Ordinary Wolves (35 page)

“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 Takunak. 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
X
s 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.

Inside, when it softened enough to cut, we dipped the frozen fermented fish in seal oil and ate it before it melted. Abe heated water for tea with bread and jam.
“Aarigaa taikuu,”
Abe said and leaned back from the food. Twilight darkened into the early evening, and I rummaged in my bag, got out the bottle of One-Five I'd been saving.

Franklin went for his mug on the shelf. We sipped by candlelight while coals glowed through cracks in the stove. Franklin fiddled with the shortwave, and Radio Moscow came faint and crisp into the cabin.

“They've been dumping nuclear waste in the Arctic Ocean,” he interrupted the announcer. “Our trout sometimes winter across in Siberian rivers. Who knows what we're eating. Look what it did to my hair!”

I lay on the bearskin couch with my feet hanging over. Frostbite tingled and itched my face. The men argued now, about global spin pushing pollution to the poles—smog from the Ruhr Valley and the East Coast—about the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill, and the pipeline pumping a million barrels a day out the crotch of Alaska. They were informed about the news, the radio no longer something perfidious and vain.

“How come you quit smoking, Abe?”

He untied a cloth sack of dried apricots. “Didn't taste good anymore.” He chewed an apricot, fighting the hard fruit. Grin wrinkles curved from his eyes into his beard. “Did you think, air pollution?”

“Maybe.”

I was getting melancholy, pressed by the heavy miles of dark outside, acutely aware of the fact that the last thing that had slept with me was a sack of six onions. An idea cooked in my head. I'd fix up our old family sod igloo. I'd use the money from the mammoth tusk to buy Dawna something expensive and beautiful. The dream from there faded into little floating ice pans of reality. What would I buy?