Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  Plato raised her muzzle and poured a perfect howl into the frozen sky. The other dogs joined in a cacophony of yips and howls that swelled out over the tundra. “Shudup!” Abe growled. He whipped the billowy gut pile with a willow. It made a hollow crack. We’d empty the rumen and take it and the fat intestines home for dog food, second load. We’d leave the lungs, windpipe, stomach contents, and some blood that the dogs didn’t gnaw off the snow. The team sat, rolling their eyes apologetically.

  “Don’t hurry,” I mumbled, casual. I glanced down at the gun. Already loneliness was settling like outer space pushing down the sky. The arctic twilight would fade and Abe would be under the stars before he slid into our dog yard.

  He threw a caribou skin to me to lie on. Handed over dried meat and a chunk of pemmican with currants, dried cranberries, and caribou fat. “You don’t need to shoot any wolves. You hear? We still have a piece of a wolf skin in the cache.” His face twitched with sudden guilt for leaving. I opened my mouth to encourage the feeling, but he’d stridden back to the runners.

  “Okay! Getup there! Hike!” Away they went, the sled heavy and the dogs heaving with their hips out to the sides and their tails stiff with effort. In minutes they had disappeared to a black dot on the tundra, silhouetted by the orange horizon that lay along the south pretending the sun had been up half the day and burnt that strip of fire.

  I held my breath. Listened to the silence. The land at cold temperatures waited in molecular stillness; sound traveled far, though very little of it lived here anymore. My heart boomed. My ears filled with a waterfall of ringing. The land’s thousand eyes watched. I knelt and tried to concentrate on the fire and the smoke, sweet with the smell of warmth and company. A noise startled me.

  From a lone spruce on the far side of the lake a raven cawed. “Caaawk,” I answered. I glanced behind. The watchful bird cawed again, urging me to leave the fat meat to him. I saw him standing on my face, feasting on my eyes. I saw him on Abe’s face and I hummed quickly and fed the fire.

  THE PASTEL SKY HAD DARKENED. In the south a last strip of orange and greenish blue lingered. The walls of blackness grew and leaned close over my head and joined. An icy east breeze thinned the smoke. The night cold was a monster now, merciless, pinching my face with pliers, sneaking fingers under my parka. It didn’t seem possible to keep my cheeks thawed, and they froze over and over again. The flames sizzled the two-foot-long moose ribs I speared on a stick, burning the crisp fat while the ends froze. In the flickering light my pile of dry willow shrank. I scratched my neck to steal glances behind. The raven had gone.

  When the ribs were nicely burnt, I gnawed on the meat pressed between my mittens. I worked a bone clean, tossed it into the dark. Back home it was Jerry’s day to bake bread; probably he was sliding loaves out of our oven box in the bottom of the barrel stove, rapping the brown bottoms to hear the hollow done sound. I wished for a hot slice, and walls behind my shoulders, and Iris’s teasing squeezes.

  Jaws crunched a bone.

  I dropped the rib and snatched the rifle. The dark was made of dots, walls of eyes. A scream tore the night.

  A fox! Was it rabid? I hissed out a hoarse fox bark. Silence rang back. I barked again. To the left I heard a soft thump. Then running feet and the quick sounds of a chase. My stomach tightened. The wolves had come!

  If the fox was crippled the wolves would eat him. I wished bad luck on him until I remembered that Enuk would say he could wish the same on me. Above, aurora wavered, green smoke ghosting in the dark, quick pale brush strokes, the bottoms tinted pink, twinging up in the black. The fire had sunk, hissing and steaming down on the lake ice. I knelt forward to salvage some coals. Smoke stung my eyes. Snow squeaked. The darkness moved into shapes. Slowly, I turned my head. Behind stood more.

  The chik-chunk of the rifle loading sounded as loud as river ice booming. I aimed over the dark shaking sights. My thoughts scattered down terrified trails. The pack couldn’t have forgotten that a man had shot one of them yesterday. Now I would never get to be Eskimo, or see a 747, or know for how many years President Nixon had to go to jail. I tried to place myself in a future story to milk heroism out of my bad luck, but all I saw were clumps of bones and yellow hair. A voice I hadn’t heard whispered, “Shoot! Shoot!” I gripped the gun. I was ten. My chance to be Enuk! People in the village would know it the next time they teased, “Catch any weasel in your trap, Cutuk?”

  The steel trigger froze through my fox mitten liner. I yanked back. The gun lurched. The black wolf I’d aimed at sniffed his paw.

  The safety. I flipped the lever. Now Abe’s disappointed face floated in the way. I looked over the barrel, tried to aim. The northern lights had dimmed. It was harder to make out shapes. Abe wouldn’t cuss or even kick things around. He would help skin the wolf. That was the thing about Abe, he’d help someone else before he helped himself. The thing about me was I couldn’t accept that all people were not like that. I saw Abe as a boy, searching for his dad’s shirts. I clicked the safety back. The wolf lifted his nose and howled. The pack joined.

  Fear and elation skated on my skin. Were they cheering? Or voting? I felt cruel for lusting to kill one. I had eaten; I had a warm wolf ruff on my hood—but the gnawing inside was jittery and big, a hunger to kill and be great for it. It wasn’t good, it was mean, but it felt glued all over inside me.

  The harmony ceased. The wolves stood, listening. Finally, miles east, upwind, across the tundra, I heard the snap of branches, and fainter still, runners squeaking on cold snow; eventually came a low mumble that I knew as Abe’s encouraging “Atta boys. Good girl, Farmer. Haw over now. Haw over.”

  The wolves circled, their claws tacking the hard snow. I aimed, barehanded now, my fingers burning on the metal. Under the green luminescence from the sky the wolf pack fanned out north across the lake. The animals I’d wanted to kill mingled and faded. That wolf—how many miles and years had he walked under this smoky green light? Walked cold, hungry in storms, wet under summer rain; walking on this land I’d always called my home. He knew every mountain, every trail along every knoll so much better than I ever would. And the wolf, I only knew him dead. I didn’t want to be an Outsider. Not here, too. How was it that I’d never considered carefully that an animal would know infinitely more about something than I could?

  The whisper of their feet disappeared under the sounds of the coming dog team. Two people pitched and clawed inside me. One whispered in awe: “They were so close.” The other mocked: “You dummy! Ten years old, same age as Enuk, and you didn’t shoot.” My fingers screamed in the pain of warming. I hunched over them, humming to hide the anguish. Abe had said to watch, but he was a painter. He read books and watched the sky too much. Enuk said to respect the wolves, but he’d have shot as many as he could. Even the last one. Under my skin, so well I knew, in the village “could have” meant nothing without the mantle of a dead animal. I wanted the stars to drop some silver stranger, an alluring alien like Wax Tiera, to tell me what I should think. But there was only the dark, the cold, the miles and miles of snow.

  THREE

  THE MOON IS BEHIND THE LAND, narrow and nothing to hunt by. The pack moves south in the dark, spread out in pairs and alone, toward the kill. Tension is in the pack, a missing sibling, and quick snarls. A wolf noses through a line of willows. Pale light ripples overhead. He drops onto a lake. Three big pups trail him. They stop often to nose each other and sniff mouse tunnels. On the lake they stand, their long gazes pointed at a dancing orange hole in the night, and the scent of smoke and blood and man and dog. The wolves circle. A fox streaks past. The pups give chase in the dark.

  The pack halts out of the flick of firelight. They sniff the man’s sweaty fear and the charred bones. They hear his quick breathing. The large wolf tastes something else, a scent sealed into his puppyhood and the loss of his mother. The scent makes him yawn in apprehension. After a time he leads the pack away from the danger of this kill. Past their own kill with man’s scent there now, too.
Away into mountains.

  FOUR

  BRUCE LEE ARRIVED in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. Mr. Lee’s style of instant gratification leapt the language barrier and left John Wayne piddling in the dust. He was an overwhelming success—the movie took in two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat.

  A week later, when, unaware, we mushed into the village, I felt the ramifications of Lee’s acceptance into Iñupiaq culture.

  We traveled to town two or three times each winter to deliver Abe’s artwork—furniture and paintings—and to pick up mail and gossip, gunpowder, powdered milk, and mail-ordered vanilla extract for snow ice cream. Necessities. We tied our door shut, iced the runners, and hitched up the dogs. We got on the trail as the first twinges of morning twilight painted the Shield Mountains. “Take your mittens off a minute,” Abe suggested, reminding us to go barehanded until our hands went numb, to shock the blood into flowing hot in our fingers for the day.

  Two bends west, the river was deep with fresh snow that wind hadn’t shifted and settled. Jerry, Iris, and I took turns spelling Abe. Two of us snowshoed in front of the team, breaking trail. The other ran behind. Only one of us got to ride on the runners, and often that person had to run, too. Frost whitened our furs and the dogs’ faces. I froze my face as much as possible, getting ready to look tough and hunterly in town. At dark the first evening, we cut a dead sapling for a ridgepole and green saplings for spruce boughs to sleep on, and pitched our wall tent where the winter trail abandons the river for three bends. Thoughtfully, Abe pressed the faded canvas of the tent between his thumb and finger. Iris leaned against my shoulder smiling. “He’ll be boiling bone glue, brushing size and ground on our tent,” she whispered. “It’ll only be a matter of time until he needs canvas and cuts it up to paint.”

  Jerry set up the five-gallon-can stove and pipe. We spread out caribou skins and ate blocks of pemmican and melted snow and threw dried whitefish to the dogs.

  The following afternoon, amid the clamor of hundreds of barking dogs, we slid into Takunak, hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners, wool long underwear and balaclavas. Log cabins and a few plywood houses hunkered along the north shore. Fish racks were pitched along the shore, half buried and glinting with tin coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers’ bad reputations.

  He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers’s house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some paniqtuq.” He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.

  The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.

  “Maybe the Jafco catalog came.”

  “Maybe.” I toed a splintered board, nails up on the packed snow. We felt sliced by hidden eyes behind cabin windows. Behind a cache—and heaped sleds, machines, caribou hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq’s. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington’s upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn’t know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we’d arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.

  Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You’ll have to write and thank him.”

  I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe’s, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather’s? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?

  “Abe!” Iris moaned. “Don’t you know we’re embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”

  “Salvation Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose-babiche sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it’s supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”

  “Yeah! Let’s!” Iris and I said.

  “Wait. There’ll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”

  I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.

  “Some kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”

  WE SLEDDED TO the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail, letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers’ handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.

  “Do well?” Abe asked.

  Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of paniqtuq. Abe’s blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.

  “All As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”

  “C in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn’t yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn’t argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought instead of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he’d thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris’s second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.

  I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school g
rade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.

  “Better off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don’t let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.

  “There!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They’re coming!”

  Who would they be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.

  “Hi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said hi and someone’s name, all as one word.

  “Hi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas’ mom?” a small boy asked.

  “When you go around here?” another boy interrupted.

  “Today.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn’t a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived out in what they called “camp”—but few knew even from what direction we appeared. Out of town simply meant out of touch, out of money, the opposite of lucky. No family from Takunak lived in “camp.”

  My cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don’t get chilled.”