Ordinary Wolves (21 page)

After Freezeup Janet Wolfglove had fed me boiled
tiktaaliq
livers, complaining when I wouldn't eat. Her kitchen smelled of fresh rolls. Out the window on the river ice a black log had frozen in. A good cache pole. As if anyone built caches anymore. And later, packing.
What to bring? My two knives, string, matches, an Army sleeping bag, a strip of sleeping skin; leaving everything else I'd ever known there on the north shore of the Kuguruk River.

The jet moved. The man with the computer rocked his knees up and down. “Alaska Airlines is another company just trying to salvage the bottom line.” I had no idea whether he was addressing me, his computer, or the seat back, or what a bottom line was. I pictured a heavy rope used for towing jets when they ran out of gas or wouldn't start.

The tube hurled forward, inhaling black sky. My throat swallowed itself. I clung to a knit seat cushion—apparently a life preserver—asking for insurance from a God whose Sunday premiums I'd never paid. We climbed sickeningly, and down into the blue-black twilight the wind and frozen sea fell. Behind my forehead something like a spoon pressed down. Stars shone beside us. Far off to the south the sky thinned to a hazy curtain of blue.

“Are you okay?” The flight attendent offered a toy pillow.

“Fine,” I croaked, the village in my voice. “Fellas let me drink Lysol for my birthday. I'm hungover. I sure
tupak
to fly.” Village English was a different way of holding the back of your tongue, crushing the words—swallowing the big ones, of course.

Her smile shifted and lodged like a forked pike bone had caught in her throat. In the next row an old woman was telling a light-brown white man about being spanked by missionaries, in boarding school. For speaking Iñupiaq. “Tat what I always see when I see white peoples,” she
shouted. I lowered my eyes, remembering running my dog team behind the Takunak church, sixteen and scared. Tommy Feathers roared around a curve on his snowgo. He swerved and plowed into willows. He kicked my dogs. “Goddamn you white shit! How come you be on ta way?” His heavy lips twisted. Booze breath stunk. “Get my gun and shoot you yet!” My rifle hung in its caribou-skin scabbard, ready as always. “Plato, come-gee!” Plato poked her nose under lines, trying to bring the tangled team around. Tommy had stopped at our igloo for all the years I could remember. He spent the night last December rubbing his huge thawing ears, laughing and visiting while Abe soaked moose
babiche
to repair his sled. Making
babiche
for snowshoes and sleds involved shooting and skinning a moose—or caribou—soaking the hide, and scraping it daily with a shovel until the hair slipped, then half-drying the hide and slicing it into perfect strips to dry and store. Tommy's sled was lashed with nylon twine.

“White shit cocksucker!”

Kids raced up.
“Qilamik!”
They swiveled the team around. Most of them had beaten me up before, thrown rocks, chased me with slingshots and pellet rifles. But here they were looking out for me like cousins. Tommy was an elder. There wasn't any direction to run from that. They understood. “Go!” The kids whistled to the dogs.

The woman in the next row crooned on. I sat stiff and straight in the middle seat, picturing a sun-shot wolf turd twisted with caribou hair—white shit—and trying to feel mysterious, a secret agent trained in all the kung fu of the land. It didn't work. Someone who mattered needed to assure me that I mattered. Enuk was gone. Who else was hero enough? I pried out the folded money in my pocket and looked at the faces.
Thomas Jefferson?
Iris was the closest thing to a hero for me. She'd suggested that I experience the city, make and spend some money without Abe nearby. She said she had loved the city but had started to feel tired out by it; she had missed Abe, the dogs, picking berries. And taking care of food.

With nothing else to do, I counted my money. Ten twenties. And a two-party check for five dollars and seventy-four cents. The earth curved beneath us, squiggly rivers, white lakes, dark ink spills of trees—a thousand miles of wilderness, flat and colorless and no relative of home from
up here. Across the riveted aluminum wing, the sun glowed on splendid mountains.

The flight attendant handed out baskets of food. On a napkin I jotted a note.
Abe, It's warm in a jet. A beautiful tall brown-haired woman wants me to eat. Alaska Airlines wants me to drink their coffee.
I paused, wondering what Abe had been teaching us all his life. He seemed to have taught
Don't chase money, that's a cheap way to live. Don't kill animals for glory, that makes you the worst kind of bully.
But what was in between? What did he want us to
do?
After a minute I grew more generous.
Be happy
was what he'd tried to teach. But weren't people supposed to be best at what they were taught and practiced? Kids in the village were great at basketball and stoning swallows off the telephone wires. Somehow I'd spent my practice
wanting
to be happy.

She handed me a tiny bag of almonds, a plastic cup, a 7UP, and a packet with two aspirins. “For your headache.”

Quickly, I shoved the money back in my pocket. I stared, awed by sweet and carbonated water, rogued cheeks and soft brown eyes. The city was going to be exciting. The two white pills lay in my palm.

She held out her hand. “I'll take that wrapper.”

I hesitated, then stuffed it in my pocket and patted it. “Oh, I'll save it. For fire starter.”

She smiled fleetingly, then moved down the walkway.

 

 

INSIDE, THE ANCHORGE
airport building blurred into distance. A world inside, like Trantor in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. Too many people moved too fast, most of them white; it was eerie. All different sizes and shapes of white people, their clothes so clean and their shoes so shallow. I held onto a wall.
Eskimos hate rushers. Wolves eat stragglers.
Something was wrong with their eyes. I glanced at their faces, and finally down at my hands. Was I invisible? The flight attendant hurried past, her fast high-heeled legs as stiff and cloppy as a walking caribou's. I wanted to shout
Wait!
But for what? For me to woo her with stories of shrews
running over my face in bed, gnawing at the greasy duck feathers in our homemade pillows?

First I had to learn how to get out of this village inside walls, on carpet and tile ground. Janet had warned, “Don't get lost on that airport.
Aachikaaŋ
that blace.” What had Iris said?
“. . . the road goes right past January Thompson's . . .”

The air tasted tired. The ground under the airport had to be holding its breath. I walked, came to bears standing dead in glass boxes, shot by dentists. Doors were numbered, locked, alarmed, signed with NO. I walked the other way, averted my eyes from the bears, passed a bald eagle perched in glass. Rode electric stairs, arrived at electric glass doors. They opened, pleased to see anyone go. Who paid the electric bills?

Outside, the air echoed and thundered and stank. In the warmth, snow melted under a steel rail. The snow was different from the kind you'd scoop a handful and eat. Herds of people milled with purpose. They rolled luggage to cars, and rolled away. In all directions exhaust pipes puffed. Jets veering into the sky. Cars parked with engines running. Buses spewing smoke. A truck charged past my ankles, its stinky breath blowing my clothes. Sunlight leaked under the overhang, amazingly bright, and yellow. Could this be midwinter? Crotch Point was still back in morning darkness.

I shouldered my bag. The snowdrifts were knee deep and greasy. I waded back along the pavement. People stared out car windows. Something had changed. From inside their cars I wasn't invisible anymore. Hiccups climbed in my throat—the noise and stink. Monstrous trucks roared and ripped the air a foot from my side. They blurred as they passed, warping vision, the most frightening and instantaneous death I'd ever faced. The road stretched impossibly straight, wet and painted black with white and yellow lines. No one else was walking. Maybe it was against the law. I ran, my bag flopping, my
mukluks
growing ruined. Webby scum clung to the caribou hair. Water sopped through the moosehide bottoms, up through the sheared caribou insoles. It was a dishonorable end for a pair of Janet's beautiful cold-weather soft-bottom
mukluks.

Where the road forked, I stopped, reaching into my pocket for the
address and map to January's that Iris had given me. My money was there; the slip of paper was gone. I glanced around, shivering a small chill of terror. It had been folded with my money. I looked back. A jet lumbered into the sky.

 

 

HOTELS WITH A HUNDRED
windows loomed. The roar was constant. Nothing at home was this frantic; the closest thing was female mosquitoes, brave and fiercely competitive, trying to acquire blood before they died. Poles and signs reached like trees for the light—survival of the fit-test, city style. Everything had words. Flashing words. As if someone had cut up a magazine, glued it on the sky.
Dawna must love this!
No reading the river, snow, ice, tracks—the city took it literally; reading sign meant reading signs.

I turned onto smaller roads. Cars were fewer and I waved each time one passed, hoping one would stop and offer assistance. An elderly lady waved back. The air quieted between the close houses. The houses had numbers nailed on them. Someone was keeping count. Music thumped. A chain rattled. I glanced behind. I had never walked across Takunak without fear, never run my dogs into town without keeping an axe handle or a chain handy, wondering which loose dogs would try to fight my dogs, or who would try to fight the white boy. Iris had made it sound as if I could be exempt from that in Anchorage.

I unclipped my bag and pulled out a strip of moose
paniqtuq
and my knife. Abe had smoked the moose, for January, and sprinkled on a little salt. I bit it, cut pieces off at my lips. Dogs barked. They sounded strange, like prisoners, the barks coming one here, another there, not from any whole teams. A deep-chested black and yellow dog padded around the corner of a house. It bounded out. Dollars and dollars worth of galvanized chain uncoiled. No axe or shovel leaned in sight. Only mailboxes, pounded into the earth. I leapt back. The dog hit the end of its chain. A woman opened a window.

She was inaudible over the barking dog.

I pulled sinewy meat out of my mouth. “Hi. I'm l-looking for a friend. Any chance you could help me?”

She smiled, fleetingly and taut. “What are you doing in this neighborhood? Quiet, Zoogy!”

I tossed the tough sinew to the dog. He sniffed, picked it up, swallowed, and tilted his head for more. “W-walking. I'm looking for January.”

Her glance angled to my
mukluks.
“For January? Don't give Zoogy your nasty germs. Go back where you belong or I'll have to dial the cops.” She cranked the window shut.

I blinked, closed my mouth, bolted between houses. Ran around corners, my wet feet slopping on pavement. Signs accosted me. TURNAGAIN. DEAD END. STOP. NO TRESPASSING. IOWA. 32ND. BEWARE OF OWNER. TURNAGAIN. A person in blue tights, yellow shoes, and a helmet rocketed past on a bicycle. “Hi.” Its white teeth flashed in a grin. A man or a woman, I couldn't tell. I halted, panting. Over my shoulder I grinned too late. “Iris,” I murmured,
“these
are supposed to be my people?”

Along a fence, boot prints led over a bank, down to railroad tracks, metal with hundreds of big spikes driven into square wood. In the distance and falling light, blue signs said something that started with NO. People tracks crossed the railroad and angled through birch and spruce. I shoved both hands into my one glove to warm them. Houses lurked in the trees, their windows never all out of sight. Miniature lynx tracks traversed the trail.

The trees grew thicker. I knelt down. Finally, just barely, all houses were out of sight. I decided to camp, to find January tomorrow. It wasn't much of a camp site—stomped snow, spruce boughs, and my
qaatchiaq
and Army sleeping bag. I was unsure about laws concerning building a fire even though dry dead spruce limbs hung, tempting. Where the cat's trail dipped under a limb, I buried some dried meat and set a snare with a piece of twine. Car sounds penetrated the trees. A bird flapped overhead, its wings panting like only a raven's. I jumped to my feet, forgetting the house windows, breathing quickly, as if I could inhale
home and this raven and the smell of warm snow and wind up in those branches.

 

 

IN THE DREAM,
wind howled. Plato writhed backward out of her harness. A truck bellowed past downriver. The truck's panel side had no end. It grew louder. Plato pulled, twisting out of her pelt, leaving it hanging in my hands. The skin was rotten. Putrid fur shed on my wet palms. Her naked carcass snarled and bit my fingers. I awoke clenched in terror. The ground shook, light and thunder filling the trees.

Slowly the rhythm to the roar told where I was. A long time later the train had gone and still my breathing heaved. Up in the sky, orange light leaked on puffy clouds, leaving night not night but something cataclysmic. The sound of cars had not quit. Where did they all go? Who were all those countless white people? What if a road were plowed through to the Kuguruk River? Agh, the end of America must have been horrifying for the Indians.

I lay on my back, careful not to knock snow on my
qaatchiaq,
my face cold and breath rising in clouds.
Alappaa.
How did Iris make this trip warm and with friends? Enuk's voice blurted,
Turn back? Gonna never starve little bit even?

I pictured the creek with the wolf den, the shred of green rope hanging from the tree. I wondered if I should try to find January in the morning, or try to absorb some of the city on my own first. “Enuk, you never came to Anchorage,” I whispered. “I'm lost double 'cause I don't know this place or the people. Maybe triple. Maybe I don't know who I am either. So don't haunt my head.”