by Seth Kantner
THE WOLF WAS TIED across the cowling of the snowgo, a pure and continuous brag requiring no words. I drove around the village, drunk on my luck, the sorrow of killing softening under a warm rain of admiration. I kept stopping beside strolling people, asking, “Seen Walkin’ Charley?”
Treason sat behind me on the seat. He was big and broadshouldered—a hundred and ninety pounds—and I was glad for my fancy shock absorbers. He wore an earband, Takunak knit into it, and his hair was trimmed short, flat on top. Dawna had cut it for him with electric trimmers. It was a shade browner than everyone else’s black hair. The girls went for his smile that faded away lazily, like he didn’t care what might be up the trail. Maybe he’d learned it from TV, or from watching his dad and mom and too much else disappear.
“TV’s broke,” he said. “Alaska Satellite is wrecked-up, guuq. Charley got jugs of One-Five. He’s selling for Crotch Spit fellas.” His Zippo clinked, a toy under his big thumb. “What I heard anyways.” He passed a lit joint. I drove one-handed and pinched it, inhaling. I’d smoked only twice and felt clumsy and obvious.
The weed mixed with the smell of wolf blood dripping and searing on my muffler. I squinted, trying to look tough. Smoke shot out of my mouth. Smoke—one thing Abe had not taught us to conserve.
“Think he’d trade a bottle for a wolf?”
One-Five sold for three hundred dollars a bottle. A wolf skin was worth five hundred. But that was to the old ladies. Ahead a figure appeared in the trail.
“There’s your teacher, Mr. Long Handle,” Treason said. “And that dog musher naluaġmiu. Hide the j.” I squeezed the joint out in my glove and stopped the machine next to my teacher.
“Cutuk! How’s the best student north of the Arctic Circle? My wife heard you bought that snowgo.” Tom Standle touched my shoulder faintly. He had wide-set dark brown eyes and red hair and was over six feet tall and skinny; when he sat on a snowgo he looked like bent branches. He wasn’t like the regular schoolteachers, trying to shoot the biggest animals, taking the heads home to snarl on their States walls.
“A wolf! You just get him?”
He’s trying to talk Village English? After all that bunk about prepositional phrases and dangling modifiers? I nodded, not trusting my throat. His face kept locking in front of my eyes, too close, then far. Then Abe’s face. If I said one word, he’d see I was stoned. Now the white guys were examining the wolf too much. They must smell the sizzling blood. They must think me cruel, roaring around with a shot-up wolf strapped across my snowgo like Jesus wired on the poles.
“. . .’s a gray one.” The dog musher, Ted Brown, was uttering. “I could have had five of those last week, if I wanted.”
I looked away, embarrassed by the bragging—taboo to a hunter. He had bulgy eyes and wore black canvas imitation mukluks tied at the knees over wool pants and a knit hat with long earflaps—good warm gear, but Outsider stuff. His hands were smooth strong hands. Newt at the store had said he was an ivory picker and a dog racer—new in the village—and had promised Nippy Skuq Jr. he’d teach him to pan gold and run a sluice box when summer came. Around the Native Cache woodstove, Newt had mentioned that the white man had thirty dogs and an equal number of guns. No one could quite fathom such excess. “What they always do with thirty guns?” Melt spat in Newt’s wood box. Newt smiled slowly. “They use ’em something to talk about.” Tommy nodded and spat. Newt eyed the rounds of firewood. Later he’d have to handle them and all that spit. Tommy plucked thoughtfully at the black hairs below his lip. “He’s from the Middle East, guuq. Wisconsin. He got not-much-hair wife. Always holler at her like dog.”
What had they said about my mother?
Now Treason stood up. “Silver wolf. That’s good one.”
“Oh? How you tell best fur? The long back hair?” Abruptly, the man’s tone had changed, gone to an overdone attempt at Village English so painful and common among Outsiders. He tilted his head. His hazel eyes were too agreeable talking to Treason. Native-worshiper! Suddenly I wanted to see Treason throw a punch into that white face. A tiny voice said, Your face is the same color! And you’re mean—you change your voice, too. I swallowed and wished there were a different kind of place to go in the hundreds of miles of night. Wished I could be a hero like John Wayne in the Western movies, mount my horse and clatter off to search creekbeds for Enuk. But that was stupid. The land was dark, ice, deep snow, and the size of the moon. A horse would founder. I’d have to eat it, warm my hands in its heart, and walk back here.
Mr. Standle didn’t notice that I hadn’t spoken. Hopefully, he wouldn’t start his Big Opportunity speech. All my graduates go to college for one semester then drop out. They all come home. None of them make it. What was “making it”? White people talked as if Takunak and the land were just a camping spot before college and the big shiny world.
Dawna and Dollie Feathers appeared in the glittering pool of streetlight. They wore faded jeans, puffy nylon jackets. Dawna was chewing gum. “Say! You get lucky, huh, Yellow-Hair?” Her voice was throaty and hoarse. The admiration in her eyes bounced around in my chest. I wondered what part of the cities Dawna forgot long enough to admire a hunter.
“You fellas gonna go dance?” Dollie said.
Treason swung his leg off the machine. He raised his eyebrows. “See you at gym, Cut.” He walked away, bored with too much talk. Dawna flashed a smile and hurried after him. In seconds they seemed far away, and close together. A wind was picking up. Snakes of snow smoked along the hard-packed drifts.
“See you, Mr. Standle. I have to go.”
He nodded. I tried to wave, but Dollie was giggling and gripping my arm. She climbed on the seat. She had never touched me before. Did this have to do with the wolf, or the weed? Her face dimpled with the laughter that seldom left her face. Maybe she had to laugh; her brother was Timmy, the village walking-impaired rock target. My face and fingers throbbed from the day’s frostbite. I hoped I wasn’t red under the streetlight. Or orange. I flattened my nose.
“Com’on, Cutuk!” She giggled. I recognized the smell of Dawna’s shampoo in her hair. “Let’s find Charley then follow Treason an’em to dance.”
Dance? They just wanted to jeer the way they had my whole life. Beat me up behind the gym. Maybe Dollie only wanted a laugh and a buzz. She had never spent a minute alone on the land. She didn’t care how it felt to find tracks, and follow them, until an animal appeared on the huge cold emptiness, forming those tracks. And then to race up the trail of that life to the very last track, and kill, leaving smooth snow ahead where there could have been a million more footprints if not for you.
I started the engine. “’Kay then. Let’s find Charley.” Anything to hold this slippery grip on friends. And erase the wolf that ran in front, snatching fleeting glimpses back.
We roared toward a place I hated, the physical and cultural center of the new village order—the gym.
NEWT´S OLD LOG CABIN was black inside as we shouldered through the racked doorway. Under the broken window a snowdrift glowed luminescent like a sleeping white dog. My eyes flashed with leftover light burned by the dance strobe. I tripped sideways and held onto Dollie.
“You okay?” Treason slurred. We all giggled.
Outside in the wind snowgos screamed past, the men on the machines drunk and searching for us, to buy or take the marijuana that we’d already smoked. They had cornered me in the cold orange electric light outside the gym. Maybe my stonedness showed the worst. I was uncomfortable—off balance, hands uncertain, eyes shifting—under the stares and glares and jokes. I had felt shocked loose of my past. People here would knock down their aana, beat a brother to mush, just to not be the only straight ones in this village while nearly everyone else was amped, baked, or buzzing. “Sell one joint even, you cheap honky fuck!” Nippy Jr. had jabbed his numchuks in my face. “We know you got.” Yesterday he’d asked me to help him fill out a Big Ray’s order blank. His brother, Elvis, and two other guys stood behind him against the gym. I traded them what
was left of Treason’s joint for a B9ES spark plug and a shove.
In the cabin, Dollie whispered, “I hope they don’t stop.”
Treason showed us the glinting outline of his knife. “Let’um.” His hands had dried blood—mine too—from skinning the wolf. We were good at it, and fast. I was better, but too dense to realize that Janet and everyone would hear in the morning of my trade for the rum. I fingered a cut on my knuckle. I’d skinned the mouth and knicked myself with the blade. Rabies! sprang into my mind as the saliva mixed with my blood. I’d wiped my hand on my jeans, shrugged. Worrying about a virus, in Takunak, was not cool.
I heard the squeak of the cap on my Bacardi bottle and the weak slosh left in the bottom as it passed. I pretended to drink. The smell made my throat climb. Treason glugged long on the fiery 151. He leaned forward and fell, laughing and knocking us all sprawling to the floor. The bottle rolled away hollowly on the uneven boards. In the dark Dawna and Dollie giggled. Jealousy tightened my face. Treason mumbled, “Com’on, where you . . .” He stumbled behind the partition wall with Dawna.
The wind gusted. Snow sifted in. I stood up dizzily and reached inside my jacket for Treason’s lighter that had ended up in my pocket. My eyes locked on the spark, blackness shot with spinning blue and orange chips. Somewhere, in this cabin, years ago, Newt had shotgunned his hand off.
Dollie brushed me. Suddenly she was in my arms. I put a hand up to touch her face. Smelled shampoo in her hair. Felt her soft throat and face. Dawna? Her lips found mine. My body dissolved into longing, leaving no cabin, no me, no last high school English class, no windblown Takunak. Now I was in the warmth, somewhere behind the back wall of reality. We tilted sideways to the floor. Our hands struggled with zippers and clasps. She pulled me down, and we were clumsily together, apart again, and finally together.
So this is it. This is everything. My shoulders shook, with relief to finally be part of the clan of people having sex, and remorse that I’d never learned to kiss first or hold hands. Under her clothes her skin was as smooth as plastic and hot, her arms strong and her tongue sweet. I had never been held like this, never felt surrounded by another person. As I traveled into the spinning strobing lights, I wondered, was it Dawna pressing against me? Were my elbow and forearm getting splinters from the same boards Newt’s blood had soaked into? And was there some debt there that had something to do with me? It didn’t matter. I’d wanted to hold Dawna’s hand and kiss her. I wanted a girlfriend and love. I wanted a girlfriend and to be Eskimo, and to be loved, but none of that lay on the boards of Newt’s old cabin. None of that.
TEN
DAY AFTER DAY caribou pass on the ice of the creek. Thousands straggle by in strings of five and ten and a hundred, stopping and fretting and checking the wind, always heading north. The methodical clicking of their hoof joints joins the canyon sounds of falling pebbles and plunking water. The spring smells, of warm rocks and spruce bark, meltwater and caribou hair and turds and breath, are sharp after the aromatic hush of winter. The night sun stretches long on the face of the mountain.
In the chill of the evening, a less-edible animal walks up the creek. The smell of this carnivore shouts danger. Up on a canyon wall a wolf watches. The wolf crouches and backs into her den. High in the rocks she is hidden, eyes in shadow.
Down below a man shuffles along the ice. He smells of smoke and dogs, seal oil, salmon, and himself. He comes without a machine, rare for a man. He carries no rifle. The wolf senses no hunt in his movements. She eases forward in her den, peers down. On the ice the man stops. He seems to sense her—his stance says it. His stare swings, probing the rocks. Near her paw, a tiny chip shifts and a pebble bounces away. A puff of snow cascades down.
The man jumps. His eyes lift. For the first time in her life the wolf locks gazes with a human. She stands as still as only a predator will, life focused in her powerful stare. The man backs away. An instant of fear tightens the air between them, then he hurries down the pale green ice of the creek.
The wolf paces the ledge, whining, whiffing the air for her mate, gone hours hunting or, now, maybe hunted.
ELEVEN
OVER THE COURSE of an hour the slice of moonlight eased across the floor and worked up the post of Abe’s bed. The white light seemed to slide on celestial rails designed with infinite purpose, and just before it slivered to nothing it reached Abe’s eyelid. He snapped awake. On Jerry’s bunk I narrowed my eyes, let my breath run long, and for no conscious reason pretended to be asleep.
Abe knifed wood shavings. He stacked kindling in the barrel stove and it crackled to life. He stood naked, the match pinched in his fingers, and rustled in the shelves for a stash of camping coffee, trying to avoid a cold morning trip to the cache for a new can of Hills Bros. He grunted in success. The match flicked out. The stove draft danced orange shadows on the walls.
I groaned.
“Alappaa. Got cold again,” Abe said cheerfully.
I rose and stood at our new glass window that Iris had sent. Cold air played on my thighs. Outside the land sparkled under a million moth wings of frost. “Thirty-two below? Son-of-a-bitch!” Abe didn’t appreciate cuss words. But I was twenty-one now and felt an infuriated need to prove something. “Guess I’ll leave my snowgo home today. Plastic parts don’t snap off the dogs.”
Abe slapped meat in the sizzling skillet. He scratched under his beard. “It’ll warm up, when the sun comes around. I figure in a few weeks we could go spring camping. Back in the Dog Dies. Once you’re done trapping.”
“I’m trying to catch one more lynx.”
I sat on the couch. It was soft and deep again with a new brown bear hide I had tanned with sourdough. I lit a candle and opened the automotive mechanics book to my weasel-tail bookmark—“Theory of Combustion”—where I’d been studying last night. The weasel tail was dried. The fur was black on one end, then pure white. The last few hairs were yellow, where they’d once attached to the ermine’s pee-sack. The book was overdue. It needed to be mailed back to Fairbanks with the rest of the monthly library box. I wished I had a car to tinker on. I’d taken my snowgo apart to understand the needle valve, magneto, wrist pins.
Abe examined a half-completed birch snowshoe on his workbench. “Lynx are close to shedding, huh? Geese will be coming soon. We don’t need the meat.” In the kitchen his fry pan started to smoke. He eyed his workmanship critically. The snowshoe was light, the wood pearly white with gray caribou babiche webbing shrinking tight as it dried. Somehow Abe memorized the intricate pattern for lacing the webbing.
“There’s plenty of lynx,” I said. “Prices are high. Geez, I’ll let him go if I get a shedding one.”
“Hmm.”
“Okay, I’ll pull the number-four jump traps.”
Abe hurried back to the spattering pan, peered in, and forked the steaks. “You’d be surprised, if you quit going to town and buying plastics, you’d hardly need money. I think—”
“Everybody knows what you think, just nobody except maybe Franklin knows why.”
I snaked my legs into my stiff jeans. Go for a long snowshoe, I told myself, or open a new water hole. Four more weeks and Iris would be home. Abe and I would get along again. We only needed to feel like a family. We hadn’t seen Iris since last spring. If they hired her to teach in Takunak, I could jump on the snowgo or hitch up my dogs and go stay with her. Or walk to the village in the fall. Qayaq in the summer. Maybe she could teach me to dance. I had done the right thing, waiting here and not bolting to the rumor and intrigue of the city.
Now if only Dawna would return. The beat-up valentine had ceased to emit feeling; now I’d been using it for lynx bait. Lynx were curious creatures, and, dangling on a string, glinting and twirling, Dawna’s valentine was too much to resist. The inside-out braille note on the magazineseed—from when I was twelve, before the Wolfgloves moved out of their shack—I’d wrapped in a plastic bag and buried under the moss and blueberry bushes behind the house. For years I’d searched and never been able to
find where I’d buried it. Its disappearance seemed a bad omen. All my memories of Dawna were threadbare and didn’t cause the undersides of my ribs to ache anymore.
Abe cleared his throat. “Ah, sorry if I was harping on you.”
“Huh?”
I couldn’t remember Abe ever saying sorry. He didn’t like the word. I glanced up. In the last years gray had mixed in with his hair; lines on his face had deepened to trenches. His thick neck was still red, but the skin was rougher and lines forked into each other. Two decades here, and more—one wife and two children leaving, a third roaming the hills like a porcupine-quill-filled brown bear. Abe hadn’t complained. His eyes still twinkled. He found new things to run through his fingers, to paint and chuckle about.
I sat on a stump and untangled the dog harnesses that needed repair. They needed sewing often. When the dogs were excited, lunging to leave the dog yard, they chewed towlines, necklines, harnesses. We sawed new puppies’ mouths with rope when we caught them chewing lines, and most learned from the terrible and excruciating lesson. The harnesses were greasy. One was store-bought, the rest sewn from yellow cotton or red nylon webbing. My hands smelled of sweaty dog butthole. My throat felt raw.
“Abe, sometime I think you’re like that Thoreau fella, living some back-to-the-wilderness dream. I’m not. It’s like I’m a species of one. For me this is plain life, and most of the time I feel like I’m breaking trail.”
Abe grasped the frying pan and stopped. He looked at his hand for a second. He hurried over and lowered the frying pan on the table. I washed with hot soapy water in the basin. Dumped the brown water in the slop bucket. Abe had the head of the dogfood axe tilted near the stove, toasting out a stub of broken handle. The blade was nicked from chopping bones so the dogs could get at brains and patiq.