Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  “White shit cocksucker!”

  Kids raced up. “Qilamik!” They swiveled the team around. Most of them had beaten me up before, thrown rocks, chased me with slingshots and pellet rifles. But here they were looking out for me like cousins. Tommy was an elder. There wasn’t any direction to run from that. They understood. “Go!” The kids whistled to the dogs.

  The woman in the next row crooned on. I sat stiff and straight in the middle seat, picturing a sun-shot wolf turd twisted with caribou hair—white shit—and trying to feel mysterious, a secret agent trained in all the kung fu of the land. It didn’t work. Someone who mattered needed to assure me that I mattered. Enuk was gone. Who else was hero enough? I pried out the folded money in my pocket and looked at the faces. Thomas Jefferson? Iris was the closest thing to a hero for me. She’d suggested that I experience the city, make and spend some money without Abe nearby. She said she had loved the city but had started to feel tired out by it; she had missed Abe, the dogs, picking berries. And taking care of food.

  With nothing else to do, I counted my money. Ten twenties. And a two-party check for five dollars and seventy-four cents. The earth curved beneath us, squiggly rivers, white lakes, dark ink spills of trees—a thousand miles of wilderness, flat and colorless and no relative of home from up here. Across the riveted aluminum wing, the sun glowed on splendid mountains.

  The flight attendant handed out baskets of food. On a napkin I jotted a note. Abe, It’s warm in a jet. A beautiful tall brown-haired woman wants me to eat. Alaska Airlines wants me to drink their coffee. I paused, wondering what Abe had been teaching us all his life. He seemed to have taught Don’t chase money, that’s a cheap way to live. Don’t kill animals for glory, that makes you the worst kind of bully. But what was in between? What did he want us to do? After a minute I grew more generous. Be happy was what he’d tried to teach. But weren’t people supposed to be best at what they were taught and practiced? Kids in the village were great at basketball and stoning swallows off the telephone wires. Somehow I’d spent my practice wanting to be happy.

  She handed me a tiny bag of almonds, a plastic cup, a 7UP, and a packet with two aspirins. “For your headache.”

  Quickly, I shoved the money back in my pocket. I stared, awed by sweet and carbonated water, rogued cheeks and soft brown eyes. The city was going to be exciting. The two white pills lay in my palm.

  She held out her hand. “I’ll take that wrapper.”

  I hesitated, then stuffed it in my pocket and patted it. “Oh, I’ll save it. For fire starter.”

  She smiled fleetingly, then moved down the walkway.

  INSIDE, THE ANCHORGE airport building blurred into distance. A world inside, like Trantor in Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Too many people moved too fast, most of them white; it was eerie. All different sizes and shapes of white people, their clothes so clean and their shoes so shallow. I held onto a wall. Eskimos hate rushers. Wolves eat stragglers. Something was wrong with their eyes. I glanced at their faces, and finally down at my hands. Was I invisible? The flight attendant hurried past, her fast high-heeled legs as stiff and cloppy as a walking caribou’s. I wanted to shout Wait! But for what? For me to woo her with stories of shrews running over my face in bed, gnawing at the greasy duck feathers in our homemade pillows?

  First I had to learn how to get out of this village inside walls, on carpet and tile ground. Janet had warned, “Don’t get lost on that airport. Aachikaaŋ that blace.” What had Iris said? “. . . the road goes right past January Thompson’s . . .”

  The air tasted tired. The ground under the airport had to be holding its breath. I walked, came to bears standing dead in glass boxes, shot by dentists. Doors were numbered, locked, alarmed, signed with NO. I walked the other way, averted my eyes from the bears, passed a bald eagle perched in glass. Rode electric stairs, arrived at electric glass doors. They opened, pleased to see anyone go. Who paid the electric bills?

  Outside, the air echoed and thundered and stank. In the warmth, snow melted under a steel rail. The snow was different from the kind you’d scoop a handful and eat. Herds of people milled with purpose. They rolled luggage to cars, and rolled away. In all directions exhaust pipes puffed. Jets veering into the sky. Cars parked with engines running. Buses spewing smoke. A truck charged past my ankles, its stinky breath blowing my clothes. Sunlight leaked under the overhang, amazingly bright, and yellow. Could this be midwinter? Crotch Point was still back in morning darkness.

  I shouldered my bag. The snowdrifts were knee deep and greasy. I waded back along the pavement. People stared out car windows. Something had changed. From inside their cars I wasn’t invisible anymore. Hiccups climbed in my throat—the noise and stink. Monstrous trucks roared and ripped the air a foot from my side. They blurred as they passed, warping vision, the most frightening and instantaneous death I’d ever faced. The road stretched impossibly straight, wet and painted black with white and yellow lines. No one else was walking. Maybe it was against the law. I ran, my bag flopping, my mukluks growing ruined. Webby scum clung to the caribou hair. Water sopped through the moosehide bottoms, up through the sheared caribou insoles. It was a dishonorable end for a pair of Janet’s beautiful cold-weather soft-bottom mukluks.

  Where the road forked, I stopped, reaching into my pocket for the address and map to January’s that Iris had given me. My money was there; the slip of paper was gone. I glanced around, shivering a small chill of terror. It had been folded with my money. I looked back. A jet lumbered into the sky.

  HOTELS WITH A HUNDRED windows loomed. The roar was constant. Nothing at home was this frantic; the closest thing was female mosquitoes, brave and fiercely competitive, trying to acquire blood before they died. Poles and signs reached like trees for the light—survival of the fit-test, city style. Everything had words. Flashing words. As if someone had cut up a magazine, glued it on the sky. Dawna must love this! No reading the river, snow, ice, tracks—the city took it literally; reading sign meant reading signs.

  I turned onto smaller roads. Cars were fewer and I waved each time one passed, hoping one would stop and offer assistance. An elderly lady waved back. The air quieted between the close houses. The houses had numbers nailed on them. Someone was keeping count. Music thumped. A chain rattled. I glanced behind. I had never walked across Takunak without fear, never run my dogs into town without keeping an axe handle or a chain handy, wondering which loose dogs would try to fight my dogs, or who would try to fight the white boy. Iris had made it sound as if I could be exempt from that in Anchorage.

  I unclipped my bag and pulled out a strip of moose paniqtuq and my knife. Abe had smoked the moose, for January, and sprinkled on a little salt. I bit it, cut pieces off at my lips. Dogs barked. They sounded strange, like prisoners, the barks coming one here, another there, not from any whole teams. A deep-chested black and yellow dog padded around the corner of a house. It bounded out. Dollars and dollars worth of galvanized chain uncoiled. No axe or shovel leaned in sight. Only mailboxes, pounded into the earth. I leapt back. The dog hit the end of its chain. A woman opened a window.

  She was inaudible over the barking dog.

  I pulled sinewy meat out of my mouth. “Hi. I’m l-looking for a friend. Any chance you could help me?”

  She smiled, fleetingly and taut. “What are you doing in this neighborhood? Quiet, Zoogy!”

  I tossed the tough sinew to the dog. He sniffed, picked it up, swallowed, and tilted his head for more. “W-walking. I’m looking for January.”

  Her glance angled to my mukluks. “For January? Don’t give Zoogy your nasty germs. Go back where you belong or I’ll have to dial the cops.” She cranked the window shut.

  I blinked, closed my mouth, bolted between houses. Ran around corners, my wet feet slopping on pavement. Signs accosted me. TURNAGAIN. DEAD END. STOP. NO TRESPASSING. IOWA. 32ND. BEWARE OF OWNER. TURNAGAIN. A person in blue tights, yellow shoes, and a helmet rocketed past on a bicycle. “Hi.” Its white teeth flashed in a grin. A man or a woma
n, I couldn’t tell. I halted, panting. Over my shoulder I grinned too late. “Iris,” I murmured, “these are supposed to be my people?”

  Along a fence, boot prints led over a bank, down to railroad tracks, metal with hundreds of big spikes driven into square wood. In the distance and falling light, blue signs said something that started with NO. People tracks crossed the railroad and angled through birch and spruce. I shoved both hands into my one glove to warm them. Houses lurked in the trees, their windows never all out of sight. Miniature lynx tracks traversed the trail.

  The trees grew thicker. I knelt down. Finally, just barely, all houses were out of sight. I decided to camp, to find January tomorrow. It wasn’t much of a camp site—stomped snow, spruce boughs, and my qaatchiaq and Army sleeping bag. I was unsure about laws concerning building a fire even though dry dead spruce limbs hung, tempting. Where the cat’s trail dipped under a limb, I buried some dried meat and set a snare with a piece of twine. Car sounds penetrated the trees. A bird flapped overhead, its wings panting like only a raven’s. I jumped to my feet, forgetting the house windows, breathing quickly, as if I could inhale home and this raven and the smell of warm snow and wind up in those branches.

  IN THE DREAM, wind howled. Plato writhed backward out of her harness. A truck bellowed past downriver. The truck’s panel side had no end. It grew louder. Plato pulled, twisting out of her pelt, leaving it hanging in my hands. The skin was rotten. Putrid fur shed on my wet palms. Her naked carcass snarled and bit my fingers. I awoke clenched in terror. The ground shook, light and thunder filling the trees.

  Slowly the rhythm to the roar told where I was. A long time later the train had gone and still my breathing heaved. Up in the sky, orange light leaked on puffy clouds, leaving night not night but something cataclysmic. The sound of cars had not quit. Where did they all go? Who were all those countless white people? What if a road were plowed through to the Kuguruk River? Agh, the end of America must have been horrifying for the Indians.

  I lay on my back, careful not to knock snow on my qaatchiaq, my face cold and breath rising in clouds. Alappaa. How did Iris make this trip warm and with friends? Enuk’s voice blurted, Turn back? Gonna never starve little bit even?

  I pictured the creek with the wolf den, the shred of green rope hanging from the tree. I wondered if I should try to find January in the morning, or try to absorb some of the city on my own first. “Enuk, you never came to Anchorage,” I whispered. “I’m lost double ’cause I don’t know this place or the people. Maybe triple. Maybe I don’t know who I am either. So don’t haunt my head.”

  IN THE MORNING I hadn’t caught a cat. I dug up the paniqtuq and ate it loud with ice crystals. My feet tingled, numb, my back stiff, everything cold and wishing for fire. It was colder today. I packed, trading the glove from hand to hand, thinking of Franklin. I wandered out to scary roads that left me stranded in merging lanes like a deadhead in Breakup ice; braved traffic that should have earned me medals; crossed roaring bad-lands of no clean snow. Buildings towered overhead, named after oil companies and banks. Downtown people walked. Some of the people were Eskimo, but their gazes stayed away.

  Inside a glass storefront, sweating half-naked men and women raced in place. A man spread blue crystals on cement. “How’s it going?” he questioned, friendly, then disappeared in a door before my answer. Oily slush coiled into grates in the street. Trees stood alone, dreary and dripping and surrounded, roots weighted under heavy stone. Stores sold breakfasts. Stores sold ivory figurines, postcards, smoked salmon in flat cardboard boxes—twelve ounces for twenty dollars. My dogs hadn’t known they lived so rich. The storekeepers were not like Newt with his flat eyes and fresh gossip. “Leave your bag at the door,” a man ordered. As my bag lowered, his eyes fastened on my knife. I pulled my jacket down. Being suspected made my muscles stiffen suspiciously. He picked up a phone. I picked up my bag and hurried out. Movie-star women passed, taking my breath away and leaving perfumed air in fading trade. Tremendous metal glass skyscrapers grew like square cliffs out of the street. Great lookouts to hunt from. Glass people up there, hunting what?

  IN THE NEIGHBORHOODS I found a green mitten, right-handed. A woman was checking her mailbox. “Hi,” I said thickly. My smiling muscles felt out of shape. I thought about asking to use her phone book but couldn’t find the courage. I walked on, talking in my head. In all the miles no silence lived. Inside my thoughts, I realized finally that, more than in wind or cold or Breakup, the power and absoluteness of wild earth resided in its huge uncompromising silence. Anchorage conquered silence, left not a trace—more frightening, not even a memory. Silence the dentists could not shoot and put in glass boxes. Whatever was left when humans were done, silence would come home.

  My feet were soggy and peeling and staying numb now. I ached for someone to talk to. Something was not right in my mind. Thoughts carried on their own conversations. They shot across my head using only the first letters of words. It was spooky, unbalanced, a head full of acronym thoughts shouting to other thoughts. Leaving me out. LMO. “This is not good,” I said aloud. TING. “Surrounded by a quarter of a million humans, and the longest conversations you’ve had have been with a napkin and a ghost.”

  IN AN ALLEY, an Eskimo woman who looked like Dollie Feathers hunched eating pizza out of a flat box that would make a good dart board. She breathed on her hands to warm them. She resembled Dollie, pretty, though older and no giggles. I slopped past. Forced my mouth to open. “Uvlaalluataq.” Good morning. I kept going, eyes shifting.

  The woman peered out of her sweatshirt hood. Her eyelids were scarred and would never again close properly. “Ha? That white boy that always can’t play ball.” She spoke in a monotone.

  That easy you can see my two worst flaws?

  She spoke Iñupiaq, and waited. “Kaŋiqsivich?”

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  “You do little bit. We used to been go Takunak sometimes for Mamas and Papas Tournament. I’m from Uktu. Now I’m living in Anchorage, how long.”

  Two men walked past in suits. We kept our eyes down, waiting for them to pass. “Is there a difference between a pistol and a revolver?” one was saying. “Sure,” the taller man said, “a pistol is a twenty-two.” A woman and a man followed behind them. “Do you know how debilitating that is,” she told him, “when you don’t have a ball in your mouse?”

  Pizza wafted into my concentration.

  “Have some. They gave it to me from the back door. I won’t finish it. Can’t get good buzz if I eat too much.”

  I raised my eyebrows, yes, that was true. I sat where the pavement wasn’t icy. The pizza was thick with cheese, frozen on the surface but still warm way inside, like a fox that died in the trap. Her name was Hannah Wana. We asked who each other’s parents were, the way introductions went in the village; who we were wasn’t as important, and meant little without that information.

  Hannah stood and dusted snow off her knees. Her legs were bowed. Her throat had hole scars. My head filled with visions of the Takunak airfield, the crowd around the mail plane. It’s time to swallow your pride, Cutuk. It was time to call the Takunak school to talk to Iris, to ask her to give me more directions.

  I sat and finished the pizza. Pizza Hut. I’d seen it advertised on the Wolfgloves’ TV. Eating made me happy and I thought of Janet. When Janet fed me tiktaaliq livers she said she was proud of me. Abe hadn’t taught pride. Pride had to do with country music, sports, joining the military and getting dead for some devious president. Pride was cousin to bragging, and required a support group. Nothing we needed or had. Nothing for something.

  Iris would have something to say, something like “Absence makes the heart swallow your marbles.”

  THIRTEEN

  ON THE PHONE he believed my lie. Under the airport terminal, where suitcases went around and around, my eyes latched onto his overhanging gut. This man had shotgunned wolves from the sky, guuq, and taken my mother soaring away before the back of my memory. All I felt was surp
rise—that a ski plane could lift such a huge, tall, fat person.

  The airport did not close. I’d walked here last night, after Value Village closed—Iris’s idea.

  “I’m not moving to another village, Iris. I’m staying.” Until I prove I can make it.

  There had been a pause while her laughter bounced off the satellite and spiraled down to the earpiece, out of a past now hard for me to believe. “Value Village. A used-clothing store, Cutuk. Just admit it—recite after me: ‘I will spend money on clothes. And a haircut!’ Don’t worry, I won’t tell Abe! What do you want me to say to Janet? She asks about you every time.”

  “Tell her I’m getting a job.”

  In the airport bathroom, I’d flushed the toilet half a dozen times, stripped off my clothes, dipped the rag in, and scrubbed my naked body. The clean used jeans, shirt, and leather boots fit better than any January had ever mailed. I stuffed Janet’s mukluks in a garbage slot. At the sink, I shampooed with free lotion soap, scraped my chin with my knife. I combed my hair back with my fingers. Abe didn’t own a comb. Combing felt vain. A man in a soft leather jacket fiddled his perfect hair, stealing glances sideways. I had avoided his eyes and tried to walk innocently out the door.