was stained reddish brown. She was a gentle dog. I coaxed her to the front of the team where she shivered with her back arched, tail under her belly and pads freezing. Abe and Jerry harnessed the big, hard-to-handle dogs. The snaps were frozen. The harnesses were stiff and icy and hard to force into dog shapes. Our dogs weren’t accustomed to company; even cold, they showed off to Enuk’s dogs, tugging and barking, tangling the lines.
A quarter mile downriver, Abe waved a big wave good-bye to Enuk. Abe geed the dogs north, up the bank below the mouth of Jesus Creek. The snow on the tundra was ice hard, scooped and gouged into waves by wind. It creaked under the runners. Morning twilight bruised the southern sky. Shivers wandered my skin. I yanked off a mitten and warmed frozen patches on my cheeks. The cold burnt inside my nose. My fingers started to freeze. I wondered what thoughts walked in Abe’s mind. I felt as cumbersome and alone as a moon traveler, peering out the fur tunnel of my caribou hood, beaver hat, and wolf ruff.
Farmer led toward the Dog Die Mountains. They were steep mountains, the spawning grounds of brown bears, storms, and spirits. They beckoned like five giants, snowed in to their chins. Occasionally we crossed a line of willows that marked a buried slough or a pond shore, and a dog or two would heave against his neckline and mark a willow, claiming any stray females in the last ten thousand acres.
“Is that a moose?” I said.
The dogs glanced over their shoulders, faces frosty and alarmed at my shout.
“Might be a tree,” Abe said softly.
My moose mutated into one of the lone low dark trees that grip the tundra, hunkered like a troll, gnarled arms thrust downwind. Abe had more careful eyes than I did; they grabbed details, touched textures, took apart colors. I slumped, cold on my caribou skin, stabbed by love for my dad. He didn’t have to say “might be a tree” when he knew. Plenty of the dads in the village would holler, “Shudup. You try’na scare everything again?”
On a ridge, Abe whoa’d the dogs. He took out tobacco and papers. His bared hands tightened and turned red. I looked away, pretending for him that they were brown. He was too naive to know that red fingers were not the kind to have. The smoke smelled sharp in the smell-robbed air, comforting. The southern horizon glowed pink and for a few minutes a chunk of the sun flamed red through a dent in the Shield Mountains, like a giant flashlight with dying batteries. The snow glowed incandescent. I sprinted back and forth, melting fingers and toes. Abe glassed the land.
“Hmm. There she is.”
Through the binoculars the moose stood silhouetted, black as open water. We mushed closer. A deep moan floated on the air. Abe braked the sled. He shushed the dogs. They held their breath, listening. Then the pups yowled and tugged, the scent stirring their blood.
“Must be that cow missing her calf,” Abe said.
“They can sound like that?” I’d heard loons laughing manically, the woman-screams of lynx, ghoulish whimpering from porcupine, but I hadn’t heard a mourning moose. I was proud of Abe, proud of his omniscient knowledge of the land.
“Never heard anything like it before,” he said, pleased.
We jounced on.
“Abe, why do you think greatness is bad?” My question startled both of us. I stiffened, mortified. He snapped ice off his mustache. “I mean—. Burning your best paintings. And acting like you don’t know how to hunt when travelers are bragging.”
When Abe spoke, he used his historical-problems-with-the-world voice. He had a degree in art and history; Iris often teased that his degree was history. “This book I’m reading, the author argues that our heroes aren’t heroes at all and have traditionally—”
I stopped listening and watched frost-laden twigs pass. Abe liked to mull things over until he got them complicated. A discussion with him was like rolling a log uphill in sticky snow. Ideas glommed on. I started to offer ten-year-old facts, but the dogs sped up and we dropped into a slough and lost the trail of the conversation when the team piled up on the leftovers of the calf moose. Backbone, hair, hooves, and the head with the nose and eyes chewed down, all scattered in a red circle. Fine wolf trails and deep moose trenches mapped out the battle.
The dogs bit at the frozen blood and woody stomach contents. Abe bent, careful not to let go of the sled handlebar. He touched a clean wolf paw print. “Soft,” he mused. “Been back to finish her up.”
The dogs raced west, up a narrow slough. “Abe,” I whispered, “should we maybe not shoot that ma moose? She’s had enough bad luck. Didn’t you want to shoot a barren cow, to be fatter?”
I wanted to get out of the overhanging willows before she charged. The snow was soft and deep. Anyone knew moose were more dangerous than bears. Especially on a dog team. As a child, I had been petrified during the night with fear of a moose dropping in our ground-level skylight. The thrashing black hooves would crack our skulls. The wind would sift the igloo full of snow. Shrews would tunnel under our skin and hollow us out, and when travelers found our bodies we’d be weightless as dried seagulls. Abe nourished the nightmare, shrugging, conveying the impression that, sure, given time, my prophecy was bound to come true. Abe was that way. Realistic, he called it.
He ran behind the runners, dodging willows that tried to slap his eyes. He panted over my hood. “Might be the only moose in fifty miles that doesn’t care either way.”
I knew I could argue with him, and he’d leave the animal. He’d welcome the discussion—and the chance not to kill. I shut my stiff lips. Willows whipped past. Abe climbed on the runners and rode. He cleared his throat and whistled encouragements to the dogs. I squinted in frustration, thinking, Now I’m definitely not going to get to shoot.
“My parents split up after the war,” Abe said. “People didn’t do that back then. That-a-girl, Farmer. Haw. Haw over. I was thirteen then.”
In the sled I stared at my mukluks. Shocked—not that his parents divorced, but that he was telling me. His past was always as distant as the cities.
“I came home from school one day, in trouble with Sister Abigail for saying I trusted animals more than people. Dad’s flannel shirts were all gone from the floor and the backs of chairs. I knew without those shirts, he was gone. He went off hunting fame or fortune, I guess.” Abe sounded like he was telling himself the story, too. I stayed silent, pretending indifference. Those seemed to be the manners I’d been taught; I just couldn’t remember learning them.
“Even in Barrow, I usually drew animals instead of shooting them. I would’ve liked to be a hero. Of course I wanted to be one. It just felt . . . phony. Wearing the clothes. Strutting and flexing. Shooting some poor creature. It just wasn’t me.”
Had he told Iris this yesterday? Probably not; she didn’t have my mouth that had always wanted to know how to be someone else.
“I propped the Super Cub for my dad, the day he crashed. Kind of a heroic thing to do?”
Willows slapped my face and the crook of his arm. Snow sifted down my neck.
“The engine sounded funny. I could have said something but Dad would have hollered to stand clear. Guess life’s like shooting a caribou, huh? You want a fat one, but if you end up with a skinny one, you don’t waste it.”
“People leave a skinny caribou, Abe. Or feed it to the dogs and shoot a sledload more.”
“You kids!”
