by Seth Kantner
I raised my eyebrows, handed him the antler. “By accident. I was looking for a log to tie my dogs.”
Charley’s mouth formed a quick smile. Nothing else moved. “In good shape? How big?”
“I never weigh it. Eighty-ninety pounds? It’s in okay condition. Just the tusk, no mammoth meat on it. I didn’t find the tongue or anything.” Treason and Lumpy snickered. I grinned and decided to prod Charley. “Today I checked on an old birch tree I found before. Ways up Jesus Creek. Back in the mountains. Something had been cutting it.”
Charley’s expression didn’t waver. “I been show Ted Brown the country. He ordered airboat, same like white guys always hunt crocodile in TV. Use lot’a gas and go anyplace. He’s good friend a’ mine. Always give me jug.”
Dismay tugged at my mouth.
On the other side, Lumpy nudged me. A bewildered grin flashed across his face. “What the fuck this fella saying, anyways?”
“They’re gonna have classes, teach how to be Eskimo, just learn on your computer. Who knows, the new principal might get a better grade than you.”
Lumpy’s face stiffened. His face had grooves it never had when we were kids—frostbite and Bacardi wrinkles. His lip slumped in where his rotted teeth clung. He looked haggard, confused, and sick—exactly how I felt. Up in front, a naluaġmiu scraped his chair back over the gouges in the Tribal Building floor and stood. Everyone stopped whispering. Everyone knew what those gouges were. They were cuts left by quiet men working with Skilsaws cutting too deep, building caskets, after too many four-wheeler accidents and drownings, dying elders and suicides, in a town of 210.
“Good evening,” he said. “First, I have to say how glad I am to be in your wonderful serene little village. I am also grateful to be able to meet so many of you and glimpse you living your traditional lives. I am here with Mi-tick,” he nodded at Joe, “to make you aware of the sixty-four billion dollars available in grants to communities like yours.”
The crowd laughed.
Treason muttered. “Com’on, let’s go spark a bowl.” He and Lumpy and Elvis rose and headed outside; each had a hand in his pocket.
The man glanced around quizzically, shuffled papers, and retreated into a forest of overgrown words and Accountant English. The meeting trailed into whispers and tittering. Back on the metal chairs, we chuckled at the man’s pronunciation of Joe Smith’s Eskimo name. We heard “my dick.” We laughed, not because we were mean, but because laughing was traditional, it was something we were good at, and tonight we still remembered how.
ʺWHO WON THE TV?ʺ Janet asked.
Lumpy opened her refrigerator. He squinted at the pots and containers. “How you know what the fuck anything is in here?”
Janet dropped the marten skin she was tanning. “What you want, son? That fish—take it off the way. Wait! I bought peef. I’ll make soup.” She put a pan of water on to boil, sharpened her ulu, and expertly chopped the sirloin into cubes and dropped them into the water. Daisy crawled into my lap. Whitney-Houston pressed beside me on the couch, encircling the Barbie in her arm. I felt the little girl shaking. I pulled twine out of my pocket, tied the ends, and made a caribou. “Tuttu.” I pointed at my string. “That’s tuttu.”
Daisy’s big brown eyes glanced up under my jaw. “Care boo?” She raised a finger, red polish on her tiny nail, and made a gun bang and hit the string. I flopped the loops on my knee. “Boom. You shot him, now you have to skin him and take care of the meat.”
“Again.” She giggled. “Shoot it again.”
“Mom!” Lumpy shouted. “My Kmart COD come?”
Janet bent over the stove, tasting the soup. She pointed. “Takanna! By the bed.” Lumpy ducked into Janet and Melt’s heaped bedroom and came out with a box. “So, how’s them dogs I give you, Cutuk? How about Mike?”
Janet glanced up. “Lumpy never tell you? That dog’s funny. When it was puppy kids put it forty seconds in microwave.”
Lumpy opened the door, wadded his glove onto his bent fingers, grabbed his box, and went out.
Janet sighed. “I guess he won’t eat.” She took an Eskimo Pie out of the freezer, cut it with her ulu, and gave half to Whitney-Houston and half to Daisy. She clicked the TV off and sat down. “Arii.”
The CB made gasping sounds. “Help me!” a young girl screamed. “Help me, somebody!” Her voice turned wild, a primal scream.
“That’s Sara Skuq!” Janet leaned forward. “She was go Anchorage to bleach her teeth for school pictures.”
“Sara!” Her mom shouted from a CB, somewhere, high, her voice hoarse. “Sara? You shudup!” The CB went silent.
“The meeting was about teaching Eskimo,” I said quietly.
“You kids need to speak Iñupiaq. Better than last meeting, that white lady tape-recording women’s traditional work.” Janet giggled. “I told her, ‘Women work, too much.’”
“Not words only. Eskimo everything.”
A fly buzzed in the kitchen, wings frozen in the window ice. Outside, the temperature was falling. Daisy was still on my lap; chocolate and ice cream ran down her arms in big muddy drops. I felt more exhausted than I could remember; Abe and Anchorage hugely distant; the land somewhere not real. I got a rag and wiped Daisy’s hands, then went and melted the fly loose. Take advantage, mister fly, of your abilities to hibernate, and fly.
I yawned. “I’m tired. I’m going up to Iris’s.”
“Cutuk.” Janet peered seriously. “That pox. Lumpy get Aqua Net. Those boys been drink it. Melt even always drink that kind. You need to let them quit.”
AN EAST BREEZE BLEW thirty-below air down the Kuguruk Valley. The Darkness was boundless, the bottom rim of outer space. Two houses behind Aana Mable’s stood Lumpy and Stevie’s house. Three Polaris snowgos and an Arctic Cat were parked on the snow, the modern machines sleek and predatory. Figures rushed into the cold-fogged qanisaq. Inside, the room was gutted, the faces blue in the TV wash. A battered television sat on a fifty-five-gallon drum, snowmobile shocks and scored pistons and a moose hoof piled beside it. Rifles and a shotgun leaned in a corner. A chain saw lay on the kitchen linoleum. The air smelled like cornstarch and gassy gloves, sour meat and cigarette residue.
Men sat on buckets, stumps, and a couch. Dollie leaned against a white guy, John, who hunched like a seagull trying to fit in with ravens on a gut pile. John was one of the marijuana salesmen the young girls occasionally brought home from Anchorage. He had thin red hair and big splotchy arms. His voice was nasal. “Yeah, man, I had this Ninja nine hundred.” Motorcycles buzzed on the TV. Dollie smiled her dimpled smile. She had gained weight and her mouth had a stretched look, like she’d flossed or screamed a lot.
Stevie knelt, shaking a gallon jug. “Yellow-Hair! The six-dog Iditarod champion!”
“Four-and-a-quarter-dog,” I said wryly. I sat on a bucket.
“Man, my Ninja was bad, man,” John said. “I—”
Stevie’s eyes narrowed. He pressed his remote. The motorcyles vanished and a documentary flicked on: Alaska natives hunting moose, the narrator whispering of respect given for every part of the animal, otherwise bad luck might befall the hunter. Stevie spat in a piston and grinned. “Fuckin’ Lumpy better take care of his quaq moose outside.” He pressed the remote again and blondes in bathing suits came on, twirling and humping around steel poles. Stevie thrust out the plastic jug. “Here you go, Grizzly Adams Junior. Maybe you’re the last Aqua Net virgin.”
A group of girls rushed in. “Stevie!” They tugged his sleeve. “Melt’s coming this way! He alapit. Stumbling all over the place.”
“Let’um, that guy can’t know how to drink.”
Big money changed hands. A group rushed out. Snowgos roared. I recognized a cough—Tommy Feathers sat on a gas can, passing a stained ivory pipe, weed smoke curling out of the bowl. Tommy was in his late fifties now, maybe sixty. Most of his experience was with alcohol, but he took advantage of his elder status at Search & Rescue meetings and funerals in church. He exhaled, slit eyes watching
my hand on the jug.
“Don’t have to,” Treason mumbled.
I was tired. If only I could settle in and be part of the crowd. Haltingly, I passed the jug—and felt surprise. My hands had never passed a chance to fit in, never stepped willingly to the edge of the herd. The decision had come from somewhere in my head where I was unfamiliar with the territory. It was lonely here on the edge of the party, but the seconds ticking by had exotic clarity that I felt I might like, and I nodded thanks to Treason. He shrugged. “Going hunting tomorrow,” he murmured. “Maybe look for wolves. Wanna malik?”
“Getting cold for snowgo, isn’t it?”
“Let’um. I jus’ wanna hunt. Nothing else.”
The blond girls twirled and rocked their crotches. Lumpy slumped in the door. “Any hunter success?” Stevie teased. His lips glowed metal blue in the TV light. Lumpy’s hand came out of his jacket holding his semiautomatic pistol, and he swung it, making a point of pointing it at John.
“Not that kinda hunter success,” Stevie growled.
Lumpy reached in his other pocket and pulled out a wad of cash and two-party checks.
“’Kay then! Let’s go Las Vegas, Cut,” Stevie said. “Drink real beers like you’re accustomed to.” He pushed up his glasses. The earpiece was tied with dental floss. “I been to Point Hope, Point Lay, Point Barrow. What’s the point?” He drank long on the jug. “Point Lay, man, I was there when they shoot sixty belugas. Muktuk on the ground even. Point Barrow Search an’ Rescue got helicopter. Bring fellas home with polar bear and their snowgos just hanging.”
I gripped Stevie’s wrists. “Why don’t you not drink any more of that crap,” I whispered. “Janet’s worried about you. Shuck, I’m worried about you.”
He bowed his forehead against mine. “Cut, you shoulda stayed. Alcohol is my best friend now. I just love my daughter. I don’t want Daisy to see me like this. My other kids, they already seen me party, how many times. I mean . . . I love you. You’re my brother. I’m glad you went, Cut. You’re lucky.”
I pictured the softness of Daisy’s little golden face. I braced myself against the wall—a partition had been ripped out there and dried blood was smudged; a smashed nose had left an angled trail to the floor.
“Stevie, we’ll go, uh . . . hunting. Heck, I don’t know what we’ll do. Don’t call me lucky. I don’t know anything.”
“That cocksucker Eskimo naluaġmiu.” Lumpy spat in a pop can. For an instant, I tensed, swiveling, thinking he was reading my thoughts, talking about me.
“You better not be talking about me.”
“Fuckin’ Crotch Spit people take alla government money that’s for us. They sit around office play with computer and make sixty thousand. No school principal is more Eskimo than me. We know how to take care of the land. Not like white peoples. I can hunt anything, anytime.”
The jug came around. The pipe came around. The strippers danced. No one spoke. I glanced at Stevie, nodded around the room, picked up my parka and beaver hat, and stepped out, into the qanisaq, and out to the snow. I stood, breathing out secondhand frustration and Marlboro smoke, breathing in clear cold air, staring at the boundless night sky. If Melt staggered up now . . . geez, I might punch him in the head, an early Christmas present for Dawna.
But only the aurora was out, stretching green gauze across the Milky Way. Green fire burned low in the east, behind the mountains, highlighting the peaks in eerie radiance. Under chain-girdled spruce, Lumpy’s two remaining dogs whined. They were black shadows, their backs narrow and humped from starvation. The biggest one squatted, then turned in a stiff circle and swallowed its own steaming shit. A snowgo screamed at the other end of town, skis scraping the porcelain snow. I didn’t feel like going back inside. I headed toward Iris’s cabin. The east breeze streamed my breath away.
IRIS PUT ON her shoepacks and overpants and parka, and came out to help feed dogs. Light came out the windows of the cabin. We chopped caribou, frozen hard as soapstone. My team, and her other five dogs, barked and shrieked to be fed. Each time the axe struck, chips of meat scattered, and the dogs whined and wagged and kept vigilant track of the morsels closest to them. Iris swept meat dust, snow, and chips and chunks to each dog. When the last dog was fed, the cacophony ceased. They swallowed fist-sized pieces and made loud gnawing sounds, trying to crack the larger chunks.
“Oh, I like feeding dogs!” Iris said. She hoisted up the front half of the caribou and heaved it off the trail. I grinned. Iris was still strong. “Remember Ponoc, how he used to dunk over his eyes to gulp off the bottom of the dog pot?”
“Ponoc . . . yeah. This one’s Mike. Turns out kids put him in the microwave. I can’t fatten him up. He shivers and shivers and never pulls. I’m going to have to shoot him.”
Overhead the aurora built and built, the sky twiching cold green embers. We stood with our heads as far back as they would go.
“God!” she said. “This is amazing. I bet they can see them in Chicago. Wouldn’t that be funny if Mom’s looking at them, thinking of us?”
Red rays began stretching down from the North Star; pink and green bands ran from east to west. Overhead a red gel grew, obliterating the stars.
“Do you believe in God?”
Two Can’t-Grows bounced up in the dark, frosty and yipping and shivering. They went straight to the back fat under the carcass and gnawed at it. Iris knelt to pet the little dogs. “Oh yes!” Her teasing laughter rang. “Just look everywhere! God is in those who are what they eat.”
I leaned against the sled, comforted to know I could speak feeble words and have Iris understand, and I told her about the yellow stakes, the meeting, Lumpy’s pistol, his other dogs, and the drinking.
She straightened her neck, sheathed the axe. “Miss Hawcly’s not allowed to go to Lumpy Wolfglove’s den of iniquity. He is a terrible influence on my students. I don’t even know how many junior high girls have gotten pregnant over in that house.”
Inside, Iris opened the oven and set a lynx roast and baked potatoes on the table. She was pale and her eyes deep startling blue. Her arms were lithe and muscular. “It got dark and so late, I was wondering when you’d get here. I thought something had happened upriver.” She had set the plywood table with a flowery tablecloth. In the middle stood a blue gin bottle with red and brown grass seed heads from fall.
“Uh-oh. What’s this, Miss Hawcly, drinking gin again?”
She pinched my neck. “Treason gave me this lynx. I gutted it and cut it up quick. Long time since you’ve had lynx?”
Images of Anchorage clogged my head. “Centuries. Thanks, Iris.” I sliced tender white meat off a thigh, dark meat off a shoulder. It was fat and heavenly good. Silently, I ate until I was stuffed.
“What’s wrong,” she giggled, “cat got your tongue?”
We stretched out on her couches and sipped decaffeinated coffee. Iris opened a box of mints and put a CD in the player. “This is Lucinda Williams. Doesn’t that sound like a Takunak name? Lucinda knows how the story goes. Maybe she’s from Uktu!”
“This is nice. I like your place, Iris. This is real nice. This town, I don’t know . . . I walk around, and I feel the way I did before, except now there’s no Dawna.”
“Oh, it’s the Darkness, Cutuk. We’ll be over the hump soon, the sun will be back. You should call Dawna, or write a letter—she asked about you.”
“She wouldn’t live Out. I sure don’t know if I’d live In.” The couch was comfortable, and I closed my eyes. “I think I know how the guys feel. Real hunting is gone. Shoot, I’m wearing Sorel shoepacks. Trapping feels phony; things cost so much and furs are worth so little. Every time I get a grip on what matters, then I’m all confused again. A white-person career, with insurance? And a pension? Something is missing in me—that feels like being born a wolf and choosing a dog’s life.”
Iris set her cup on the worn plywood floor. The floor was cold, nail heads frosty by the door. She slipped her feet into beaded sealskin slippers and checked a blueberry p
ie in the oven. “Well. I’ve got a little white-girl career—there’s problems, but that’s life. I like it here. I’m with kids, I’m trying to help things, I’ve got a computer and a phone. If I wanted to, I could catch a plane to Fairbanks. I can mush up to see Abe. So many caribou came through this fall they could hardly keep the airstrip open. Bears—” She sliced the pie briskly. “You know how people talk about Takunak and the wilderness being the middle of nowhere? I think this is the middle of everywhere.”
“Sometimes I feel like I have something, some potential, like Abe,” I said, “just right under my skin, all unfocused. What I’d really like is to do something for the country.” I sat up. My hands were gripping each other. “I don’t mean the American flag and the president. I mean for the country.”
Iris glanced up sympathetically.
“I don’t know what, that’s the problem. I’m not going to join the Sara Club!”
Iris giggled. “We were so naive.”
While the pieces of pie cooled, she poured boiling water in dishpans, one wash and one rinse. “You can be my running water—tomorrow run and get me some down at my water hole. I’ve lived so long without plumbing, I’m happy without it. I wash clothes and shower at the school, though. You’re welcome to, too, Cutuk.”
I helped wash the dishes, then we ate pie. It was after midnight and Iris had to get up early. We brushed our teeth, spat in a slop bucket. I unrolled my sleeping bag beside her on the bed, but every time we nearly drifted off, one of us would murmur or ask a question.
Iris yawned. “Dawna seemed tired of Anchorage. She talks about you all the time.”
“What about you? Don’t you have somebody you—”
“Cutuk!” she whispered, her voice full of dread.
“What? What’s wrong?” I found her hands. They were trembling.