Ordinary Wolves (13 page)

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.

 

 

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?”