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. “Iâ”
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 coughâTommy 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 jugâand 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 wallâa 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
naluaÄ¡miu.”
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.
Â
Â
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 letterâshe 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 meâthat 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 pie in the oven. “Well. I've got a little white-girl careerâthere'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. Bearsâ” 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 waterâtomorrow 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 youâ”
“Cutuk!” she whispered, her voice full of dread.
“What? What's wrong?” I found her hands. They were trembling.
“Something bad. . . . It's going to happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don't know,” she cried. “It's that feeling I get. The first time was before January landed and took Mom. Now it just happens. Maybe it's just intuition, I don't know. I can feel it.”
I hugged her shoulders and held her. “It's the Darkness,” I said reassuringly. “It makes things seem all wrong. Try to get some sleep.”
It grew very late, and I breathed deep and even, pretending. Eventually, we both hovered on the edge of sleep.
A muffled gunshot thumped.
In the dark, Iris moved, then went silent, listening. “What was that?” She leaned up on one elbow. She stood and went to the window. “What was that? Sounded like a gun.”
She opened the door. Condensation rolled around her calves. Aurora flamed behind the black outlines of spruce. We listened to sounds in the crystal night. A dog's teeth chattering, trees crackling, the throb of the generators; in the leftover silence in between, snowgos suddenly screamed. And then the village siren wailed. We threw our jeans on, our parkas and snowpants, boots, fur hats, and gloves. On and on the siren went, a giant electric rabbit wailing in frozen darkness, calling Takunak together to be torn apart. Every dog in town howling. The northern lights dancing wildly. Stevie up on the ridge, crying like a tortured animal.
“WHY YOU DIE? WHY YOU HAVE TO DIE? WHY YOU DIE?”
And Lumpy on the snow, under the flashlights. His face fallen in. His trail ended here in the cold and night. Nothing as natural as death or even murder. Suicide. Janet limped up the hill. She put her arms around us. All of us. They were old arms, and fierce with love.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE FRESH SNOW
is new and clean, glinting under the stars.
Otter and mice, owls and foxes, and all the animals move, digging themselves out after the downfall, shaking off snow and searching for food. Their sounds carry in the frozen air, while their scents and breaths cling close.