by Seth Kantner
We ate meat in silence. Abe bit grease off the backs of his thumbs. He sat on the wood box and took off his sock and searched for a splinter that was stabbing his ankle. The heel had been darned with navy blue yarn unraveled from the arms of his old sweater that he had remodeled into a vest.
“There were a bunch of reasons I brought you kids here.” He sighed and stared out the window. “Some kind of birds working out there. Crossbills?” His jaw moved. He started to speak a few times. “Pandora’s box.” He chuckled. He glanced down at his rough swollen hands. “To the old Eskimos the land was everything. They knew the land.” His hands gripped each other. “I think I was thinking that there wasn’t time left . . . to let you grow up and find your own wilderness. City,” he rubbed his ears. “It’s everything about insulating you from the earth. I didn’t want to work some job just to afford to get out to the wilderness once in a while. You can’t have both. I like life close to the earth. It’s alive. The city made me feel wrapped up and a long way from myself. Heck, maybe I’ve just been selfish!” He smiled his big beautiful straight-teeth smile. He worked his sock back on and folded the cuffs of his pants into his socks. I glanced away, faintly embarrassed—nobody since George Washington did that with their socks.
He rose and fiddled with the draft on the stove. “A part of you maybe is going to always be across the river from other people. You might be in for hard times. People believe in city. They call it ‘the real world.’ Won’t be surprised if you’re not able to do that.” He sounded curious, not sorry.
In the crook of my thumb I pressed my nose flat. It didn’t seem to be flattening. A thought flashed in my head: Abe would cry if he knew what I was doing.
There was a pained look to his eyes and in the lines disappearing into his beard. A mouse rattled a spoon on the counter. Abe glanced at it. “My dad poached polar bears,” he chuckled, “his proximity to nature.”
He had never said “your grandpa.” As if he had always insulated us from that man.
“He landed his hunters and drove bears back to them. And he was certain no one loved the land more than he did.” Abe glanced into my eyes. It was hard to look into his powerful deep blue gaze. “To prove it, he took all sorts of pride in ignoring laws. Danger, too. That day, if I’d told him his engine sounded wrong, he’d have said, ‘Stand clear! Go play with your pansies.’ That’s what he called my pastels. Said, ‘You’re gonna end up in Paris, painting pansies.’”
Abe laced his mukluks. They were soft-bottomed, cold-weather mukluks with black and red yarn ties at the top. Janet had four-braided the ties. “Pansies are tough flowers. They survive wind and being frozen. People don’t give pansies credit.” Abe stood. Just like Enuk’s, his story was over when he got tired of telling it. Or maybe he didn’t know how to tell it. He was a painter. I played with my knife, breathless to know more, but under the weight of some childhood prohibition. Maybe when Iris came she’d be different; maybe she’d ask questions we’d been inured not to ask.
“Pansies,” I murmured softly.
Abe didn’t say anything. Again the mouse rattled spoons. We glanced up and laughed together. In that moment, me hunched at the table finger-nailing the empty skillet, him squatted on a round of firewood, taking his mukluk off one more time to research his sock for a splinter, we were closer than we’d been in my lifetime and half of his. Maybe during the night I’d advanced into adulthood, like a deep bruise that finally turned black and blue after the hurt; maybe now at last we were two men, not a dad and a kid. Still, I felt like a boy inside. Would that ever fade? Or did people just stop seeing it from the outside?
In the kitchen we heard tiny frantic hopping. The mouse that had been doing nightly turd dances on our bread had plopped into a mason jar. We grinned, thankful for the interruption. We peered down opposite sides into the glass at the furry face.
“You’re going back outside.” Abe slid his calloused hand over the jar. “Back to that life before white man and bread. Or was it white bread and man?”
Abe wasn’t going to dump the mouse in the slop bucket or bonk it with a piece of kindling. I realized that I wasn’t going to, either.
THE COLD SPELL BROKE, and in the last days of April our sod roof began leaking. We had dishpans and pots spread, pinging under the tea-colored drips. Iris had sent a wave of exhilaration in front of her arrival; we were lighthearted as we carried grub boxes and sleeping skins down to load on our sleds. Abe chuckled. “Drips, that’s spring telling you to get outside. Bears will be getting the same message.” We laced on our mamillaks. They were skin-out mukluks, sticky and yellow-black with old seal oil. The grease waterproofed the seams and protected the caribou-skin tops and sealskin bottoms from being ruined by water and slush.
Down in the dog yard, the dogs stretched, trying to lick the oily skin. We hitched up after midnight. Abe examined his leader’s feet. She often had foot problems. She had pink pads; racers now claimed that dogs with black pads were tougher. Abe walked up to the house and untied the rope on the door. He came out with medical tape and bacitracin and bear fat, and rubbed it on her pads and taped his old socks on her.
The icy night crust ran hard in all directions. Abe geed his dogs for the steep mountains in the northwest, and I let my team follow across the rasping snow. A red fox sat and watched us leave. They were unafraid in spring, mating, and often mistaken for being rabid. Three moose stood across the river, heads high, curious. Ptarmigan rattled in the willows. The air was rich with tundra smells, and peaceful, and half a mile of silence stretched out between Abe’s team and mine. Caribou trails veined the tundra and herds poured out of draws and raced away in front of our leaders. Ravens chuckled and echoed their secrets of death and food across the distances. My heart grew as the Dog Dies towered higher in the bright night. Somehow I forgot each time how much I loved mountains. They were friendly giants, transforming with the seasons, not a grain of judgment in them.
I ran only five dogs now. Ponoc, with his misspelled name, like mine, had died after a moose kicked him in the jaw, and last spring I’d had to shoot Figment. His testicles were pink and swollen from freezing for so many winters, and irritability kept him picking fights and growling through the nights. I walked him out on the tundra and he padded along, the same floppy-eared shambling dog whose only ambitions had been food and to slip his collar once in a while and maybe get laid or chase rabbits. Figment had never taken offense at getting drifted over at night or curling up in harness and waiting while I checked traps or snowshoed after caribou. Each sled dog developed a personality of its own, like a friend, and when I tied him to a tree he sat painfully, and patient, and when I pulled the trigger, all the memories of my friend flashed and cracked and the death in his eyes was that unearthly creature.
I stood on the runners. Looked at pictures in my mind. How had Enuk shot all the dogs in his team in that storm how many lifetimes ago? Far ahead, Abe stopped in front of a towering slate outcropping, an island in the tundra just before the shore of the mountains. He stomped in his snow hook. When I pulled up, he’d already cut poles and laid down sweet-smelling green spruce boughs to keep our qaatchiaqs off the snow. He was tying knots that were quick to untie, pitching the white canvas wall tent, using a dead sapling for a ridgepole so pitch wouldn’t mar the fabric. I chained out the dogs. Got a fire going. On sticks we roasted caribou leg bones that we’d boiled earlier. The sun came around the eastern summit and warmed the morning and our shoulders.
ABE SPENT THE DAY IN CAMP, watching birds and sketching. I climbed the peak behind our tent and came down in the late afternoon, bushed, damp, and chilled. I hunkered close to the fire, letting the frozen legs of my overpants steam. Abe moved around the sleds, tossing dried salmon to the dogs, checking their feet, patting their heads. He folded the sled tarps closed. Coiled the harnesses and lines on the bed slats. Picked up our axes in case of a surprise storm.
He came back yawning. “Shoot a caribou tomorrow for dog feed, feel like it?”
�
�’Kay.”
“I’m going to climb in.”
We’d been up for nearly forty hours.
I poked the coals. Abe had moved the campfire onto a slab of slate with green branches underneath to keep it from plummeting down through the snow. The smoke stung. Burning mushrooms, or lichens. Or flies hibernating between the layers of stone. I felt tired, dizzy, and the mountain kept locking in my eyes, almost as if I were stoned again.
“Make another pot of coffee, if you want to stay up and dry your stuff.” He knew I liked to push myself to see how long I could stay up in the endless day of spring. A chill was settling. A portion of my brain kept pitching over a cliff into sleep. I retrieved my stiff frozen gloves from a stump. Laced on snowshoes.
Behind the rocky mound where we camped, a canyon twisted up the narrow valley. I snowshoed into its mouth. I’d been here before, but something else felt familiar about this creek. I sniffed the air. A north breeze fell off the slopes and a bundle of alder seeds rasped across the hard snow, sailing behind the curled skeleton of a leaf. High on the precipitous walls, clumps of brush and a few wind-bitten spruce clung to the rocks like sentries.
The creek ice was firm walking, rippled with pearly frozen overflow and wet on the surface. I left my snowshoes wedged in a split fallen boulder. It wasn’t wise to dampen the babiche by walking in water. Trenched caribou trails braided up the sides of the mountains. In the orange sun bowls high up toward the pass, I saw a string of dots—caribou, or possibly a pack of wolves—climbing north.
After half a mile the canyon narrowed and made a sharp bend. No sun or wind found its way down here. The air was motionless. Seams of quartz protruded from the gray slate cliffs. Tundra moss draped the rim of the rock. I stood for a moment, listening to my heart boom. A shiver rolled over my skin. Suddenly I was awake. Far under the ice, water gurgled. I stepped a few paces toward the shore, in case the ice collapsed.
My hair rose. At the top of the rocks, in a fissure under an overhanging slab of slate, the hollow black eye of a den stared. I hadn’t brought a rifle! A sensation breezed through me, a recognition of this as an exact location, here on the ice and tonight, where my trail might end. Creatures that my legs couldn’t outrun, my hands couldn’t scratch, lived on the land. Hunting food, and proximity to other very different and very wild hunters—maybe this was the “alive” that Abe spoke of. I loosened my sheath knife and in my pocket fingered Enuk’s carved bear, as if it might offer protection. Enuk poured into my mind: thick laughter, thumb and finger pinching a chunk of boysenberry jam, teeth biting ice off his dogs’ feet. I stared around, as if he might appear.
On a ledge at the entrance of the den a cornice of snow cracked. I crouched. Down it tumbled, a cloud of falling frost. In front of me lay the snowy heap. Up in the rocks, in the shadowed mouth of the den, I saw the eyes of a wolf.
For an instant my bones were liquid. I glanced behind and backed away. On the shore, grown into the crotch of a small twisted birch, hung a section of green rope. I walked over, still watching the wolf, and reached for it. The nylon parted, sun-shot, dusty, and destroyed. I hurried down the canyon.
ʺCUTUK!ʺ
I jolted awake, stiff and afraid.
Abe leaned in the tent flaps, a thumb in his suspendered overpants. Behind him a fire crackled. “Brown bear coming over. You like to see her before the dogs holler? She’s got spring cubs.”
“Yeah. Bear. ’Kay.” I fumbled for my clothes and laced my mamillaks, glad nobody was asking me to spell my name.
Outside the tent, Abe nodded in the direction of the canyon mouth, not alerting the dogs by pointing. A hundred yards away, brown humped shoulders appeared. Suddenly a wide blond body stood. The bear’s head swung, testing the air. Cubs bounced into view: one golden, one brown. Plato raised her muzzle to the east and sniffed. In the past year she’d cultivated a hearing loss, a combination of true deafness and old-dog obstinance. I picked up a stick. Plato swiveled west, still sniffing. Three dogs lunged up, barking. The other nine rose and only growled and whined.
“Shudup.” I hunkered down and advanced with the stick.
“Ssssst.” Abe hissed. He nodded, satisfied. “Never know with new pups, if they’ll holler at a bear. Farmer was always good at letting us know one was around without going crazy.”
The cubs shimmered in the sun. They stood, curious, one supporting itself on its mom’s massive rump, the other with its claws on its sibling’s shoulder. The family stared, open-faced and curious.
Abe leaned against a melting-out rock, sketching with charcoal on a cardboard flap. His rifle hung in the crook of his arm. His face was tanned and content. The bears settled on all fours, turned, and ambled toward the canyon.
Watching the adult bear’s fur ripple, I couldn’t help thinking of how happy Janet would be to have some bear fat, and fresh bear meat. “Be fun to have a young’un,” I uttered.
“A kid, or a bear?”
“What? A kid? No! A bear cub.”
“Could be lot of trouble.” Abe shrugged. “You kids were fun.” He smiled at memories. “Hard to believe Iris is coming home from college.” His glance dropped to his sketch. The bears dipped from sight. I whipped the side of the tent a last time to remind the dogs to relax and be quiet. Abe poured coffee out of our blackened Hills Bros can hung with a wire bail. He sprawled on a caribou hide to enjoy the morning and his sketch. I melted snow in another can to make oatmeal. The air was warm, the snow softening. It was going to be a warm day, too hot to travel. We were stuck here until it cooled off. The first geese could fly over any time now. We’d watch with watering mouths and I might try a long shot with the rifle. First Goose was the grandest season of the year, a change after hundreds of days of caribou meat.
“Makes the day feel good,” Abe commented, “seeing bear. Wonder where her den is?”
The night sprang up behind my eyes. I poked through images, trying to winnow out what I’d been scared of, trying to decide how to ask Abe how much he believed in spirits and other things not in my high school science books. I fingered scars on my hands, resolving to try to stop thinking about Dawna and people, and to learn more from Abe, more about the land, and my father. Something could befall us.
“You and Treason ever find that bear den you were looking for, below Takunak? Few Novembers back?”
I poked sticks into the fire and shoved my boiling oatmeal aside. I eyed the side of Abe’s face. “No. I voted, though. We were in town that election day.”
“I always use absentee ballots. It’s simpler.”
I stirred the pot. “Pretty simple in town. I voted for Reagan.”
Abe rumpled his sketch.
He flipped the cardboard at the fire. He rolled over on his back and closed his eyes. He looked old with his eyes closed. There were veins above his lids that no one ever saw. As the cardboard burned, the bears stood out for an instant, every tiny line deliberate, flawless, the bears’ expressions curious as they turned silver black and curled to ash. What, I wondered, were you supposed to think when your dad could fling away on a piece of pilot cracker box more talent than you owned in all the cells of your body?
“I don’t know how America can worship its Western myth and stomach that actor, again,” he said. “He would pave the last wilderness. And sell guns and Bibles along the roads. Without wilderness, what will all the gold and silver or uranium be worth? It’ll be worth armloads of shit!”
Abe had never stated an opinion so indubitably. He’d been more an older brother—letting us feel and think and be whatever we chose. In the silence the oats bubbled and spat. “Saw a wolf up the valley last night,” I offered. “In a den.”
“Could be a female. She’ll be denning up to have pups. Any time now.” His eyes opened and sparked with interest. He leaned on his elbow. The sun was on his face. “Maybe we ought to move camp a little bit west?”
Around our fire lay a continent of wild land. I could speak any words I chose and Abe would listen because he was my best fri
end, but I was unsure of these questions inside. Dead-people spirits, intuition, and fears were another set of feelings Hawclys didn’t talk about. And all I said was, “Maybe so.”
IRIS LEAPT DOWN out of the Twin Beech. She wore a blue windbreaker over a heavy sweater and the color made her blue eyes glow. Her black hair was long and curly with a thin earband underneath. Her face was pale and red cheeked. She ran up and twisted her arms around my neck. “Cutuk! I decided you wouldn’t be here. You can still travel? The trail’s not melted? You brought your snowgo, not the dogs?” She messed my hair. “Quit smilin’, boy,” she said in Village English. In the crowd around the plane people chuckled. Iris hadn’t changed. “Say something!”
“Shuck. I’m glad to see you.”
“I know that.” She pointed out her luggage and thanked the pilot for the flight. “If you ever get weathered-in and need a place to stay, ask around. Probably I’ll be living here.”
He struck up a conversation with her, enraptured, like everyone, by her cheer and bright beauty. I hauled her duffle bags to my sled and wrapped them in the tarp. She ran up behind. “This all? Okay to freeze?” My voice sounded too everydayish—I wanted Iris to know what her coming home meant.
I started the snowgo. She climbed on. In my ear she said, “I got the job.”
I kept my eyes on the trail. Strangely, I didn’t feel anything in my stomach, my place of thrill and anticipation. A quick twinge of fear yanked the bottom of my brisket. Fear for Iris, surviving the Darkness and the drinking of this village.
“I’ll tell you the whole story at home.”
“I have stuff to tell you, too.”
We were pulling up to the Wolfgloves’ house. Lumpy opened the door and strolled out, back from his most recent outing to jail. He had lost a front tooth. His arms and shoulders bulged from weight lifting. He was left-handed and the fingers of that hand were gnarled, like they had been taken apart and put back together wrong. An Arctic Cat primary clutch had done that for him. “Hi Iris.” He placed a cigarette between his lips. His eyes roamed her athletic body, his face empty of expression.