Ordinary Wolves (41 page)

I wrinkled my nose.

“Get cold pop.”

The refrigerator had Kraft plastic cheese, Banquet chicken, a bundle of dried whitefish in a Ziploc. I hauled out the dried fish. “You want
uqsruq?”
she asked. “You boys need to be fatter.” Janet rustled in the freezer. “Hey girl!” She rushed back and pulled her
ulu
out of Daisy's tiny hands. “You gonna cut, little love.”

Melt came out of the bedroom squinting and scratching his arms.

“Hello, Cutuk.”

The fingers on his right hand were gone. His knuckles ended like a swollen pink spatula. Most of his toes were not in his Wellingtons, but gone on ahead to heaven or the Happy Hunting Grounds. Last winter, working in inexplicable alliance, Lumpy and Iris had saved his life. That night, as we huddled in a circle near Lumpy's body, Iris had peered at the faces, her eyes bewildered. “This is not it!” she whispered wretchedly. “There's something else wrong!” Slowly murmurs rose—
Melt! Where's Melt?
Melt, passed out behind the steep snowdrift against the Friends Church, had been in the process of changing from a liquid to a solid when Lumpy's actions roused the town and got him found and medevaced.

He heaved down at the table. I nodded, and peeled dried whitefish off
the skin and dipped the splinters in seal oil. Melt yawned and scratched. He picked up a dried whitefish and bit off a strip. “Young man, your mom still never come home?”

His eyes were sincere. Melt had not been drunk since Lumpy died. The frostbite doctors at Providence Medical Center in Anchorage had done the best they could to thaw him back to his former self but hadn't been entirely successful. The new Melt stayed home for meals, perused
National Geographic,
and made Janet coffee.

I shook my head. “Iris is trying to find her,
guuq.”

“Yuay.
Tat's good.” Melt's voice resonated the way Enuk's had.

We chewed in silence. I glanced out the window. Watching for the writer, watching the current ease the river past. Not believing that our lives were the same lives we started with. The old Eskimo stories had held intrinsic truth, after all; they started in the middle of things and ended where the storyteller grew tired. Janet's kitchen was bright and comfortable. It was home, too. I'd had dreams die right here at the table. Cutuk, always clinging to the belief that he'd paid enough for being different, believing he was destined to be special. Mixed in with the fists and scorn, maybe there had been the expectation that because my skin was white I could void my past and go on.
Cutuk can hunt and do math; he'll “make it.”
But I'd come from farther out, gone farther in. How could I have fooled myself? I was no less scathed than the rest. And in the end maybe that was all I needed to know. I didn't need to be Eskimo. I didn't need dead wolves or gold, airplanes or the other shiny things.

The phone rang. I picked up another dried fish and bit off a strip. Melt scooped coffee grounds. Tony sweated against the shouting electric ninja. I looked at the TV. The screen was slanted, the volume low. The recorded-earlier Oprah looked slanted, but I could see her looking serious about something. Some new problem down in the States. Something about sex, for sure. Teenage girls who have sex with their moms' boyfriends' dogs' therapists?

“Cutuk! That lady going down to water,
guuq.”
Janet hung up. She smiled her big happy smile. “Maybe you'll let her pe your girlfriend, huh?”

The oil smelled sharp and fishy on my hands. Janet didn't know the
world this woman lived in. Or maybe she did. Janet was a gatherer from a long way back. Janet knew everything.

 

 

WOODROW AND TESSIE WASHINGTON
stood beside a washtub of whitefish, pike, suckers, and grayling. They were old and bowlegged. One of the pike flopped. The writer, Alice, stepped nimbly over the aluminum gunnel of Mr. Standle's boat and dug in her backpack for her camera. She wore crisp long-legged Levi's and a white shirt. “Wait! I want a picture of you with the traditional fishers, with those fish racks in the background.” Alice was twenty-seven and had a load of curly brown hair that she had tossed back and forth during her four days in town. Every child in Takunak knew her name, every man was smitten, every woman suspicious.

She knelt and snapped pictures. I smiled apologetically at
Aana
Tessie. Alice got back in the boat. She wore a three-pronged piece of caribou antler on a leather thong around her neck and it nestled in her unbuttoned collar. In the emancipated mood I was in, I wanted to throw it in the river and kiss her.

“Catalog girl, huh?” Woodrow glanced over the river, his old eyes bloodshot and opaque with cataracts. “Long time ago, Tommy order tat kind. Jus' clothes come in ta box. COD. Ha! Ha!”

Aana
Tessie shook her head.
“Arii!
Cutuk, you should let her take tat caribou horn off. Before it bunch hole in her
milluk.”

I shrugged, grinned at Woodrow, shoved the boat into the current.

It was a beautiful sunny night on the water. Alice was ecstatic about the wilderness she had discovered and the Eskimo culture, intertwined in peaceful harmony with the seasons and the mountains and the wind, and all the magazine stories she could write. Warm air blew by our faces. Occasionally we motored through pockets of cold air near shaded cutbanks. Cottonwood cotton floated on the water. The land was dry and wild rhubarb was already beginning to go to seed along the shore, and that meant the wild onions would soon be past, too, and the bull caribou
would have dark velvety horns, and the bulls would be getting fat but would still taste like summer meat from eating greens; and salmon would be flooding upstream to spawn, and trout would follow, silver-blue and heavy with oil; and it all
was
truly wonderful, but something irked me about the way this pretty woman—who might never see the land we called winter—could swoop in and harvest our world with her camera and words and spoon it back as if only she understood its profundity.

Dawna had always loved pictures. My thoughts hummed with the motor. A camera! I would buy Dawna a camera! The twenty-six-hundred-dollar kind. I would fix up the old house the way I wanted it, and at least show her my roots. Maybe in her hands a camera could tell stories waiting to be told. It would be one way to start caring about this place, instead of acting—as people did—as if the white people were going to take it tomorrow.

 

 

WHEN WE MOTORED UP,
Crazy Joe was kneeling on the rock bar in front of his canvas tent, filleting a salmon. He turned and stared. Alder smoke leaked out of his plywood smoker. Crazy Joe was small and stocky and had a fierce black and gray beard and black curls around the rim of his tanned skull. He'd come from Idaho, four decades ago, and never gone back. His pants were tied on. The crotch was ripped out and his testicles hung out. The material was all slimy and bloody there from him knocking mosquitoes off. He flung salmon strips in a brine bucket and ran toward us.

“You brought a
woman!”
He swung his bloody fillet knife. I handed him the sack of apples, and smelled the cloud of his notorious cologne. He sniffed the fruit. “Go eat, Hawcly. We got early salmon, the last two days running. Salmon heads all boiled, in the kettle. Give me an' the lady room.” Alice smiled nervously. He towed her away, showing her his salmon smoking operation, whispering about the coffee can of gold dust he had hidden up a slough—the goddamn natives were after it, the goddamn gulls wanted his fish, the goddamn mosquitoes . . .

“. . . waste your breath asking the young fella anything. Abe Hawcly raised those kids with their heads in the Stone Age.”

Alice turned and fluttered her fingers.

I sat on the rocks and ate a boiled salmon head. It was bright and peaceful here past midnight and I threw fish scraps to grayling that poked circles in the current.

I'd have to call Jerry, ask what kind of camera to order. Maybe Alice could help, too. “Joe!” I sloshed my fingers clean in the river. “I need that can of gold!”

“Boy, don't josh me around a woman. That's my winter rendezvous.”

I strolled along the rock bar. Here and there were Bic lighters and Yamaha oil jugs and the blue spaghetti of rotten poly tarps, detritus that two decades ago practically would have been sign of aliens.

Later, as they walked back, Crazy Joe was still talking, telling her about a helicopter. “. . . a pod hanging below the struts . . . subsurface. Probably our shit-for-brains governor, with a new plan now that someone's informed him he can't mine outer space.”

I wiped my hands on my pants, moved noiselessly across the rocks toward them. “What do you think the helicopters are looking for?”

Joe swiveled. He pondered, bathing in attention from two directions. “I'm not certain,” he admitted. “Something valuable, and poison. Uranium obviously comes to mind, these days.” He straightened. “Probably zinc or lead is what it is.”

He knelt at his campfire and blew on the ashes. I felt hollowness tunnel down my arteries and wondered why this was never enough—a man and his campfire. Didn't anyone want “economic development” to have an edge you could walk to and look at what the earth had so perfectly developed? Didn't people look at America and catch their breath, thinking, “Gosh, it must have been such amazing country!” Coals glowed, and he stacked twigs on and turned and filled a kettle from the river. “Make you folks a shot of coffee. I forgot my manners.”

Alice's tablet was out. “Wouldn't mining on a large scale change the flavor of this valley?”

“The
flavor?”
Still kneeling, the old man put his chin in his hand and
sighed. “You're a writer . . . that's right. The flavor of the water? The flavor of the fish?” Joe turned to me. “Hawcly knew. He built
above
Jesus Creek. He might act unconcerned, but he wasn't going to drink tainted water.”

“Tainted water?” I uttered.

Alice's glance strayed to the river and back to the kettle. Joe flicked a peek at her backside. He straightened. “The Dog Die Mountains—you think that's just a name, no history there? You never think maybe something back there doesn't have a history of being healthy for canines? Dogs eat some minerals, they'll foam at the mouth. Guard hairs fall out. Come on, Hawcly, you know what a gray wolf looks like underneath the guard hairs. White. Pull your goddamn head out of the sand.”

“I don't drink coffee,” Alice said.

“When a batch of butt-sniffing senators are back there putting the golden shovel in some open pit mine, then everybody's going to say Joe knew it all along.”

I smiled weakly at Alice.

She put her pen in a pocket and pointed her expensive camera at the far shore. In the late evening sunlight, along the horizon like iris petals, the Shield Mountains were velvet blue.

TWENTY-SEVEN

UNDER THE BRIGHT LEAVES
of fall, I swept out the igloo, burned gnawed chairs and tables, and Cloroxed mold off the slab walls. The moss insulating the roof needed to be added to, and the slumped spots and marten and mouse tunnels patched. The sagging beams needed spruce post supports. Windows needed to be fabricated out of Visqueen, put in, and chinked.

The fall days were warm and the air smelled of highbush cranberries and leaves and the pitch of freshly peeled logs. My net along the shore caught salmon and pike, whitefish, suckers, grayling and trout. Occasionally a huge sheefish tangled in the small mesh by its square lips. On shore I lashed poles together to build racks to dry the fish. The chained dogs yawned and stretched and watched me cut fish, and cook dog pot out of the fish heads and guts, and lay trout and sheefish in the grass to get “stink” for
quaq.
They slept and awoke to bark, alerting herds of caribou that moved across the tundra. The animals were dark in their
late-summer coats. I shot a few for meat and parka hides. When they went down in the dwarf birch they were hard to locate, smooth in their short hair and dark velvet antlers.

The fall days shortened and the nights cooled, and quickly the caribou grew white manes and their giant antlers peeled bloody and red and darkened like burnished hardwood.

In the afternoons, when the sun was warm, there were blueberries to pick, and after the first heavy frosts the cranberries ripened, and I filled wooden barrels with the plump red berries. Picking berries, I missed Iris and Jerry. Jerry had carried the World War I Enfield .30-06. Iris always had an unripe berry under her tongue to keep her from eating berries, and she carried the laughter.

I dug a new outhouse hole, filled in the old. Behind the house—where the bank sloped down to Outnorth Lake—I dug a pit and built a new
siġḷuaq
out of logs in the ground to store kegs of berries, jars of fat, butter, a bucket of
quaġaq
from Janet, seal oil, and a keg of salted salmon bellies.

Every morning I jumped off my
qaatchiaq,
made coffee and oatmeal, and heated leftover meat. I stretched the ache out of my hands and hurried outside to work. The sky was windy blue and scudded with cat-scratch clouds. The air was clean and the leaves smelled good. The animals and birds were busy preparing for winter. I kept a journal and wrote down what the land and creatures were doing. I told myself I needed to learn if I claimed to care and planned to help. I wondered if that was true or just sounded good.

Boats passed occasionally. Stevie had boated up to visit and bring my mail and the camera order. Another time, an aluminium boat banged into rocks out in front of the dog yard. “WHERE'S THE CHANNEL?” The men looked cold and eager. They motored closer. “Much caribou around?”

“Should be better back down four bends.”