by Seth Kantner
Often, Abe helped me make birch and babiche snowshoes that few in Takunak remembered how to make. Or one time he helped write a letter to the substitute president, Gerald Ford. But he would never pick up an axe like he was tough. Never talk or hold a gun that way. Never brag, “I’m goin’ after bear.” Any bear we got walked up on its own and still Abe didn’t want to kill it. Around travelers, Abe’s modesty trimmed off too much of the fat. Apparently things started getting out of balance back with his dad. Tom Hawcly had been a sport hunter, a menacing species to have in any food chain. He left our grandmother in Chicago and roamed off to Barrow to be a pilot, the owner of two Super Cub airplanes, and a guide for polar bear hunters. The story was exciting enough, and romantic—up to the part where they found him smeared dead on the sea ice. People along the Kuguruk River hated sport hunters and guides as much as they did schoolteachers. Frequently they were one and the same. I was thankful that Barrow was a long way north. And that people thought of white people as having no relatives.
Enuk finished skinning out the paws. He talked of shooting his first wolf when he was ten. His dad had taken him to check a tiktaaliq fish trap. A lone wolf was there on the ice gnawing yesterday’s frozen fish blood. The wind was behind the wolf. Enuk’s father handed him the rifle.
I listened to Enuk’s low voice and lusted to gun down a whole pack, to stockpile prestige. Somehow, I had to learn to stop worrying about wolf pain. Abe had to stop molding me into an unhero.
Abe slapped his pants, fumbled in his big pockets for tobacco and papers. He glanced over the table and workbench, and eventually gave up. To Iris he said, “Otter, boil water? When Enuk’s washed up maybe you’ll make a splash of tea?”
Iris set her math book on the wood box. She smiled at Enuk. The frostbite was pretty across her cheeks and nose. “Nine times eight, Cutuk!”
“Huh? Seventy-two.”
“Twenty-one times eleven.”
“Two hundred and thirty-one.” My thoughts softened; I pictured happy otters playing, sliding along day-old ice, stopping to nuzzle each other.
Iris dripped the dipper on my head as she danced barefoot toward the water barrel. She peered close, to focus out of her weak eyes. “Cutuk? Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”
I flicked her leg. The religious poster—the one Abe tacked out in the outhouse, the one the Gospel Trippers had left when they passed through last winter—said a family was supposed to say it: “I love you,” I whispered, at my hands, too softly, the only time in my life. Iris, with her black hair and surprising blue eyes, full of smiles where I had storms, she never heard. She was in her own thoughts. What were they? I should have asked, but kissing, saying the word love, and talking about feelings weren’t what Hawclys did, and I was embarrassed and went outside for a few minutes in the dark, to stand barefoot on the snow and listen to the night beside the naked wolf.
THE STOVE DRAFT FLICKERED orange lights on the peeled poles of the ceiling. The orange melted through my eyelids to clutter my dreams with flames. Pitch smoldered, sweet and resinous on top of the stove.
Enuk lay on his qaatchiaq. His legs stretched out of sight under the table. Iris’s black hair curled across my face. I brushed it aside and pulled our pants and shirts under the covers to warm them. I gripped the corner of the sleeping bag tight to keep the chilly morning out. For years Abe had promised to order me my own sleeping bag. Like Iris’s glasses, it was another thing we’d have to go out into the world and find for ourselves. Iris took up more room this winter. She was bigger. Her breasts were growing, disconcerting to me when I accidentally brushed them.
“You elbowed me really hard in the eye last night.” Her voice was sleepy. She wore one of Abe’s flannel shirts, faded and thin. She smelled of flannel, candle wax, and soft skin.
Jerry’s bed was head to head with ours along the back wall. I wasn’t sure if he was awake on his caribou skin. It was dark in the room, except for firelight. Abe banged the coffeepot on a round of firewood. He swore softly when a chunk of frozen grounds crumbled on the floor. He toed the grounds against the wood box. Iris leaned her chin on her wrists. “Daddy slobbest. What will he do without us?” Her words made me shiver. Firelight glowed on his broad white chest and arms. He crumpled a painting, stuffed it into the stove. The stiff paper caught and flared. For cash Abe made furniture to sell in Takunak, and occasionally he mailed one of his paintings to Anchorage. Never his best. I lay fantasizing; he was an outlaw artist with a notorious past, his name would be legend in the places I traveled.
His bare feet rasped on the cold boards. Outside darkness painted the windows black. The roar of the stove grew, and frost in the safety dripped and hissed. Kettles began to whine. Enuk yawned and rose. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. His body was stout and muscular. The sun had never seen it, and his skin was smooth and pearly brown as a young man’s, except on his thick hands and face where weather and time had stained their stories.
They sipped coffee. Abe lit the lamp. He took the cannibal pot off the stove and put it on the table. We knifed out hot meat and gravy and ate it with bread and the frozen sliced canned jam that Enuk brought. A fly buzzed, one wing frozen to the ice on the inside of the window. The door was frosty around the edges. It was still dark outside. The dogs howled.
Enuk put down his cup. “Today I get old.”
Iris pattered her fingers on his shoulder, as unconcerned as if he were a shelf. “Are you a hundred?”
I watched her hand. Jerry was watching, too.
“Jan’wary twenty-one, nineteen hunnert an five. How many tat gonna? Seventy?”
“Seventy-one!”
“Not so many. I still hunt best than my son.”
“My birthday was the fourth,” I said, thinking how perfect it would have been to be born seventeen days later, on Enuk’s birthday. “We’re not sure we celebrated on the right day. That day was warm and it snowed sticky; you remember, was that the fourth?” I trailed off. The mouthful of numbers felt white.
Enuk ignored me and retrieved his frozen wolf skin from outside the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He eyed the skin for shrew chews. His leather pouch lay beside his mug on the table. It had sounded heavy when he plunked it down. “You fellas have tat.” He nodded at the can of jam. “Cutuk, t’em mooses waiting. You gonna hunt?”
I studied Abe’s face for a sign.
“It could be cold.” He sharpened his knife, three flicks on the pot, three flicks back. “Real cold.”
“I’ll put my face under the tarp when it freezes.”
“Tat a boy!” Enuk said.
DOWN AT THE RIVER it was minus a lot. My nose kept freezing shut on one side. The dogs uncurled and shook frost off their faces. They stood on three legs, melting one pad at a time while the other three quickly froze. Abe’s leader, Farmer, stayed tight in a ball, melted into the packed snow. Her wide brown eyes peered out from under her tail. The hair on her feet was stained reddish brown. She was a gentle dog. I coaxed her to the front of the team where she shivered with her back arched, tail under her belly and pads freezing. Abe and Jerry harnessed the big, hard-to-handle dogs. The snaps were frozen. The harnesses were stiff and icy and hard to force into dog shapes. Our dogs weren’t accustomed to company; even cold, they showed off to Enuk’s dogs, tugging and barking, tangling the lines.
A quarter mile downriver, Abe waved a big wave good-bye to Enuk. Abe geed the dogs north, up the bank below the mouth of Jesus Creek. The snow on the tundra was ice hard, scooped and gouged into waves by wind. It creaked under the runners. Morning twilight bruised the southern sky. Shivers wandered my skin. I yanked off a mitten and warmed frozen patches on my cheeks. The cold burnt inside my nose. My fingers started to freeze. I wondered what thoughts walked in Abe’s mind. I felt as cumbersome and alone as a moon traveler, peering out the fur tunnel of my caribou hood, beaver hat, and wolf ruff.
Farmer led toward the Dog Die Mountains. They were steep mountains, the spawning grounds of brown b
ears, storms, and spirits. They beckoned like five giants, snowed in to their chins. Occasionally we crossed a line of willows that marked a buried slough or a pond shore, and a dog or two would heave against his neckline and mark a willow, claiming any stray females in the last ten thousand acres.
“Is that a moose?” I said.
The dogs glanced over their shoulders, faces frosty and alarmed at my shout.
“Might be a tree,” Abe said softly.
My moose mutated into one of the lone low dark trees that grip the tundra, hunkered like a troll, gnarled arms thrust downwind. Abe had more careful eyes than I did; they grabbed details, touched textures, took apart colors. I slumped, cold on my caribou skin, stabbed by love for my dad. He didn’t have to say “might be a tree” when he knew. Plenty of the dads in the village would holler, “Shudup. You try’na scare everything again?”
On a ridge, Abe whoa’d the dogs. He took out tobacco and papers. His bared hands tightened and turned red. I looked away, pretending for him that they were brown. He was too naive to know that red fingers were not the kind to have. The smoke smelled sharp in the smell-robbed air, comforting. The southern horizon glowed pink and for a few minutes a chunk of the sun flamed red through a dent in the Shield Mountains, like a giant flashlight with dying batteries. The snow glowed incandescent. I sprinted back and forth, melting fingers and toes. Abe glassed the land.
“Hmm. There she is.”
Through the binoculars the moose stood silhouetted, black as open water. We mushed closer. A deep moan floated on the air. Abe braked the sled. He shushed the dogs. They held their breath, listening. Then the pups yowled and tugged, the scent stirring their blood.
“Must be that cow missing her calf,” Abe said.
“They can sound like that?” I’d heard loons laughing manically, the woman-screams of lynx, ghoulish whimpering from porcupine, but I hadn’t heard a mourning moose. I was proud of Abe, proud of his omniscient knowledge of the land.
“Never heard anything like it before,” he said, pleased.
We jounced on.
“Abe, why do you think greatness is bad?” My question startled both of us. I stiffened, mortified. He snapped ice off his mustache. “I mean—. Burning your best paintings. And acting like you don’t know how to hunt when travelers are bragging.”
When Abe spoke, he used his historical-problems-with-the-world voice. He had a degree in art and history; Iris often teased that his degree was history. “This book I’m reading, the author argues that our heroes aren’t heroes at all and have traditionally—”
I stopped listening and watched frost-laden twigs pass. Abe liked to mull things over until he got them complicated. A discussion with him was like rolling a log uphill in sticky snow. Ideas glommed on. I started to offer ten-year-old facts, but the dogs sped up and we dropped into a slough and lost the trail of the conversation when the team piled up on the leftovers of the calf moose. Backbone, hair, hooves, and the head with the nose and eyes chewed down, all scattered in a red circle. Fine wolf trails and deep moose trenches mapped out the battle.
The dogs bit at the frozen blood and woody stomach contents. Abe bent, careful not to let go of the sled handlebar. He touched a clean wolf paw print. “Soft,” he mused. “Been back to finish her up.”
The dogs raced west, up a narrow slough. “Abe,” I whispered, “should we maybe not shoot that ma moose? She’s had enough bad luck. Didn’t you want to shoot a barren cow, to be fatter?”
I wanted to get out of the overhanging willows before she charged. The snow was soft and deep. Anyone knew moose were more dangerous than bears. Especially on a dog team. As a child, I had been petrified during the night with fear of a moose dropping in our ground-level skylight. The thrashing black hooves would crack our skulls. The wind would sift the igloo full of snow. Shrews would tunnel under our skin and hollow us out, and when travelers found our bodies we’d be weightless as dried seagulls. Abe nourished the nightmare, shrugging, conveying the impression that, sure, given time, my prophecy was bound to come true. Abe was that way. Realistic, he called it.
He ran behind the runners, dodging willows that tried to slap his eyes. He panted over my hood. “Might be the only moose in fifty miles that doesn’t care either way.”
I knew I could argue with him, and he’d leave the animal. He’d welcome the discussion—and the chance not to kill. I shut my stiff lips. Willows whipped past. Abe climbed on the runners and rode. He cleared his throat and whistled encouragements to the dogs. I squinted in frustration, thinking, Now I’m definitely not going to get to shoot.
“My parents split up after the war,” Abe said. “People didn’t do that back then. That-a-girl, Farmer. Haw. Haw over. I was thirteen then.”
In the sled I stared at my mukluks. Shocked—not that his parents divorced, but that he was telling me. His past was always as distant as the cities.
“I came home from school one day, in trouble with Sister Abigail for saying I trusted animals more than people. Dad’s flannel shirts were all gone from the floor and the backs of chairs. I knew without those shirts, he was gone. He went off hunting fame or fortune, I guess.” Abe sounded like he was telling himself the story, too. I stayed silent, pretending indifference. Those seemed to be the manners I’d been taught; I just couldn’t remember learning them.
“Even in Barrow, I usually drew animals instead of shooting them. I would’ve liked to be a hero. Of course I wanted to be one. It just felt . . . phony. Wearing the clothes. Strutting and flexing. Shooting some poor creature. It just wasn’t me.”
Had he told Iris this yesterday? Probably not; she didn’t have my mouth that had always wanted to know how to be someone else.
“I propped the Super Cub for my dad, the day he crashed. Kind of a heroic thing to do?”
Willows slapped my face and the crook of his arm. Snow sifted down my neck.
“The engine sounded funny. I could have said something but Dad would have hollered to stand clear. Guess life’s like shooting a caribou, huh? You want a fat one, but if you end up with a skinny one, you don’t waste it.”
“People leave a skinny caribou, Abe. Or feed it to the dogs and shoot a sledload more.”
“You kids!”
We plowed out of the willows, onto a lake. I saw her across the ice; she stood on long graceful legs, huge black shoulders. The backs of her ankles were pale yellow; along her flank stretched a white gash in the hair. Figment hollered and lunged, cheering the other dogs on. The moose cantered into low brush. The brake ripped furrows in the snow. The sled slid across the ice.
“Stand on the snow hook!”
I jumped out with the hook. It bit into the packed snow. I held it down with knees and palms. The moose waded in deep snow, disappearing into the willows. Abe raised the gun and shot. The moose went down, and WHOMP—the bullet hit sounded like an air-dropped box of nails. Fresh meat! I forgot my frozen cheeks. But not that I wanted to be the one to shoot. Abe wasn’t going to change. He didn’t believe it made any difference which hunter pulled the trigger. Since he was already an expert, of course he always shot.
A FEW YARDS FROM THE DOGS, I stood beside the steaming gut pile. Under the snow, the lake was solid six feet down, and I pictured lethargic pike and whitefish squeezed in the dark silence between mud and ice, waiting with cold-blooded thoughts for winter to go away. I felt strong withstanding the cold.
Up close the moose was alarmingly big. Abe and I loaded the huge hindquarters and butt on the basket sled. He hurried off to break willows, the springy sticks shattering like glass in the cold.
“Making stick towers to scare the ravens?”
“Get dry wood. I’ll start a fire.”
I discovered with dismay that one of us was staying with the remaining meat. Abe stepped away from the newborn fire and cut snow to clean his bloody knife.
I pretended to break the ice off my eyelashes. I peered about nervously. A couple of the dogs whined and tugged at the anchored sled, their fee
t and noses freezing, their hearts anxious to run toward home and dinner. The rest had curled up, conserving warmth. I longed to go, tented between the companionship of my father behind on the runners and the huskies panting faithful in front.
“I’ll try to make it back ’fore too late.” Abe planted the .30-06 stock-first in the snow. He stepped carefully, keeping his moosehide-bottom mukluks out of the circle of blood around the kill. “At home I’ll have to lash on the gee-pole. And my skis.” The gee-pole tied onto the front of the sled and Abe skied behind the wheel dogs—in front of the sled—and used the pole to steer when the load was heavy or the trail deep. I hefted the gun. The weight was powerful. The cold steel seared my bloody fingers and I knelt and thawed them in the pool of blood coagulated in the moose’s chest. I wiped my hands on the coarse fur, slid my mittens on.
Suddenly all the dogs held their breath. Nine pairs of ears swiveled north. Abe and I turned. Across the distance floated shivers of sound: wolves howling. Abe straightened up bareheaded. His hair, aged gray with frost, slapped me with a glimpse of the future. We scanned the horizons. Finally, he took off his mittens and cinched the sled rope. Abe hated loose loads the way he hated whiny kids. “Nice to hear the wolves,” he murmured. “Country’s poor without them. Cutuk, it means there’s other animals around.”
I shifted, uncomfortable with him using my name. Abe had heard and seen hundreds of wolves over the years since he’d been a teenager in Barrow. He didn’t shoot them; why did he care so much to see more?