gut pile. “Aana Gladys Skuq bought that wolverine skin of yours, Cutuk. Four hundred dollars. One of our rocking chairs sold.” He handed Iris a wad of bills to put in the Hills Bros can. She dumped the can on the bearskin couch and forked bills and coins out of the balding brown hair. The can pinged as she counted. Abe brought the sack of apples in. We pulled out our sheath knives and ate frozen apple.

  “Nine hundred and forty-seven.”

  “Take eight then, when you go.” Abe sucked on a hard chunk of apple. “We’ve still got a table and two chairs down in the Native Cache. A letter came from Big Dipper Gallery. They’re making numbered prints of that wolf pack. I don’t like that. We’ll ask them to stop when you’ve had all the college you want, ’kay?”

  Tears started dripping off Iris’s nose.

  My throat suddenly needed swallowing. Franklin shifted on a stump near the stove. He’d been sampling the Bacardi 151 left in Abe’s bottle—the bottle that usually stayed out of sight and lasted untouched until next spring—and glancing distractedly at a book in Chinese, bare pages of scratches like lilliputian trees, tent poles, sandpiper tracks.

  “Where you going, Iris?”

  “Fairbanks.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m going to college.”

  “Well! Good for you! When’ll that be?”

  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.