Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  “Should have come out to check the barking,” he muttered. “Like to have the scene in my mind.” He stood and stared off north, spraying a square of his powerful imagination against the sky. He often leaned against trees, absorbed in the pastel glow of evening. “Been years since the wolves took much from us. Usually too wary. Hope we don’t get people-company next couple days.”

  A raven flew overhead, heading north. We eyed it.

  “We’re low on meat.” Jerry melted his cheek with a bare hand. Black hairs were sprouting on his jaw. I itched with distress when his hand wandered to the icicles on his downy mustache. “Wolves’re always coming by. Why’s it a big deal?”

  I kicked the snow ground, embarrassed for both of them. I was ten years old, behind schedule on shooting my first wolf. “Let’s go after ’em.”

  Abe didn’t hear.

  For the next two weeks Abe read on his bed. Suddenly his book would drop and he’d rise, practically walking through us to his easel. He worked in oil. The turpentine fumes left us breathless and lightheaded. Tubes of his paint had frosted to the wall under his workbench, and he swore. He glared over his shoulder at the dim light, paced, peered, his mouth puckered. At night he tossed on his qaatchiaq, lit candles, rose to sigh at his work, and one night he tore the canvas free and stuffed it in the stove.

  The second painting became a staked dog team, witnessing a pack of wolves borrowing caribou. Each dog’s face held a different expression. Some merely whined, sitting, suffering the thievery patiently. Others stood on their sinewy back legs, lunging against their chains. Their mouths were outraged barks. None of the dogs were of our team—they lived in Abe’s past or in his imagination. A black dog closest to the wolves jumped so hard his chain flipped him upside down, and Abe painted his curled claws, hinted at the wiry gray hair between his toes. Nine wolves leaned over the meat, cracking bones in their triangle molars. The painting had a dark silvery feel, a feeling that the wolves were friends, with each other, and with the night. I thought Abe’s paintings of wolves were better than his other paintings.

  During those weeks the fire in the barrel stove often burnt down to ashes. The cold waiting beyond the door and walls hurried in. Our last caribou shrank to a backbone, neck, and one shoulder. We peeled the back sinew—for thread for sewing—and made frymeat out of the backstraps before boiling the backbones. Abe didn’t care what was for dinner. He sipped his tea and answered some of our questions, not all of them. We asked few. He was in a place for artists; we didn’t know the language. We kids simply knew Abe wouldn’t hunt and kill meat until something changed. We were allowed the few .22 cartridges to shoot ptarmigan and rabbits and foxes—if we could find any—but not allowed to take the big rifle or its ammo.

  Jerry and Iris and I sling-shot mice gnawing in the food shelves, and split wood and chipped five feet through the river ice and hauled buckets of water. We heated water on the stove and scrubbed our gray laundry in the galvanized washtub, mopping with a shirt at water that came out the leaks. The two windows steamed up. The black water we hauled outside and poured down the slop hole. Steam rose and the ice popped and crackled. The second week we splurged and hauled extra buckets and took baths in the washtub. It was my turn to use the water first. That meant I had less to kneel in because we kept the last kettle boiling to add as the tub cooled. Abe squatted in the tub last. His fingers and forearms were smeared with paint. The surface of the water grew oily. He stood naked by the fire and dried.

  We studied our schoolbooks, administered exams to each other: spelling, phonics, math, English, biology. With his hands floury from making bread, Jerry drew circles, explaining cells and cell walls, mitochondria and osmosis. On the bearskin couch we read books out of the library box and flipped through Harper’s magazines, scrutinizing glossy pictures advertising giraffe-legged women smoking cigarettes and sleek gray automobiles called Cougars.

  “Someday I’m going to have a Chevy truck,” Jerry declared.

  “Don’t be boring!” Iris bent his fingers off the page. “I’ll have an ocean-blue convertible. And smoke Virginia Slims!”

  “You never seen ocean. Except in Crotch Spit. That was frozen. It doesn’t count.”

  I kept quiet. I was the one born in the native hospital in Crotch Spit. I’d never seen a real car—only the dead red jeep where kids in Takunak played tag and bounced on the burnt seat springs.

  We put the magazines up and scraped caribou hides with the ichuun. You always scraped with another hide underneath, to pad the skin and keep the ichuun from tearing holes. We then spread on sourdough, folded the hides skin to skin, put them under Abe’s qaatchiaq to let the sourdough soak in overnight, and later dried and scraped the skins again to finish tanning. The windows dripped condensation. Outside in the twilight, big snowflakes fell. We hauled in wood and kicked the door shut tight and stuffed a jacket at the base of the door to keep cold air out. Abe lit the Coleman light. He pumped it and hung the hissing lamp from a nail on the ridgepole. Shadows twirled and came to rest. We got out an early-fall hide that Iris had sourdoughed earlier. The hair was short, thinner, and soft. We scraped it and worked the skin in our hands until it was tanned and white. Jerry traced new insoles for all of our soft-bottom and ugruk-bottom mukluks. Iris cut them with Abe’s razor. In silence we sewed ourselves caribou socks, then swept up the hairs. Abe hunched over his easel, silent. Caribou hairs clung to his sweater. Outside, the snow piled up.

  “Should I boil meat?” Jerry murmured. Iris and I soundlessly raised our eyebrows, yes in Iñupiaq.

  Jerry put leg bones and water into the cannibal pot. While it simmered, we used Abe’s powder scale to measure 4832 gunpowder, and reload .30-06 ammo with the Lee Loader. Iris sighted down a completed cartridge. “Boy, fresh moose heart would be good, wouldn’t it?” She covered a grin, swinging her gaze to Abe.

  “Look!” Jerry said. “You forgot to prime this one. You’re wasting!” We glanced at Abe. Wasting was the baddest word in our family. Jerry bit the lead. He pried the bullet out and dumped the gunpowder back in the scale. The bullet copper was dented but would still be good enough for finishing off a caribou if it was too alive to get with a knife. “Here! You’re not supposed to get the inside of the primer sweaty, ’kay?”

  I crossed my arms, checked my muscle. Actually, we had plenty of food: seasonings and sugar and fifty-pound sacks of flour, powdered milk, rice, and beans. Jars of rendered bear fat for shortening. Most of a quart of vanilla. And there was a keg of salted salmon bellies, and piles of quaq in the dogfood cache. We could eat that. It was good with seal oil, and in the seal oil were our prized masru and pink tinnik berries. We wouldn’t go hungry.

  IN LATE JANUARY, Abe took his rifle off the peg behind the stove. We kids scattered for overpants and parkas. He blew dust off the bolt and scraped his thumbnail along the stock where frozen snot or dog spit had dried. His hair and beard were unruly. His turquiose eyes squinted with a grin. “Iris? Feel like coming along?” He nodded and laid the gun on the floor across his parka and mittens. Jerry and I slumped. Abe boiled water, filled his thermos, and slid it into the caribou-hide insulating tube. We fidgeted, out of the way, while Iris got bundled and ready.

  They hitched the team and went east, hunting for an acquiescent moose to contribute both dog food and people food. The caribou herds were far south in their wintering grounds. It was cold—cold enough that the kerosene had jelled and wouldn’t pour into the lamp—and the dogs did not lunge to run.

  Afterward, Jerry wandered back inside to rewrite a letter to his pen pal in New Zealand, romancing her long distance. Mice rustled and scurried on the floor. His pen rustled the paper. He liked to write letters and poems. And his diary, too. I figured he was faking talent. We kids didn’t say it—that would be bad luck—but we hoped we’d inherited a little of Abe’s specialness. We grew up watching our dad; for months on end he was the only one to watch, to teach us about our world, and tidbits of the city world. We watched his left hand, the one with goo
d genes, hoping to recognize the first twinges in our own hands.

  I hauled armloads of wood. Jerry went out to cut meat for dinner. The house was quiet. The table and chairs and floorboards seemed gray, dingy, and bare with no one about. Curiosity pushed my honor aside—I slid a thumbnail in where the edges of his diary’s pages were smudged. My eyes scrambled over the words . . . only you who watched mothers fly away, after the cold will be my sisters and brothers . . . I dropped the book. Quickly I placed it back on the table. I laced my mukluks. Fumbled into my parka. Hurried out behind the woodpile and pretended to scan the tundra for life.

  Jerry hung the bow saw on a nail. His mukluks squeaked on the snow. He carried sawed caribou ribs inside. They were skinny ribs, thin and with signs of wolf lips and shrew turds on them. He came outside, no jacket. His brown eyes looked rolled back like a village dog held down by its last six inches of iced-in chain. “That’s mine.” There was red meat sawdust between his fingers. Jerry’s big square fist swung. My face seemed to crack open. Behind a snowbank I leaned over. Blood hung in coagulating red icicles off my nose. I tried to forget the words in the diary. And the jealousy that Jerry might have what I didn’t—a share of Abe’s gift.

  Iris, too, had something. Something completely different, though. It wasn’t something you could talk about. One spring a white-lady social worker skied down the river towing a plastic sled. She was from the distant big city of Anchorage, and how she got upriver we didn’t know. She wore bright blue windbreakers and windpants, and had a black backpack, an orange aluminum foil space blanket, and dehydrated space meals and Swiss chocolate bars. She was very beautiful and had heaps of wavy brown hair and didn’t seem to get cold. Her name was Wax Tiera, and we adored her though we suspected her of being an alien. The odd thing was, the day before she showed, Iris cleaned the entire igloo in a way we had never before done. She swept away caribou hair and dust, washed the floorboards with steaming soapy rags, organized Abe’s paints, used the splitting maul to knock down the spike that froze in the outhouse. She had scrubbed all day, washing the outsides of mason jars, laughing excitedly, squinting nearsightedly into corners.

  Another time, two falls ago, before Freezeup, Napoleon Skuq Sr. came upriver in his spruce-plank boat. Nippy had a big eighteen-horse Evinrude. He was proud of it. He boated up every couple of years, his fall trip. Sometimes he brought a cousin, sometimes his sons, Junior and Caleb. Nippy wore a leather skullcap. His eyes around the edges were bumpy and yellow. He arrived drunk, spent the evening telling Abe how to hunt and trap, and traveled on in the morning. Within a few days he came back downriver, his prop dinged, the boat weaving slow in the first ice pans. Caribou legs poked over the gunnels of his boat. He spent the night again, and this time Nippy’s hands had a tremor as he pulled his Bible out of a cotton sugar sack. He spread it soft and sagging on his thigh and under the wick lamp preached about Jesus and sin and a bush that you couldn’t put out from burning. Then he told Abe some more of his hunting stories. He bragged about his son graduating from Mt. Edgecombe boarding school in Sitka.

  “I thought your son died,” Iris said softly. Nippy swung his wet eyes on her. “Maybe you thinking somebody else.” He was sitting on the bearskin couch, on the shoulder end, where the hair had worn the least. He glanced into the soup pot, served himself the tenderest fat short brisket bones. He scooped a plop of cranberry sauce on his plate. Iris stood up from the Standard Oil Co. wooden Blazo-box seat that pinched your butt and squeaked. She scraped her gnawed bones into the dog pot and went to fill kettles on the stove to heat water for dishes. After Freezeup, when the ice was thick enough to travel, word came that Caleb Skuq had been stabbed behind a bar in Juneau and died. No one told the whole story in front of Iris, though everyone in Takunak knew it, and they glanced at her differently.

  ABE HAD LEFT the unruly puppies, Plato and Figment. They were interested in my bloody nose. I hung around the dog yard, chopping out pissed-in chains and the third-of-a-drum dogfood cooker. The top was sharp and rusty where Abe had cut it with a sledgehammer and his piece of sharpened spring-steel. I ignored the bite of the cold and wandered in a fantasy of myself shooting a charging moose. Jerry’s pen pal wish-girl lay shrieking in the trail. Broken leg. He couldn’t get to her. Calmly I shot. The girl blurred into the dark-haired woman on the front of the JCPenney catalog and had no difficulty jumping up to kiss me repeatedly.

  Suddenly Plato sniffed. She barked, and with a worried tail stared north. A flock of redpolls shrilled up in the birch branches and vanished in a gust of small wings. Off the high tundra west of Jesus Creek slid the elongated black speck of a dog team. Travelers! It didn’t matter who, if we knew them or not, what they looked like. Or how much they ate, snored, farted—even if they spoke only Iñupiaq, or Russian. Only that they would talk and be company!

  The speck separated into seven dogs and came across what we called Outnorth Lake or Luck-a-Luck Lake or The Lake, depending on the season and the conversation. Enuk mushed up the knife ridge that formed a narrow bank separating the lake from the Kuguruk River. He kicked his snow hook into an ice-hard drift. His dogs flopped down, panting. I sank my hatchet into a dog stake and ran to his sled, gripping the toprails.

  “Hi, Enuk!”

  He gazed stiffly out of the frosty silver circle of his wolf ruff. He broke ice off his gray mustache and eyelashes. Then he grinned, as if trying earlier might have pulled hairs. He smelled of campfire and coffee. He took off his rifle and hung it carefully off the handlebar of his sled. His gaze flicked over the tracks left by Abe’s team. I stayed respectfully silent while he rubbed the frosted faces of his dogs and bit the iceballs off from between their hairy toes. It was annoying and white to talk too much or ask questions, especially when a traveler first arrived. Shaking hands, also, was a sign of being an Outsider. Enuk wore new tan store-bought overpants. On one hem was the red chalk of frozen blood. His sled tarp was lashed down, too tight for me to poke under without being nosy. Sled tarps had always held secrets, brought packages, presents, fresh meat, store-bought cookies. Old and ratty didn’t matter—sled tarps were the biggest wrapping paper of all.

  “When you leavin’, Enuk?” I asked finally.

  “Pretty quick.”

  “How come? Spend the night.”

  Staring north, he pursed his lips thoughtfully. He nodded. “Maybe gonna I spen’a night.”

  “I wish!”

  “If I know, I woulda’ bring you-fellas’ first class.” His squinted eyes roamed the snow-covered river, willows, and tundra, probing for the tiniest movement of life. He swung back to me. “Anytime they could get you.” I eyed his sled. What was he talking about? Bears? Spirits? “If they want you they get you, anytime.” He noticed my eyes on his tarp. “Ha ha, Yellow-Hair!” He kicked a fast mukluk at me.

  He unlashed the tarp and spread it open. “I get lucky.” He nodded toward the mountains. “T’em wolves kill moose young one. Not too far.” I didn’t follow his eyes. The wolf was silver-gray and huge, twice the size of Enuk’s huskies, its hair long and black-tipped. I petted the animal in wonder, feeling splinters of blood frozen deep in the fur. I recognized the clean dog odor. Broken ribs shone in a large bullet hole in the side of his chest. I saw the wolf stumbling, hearing his own bones grating, panting against death pouring into his lungs.

  I shook my head to dislodge the pictures.

  “Coulda have more, alright. Only thing, smart one in’a bunch. He let t’em others run.” He looped his stringed overmitts behind his back. Barehanded, wary of the blood, he kneaded the wolf’s thin lower legs. “Alappaa! Freeze. Hard gonna for tat way ta skin. I bring tis wolf inside. Wait for your old man.”

  ABE AND IRIS RETURNED without meat. We ate the skinny ribs Jerry had boiled. Skinny meat was a sign of a poor provider, but Enuk ate with relish. Afterward he skinned the wolf. When he finished, he folded the skin fur-out. On our floor the naked wolf grinned permanently in the weak lamplight, his teeth and tendons white against dark red muscles. The
stomach was hard, and fetid smells were beginning to come out. Enuk had only a little blood on his fingertips. There was a slit in the wolf’s throat. “Let his spirit go other wolf,” Enuk said. “Gotta respect.”

  “Do you like wolves?” I asked.

  Iris and Jerry peered over the tops of their schoolbooks. Their papers were spread on the wooden Blazo boxes that we made into desks—and also cupboards, shelves, seats, muskrat-stretching boards, and more.

  “They got fam’ly. Smart. Careful. I like ’em best than all’a animal. Your dad know. He make tat good picture. Gonna ta white ladies buy tat one more than any kinda wolf skin. Ha! Ha!” Enuk opened the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He flung the carcass into the dark. The furless animal slapped on the packed snow out under the chipped eyes of the stars. In the dog yard one of Enuk’s dogs barked nervously at the thump in the still night. An echo rolled back lonesome from the timber across the river, and the dog challenged it with three quick barks.

  “Yep, Yellow-Hair. Tomorrow you take your old man.” Enuk grinned. “Go out back way, hunt moose.” His eyes flicked to his knife, and I wondered what else he was thinking about and whether it was killing more wolves.

  “We might.” Abe smiled and looked shy about something. He wiped blood drips off the floor with a holey sock rag. His cheeks and nose burnt with red ovals from frostbite that day on the trail. Iris’s face was marked red, too. They hadn’t seen the right moose—a barren cow, a moose that would have fat meat and its hide fair for snowshoe babiche, sled washers, cold-weather mukluk bottoms.

  “We might look again tomorrow.” Abe folded the cardboard he had laid out for Enuk to work on. “You do a real nice job, Enuk.” Abe sounded as if he would have an impossible time skinning even a caribou legging. Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes, perfectly—better than any fox I’d ever seen skinned in Takunak. Their pelt was papery, difficult not to tear with the sharpened metal tube ichuun, difficult not to tear when turning the dried skin back fur-out. And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect to the animal whose life we’d taken.