Ordinary Wolves

by Seth Kantner

  OFF JESUS CREEK, the open water had frozen. We snowgoed up the drifted bank below the mouth. My Arctic Cat still ran; Janet hadn’t let anyone touch it. It steered loose and crooked—since the accident, and worse after Stevie’s one adventure with it, drunk driving the weekend Janet flew to Crotch Spit for a hospital checkup. “That same time Treason wash how many wolf and foxes in my Maytag.” Janet had laughed. “Anyways, let’um, you’re all my boys.”

  I glanced over the willows and up the creek. How many water holes had Jerry and Iris and I rechipped to avoid the brown water eddying up from this creek mouth? How many moose had we watched in these willows? How many foxes faded into these thickets? Iris had almost drowned here. And now Ted Brown, apparently, had found a trace of gold dust at the mouth, and would be back. I felt a rush of trespass and concern, knowing he would be back, with friends and big engines.

  The snow stretched away, huge and rolling, the scoured drifts hard white waves. Mountains leaned against the back of the sky. Frostbite twinged my nose, cheeks, and forehead, and water spread and froze along my eyelids. Wolves reigned over whole valleys in those mountains, the way it was supposed to be. Take away metal, I thought, and humans were hardly different from animals, regardless of all the obsession over smells and body hair; substitute back fat and cached bones for 401(k) accounts, fleet-footed prey for fast food. Wolves were smart. They cared about their kids. Sometimes they ran out of places to run, made mistakes, and died.

  And Enuk, what mistakes had he made? Did he know something mysterious and powerful from the last vestiges of the shaman days? The shamans—people in 1969 believed—had walked on the moon habitually, while the white men maybe only made up photographs of it. Had Enuk found a trail that science, the church, and the rest of us couldn’t see?

  AFTER HALF AN HOUR Treason stopped his Polaris. I stopped beside him. He melted his face and was silent for a minute the way you were supposed to be. He carefully opened a pack of cigarettes and let the cellophane blow out of his hand on the cold breeze. It crankled once, unfolding on the snow. He put a cigarette in his lips and flicked his lighter. “Couple springs back I lose black wolf in them mountains. Want to check it out?”

  I stepped aside to piss, a smoking string in the miles of rolling snow. I stepped close enough to bend and scoop up the plastic. It was a distressingly white thing to do, and I didn’t want to interfere with Treason’s happiness. I wanted him to carry prestige home to the village, to Janet and the elders, but today I didn’t want to see Marlboro wrappers on this snow.

  “Fellas been going to work at Red Dog,” he commented.

  “Red Dog Mine?”

  “Yeah, like Prudhoe, bywhere Dawna works, except it’s lead mine. Biggest in the world.”

  “Lead? Doesn’t that make your brain shrink?”

  “Could be. Lotta fellas around here that won’t hurt nothing.” Treason exhaled and scanned the tundra. “Woody came home for R and R with brand-new snowgo. He’s got a radio scanner. He heard a mail plane pilot talking about eight wolves downriver from town. He jumped on his Indy six-fifty, went and got ’em all like nothing.”

  I glanced at my black snowgo. The old bionic seat. “Does anyone ever snowgo north to Barrow?”

  “Never, that I heard about anyways. Too far to carry gas. Enuk an’em walked there in old days, guuq. You should charter airplane if you gonna go Prudhoe to find Dawna. Could be five hundred miles, open country. She’ll might be gone if you get there.”

  “Guess I need good money.”

  “You just now learn?” He grinned. “Your ivory, that’ll buy you plane fare, round-trip to Disney Land even.” His wrist flicked, rope-starting his machine.

  He led me north, to the Dog Die Mountains, up into steep foothills timbered with memories, along a rocky cliff protecting a ravine where I’d found the wolf den. Unhappily, I parked and peered over. It was getting dark, the short day falling into the Darkness. The birch tree that had devoured a green rope was down there somewhere. Everything looked different—the ice level was lower, the big winter wind drifts hadn’t matured yet, the creek was still open in places, flowing, black against the gray snow. I hurried back to my machine and followed his trail down onto the tundra. Treason circled and roared into a patch of spruce. He drove as if the skis were his flesh. His eyes took in a wolverine’s tracks, probed timber thickets, watched a raven’s hooded glances. He braked, touched the wolverine footprints, and raced away, faster than ever, his machine growling, chewing through brush. He was scared of nothing, not trees or drop offs or sinkholes in the ice. I’d forgotten—never realized how different it was Outside—here death was an accepted part of life, and fretting over the future as pointless as a dictionary.

  His Romanian AK-47 hung loose across his chest. His eyes had a cheetah’s stare, the fearsome focus of a predator. I struggled to keep up, suddenly knowing he was a predator, and an athlete, too. The Michael Jordan of the sport of hunting wolves and wolverine, moving in sync with ten thousand years of honed Eskimo blood and a hundred years of white technology.

  I gave up following, and swung up the canyon. I fought the machine through new loose drifts. The snowgo tilted into the creek. I gunned across shallow open water, weaving back and forth across shelf ice. The ice buckled, a swift current tilted pans and they disappeared under the fast ice. Finally, I braked on the snow-covered rocks. The canyon walls blocked out the sky. A few yards away stood the little birch tree, and I walked in a circle, my hands shaking, the accident with Iris pounding in my chest. I felt sick, and questioned if I could make it back to the open tundra without sinking. In the distance came four shots, and I wished I could scream across the tundra like Treason and kill. If only it were that easy.

  The green rope was gone. One of the forked limbs of the birch had snapped in a wind, and it lay partially buried. A huge black scar marked where someone had gouged out a wedge. Quickly I peeled back bark, tree scab, and pith. There was a narrow diamond-shaped scar in the crotch of the tree, a shape reminiscent of a dog-harness toggle. Walking Charley?

  After a short while, I realized Treason might be searching for me. I roared out of the canyon, made it to the tundra, and circled the top of a small rise. His headlight appeared, flicking up and down, bounding closer. His beaver hat was off. His hair was frozen, his ears and nose frozen. His windshield was in shards. A spruce pole was lashed between his skis, holding them aligned. A cigarette hung in his lips and wind had burned perforations in the paper until it looked like a miniature machine gun barrel. I thought about the Marlboro Man; what a mannequin he was compared to an Eskimo hunter. Treason smiled big.

  The wolverine was black and looked small tied behind the vinyl seat, frozen bloodcicles dangling from her mouth. We admired the thick fur and checked its length in our fists and combed the white circle above the rump. Rear claws to rear claws, a wolverine was one woman’s ruff; front claws to front claws, one man’s ruff; the rest parka trim. Treason was pleased. I didn’t say anything about the rain falling inside me. He would worry; he’d think I’d caught Animal-Loverness in the city. A traitorous thing.

  Barehanded he cleaned snow out of his cowling.

  I toed the knotted-on tree.

  “Busted my one-side steering. I lost him while I patched it. That tree throw lotta snow.” He grinned, ignoring a grease smear frosting his knuckles. “Sure iced up my carbs. I had to melt ’em with thermos. Coffee never finish, though, if you want a shot?”

  WE ANGLED AWAY from the mountains, west and circling beyond Takunak. The tundra beckoned, a thousand square miles of welcome. Shadows and snow stretched in shades of blue and gray and the Kuguruk River was an unshaven squiggle down in the flat tundra. We plowed across buried tributaries, awakening moose in the willows. They lumbered in the deep snow, tall walls of brown shoulders and silver scar-streaked flanks from the hungry wolf winter.

  We angled across the fresh tracks of two snowgos. Treason grinned back and mouthed, “Naluaġmiu tracks!” I peered at the snowmobile trail. How co
uld he tell? How could Treason so instantaneously read tracks that I should know how to read but hadn’t a clue?

  Across the river from Takunak, on the high tundra ridge running south toward Uktu, Treason sped up and roared at a yellow stake sticking up out of the snow. He grinned back. The fiberglass stake snapped in front of his machine—and whipped back upright. We stopped. My gas tank read E. In the headlight, I walked to the stake. GOVERNMENT EASEMENT. DO NOT LEAVE TRAIL. Yellow reflective stakes traversed the tundra toward Uktu, into the dim distance, a line so straight and forever.

  I shut off my engine. Treason killed his and walked over, bundled in his beaver hat, icy and face badly frosted again from the flung snow and lack of a windshield. The light was nearly gone. “Government an’em paid us good. Twenty-five bucks an hour. Twenty-four something anyways. Real good job, putting them things. Better than Exxon Valdez even. What’s easement mean?” He spat and melted his checks.

  Iris’s bright eyes flashed into my mind. “It’s short for ‘easier to bring pavement.’”

  “Huh.”

  “This strip of land already belongs to somebody’s road. They’ll pay you to build it.”

  “Ha, they think me and you gonna could stay on that skinny line?”

  Suddenly I understood how he’d so effortlessly read the snowgo trail we’d passed—the second driver followed exactly in the tracks of the first—the drivers concerned, out of their element, scared of the land.

  Around our feet lay the beautiful land, enchanted in the twilight’s weakening glow, cold, silent, unprepared. Suddenly the past was over. It would never come back to protect us. We’d been pretending as well any actors. The chasm between legends around the fire and surround-sound TV, snowshoed dog trails and Yamaha V-Max snowmobiles was too overwhelming, and no hunting, no tears, no federal dollars could take us back across. I felt an avalanche of grief, and momentarily thought I’d lost Abe, and Janet, too.

  I pulled the rope starter, squeezed the throttle. My gas was gone. I couldn’t make it home. I turned toward Takunak and hit the yellow stakes as fast as my machine would go. Progress against progress. Whatever progress really was. Maybe it was only the wind of going fast. The good frostbite seared my face. Beside me raced Treason, a best friend. Inside I burped porcupine. Sixty miles an hour. Sixty-five. Seventy. Numbers. Leftover lavender from the horizon behind faintly lighted the land. In front the closest thing to my hometown squatted, beside gleaming white satellite dishes, in Pampers, on Pepsi, drunk, stoned, desperately addicted to dollars. I whacked another yellow stake. And another. One shattered and missed my eyes. And another. The rest lurched upright, perfectly upright, whipping like laughter.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JANET´S DOORKNOB WAS GONE and a sock was stuffed in the hole. TV talk drifted out. I kicked my feet on the metal steps and went in; she would complain if I knocked.

  “Cutuk!” She heaved herself off the linoleum and hugged me in her heavy arms. Her warm cheek pressed against my face. The lights and glare were stunning after miles of cold trail. Over her shoulder, a loud Mountain Dew commercial mesmerized me, flashing sexy bodies and music, water-skiing behind a horse. Aana Tessie Washington and Aana Mable Feathers sat on the floor beside the couch, sewing calfskin mukluks. Their faces were deeply wrinkled, sunken and beaming. The old women were giggly and tense, in the middle of a MacGyver episode.

  Janet held my cheeks with her warm palms. “I’ll make hot water!” Tessie and Mable smiled, no teeth. Stevie’s little daughter, Daisy, stared wide-eyed from a high chair.

  Treason stomped his boots and came in carrying the wolverine. The old ladies’ eyes lighted and they heaved and tilted to their feet. They gathered around, clutching at the long hair and conversing in Iñupiaq. He laid the animal on cardboard behind the stove. “You should learn to hunt,” they told me sympathetically. I didn’t say anything. The windows were black—except the loud TV, a bright aperture to America. MacGyver reappeared with his porcupine hairdo. The ladies dropped the wolverine paws and scurried back to their places. MacGyver was under stress, in a hurry, wiring together a nuclear device or some such nonsense out of a washing machine and a Spam can key. I focused on my fix-it competition, MacGyver, trying to impress us with his ingenuity. Let him go a couple decades without a washing machine, he’d be walking around holding that up to the camera.

  Janet handed us coffee. When the show ended, she lit a burner and heated soup. “I guess Melt’s somewhere,” she commented to herself. She put bowls on the table. “Go eat.” A small skinny girl sat on the couch, gripping a Barbie doll by the hair. “Here’s my brand-new girl, Whitney-Houston.” Janet kissed her. The little girl’s eyes were black stones. “Her mom die in Crotch Spit. Her brother been bumped her to death with Honda. Feeling high. Arii. So lucky they find this one okay.” The little girl didn’t shudder, cry, or even blink.

  The CB squawked. “Meeting at Tribal Building. Anybody copy?”

  The CB speaker garbled as villagers transmitted over each other, the volume so loud it made my teeth ache—a mike clicked on and off, a bored kid, sabotaging the village electronic connective tissue. “Don’t play with CB!” an elder voice shouted. The mike-clicking intensified. “Fuck you,” a voice croaked.

  Treason moved around Janet’s kitchen looking for something to crack a caribou patiq bone he’d pulled out of the soup pot. He whacked the bone behind my chair leg and put it across my bowl and cracked another. Janet stuffed marrow into Daisy’s mouth. “Aarigaa, patiq, Bun. I wonder what kinda meeting? You kids better go explain for elders.”

  I sat staring dumbly at the fast images on the TV, replaying the day’s events while knifing at the bone on my plate, swallowing meat that now could have been pieces of warm luggage. Around me, Janet was already clearing dishes, scraping bones and meat scraps into a dogpot, and then Treason stepped in from smoking, wrapped in cold-air fog. He stomped his boots. “Com’on Cutuk. Go check that native meeting? Door prizes,” he grinned, “and you’ll get to see Taata Woodrow’s false teeth, before he goes out on the country and needs one for a screwdriver.”

  TREASON WAS LUCKY, though it was easy to discount the fact that if he grew his hair out it would be curly—not a good thing—and that his real mom was dead and his dad a nameless sperm donor; he won five boxes of ammo. Aana Hanna Skuq won a six-pack of pop, and her granddaughter, Elvisetta, in Pampers, won the pre-meeting grand prize, a drum of stove oil. Hanna took the fuel credit slip and gave Elvisetta a Coke. They were both happy, smiling, missing teeth.

  The color TV, the important prize, was saved for after the meeting. The elders sat on folding chairs without taking off their parkas. The men had their mouths open, deaf from years of snowgoing and shooting. They hunched, elbowing their wives for information. Newt Clemens and Tommy Feathers and Woodrow Washington and others greeted me and asked after Abe. A good portion of the town and half of Uktu were at the gym, immersed in the Jimmy Skuq Memorial Basketball Tournament, in honor of Jimmy crashing on a snowgo, drunk. Jimmy, who one night had let half the dogs in town loose and in the ensuing dogfights broke into the Native Cache. Jimmy, who stole Janet’s chain saw and ruined it trying to saw open the city office safe . . .

  The native corporation speaker droned about projected finances. The corporation developed native land and sent out yearly dividends to Eskimos. It was big business now, being Iñupiat. The corporation had even invented a politically correct term for me: a “non-shareholder.”

  Charley Casket shrugged in the door. He spotted my non-shareholder hair and came over to sit beyond Treason. He reached across and shook my hand limply. His hand passed over an artifact, a strip of antler sled runner. Swarms of kids chased back and forth. “You kids go play-out,” Hanna shouted. They ignored her. Another speaker took the place of the first. He was named Joe Smith. He wore glasses, a new haircut, tight jeans, and a gold watch with nuggets lumpy on the band. His hands were large and soft. “Funny-looking Eskimo,” Hanna whispered too loud.

  “I’m from the nonp
rofit arm of the corporation, and I’m here to inform you of our Cultural Edification Project. The project, or CEP, has been proposed through the regional elders, and a grant for one million dollars has already been procured.”

  I glanced at the antler, a porous gray artifact. Over the years, Abe had unearthed some strips of antler sled runner; surely, he’d left them behind on a window ledge or a shelf. They hadn’t been there today. The room still rustled—overhead fluorescent lights twitched and twirled, throbbing pearl shadows. The elders’ faces held the same expressions they had held at the meeting when strange rangers told them the National Park Service suddenly owned millions of acres of the best hunting land, in every direction. When anthropologists, archaeologists, and con men with computer credentials had come and held meetings and gone. The elders’ expressions, meeting after meeting, for decades: “What in ta hell they’re talking?” and “What in ta hell they’re taking?”

  A snowgo roared up outside. The door kicked open. Condensation and frozen snowgo exhaust rolled under the chairs. Elvis Jr. walked in sheepishly, thawing his face. Lumpy’s 9 mm pistol slid out of his jacket pocket and thunked on the floor. He stared at it for a second, bent and picked it up. “. . . all recorded forms of Iñupiaq knowledge will be compiled on CD. This is in terms of libraries and universities—and, of course, what you the people know. We will then utilize informational assets to organize a strategy for teaching it.” Lumpy didn’t hurry putting the pistol in his pocket, glancing it over for a minute, pointing it randomly around the room. The native sitting behind Joe stood and translated for the elders. The elders listened, baffled, impatient to go home or back to the ball tournament.

  I peered at the antler. Six hours had passed since Treason and I had left the igloo. Mice would be scurrying around in the last of the warmth seeping from the stove, nibbling any dropped morsels, huffing the spent cartridges. Charley leaned forward. “You find mastodon tusk?”