Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  “Later, when you was being borned, I flew back an’ stayed with Abe. One time, I seen Wolfglove do pull-ups with one finger on a spike pounded into your cache pole. Tremendously strong! He stayed with your family in the one-room. Drove your ma bananas. That guy wanted to figure out why a white man who could fly would live Out, in a way even Eskimos wouldn’t anymore. That bein’ Abe.”

  January put a kettle on the propane burner. He leaned against the stove, waiting, his hand resting on the grimy handle of the kettle.

  I sat on his La-Z-Boy and leaned back. I’d never tried his recliner before. With the TV on, this must be part of what they called “making it.”

  “One storm,” I mused. “Well. We got nine thousand dollars. What do you want to do with it, January?”

  “You’re spendin’ that chunk a change on your own narrow heinie.”

  “Actually, I was ready to throw it in the willows tonight. That or give it to a Texas kid.”

  “Maybe you best give ’er to me.” He grinned bad teeth.

  “Do people rent airplanes? I want you to fly me up north.”

  “Well . . .” January scratched his leg pit. He pushed out his lips, thinking and nodding, not able to keep from smiling a little to himself. He shifted the kettle. The water started to sing.

  PART III

  HOME

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE NORTH BREEZE falls off mountains and whistles down a valley. Curled leaves stir in the birches. Under the spruce boughs, dead needles release their grip and lance down. Snakes of snow smoke along the ice at the edge of the creek. The snow drifts behind tussocks, swirls into rocks and roots. It squeaks under the wolf pups’ feet, soft and powdery.

  The pups roll and kick their pantaloon hind legs in the air. They bite at their first snow. Slash upside-down noses into it, fill their eyes and nip their siblings. One by one they roll to their feet, shake, and follow each other, sliding clumsy and cautious on the shelf ice, until it cracks and drops them elbow-deep into the polished water.

  The male pups are as big as their mother already, silver giants, flashing long lips full of inexperienced ivory. They will play and chase and help very little when the first moose goes down. They will keep their tails tucked subserviently while they eat enormous shares. The female is smaller, her legs and tail and face and hair shorter, white with black tips on her guard hairs.

  Now the pups dig, claws ripping at the moss and soil, big paws flinging dirt and snow between their hind legs. They dig with playful energy. An animal’s old bones reel out of the frosted ground. The wolves mouth the bones. Pink tongues taste dirt, ball and push the bones out. They dig longer bones. White and green and pink, painted by moss and lichens and bleached by sky. The big pups struggle in a three-way tug-of-war over a piece of old dried hide, growling and raking each other’s eyes with muddy feet. The female sniffs the chalky bones and smells no food. She turns and trots up the slope, toward high rocks, and her parents and the scent of a ground squirrel.

  The wind blows up here. Snow squalls drape the broad valley, dragging the first curtains of winter, and the sun shines a bright hopeful face on the heavy clouds. The pup and her mother lick each other’s faces and ears. They lie down with their forelegs bent under their chests and watch the land turn white. The tundra stretches down the side of the mountain, rolls across hills and valleys, miles of distance, mountains and sky. Snow falls on the slate scree, covering wobbling leaves, sparse grass, squirrel skulls, and another season, painting a hue of hard beauty on the land, the wolves’ home, for a hundred thousand generations before any of the colors of human.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE FRESH FALL ICE cracked and the five dogs shied under a cutbank. In the snow and curled willow leaves under the bank, the team bounded along frozen humps of dirt, dodging stobs and dangling roots. The sled flipped on the ice. The rear stanchion snapped. “Gee! Whoa, Rex!” Lumpy’s dog—now promoted to leader—cowered and heaved with curved hind legs, clawing further onto the dirt. I longed for old Plato. Dog mushers always remembered their leaders to be dauntless in storms, able to follow long-buried trails, though we all had rifles with broken stocks, from periods when those legendary leaders needed extra encouragement.

  I was heading up to see Abe and to get my guns. That was about as far as my career plans extended. I hadn’t been along this stretch of the river before. January and I had flown north to Takunak in August—he had taken months to get his license current. Finally, out of patience, I’d bought tickets for Lance and me to Phoenix, and we’d spent a month and eight thousand dollars getting private pilot licenses, having the times of our lives, flying. That got January motivated; he passed the physical and did a check ride in a Cessna 172. By then the August rains had submerged the sandbars near Abe’s cabin. In the sky I’d turned west, banked into the north breeze, made my final approach on the new lighted Takunak crosswind runway. And walked away from flying, possibly forever, as Abe had done.

  January had left me standing in dust, beside the old duffle bag. Iris had been in Crotch Spit for a school in-service and it was Elvis Jr. who drove me over from the new airstrip. His left eye was scabbed shut. I rode behind him on his Honda four-wheeler; dust boiled behind us. His wrists were bare and brown and thin. “Here I thought you was in camp,” he shouted. “You bring any beers?”

  “Naw. What happened to your eye?”

  “I alapit. Guys said my Honda sure fly and tree bump my face. Hey bart, I got wolf dog for sale. Eighty-three percent, man. You want to buy it?”

  JANET LOANED ME her .30-30 carbine; Iris loaned a sled and one of her dogs, and Lumpy three more dogs. It was debatable whether his dogs had ever been off their chains. Or when they had last been fed. The dog racer, Ted Brown, offered an eight-month-old pup he didn’t want. “Can’t keep pace with my fast race team,” he whispered, in front of the post office. He explained how he named his puppies by the litter, like Chinese years: the litter of the weather was Frosty, Windy, Cloudy, Stormy; the litter of the sitcom . . . The yellow leaves floated off the aspens above Takunak. My eyes roamed to the sweepstakes envelope in my hand: Crat Hawker, You Could Be A Ten Million Dollar Loser. “I made Uktu last spring in five hours,” Ted said. “Spring crust is killer traveling.” He squinted wisely.

  I glanced into his hazel eyes, wondering when I’d become anyone worth impressing. A big man strode down the post office steps. He had pale blue eyes and no hair on top and he wore a cross. A preacher, an airport maintenance man, or a sport hunter? Or all three.

  “Ted! I tell you how I nailed the Dog Die pack?” He looked smug. In the air was the faint turbulence of two egos occluding. “Last April, I flew over to reconnoiter, then I snowgoed to the top of a two-thousand-foot knife ridge and dropped over a cornice. Didn’t need to fly over, really, I know the country like the back of my hand. That drop must have been a fifty-footer. Surprised the crap out of me. Sneaked right up on those bastards!” Foam specked the man’s lips. “I could’ve wasted the whole pack with my thirty-round clip of FMJs. I only shot four. Next spring I’m going to get my brother up here, get him a wolf.” The man swiveled. “Never seen you. I’ve been here for years. You ever shot a wolf?”

  I quickly nodded good-bye to them and the old Alaskan pissing contest—who had been here longer. I walked away embarrassed, somehow vanquished. Ted was saying, “. . . Iris Hawcly, that little hotty schoolteacher . . . one of the brothers . . . I panned a gram of color below the Hawcly place . . . just took fifteen minutes.”

  White people—everything talked to pieces until all the pieces had numbers. I get wolves, Enuk would have said, back by mountains. It would have been someone else’s duty to fill in the story and any heroism. Enuk seemed a long way back, and I missed him and that place. I shuffled envelopes in my hand. Your preapproved American Express card, Mr. Crawly. Behind the post office, Elsie Haft stood on a cowering dog’s chain, beating him with an axe handle. Her toddler grandson stood observing in rubber boots and a Pamper, sucking a lollipop.

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nbsp; In Melt’s Boston Whaler, Stevie boated the dogs and me and the sled upriver. The first fall ice pans were swinging downriver, too much moving ice to stop at our old place. Stevie grinned as pans gnashed under Melt’s fiberglass boat. “I hope the bottom never open.” His hair was bristly, an even half inch long. He had gained weight and had new glasses with lenses that turned gray in the glare off the water and ice. I hadn’t told him—or anyone except Iris—about my pilot’s license. I didn’t want people talking, trying to figure out why a young man with a pilot’s license didn’t hire on as a mail plane pilot. Or get an airplane to hunt with.

  Stevie helped chain the dogs, limb saplings, and pitch my tent on the bank in the willows. He trimmed the limbs close and watched as I tied the knots. He was thoughtful; it seemed as if he might want to stay. Finally, he sat on the bow of the boat, blocked the breeze with the collar of his nylon jacket, and lit a farewell cigarette. His fingers started to stuff the cigarettes into his pocket. He glanced at the white Marlboro pack and tossed it to me. “Cut, take my smokes. Maybe you’ll need ’em. No nine-one-one around here.” He grinned and shoved off into the tinkling floes without saying good-bye.

  OUT IN THE RIVER, the current hauled big frosty pans groaning and crashing against the fast ice. Cracks raced to shore, twinging like the echoes of a galactic stomach. The dogs cowered. Wind had pushed drifts of snow into the hollows of jumbled ice and the dogs scooped mouthfuls and sniffed at caribou trails braiding up the shore. On the ice, I lifted the sled on its runners. In wheel position Lumpy’s yellow dog, Mike, whined and yanked.

  “Lie down!”

  The dog never pulled. His fur was thin and still shedding. I lit one of Stevie’s cigarettes, glanced at the cutbank, and dug in my pockets for twine to splint the sled stanchion that had broken. The Marlboro magic swirled Cheryl and Takunak in the cold air. The pocket on my old caribou parka held the compost of my teenage life: matches, string, corroded .22 shells, a peregrine falcon talon, a linty rectangle of Bit-O-Honey. The dogs lay on the concrete dirt, wet pink tongues out, brown eyes warily watching the unfaithful ice. In my inside pocket was a packet of pansy seeds, the only present I could think of to bring home for Abe.

  When the sled was repaired, I surveyed our position; we were stuck at the lower end of a long cutbank, blocked by open current up ahead and willow thickets bearding the bank. The cutbank stretched up and around the bend. The dogs growled at each other and cut their soft hopeful eyes at the caribou hindquarter tied at the front of the load. “When that runs out, one of you is next,” I warned. They stepped forward, wagging eagerly. I kicked at stobs, searching for something to tie the dogs to. Tucked under the bank, just above ice level, a curved log caught my eye. I grasped it to see if it was frozen in firmly enough to anchor the team. It was as heavy as a wet log, but loose and not wood. I knelt and scraped at it with a plate of ice. Dark blue vivianite dust flaked off. An ivory tusk! I spread my hands, not believing my luck, then glanced around, remembering my last mammoth ivory.

  The big curved tusk weighed the sled heavily, and I rolled it back off the load and staked the dogs to it. I unsheathed my axe, climbed the bank and cleared trail through a sweaty mile of brush, and returned for the dogs. I heaved the cumbersome tusk on the sled, grinning, picturing Abe questioning my efforts over something that he would admire, and leave where it lay. I tried to coax the team up the bank; Rex scrambled to the top and the overloaded sled hung nearly vertical. Mike hesitated and the other wheel dog tugged him sideways.

  “Go ’head!”

  Rex peered over the bank and leapt down. The sled crashed onto the ice and plunged backward into the open water. I sank to my waist. In an instant I scrambled up, over the handbars and load, to shore. The runners punched into the river bottom. I stood on a lump of collapsed bank, panting. I flung dogs up the bank, then yanked at the brush bow of the sled, pulling it out half a foot at a time. “Hike! GO ’HEAD! GET UP THERE!” The sled rose, finally balanced and disappeared up in the willows. “Whoa!”

  My heart pounded. I grabbed roots and clawed to the top of the frozen dirt. In the willows the dogs had stopped. My gloves were soaked. I flopped them across the tusk. They froze down. Barehanded and shaking, I rubbed snow on my pants. The water had hardly penetrated my new nylon overpants but had filled my Sorel boots. I rubbed snow on the dogs’ legs to soak up the water before it froze. I unlashed the stiffening tarp, scraped out slush and water, and sat and wrung my insoles and changed to fresh socks. The grub box was wet and icy. Down below, the open water appeared clear now, the bottom steeply inclined. My breathing slowed. I rocked the tusk until it lay curve-up against a clump of willows, marked it with willows, checked my load, slid on heavy wolverine mittens, and told the dogs to go.

  In another hour we were past the cutbank, traveling on up the ice, winding into the valley as the first evening planets twinkled. There were tracks of the fourteen wolves that I had seen yesterday. They had howled at my dogs and paced and finally curled on the ice until afternoon when they ambled into the mouth of a slough. Their voices had faded in the willows, and I howled to them, suddenly overwhelmed to be home, while Janet’s voice whispered in my head, Why you never shoot ’em?

  Rex’s ears lifted. All the dogs tugged. Ahead, a small herd of caribou trotted toward us. I threw out the snow hook and pulled the rifle over my shoulder, checked the muzzle, and shot a young bull. Cows and calves flooded around us, scented the dogs, and veered onto the ice. Momentarily, the caribou stopped, wide-eyed, nearly surrounding me. The dogs barked and the animals raced back the way they had come.

  Across the river a naataq hooted. It was getting dark. The dogs wagged and whined. Quickly, I gutted the caribou, realizing it had been two years; my hands knew what to do, and it made me proud. I cut slices of liver and stuffed it in the rumen to cook and eat while I worked. The dogs got all they could swallow of fat intestines while I snapped willows and built a fire. Coffee boiled in a blackened can, and the choice parts—the tongue and brisket—simmered. The sky grew orange and green in the south, blue-black overhead. I chained the dogs, ate meat and fat, slept in the sled with six onions.

  We loaded up and went slowly on the next day, and the next, until the dogs sniffed wood smoke and sped up. At the upper end of a timbered ridge squatted a cabin. There was snow on the roof, icicles on the eaves. A cache stood nearby poking up out of the trees. Behind, mountains rose in sharp white triangles. It felt strong and good to be near mountains without names. Probably CIA satellites hunting the sky had numbered all thousand peaks—for national security—but it was these mountains, and their namelessness, that left me feeling safe.

  Dogs struck up a warning. My team sprinted up the shore. Abe stood out on the ice, Franklin coming down a path. My dogs passed both, yanking along the glare ice toward their dogfood pile of salmon and whitefish, moose and caribou. I glanced at Abe. He wore an otter hat and between the hanging flaps his beard was gray. He didn’t have mittens on, or a jacket, but a heavy wool shirt with long-underwear sleeves sticking out. A coffee mug was clamped in his fingers. His hand and wrist looked big, his shoulders thick. I stomped the snow hook into a crack in the ice and my dogs lay with their lips pointing at the pile of fish—except Magnum PI, the wiry little racer, who stood whining and tugging to go.

  Abe and Franklin held the toprails, eyed the caribou in my sled. Abe sniffed the evening air the way he always had, checking for moisture and temperature, predicting the night weather without even knowing he was doing it. Franklin wore a green down jacket, black and greasy chested and patched with duct tape. He was stooped, his eyelids chapped and papery.

  I turned to Abe. His eyes glowed, bluer than frozen sky. His face was craggy. His hands gnarled my shoulder. I could hold my head up, my smile up, but not my eyes. Part of me felt free and at home, back on the land, eating patiq bones and berries; the other part was wilted from too much cowboy coffee and culture shock. My skin felt thin and I didn’t want him to see through to the hollow spaces and doubt. He sw
allowed and made a hoarse sound; he turned away. “Help you unhitch.”

  A huge sled dog shambled over. One brown ear hung out to the side like a wind was blowing. She had the deep chest, stiff hips, and ratty tail of an old retired working dog. She pushed her chin in my hand. “Plato?” I knelt, suddenly choked up, petting her soft eyes, and I glanced up, smelling the dogcooker fire, and icy leaves and cold falling air, and hearing mice rustling in the grass and grosbeaks cracking cones up in the spruce and ice piling out in the channel, and way across the tundra I felt the sun going too far down.

  They chained the five dogs and led me up to the cabin. The steep twisting path passed an igloo—Franklin’s—overhung with birches. The snow in front of his door was shoveled, but untracked except by mice. Abe’s cabin was small with two beds along the back wall and a workbench in front below a glass window. I dropped my duffle and qaatchiaq and stood gazing at my father’s life. Paintings and brushes and plane shavings mixed on his workbench. Now black wires came in the wall between logs—from the two solar panels Iris had mentioned, and a small wind generator—to a twelve-volt battery. Wire sneaked along the roof poles to a tiny fluorescent bulb. Abe’s bed had two caribou skins stacked on it instead of one. The curled edges had been trimmed straight. A shelf above his bed held books: an atlas, a dictionary, Endurance, The Iliad, Wildflowers of Alaska, The Bourne Identity, Lonesome Dove, Journals of Samuel Hearne. Dusty aluminum foil tacked to the wall reflected light onto his pillow. Thumbtacked to logs was a postcard of the New York City skyline, a birch leaf, a lichen, one of my letters, a package of Coleman mantles; hawk feathers, chain saw files, and skin needles were poked into cracks in beams. A quote from Henry David Thoreau, printed in black ink, was speared on a nail, and a calendar photograph of a lynx in soft blue snow.