by Seth Kantner
Abe flipped his easel out of his way and gently booted tubes of paint and cans of thinner across the floorboards. He rapped on the window. “Plato, back down to your doghouse. Go eat your fish.” Along the wall beyond his bed, a bearskin couch was within reach of the fire. On the stove, a piece of antler rolled in a pot of boiling water. “Softening this, for a chisel handle.” Abe peered into the steam. Franklin reached under a counter, got out a box of pilot crackers. He was completely bald on top now, his white fronds staticky and wild and he moved creakily, pretending to innocently nudge Abe’s easel until I could see the painting. Under his tented lids he stole glances. Gray light came in at the window; at the easel, a wolf’s face gazed into mine, the face thin, hungry, surreal. Abe stoked the fire and the flames threw quick light. The lines on the wolf’s nose were tiny crosshatches. In the shadows of the cheekbones I saw my father’s face. I stepped close, and chills rafted my veins. In the reflection of the golden orbs—were those the distant towers of New York?
Abe banged the stovepipe. I jumped. Creosote tinked down the pipe. “Lot easier living here than downriver in the wind,” he said. “Deep snow, though. Gets tiring snowshoeing out our wood trails. Less animals, too.” Abe was telling me something, without delving into the past.
“Why’d you move?” I said bluntly. “You like animals.”
He sighed. His left knee cracked. “I was up Jesus Creek one day . . . watching wolves. A snowgo came and shot them with a semiautomatic rifle; he ran over some, wounded some, finally got all of them. It about got me mad at people.” Abe grinned and rubbed his knee. “Not good to feel that way. You feel better when you like everybody.”
I wondered if the hunter had been Treason, or the loud talker at the post office; it could have been anybody. Lance burst into my head: We all want a few dead wolves, don’t we?
“Abe’s been working on that for months.” Franklin nodded at the easel. His chin shook. He pulled a piece of used dental floss out of his shirt pocket and flossed the teeth he had that touched. He wadded the gray string back in his pocket.
“Don’t throw this one in the stove,” I said.
Abe swiveled suspiciously. “What would you do with my wolf?”
“I like it.” I was lying. I’d find an address in Chicago or somewhere where people cared about painting; I’d find out if Abe had the talent January claimed, if he had had open doors and still walked away. It was almost none of my business, but it seemed to matter.
“ . . . maybe the best I’ve ever painted,” Abe said. “Iris thinks so, too.” He splashed hot water over coffee grounds. The roasted aroma filled the cabin, seeping into the moss chinking, mixing with the pitchy firewood turning white and frosty, thawing beside the stove. He handed me a mug and slid the sizzling cannibal pot onto the table. The pot was black with grease, Abe not the kind of person to ruin cast iron with soap. I ran my thumbnail around the rim; it clicked into an old chip where Iris had hit the pot with my blue hatchet, chopping out broth. The hatchet lay beside the wood box. I shook my head, trying to align the years, the Taco Bells, exit ramps, rabid foxes, and this old pot.
“Built a cabin this time.” Still Abe didn’t sit. He rustled on the kitchen counter for clean mugs. His finger stub was stiff and sore-looking and didn’t curve with his big hand. “Not as warm, or as cool in the summer, but sod igloos you have to rebuild every twenty years, and I didn’t feel like building the last one when I was eighty.”
Franklin puckered a grin and softened a cracker in his coffee. “Have some, Cutuk. These are our last pilot crackers.”
By now, I knew they must be out of new reading material, too. I opened my pack and spilled out their junk mail, slippery as a washtub of fish. Franklin sorted greedily, his thumb claw gripping a Victoria’s Secret catalog. “What’s this? Sears and Roebuck got a new daughter-in-law on their cover?” He opened it in the middle and leafed back and forth in both directions, feigning minimal interest.
“We have a plank boat, with Iris’s ten-horse.” Abe dumped our lukewarm coffee back into the pot and poured hot. “The impeller wore out. I made one out of a boot heel, but I didn’t want to get stuck the summer seventy miles downriver if nobody had spare parts.” He and Franklin shook their heads. Stuck in Takunak, watching four-wheelers and airplanes and Oprah—for them too close to hell to risk; they could wait until winter and dog-team down to town.
Franklin lowered the lingerie catalog and flossed again thoughtfully. I knifed at the pot-roasted brown bear foreleg and dipped the meat in cranberry sauce. I felt bad for Franklin. He was old and those women in the catalog were so misty-eyed and inviting, and nothing remotely like that was ever going to happen to him again. Anybody could see from his mouth puckered around his teeth that he wished there was at least a prayer.
Finally, Abe sat on a stump. He cut hot meat and spooned cranberry sauce on a cracker. His forearms and hands were heavy, forked with veins, almost grotesquely huge and powerful. “Last box of pilot crackers.” He chuckled. “We were saving it for company. Shrews chewed in the back and almost outflanked us.” The cracker he lifted to his grin had an edge gone and the rasp marks of fine teeth, and it was something like love to see the humor he still took from almost being beaten by a shrew. His naïveté made my lungs catch. I looked up to smile on my dad—and shuddered in the yellow gaze of the wolf.
A WEEK AFTER I ARRIVED, Abe and I stood out on the ridge without parkas on, pissing. Franklin didn’t give us a lot of time alone, never enough to crack into the past. I wouldn’t ask any question with Franklin, a finger in Victoria’s Secret, listening, waiting to practice atrophied parenting skills. Now he was down rummaging in his igloo for flour to make pan bread. Iron Toast. The echo of Iris’s laughter made me smile.
“It’s good to be home. Though the old days feel like something I dreamed up.”
“When you’re young, the hills are easy to climb,” Abe said. “The good thing about getting older is they don’t seem so big.” He shook his penis and stuffed it back into his pants. “You were always my favorite.”
“You talking to me?”
His eyebrows twitched in sudden embarrassment. They were thick and still blond. Iris was always his favorite. I nodded, not needing to change that, but words tumbled out. “You must be getting Alzheimerish. I wasn’t your favorite. Iris was.”
In his beard his lips smiled. “Where did you learn to discount yourself?”
“Where were you? People taught me different is bad, starting a long time before I did anything besides wait with the dogs.” I stopped and dropped my eyes. This wasn’t any chat I wanted to chat. I’ve been places, Abe. I’ve flown in Boeing’s jets, walked paved streets, and kissed girls.
“Well, I’m glad you came home. I’m glad Iris came home. What did you end up liking down there?”
“It was fun to go to movies. Sometimes to a restaurant and order a BLT.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then raised his eyebrows—yes.
“Shuck, lots of it is hard not to like. Little packs of sweet salty almonds. Boy, they’re good! Washing machines. Good lights. Amazingly comfortable seats that don’t hurt your back. Not like sitting on firewood stumps.”
Abe looked at his thumbs, listening, smiling faintly, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to be quiet.
“It’s funny.” I heard my voice speeding up. “Life down there is . . . like you’re running before it runs out. Seems like people design great chairs then . . . then I don’t know. Pay bills in them? They make shoes that are beautiful and expensive, and water gets right in them. Scientists—who knows what they’re inventing or what poor animal they’re collaring so they don’t have to go outside to really learn about it. People hardly think about the animals. They argue about abortion, then get mad if you don’t ‘fix’ your dogs.”
I toed snow. “Abe, it’s all strange. Preachers preach about doom . . . and you better give money for a reservation to heaven. Like this place is crap, and you can just leave? Like Outsiders act about T
akunak. You feel bad for Jesus. He was such a good guy and all sorts of mean bunk is done with his name glued to it. They talk about gold streets in heaven. For what? Melting? People jet around the world burning fuel to spot rare sparrows. People helicopter-ski down mountains bigger than the Dog Dies and worry if their ski boots are the right color with their snowpants. When I think of humans as one big herd? I see winter coming and them scurrying around thinking about sex or losing their keys.”
Abe rocked a thumbnail between his teeth. “Well,” he grinned, “news says we are getting fatter. That’s what creatures do to prepare for cold. Fat, that’s their money in the bank.” Abe wore gray wool pants with patched knees, a knife made out of a chisel at his waist, and a flight jacket with rips and patches, grease, pitch, and dried blood on the front and sleeves. “Early cold fall.” His eyes were on the faraway horizon, playing the pastel sky. He was fifty-seven, and I was twenty-three. I thought about the last time I’d touched the controls of the airplane and wondered when his last time had been. Strangely, it seemed as if no matter what I did, I was zigzagging along his path. Maybe Dawna was right, maybe it was the curse and luck of offspring. The river and ice and tundra were pink and orange, lavender and blue, the way they had always been. An ache gripped my chest.
“Franklin and I picked two kegs of cranberries. Want to give a hand getting the rest of the meat?”
Still I stared out at the beautiful land. “The hardest thing has been to understand people. Why didn’t you teach me?”
He stuttered in surprise. “Teach? How would I go about that?” His face was thoughtful. “So much else is more interesting to me than people. Figured to let you decide yourself what was worthy.”
Our elliptical conversation and the weight of that lifelong obligation left me annoyed. I spat over the bluff, biting back swear words. “Where are my guns and my traps?”
“Fur prices are gone. The anti-trapping campaign took off in Europe.”
“Bastards. What do they know?”
“Maybe the same thing we do.” Abe had always spoken as if his words were unfiltered thoughts. Now the quiet in his voice was a strange and commanding thing. “We’ve seen plenty of fox legs shattered and torn off. Wolverine, ripping their feet off.”
I glanced at the path, watching for Franklin. Trapping logic trickled into my brain: wolverine tracks were like lynx, but not so neat; foxes had two toenails nearly touching, on their front feet, that showed in their tracks; at fifty below a wolverine might stay in a leghold trap for a night while at zero it might last three nights before breaking free. Furbearers moved before a storm, seeking food. Now a dog shook down in the dog yard. Abe gazed at the river, frozen all the ways it flowed. The cold stood hairs up on his wrists. My heart softened. This was my father, after all, the anchor of my life. Abe’s mouth opened as he listened to a raven in the distance. “Fog, over there against the mountains,” he breathed. “It’s cold enough now, winter meat will keep. Good! I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re thinking about things.”
Something thudded down in Franklin’s house. We were quiet, our breath rising fat and orange in the dying sun. Franklin’s moosehide mukluk bottoms padded on the snow.
“January said you could have been a famous artist.”
“January Thompson? What a nice guy. No, I was just a student drawing wolves downing moose, instead of one naked lady after another. Later, at college, people stopped and looked. Sometimes I painted things they bought to lean in their garages, hoping I’d get famous. I didn’t like being waited on. Linda liked it. I didn’t.” Frost had formed on the chests of our long-underwear shirts. “Let’s go in and poke up the fire.” Franklin shuffled up the path, a Hills Bros can of flour under his arm.
I couldn’t see my dad and a garage in the same lifetime. “You could have given her the world!” I whispered in awe.
“Maybe you are confusing things,” he said gently. “I did give her the world.”
A RAVEN CIRCLED AND CAWED. I cawed back, and she led us north. She wasn’t mystical or mysterious, just hungry and intelligent, and I liked to think we both enjoyed sharing sounds. The tundra was mottled with tussocks and snow, brown and white and yellow in the weakening sun. Mottled humps moved. Abe and I knelt and checked the wind. The big bulls were rutting, grunting and rattling their antlers in quick sparring matches, peeling their lips back and chasing cows and calves. Now, in late October, their blood and meat would be stinky with hormones. We crawled closer, glassing teenagers, four-year-old bulls, watching which ones still nosed at lichens instead of thrashing small spruce with their antlers. Snow melted through my elbows and knees, and refroze, burning pressed circles of frostbite. With a rifle in my hands the pain was distant and I made room for it. The raven waited. Behind the herd, heavy timber marked a creek. Abe crawled west, toward the spruce. I glassed one more time, memorizing the animals I wanted. He nodded slowly, fifty yards away, and lowered his cheek to his gun stock. The boom cracked across the distance, whomping into a caribou. A caribou lunged on its hind legs, warning the herd of danger, the same movement advising predators of its prowess. I fired. Echoes thundered in the trees. The herd split and poured west. Fifty animals raced toward Abe and veered. I shot another, and another, the instinct to protect the food pile taking over. Winter lasted a long time. Everything would be hungry for fresh meat before the caribou migrated back north. I gathered my brass cartridges and shouldered the rifle. In the distance, the herd paused on the skyline. In front of us, a few wounded animals kicked and fought to get to their feet. I circled, and jumped, pinning a bull’s antlers and stabbing my knife behind his neck; across the tundra, Abe was doing the same. Blood flowed into the snow. I sniffed it to check for rut. The caribou shivered. The raven watched. Against the white mountains I saw the black dots of her coming cousins.
It took a couple hours to clean eleven animals. Abe rolled them ribs-down to drain and keep the meat warm and start it aging. He was particular and exact about how his meat was handled. We dragged the gut piles aside and cut boughs to make Xs over the kills and hung bandannas on a branch to keep the birds wary. Enuk’s voice seeped out, Don’t shoot tulugaq. Gonna storm plenty on you. Abe and I hurried home to get the dogs, our sacks heavy with tongues, livers, hearts, and itchaurat.
At the cabin Abe knelt and pulled a dog-collar ring lashed to a trapdoor in the floor and swung open his cold hole. “Stevie Wolfglove brought his sister up, during high water last fall.” He bent and retrieved an onion. “She told us about Anchorage, being on some kind of drugs, in a darkroom? And about Flossie in Uktu teaching her to cut wolverine skin. Said they both leaned back to watch TV and when she sat up Flossie had passed on.”
“Dawna came here?” I glanced around, embarrassed that she’d seen the likes of my meager roots.
“Reason I moved up here,” Franklin mumbled over his coffee, “was come spring, snowgoers chased the caribou so bad the meat was worn out.” His hair was wild and sleep still crusted in his eyes. “I never cared for the taste of a run caribou.”
Onion smell filled the air. I hoped Dawna hadn’t said anything that included me, but, of course, she must have.
“A lot of people can’t tell,” Franklin said, “but I never cared for the taste.”
I sat on the floorboards, sharpening my knife, my thoughts wandering back, wondering how respectful the local ravens were, whether they were already beak-deep in the back fat of our meat. Everything wanted fat. Fat got you through the winter. Every conversation that had to do with meat, fish, and birds came around to when were they the fattest. Janet would be uncomfortable if I brought her skinny meat.
Abe cut itchaurat into the heated pan. The sides of his hands were crusted with dried blood. His face was flushed and pleased with the morning. He dropped two tongues into a pot to boil. Everyone’s favorite part was the fat tongue. “Strange thing, Franklin,” he said, “often the machines made it easier for me. The caribou forgot what a man on snowshoes was. Remember before snowgos? The man who could
get caribou all winter was a leader.” Abe and Franklin sounded as if they discussed the year before last. Age was squeezing their years, grinding them into wisdom. My dad was an elder! How had I been so gullible and faithless as to believe an elder must be brown-skinned? “. . . snowgos, not TV, killed the old culture.” He forked liver and tenderloin slices in the pan. Searing meat smoked around his head. “Sure is special, Cutuk, having an onion.”
WHEN THE MEAT was sledded in, we cut the lower legs off at the elbows and knees, and stacked caribou on a low pole cache with the skin left on to insulate and protect the meat for the winter. The remaining animals we skinned and stretched the hides and legging out on the ice to freeze flat and smooth, then ripped them up to finish drying slow in the winter air. Freeze-dried, the skin came out thick and white; inside the house, it dried quickly, brittle and brown. The back fat we rendered in one pot; the softer fat, the poopshoot and kidney and itchaurat in a second pot. Abe cut up the meat and allowed the ribs, briskets, and backbones for soup to freeze quickly. He dug a hole in the snow and lay a fresh caribou hide in the bottom and stacked the quarters and loins in. He covered it with another hide and soft snow to insulate. Later, hindquarters were half-frozen, then shaved thin and the strips hung inside on long poles to dry into paniqtuq. The dry paniqtuq was stuffed into cloth flour sacks and stored in the cache—except what we pounded into dust and chips, to mix with dried cranberries and blueberries and pour rendered back fat over to make bars of pemmican. Some of the hindquarters and the backstraps he cut into steaks, while all the leftover bones were saved for soup, roasts, or eating the marrow raw.
After the meat, we cut dead spruce and hauled sledloads. The first thirty-below day I split wood beside the cabin, aiming for natural seams as thin as paper. The maul smacked into the rounds. The cold wood shattered. My muscles felt clean and accurate, uncramping after so long in sight of judging eyes. Abe snowshoed up, a frozen trout was under his arm. “Come in. Eat quaq.” His beard, eyebrows, and wolverine ruff were frosty. Plato paced behind him and stopped when Abe stopped. She wagged a quiet greeting. Abe contemplated the piles of split wood.