Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  Out under the wings, she held my hand and peered at the cable workings of the craft. The cable clamps were corroded and powdery. The aluminum prop was nicked, the fabric tattered. Suddenly I saw the plane wasn’t even blue and gold anymore; it was closer to gray and dirty yellow. Cheryl went on explaining ailerons, ground effect, angle of attack—things I’d been studying in library books. She ran her hand along the trailing edge. Her fingers were long and strong. “Extended flaps,” she murmured.

  “Is that better?”

  “Less air spillage. It’s for short takeoffs.”

  For landing on wolves!

  EIGHTEEN

  THE TUNDRA SHIMMERS VAST and white under the May sun. The scent of caribou drifts provocatively on the air, whispering of a herd hurrying north, of calves and pregnant cows—of meat after three lean weeks since the last kill. In the north, mountains serrate the sky. The final timber before the arctic treeline beards their slopes, and higher the speckled rocks and snow reach against the blue.

  The wolf drops out of a fluid trot and swings sideways to snatch stray sounds off the tundra. The wolf glows black as a hole in the day. In her blackness she has learned to walk warily and listen.

  A mouse-sized clump of snow settles behind the bole of a lone stunted spruce. A raven out of sight to the east caws over a thing alive. A drone that might have been an airplane drifts from beyond the southern mountains. Another raven with a second and different voice speaks of the same life to the east. And the wolf trots again. In her stomach she feels the faint satisfied fullness of her young pressing under her diaphragm. The fullness is an illusion that belies an increasing hunger in her. Now only her shrunken stomach cries for food. Before the next moon the cries will come from a circle of short-faced pups, looking to her for a share of life. In the steep mountains to the north, she and her mate have a good den, safe in the dirt above a slate cliff.

  The scent of caribou grows until it swirls and titillates the fine membranes of her nose, giving the wolf energy, the scent a veritable food she can taste and draw strength from like the meat and blood to come. The instinct to hunt and kill rises in her. She breaks into a lope, swinging closer to the mountains with their narrow-walled tributaries and trees. This home is good; with the seasons the land ripens with game for those fast and hungry enough to kill. She moves in and understands the cycle of hunger and the hungry, always circling each other.

  THE SURFACE OF THE SNOW grows soft in the warm day. The wolf feels the heat on her already shedding black back and on her thin legs and nose. Behind her stretches a line of tracks shouting freshness to those who listen to the smallest whispers of smell. Her tracks on the white tundra shout also to all who hunt with eyes.

  The hair on her shoulders shivers a tiny subconscious shiver. Again she stops to listen. The drone, which had sounded like one of the many new drones in the sky, has changed. It swells and shrinks behind her—the gnashing scream of a snowmobile tearing across the snow. She bolts for the mountains. At seven years old, still in her limber prime, the span between her front and back feet measures more than six feet. She has been chased by the machine-hunters three times before, always part of a scattering pack. The first time seven out of nine were killed. A bullet still rides, an aching cyst in her hip. The hunter had chased her over mountain ranges for hours before it gave up, to return the following day and search again. The second encounter, the pack lost none; the third, her mate had been shot.

  The wolf’s legs recognize fear.

  One smooth mile from the timber it breaks over a rise behind her. She begins weaving. None of her litter mates had known to zigzag. Or climb for the rocks. They didn’t have a second chance to learn. Now the machine-hunter comes, an impossible creature moving twice the speed of any animal on the tundra. It screams past, striking her flank a glancing blow. It slides to a stop between her and the mountain. She flees left—toward a line of spruce marking a creek. A hundred yards short of the trees the machine catches her again.

  She lunges sideways. Again it stands in front of her.

  She runs for the mountain. In front of her, snow chips and sprays. Behind come fast popping and the wail of air being torn aside. A bullet pierces her neck, cutting through the flesh. The land tilts up and she reaches with the last strength in her for the mountain.

  She reaches the peak of the mountain. Runs down the far slope. Up a second mountain. The snow on the south-facing slope sluffs soft and deep. Scattered spruce pluck shedding fur out of her sides. Again the machine-hunter comes, still untired. Bounding effortlessly up the slope. Smashing like an uphill avalanche through brush and small trees.

  It hits her square, flipping her upside down, crushing her under the weight and blackness of its huge ripping foot. Sky and blood fill her retinas. She rolls to her feet, hurt, staggering upward. Suddenly a cliff drops away in front. She leaps into the freedom of air and death.

  The steep angle of the landing saves her. Stunned, she tumbles down a ravine, bouncing off rocks and trees. At the bottom she regains her crippled feet and runs again while around her whacks the metal rain.

  NINETEEN

  SUMMER SLIPPED IN under roily clouds from the sea. The geese had gone north without me. And Cheryl west, to Bristol Bay, helping her dad fish, and after the season, mending net and doing maintenance on their set-net boat. Lance went east to visit his mother in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I stayed, struggling not to be disappointed at my friends for leaving me in solvent, TV white noise, and the unsilence of Anchorage. One afternoon in August I stood scrubbing dishes in January’s sink, my thoughts pacing, solvent fumes in my conscience—if I still had one.

  Outside, Spenard Road growled with Lower Forty-Eight motor homes lurching into Gwenny’s Restaurant, here to do the Last Frontier. A black Toyota with a steel rack pulled in beside January’s truck, a pump shotgun in the back window, an eighteen-inch walrus usruk bone on the dash. The driver wore shorts. His legs and arms were tanned, his black hair sun-shot like a summer beaver’s. An expensive-looking camera hung from a strap twisted around his hand. I raced out of the trailer, wiping soap foam on my jeans. We stood eyeing each other like two sled dogs that might have once been litter mates. I hadn’t seen Jerry in five years. We were related strangers.

  “You’re big.” He stood a couple inches taller still—six foot—and thicker in the arms and chest. He stood different, slack and rugged, though still wary. His chin was black stubbled. He looked like a man; he’d left looking like Jerry. “Iris told me you were here.” Jerry kicked a rock. His tennis shoe was cracked and leaked toes, his T-shirt faded. “She’s a schoolteacher, isn’t that funny?”

  “They used to always be from the States, weren’t they?”

  “Got a job for you.”

  “You’re wearing shorts.” I discovered my bare foot, aiming at a spruce cone.

  “Goddammit!” January’s voice came from inside the trailer.

  “He’s heating goat’s milk,” I explained. “To 116 degrees to make his yogurt. It must have cooled or boiled over. Acidophilus is going to protect him from Martian intestinal viruses that are going to make the planet shit itself, guuq.”

  Jerry smiled at the Eskimo word. “I remember that wolf bounty hunter.” He squinted through his camera, focusing on me, or maybe the front of the trailer. His lips scrunched, red. One eyebrow showed over the corner of the camera. “He landed right after Mom started crying and her guitar got chewed.”

  “And he didn’t come back?” I asked softly.

  “He did. She went to buy a new guitar and go see her parents until the sun came back. Abe was supposed to take care of us. After the plane came back without her, I had to. Lucky we had a sod igloo. They’re way warmer than a cabin when you’re out of firewood.” He was nonchalant. The shutter clicked. The camera swung from his hand again. “Fairbanks is way smaller than Anchorage. Less people fresh from the States dragging along their Everything and lawsuits. Hey, I’m a contractor now.” His smile flashed and vanished. He hadn’t forgotten the old
way—humility’s role in luck.

  “I forgot how we used to talk. Remember, Jerry, we thought lawsuits were policeman clothes?”

  He laughed, careful. Jerry had inherited Abe’s closed-mouthness for the past.

  Inside, January opened beers. We hunched forward, elbows on our knees, and pushed wet lines up the sweating cans. We talked about Abe, building a cabin farther upriver. Jerry cracked a third beer. I sipped my first, waiting for him to say something, something like: How have you really been? Somebody show you how to talk City English carefully, so you don’t say “I eat a lot of meat” or “I whacked my stick on a beaver”?

  “Where’d you get the usruk?” I asked finally.

  “A Yu’pik laborer on my crew borrowed a hundred bucks. He gave me that as collateral. He sells them to the Koreans.” He pushed his hair back. The top of his forehead was pale. A grin streaked across his face. “Don’t they grind them up, January, for dick-hardeners?”

  January snorted. “Now-a-days that’s all them hunters chop off walrus, the three tusks. Whites ain’t allowed to hunt seals anymore, no polar bears. Marine Mammal Protection Act. Kid, when I take you flying we’ll head way up to the coast, you’ll see headless walrus washed up for hundreds a miles. They look like blown-up rubber gloves. Thousand pounds each. Native politicians scream foul if you don’t bow and call it subsistence. You boys ain’t even allowed one seal for mukluk bottoms. Dammit, don’t get me heated up.”

  My fingers strayed to my ugruk-skin knife sheath.

  Jerry smiled uncomfortably into his beer. “Want to go up to Fairbanks, work a month? The wages are close to Davis-Bacon.” He spoke casually, a boss asking an opinion. Sadness salted down. Weren’t we supposed to turn out like brothers in the movie Outsiders?—teasing, arm wrestling, ready to cry and die for each other.

  January stood and unwrapped the towel around his jar of warm gray milk. He nudged it. “Yog, you little friggers?” He slumped to the window at the end of the trailer, looked at the world outside, stooped and spat tobacco slime out the crack. Not all of it made it. “Gonna teach your brother to fly the Cub.”

  Why do you keep talking about flying? This is all the definition of dysfunctional, pretending chains and taxes don’t exist.

  Jerry nodded politely. He glanced out for the sun, the way Abe did when he was impatient. “So you like the city?”

  “It’s . . . okay. Hard to sleep at first. Houses are so loud. All the droning. Blowers and suckers and little motors. Like there’s constantly travelers coming. I don’t like crapping in the house. And the splash.”

  January shuffled in the kitchen, muttering, “. . . still Alaska. The kid’s gotta learn to fly.”

  “I hate the splash,” Jerry said. “Where I rent my cabin the trees are thick and I can piss outside.”

  “People don’t realize how much that matters.”

  “Nope. I’ll come by in the morning, ’kay? See if you want to go.”

  IN THE MURMUR of the night my loyalties slipped anchor. The more I weighed the decision, in all this roar and clutter my brother was one of the quiet things that did matter. When Jerry drove away, more years would go with him, maybe all the years we had left. January wasn’t flying anywhere. I felt invisible again in Anchorage without Lance and Cheryl. Even Ubaldo had graduated from mechanicing to join the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso. For a couple weeks now I’d been seeing Dawna, a seen woman. Seeing was an expression I stole from TV, without understanding it. Like sleeping together—which I knew we were not doing—it somehow shaved the truth of a relationship down to an enviable lie.

  But Dawna wasn’t admissable in my court as a reason to stay. Dave still existed on earth. “I’m going to leave him,” Dawna had said quickly, last night when I told her about Cheryl. “I’ll go back to college.” We’d sat in her car behind streaming windows in front of January’s trailer. She hugged her legs, resting her jaw on her knees. Rain typed messages on the roof. “I just can’t right now, I can’t.” She wiped her face on her sweatshirt. The wet left dark circles on the purple cotton. I leaned under the dusty steering column, searching for more wires that might bring her signal lights to life. The word can’t banged in my head like a cracked piston. “You can if you want to.” I arched upright and leapt out. Raindrops splashed down. I stumbled inside to greet the light and January’s hale words, while the wet night swallowed Dawna, with no signal lights and no license.

  Now I stacked library books to return: Stick and Rudder, The Art of Flying Skis, East of Eden, Ice Station Zebra, From Where the Sun Now Stands, The Right Madness on Skye. I wondered what books Lance read. What Abe was reading. I stuffed my duffle bag. I remembered Nippy Skuq, the Washingtons and Wolfgloves—suddenly throwing mattresses and pots and guns, kids and wife on a sled, or in a boat, leaving for the hot springs or the coast. Woodrow Washington Jr. handing his infant to Janet and hopping the plane to Fairbanks. Abe called it “Eskimo exit.” It came as a surprise to realize it, too, had grown up inside me. I called John at the garage and apologized into his gray silence. Dialed Dawna. Her phone rang and rang.

  I lay on the couch, then got back up and rummaged for paper. The letter I wrote to Cheryl didn’t mention her plans to go to college in Cincinnati—only said I missed her, it had rained since she left, how soon after the boat was repaired would she return to Anchorage? The note to Dawna said I was leaving in the morning. Be gone a month or so. Dave, the blow-dried Safeway cottage cheese reshelfing expert, could frame it next to his employee-of-the-moment award and flick beer caps at my fall-down Iñupiaq name.

  IN THE DREAM Enuk sat on leaves and sticks on the bank above Jesus Creek. He sat skinning a white wolf, occasionally shaking his head. His face was frostbitten. Dawna hid behind him staring into an upside-down Alaska Airlines magazine. A clump of white condominiums towered over our igloo. Cheryl and Lance and I knelt on the ice, probing the water hole with beer bottles. Tourists watched from the shore and pointed video cameras.

  “You ta one should gonna been drown,” Enuk commented. He tossed his knife in the air. The knife glinted, a 38,000-feet-up jet. The knife plunked into the water. Iris floated to the surface, slated with mud. Black holes gaped where her pretty white teeth had fallen out. I pulled the rags of her shirt down over her chest. The tourists rushed to steady their cameras. Treason’s Ruger Mini-14 rifle was in my hand. I clicked the safety and fired fast at the tourists, aiming for heads and hearts, like knocking down dogfood caribou for the winter. The booms lanced across the tundra, whomping into bodies. My aim was true. But they kept standing back up—more closing in behind. I shuddered awake, gasping, clutching memories of the accident in Jesus Creek. Had Iris not survived? Was Enuk alive? Had his remains been found? I lay on the couch in the trailer night, afraid for my families, my skin as cold as creek water.

  THE DRIVE NORTH to Fairbanks took seven hours, a long time inside the vinyl-smelling glass box of a car. We talked, catching up on the years. Trees stripped by. Wind punched the car. I drove fast, exploring the limits of my learner’s permit, occasionally asking Jerry if I should shift up, or down. A sign read DENALI STATE PARK. “This tundra,” I said, “it feels like home, huh?” It didn’t quite. Inside a car was like watching TV. Home had wind and smells and birds arguing.

  “What do you think of it down here?” he asked.

  “Oh . . . it’s nice how everybody doesn’t stare, isn’t it? I like that. A lot of stuff, it’s a bunch of pretending, huh? You see the boards and good metal they throw away? Even nectarines, with one soft spot. Seems like we grew up the opposite. If something broke or got eaten, didn’t it seem like that was the last one ever?”

  Jerry’s elbow popped and he rubbed it ruefully. “People pretend they’re not animals. It makes them tired. So they pretend a whole bunch more. That makes them really tired.” He grinned and peered at his arm, equally interested in the conversation and his elbow. “The biggest heroes are the biggest pretenders. Actors. The big pretend story is it’ll-all-be-better-in-the-end.” He grinned, �
��It’s called heaven.”

  “Huh. Soon as I mention the Kuguruk, people want to know how to hurry up there to hunt ‘griz’ and sixty-inch moose. ‘Need to get my moose. Gruh, Gruh, Gruh.’ All manly—and what they want is the antlers? If they shoot something with big antlers that means their penis gets bigger? Why do they invent that kind of nonsense?”

  Jerry scratched in his ear with his little finger. He flicked the wax out from under his fingernail and didn’t say anything.

  “People say they wish they could go live in a cabin in the wilderness. Is that true? Why don’t they?”

  “I say I’m from Chicago,” he murmured. “It’s easier.”

  Motor homes were pulling over. I slowed. A large beaver hunkered in the road. It balanced itself with its tail and bared its teeth at tires.

  “Fairly orange guard hairs you’ve got,” Jerry said. “Better stay out of the sun.”

  I steered around the motor homes and sped up. “Jerry, what’s a cheer leader?”

  “Cheerleader. One word. That’s those football players’ girlfriends who bounce during the game.”

  “Hey, did you know, Iris is trying to track down our mom.”

  He leaned forward, flicked on the radio. “She left us, Cutuk. Or I guess you don’t remember. She used to sing and give me toy trucks with little doors that opened. Then she just—just went.”