Ordinary Wolves (34 page)

The big curved tusk weighed the sled heavily, and I rolled it back off the load and staked the dogs to it. I unsheathed my axe, climbed the bank and cleared trail through a sweaty mile of brush, and returned for the dogs. I heaved the cumbersome tusk on the sled, grinning, picturing Abe questioning my efforts over something that he would admire, and leave where it lay. I tried to coax the team up the bank; Rex scrambled to the top and the overloaded sled hung nearly vertical. Mike hesitated and the other wheel dog tugged him sideways.

“Go 'head!”

Rex peered over the bank and leapt down. The sled crashed onto the ice and plunged backward into the open water. I sank to my waist. In an instant I scrambled up, over the handbars and load, to shore. The runners punched into the river bottom. I stood on a lump of collapsed bank, panting. I flung dogs up the bank, then yanked at the brush bow of the sled, pulling it out half a foot at a time. “Hike! GO 'HEAD! GET UP THERE!” The sled rose, finally balanced and disappeared up in the willows. “Whoa!”

My heart pounded. I grabbed roots and clawed to the top of the frozen dirt. In the willows the dogs had stopped. My gloves were soaked. I flopped them across the tusk. They froze down. Barehanded and shaking, I rubbed snow on my pants. The water had hardly penetrated my new nylon overpants but had filled my Sorel boots. I rubbed snow on the dogs' legs to soak up the water before it froze. I unlashed the stiffening tarp, scraped out slush and water, and sat and wrung my insoles and changed to fresh socks. The grub box was wet and icy. Down below, the open water appeared clear now, the bottom steeply inclined. My breathing slowed. I rocked the tusk until it lay curve-up against a clump of willows, marked it with willows, checked my load, slid on heavy wolverine mittens, and told the dogs to go.

In another hour we were past the cutbank, traveling on up the ice,
winding into the valley as the first evening planets twinkled. There were tracks of the fourteen wolves that I had seen yesterday. They had howled at my dogs and paced and finally curled on the ice until afternoon when they ambled into the mouth of a slough. Their voices had faded in the willows, and I howled to them, suddenly overwhelmed to be home, while Janet's voice whispered in my head,
Why you never shoot 'em?

Rex's ears lifted. All the dogs tugged. Ahead, a small herd of caribou trotted toward us. I threw out the snow hook and pulled the rifle over my shoulder, checked the muzzle, and shot a young bull. Cows and calves flooded around us, scented the dogs, and veered onto the ice. Momentarily, the caribou stopped, wide-eyed, nearly surrounding me. The dogs barked and the animals raced back the way they had come.

Across the river a
naataq
hooted. It was getting dark. The dogs wagged and whined. Quickly, I gutted the caribou, realizing it had been two years; my hands knew what to do, and it made me proud. I cut slices of liver and stuffed it in the rumen to cook and eat while I worked. The dogs got all they could swallow of fat intestines while I snapped willows and built a fire. Coffee boiled in a blackened can, and the choice parts—the tongue and brisket—simmered. The sky grew orange and green in the south, blue-black overhead. I chained the dogs, ate meat and fat, slept in the sled with six onions.

We loaded up and went slowly on the next day, and the next, until the dogs sniffed wood smoke and sped up. At the upper end of a timbered ridge squatted a cabin. There was snow on the roof, icicles on the eaves. A cache stood nearby poking up out of the trees. Behind, mountains rose in sharp white triangles. It felt strong and good to be near mountains without names. Probably CIA satellites hunting the sky had numbered all thousand peaks—for national security—but it was these mountains, and their namelessness, that left me feeling safe.

Dogs struck up a warning. My team sprinted up the shore. Abe stood out on the ice, Franklin coming down a path. My dogs passed both, yanking along the glare ice toward their dogfood pile of salmon and whitefish, moose and caribou. I glanced at Abe. He wore an otter hat and between the hanging flaps his beard was gray. He didn't have mittens on, or a
jacket, but a heavy wool shirt with long-underwear sleeves sticking out. A coffee mug was clamped in his fingers. His hand and wrist looked big, his shoulders thick. I stomped the snow hook into a crack in the ice and my dogs lay with their lips pointing at the pile of fish—except Magnum PI, the wiry little racer, who stood whining and tugging to go.

Abe and Franklin held the toprails, eyed the caribou in my sled. Abe sniffed the evening air the way he always had, checking for moisture and temperature, predicting the night weather without even knowing he was doing it. Franklin wore a green down jacket, black and greasy chested and patched with duct tape. He was stooped, his eyelids chapped and papery.

I turned to Abe. His eyes glowed, bluer than frozen sky. His face was craggy. His hands gnarled my shoulder. I could hold my head up, my smile up, but not my eyes. Part of me felt free and at home, back on the land, eating
patiq
bones and berries; the other part was wilted from too much cowboy coffee and culture shock. My skin felt thin and I didn't want him to see through to the hollow spaces and doubt. He swallowed and made a hoarse sound; he turned away. “Help you unhitch.”

A huge sled dog shambled over. One brown ear hung out to the side like a wind was blowing. She had the deep chest, stiff hips, and ratty tail of an old retired working dog. She pushed her chin in my hand. “Plato?” I knelt, suddenly choked up, petting her soft eyes, and I glanced up, smelling the dogcooker fire, and icy leaves and cold falling air, and hearing mice rustling in the grass and grosbeaks cracking cones up in the spruce and ice piling out in the channel, and way across the tundra I felt the sun going too far down.

They chained the five dogs and led me up to the cabin. The steep twisting path passed an igloo—Franklin's—overhung with birches. The snow in front of his door was shoveled, but untracked except by mice. Abe's cabin was small with two beds along the back wall and a workbench in front below a glass window. I dropped my duffle and
qaatchiaq
and stood gazing at my father's life. Paintings and brushes and plane shavings mixed on his workbench. Now black wires came in the wall between logs—from the two solar panels Iris had mentioned, and a small wind generator—to a twelve-volt battery. Wire sneaked along the roof poles
to a tiny fluorescent bulb. Abe's bed had two caribou skins stacked on it instead of one. The curled edges had been trimmed straight. A shelf above his bed held books: an atlas, a dictionary,
Endurance, The Iliad, Wildflowers of Alaska, The Bourne Identity, Lonesome Dove, Journals of Samuel Hearne.
Dusty aluminum foil tacked to the wall reflected light onto his pillow. Thumbtacked to logs was a postcard of the New York City skyline, a birch leaf, a lichen, one of my letters, a package of Coleman mantles; hawk feathers, chain saw files, and skin needles were poked into cracks in beams. A quote from Henry David Thoreau, printed in black ink, was speared on a nail, and a calendar photograph of a lynx in soft blue snow.

Abe flipped his easel out of his way and gently booted tubes of paint and cans of thinner across the floorboards. He rapped on the window. “Plato, back down to your doghouse. Go eat your fish.” Along the wall beyond his bed, a bearskin couch was within reach of the fire. On the stove, a piece of antler rolled in a pot of boiling water. “Softening this, for a chisel handle.” Abe peered into the steam. Franklin reached under a counter, got out a box of pilot crackers. He was completely bald on top now, his white fronds staticky and wild and he moved creakily, pretending to innocently nudge Abe's easel until I could see the painting. Under his tented lids he stole glances. Gray light came in at the window; at the easel, a wolf's face gazed into mine, the face thin, hungry, surreal. Abe stoked the fire and the flames threw quick light. The lines on the wolf's nose were tiny crosshatches. In the shadows of the cheekbones I saw my father's face. I stepped close, and chills rafted my veins. In the reflection of the golden orbs—were those the distant towers of New York?

Abe banged the stovepipe. I jumped. Creosote tinked down the pipe. “Lot easier living here than downriver in the wind,” he said. “Deep snow, though. Gets tiring snowshoeing out our wood trails. Less animals, too.” Abe was telling me something, without delving into the past.

“Why'd you move?” I said bluntly. “You like animals.”

He sighed. His left knee cracked. “I was up Jesus Creek one day . . . watching wolves. A snowgo came and shot them with a semiautomatic rifle; he ran over some, wounded some, finally got all of them. It about got
me mad at people.” Abe grinned and rubbed his knee. “Not good to feel that way. You feel better when you like everybody.”

I wondered if the hunter had been Treason, or the loud talker at the post office; it could have been anybody. Lance burst into my head:
We all want a few dead wolves, don't we?

“Abe's been working on that for months.” Franklin nodded at the easel. His chin shook. He pulled a piece of used dental floss out of his shirt pocket and flossed the teeth he had that touched. He wadded the gray string back in his pocket.

“Don't throw this one in the stove,” I said.

Abe swiveled suspiciously. “What would you do with my wolf?”

“I like it.” I was lying. I'd find an address in Chicago or somewhere where people cared about painting; I'd find out if Abe had the talent January claimed, if he had had open doors and still walked away. It was almost none of my business, but it seemed to matter.

“ . . . maybe the best I've ever painted,” Abe said. “Iris thinks so, too.” He splashed hot water over coffee grounds. The roasted aroma filled the cabin, seeping into the moss chinking, mixing with the pitchy firewood turning white and frosty, thawing beside the stove. He handed me a mug and slid the sizzling cannibal pot onto the table. The pot was black with grease, Abe not the kind of person to ruin cast iron with soap. I ran my thumbnail around the rim; it clicked into an old chip where Iris had hit the pot with my blue hatchet, chopping out broth. The hatchet lay beside the wood box. I shook my head, trying to align the years, the Taco Bells, exit ramps, rabid foxes, and this old pot.

“Built a cabin this time.” Still Abe didn't sit. He rustled on the kitchen counter for clean mugs. His finger stub was stiff and sore-looking and didn't curve with his big hand. “Not as warm, or as cool in the summer, but sod igloos you have to rebuild every twenty years, and I didn't feel like building the last one when I was eighty.”

Franklin puckered a grin and softened a cracker in his coffee. “Have some, Cutuk. These are our last pilot crackers.”

By now, I knew they must be out of new reading material, too. I opened my pack and spilled out their junk mail, slippery as a washtub of
fish. Franklin sorted greedily, his thumb claw gripping a Victoria's Secret catalog. “What's this? Sears and Roebuck got a new daughter-in-law on their cover?” He opened it in the middle and leafed back and forth in both directions, feigning minimal interest.

“We have a plank boat, with Iris's ten-horse.” Abe dumped our lukewarm coffee back into the pot and poured hot. “The impeller wore out. I made one out of a boot heel, but I didn't want to get stuck the summer seventy miles downriver if nobody had spare parts.” He and Franklin shook their heads. Stuck in Takunak, watching four-wheelers and airplanes and Oprah—for them too close to hell to risk; they could wait until winter and dog-team down to town.

Franklin lowered the lingerie catalog and flossed again thoughtfully. I knifed at the pot-roasted brown bear foreleg and dipped the meat in cranberry sauce. I felt bad for Franklin. He was old and those women in the catalog were so misty-eyed and inviting, and nothing remotely like that was ever going to happen to him again. Anybody could see from his mouth puckered around his teeth that he wished there was at least a prayer.

Finally, Abe sat on a stump. He cut hot meat and spooned cranberry sauce on a cracker. His forearms and hands were heavy, forked with veins, almost grotesquely huge and powerful. “Last box of pilot crackers.” He chuckled. “We were saving it for company. Shrews chewed in the back and almost outflanked us.” The cracker he lifted to his grin had an edge gone and the rasp marks of fine teeth, and it was something like love to see the humor he still took from almost being beaten by a shrew. His naïveté made my lungs catch. I looked up to smile on my dad—and shuddered in the yellow gaze of the wolf.

 

 

A WEEK AFTER I ARRIVED,
Abe and I stood out on the ridge without parkas on, pissing. Franklin didn't give us a lot of time alone, never enough to crack into the past. I wouldn't ask any question with Franklin, a finger in Victoria's Secret, listening, waiting to practice atrophied
parenting skills. Now he was down rummaging in his igloo for flour to make pan bread.
Iron Toast.
The echo of Iris's laughter made me smile.

“It's good to be home. Though the old days feel like something I dreamed up.”

“When you're young, the hills are easy to climb,” Abe said. “The good thing about getting older is they don't seem so big.” He shook his penis and stuffed it back into his pants. “You were always my favorite.”

“You talking to me?”

His eyebrows twitched in sudden embarrassment. They were thick and still blond. Iris was always his favorite. I nodded, not needing to change that, but words tumbled out. “You must be getting Alzheimerish. I wasn't your favorite. Iris was.”

In his beard his lips smiled. “Where did you learn to discount yourself?”

“Where were you? People taught me different is bad, starting a long time before I did anything besides wait with the dogs.” I stopped and dropped my eyes. This wasn't any chat I wanted to chat.
I've been places, Abe. I've flown in Boeing's jets, walked paved streets, and kissed girls.