trigger froze through my fox mitten liner. I yanked back. The gun lurched. The black wolf I’d aimed at sniffed his paw.
The safety. I flipped the lever. Now Abe’s disappointed face floated in the way. I looked over the barrel, tried to aim. The northern lights had dimmed. It was harder to make out shapes. Abe wouldn’t cuss or even kick things around. He would help skin the wolf. That was the thing about Abe, he’d help someone else before he helped himself. The thing about me was I couldn’t accept that all people were not like that. I saw Abe as a boy, searching for his dad’s shirts. I clicked the safety back. The wolf lifted his nose and howled. The pack joined.
Fear and elation skated on my skin. Were they cheering? Or voting? I felt cruel for lusting to kill one. I had eaten; I had a warm wolf ruff on my hood—but the gnawing inside was jittery and big, a hunger to kill and be great for it. It wasn’t good, it was mean, but it felt glued all over inside me.
The harmony ceased. The wolves stood, listening. Finally, miles east, upwind, across the tundra, I heard the snap of branches, and fainter still, runners squeaking on cold snow; eventually came a low mumble that I knew as Abe’s encouraging “Atta boys. Good girl, Farmer. Haw over now. Haw over.”
The wolves circled, their claws tacking the hard snow. I aimed, barehanded now, my fingers burning on the metal. Under the green luminescence from the sky the wolf pack fanned out north across the lake. The animals I’d wanted to kill mingled and faded. That wolf—how many miles and years had he walked under this smoky green light? Walked cold, hungry in storms, wet under summer rain; walking on this land I’d always called my home. He knew every mountain, every trail along every knoll so much better than I ever would. And the wolf, I only knew him dead. I didn’t want to be an Outsider. Not here, too. How was it that I’d never considered carefully that an animal would know infinitely more about something than I could?
The whisper of their feet disappeared under the sounds of the coming dog team. Two people pitched and clawed inside me. One whispered in awe: “They were so close.” The other mocked: “You dummy! Ten years old, same age as Enuk, and you didn’t shoot.” My fingers screamed in the pain of warming. I hunched over them, humming to hide the anguish. Abe had said to watch, but he was a painter. He read books and watched the sky too much. Enuk said to respect the wolves, but he’d have shot as many as he could. Even the last one. Under my skin, so well I knew, in the village “could have” meant nothing without the mantle of a dead animal. I wanted the stars to drop some silver stranger, an alluring alien like Wax Tiera, to tell me what I should think. But there was only the dark, the cold, the miles and miles of snow.
THREE
THE MOON IS BEHIND THE LAND, narrow and nothing to hunt by. The pack moves south in the dark, spread out in pairs and alone, toward the kill. Tension is in the pack, a missing sibling, and quick snarls. A wolf noses through a line of willows. Pale light ripples overhead. He drops onto a lake. Three big pups trail him. They stop often to nose each other and sniff mouse tunnels. On the lake they stand, their long gazes pointed at a dancing orange hole in the night, and the scent of smoke and blood and man and dog. The wolves circle. A fox streaks past. The pups give chase in the dark.
The pack halts out of the flick of firelight. They sniff the man’s sweaty fear and the charred bones. They hear his quick breathing. The large wolf tastes something else, a scent sealed into his puppyhood and the loss of his mother. The scent makes him yawn in apprehension. After a time he leads the pack away from the danger of this kill. Past their own kill with man’s scent there now, too. Away into mountains.
FOUR
BRUCE LEE ARRIVED in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. Mr. Lee’s style of instant gratification leapt the language barrier and left John Wayne piddling in the dust. He was an overwhelming success—the movie took in two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat.
A week later, when, unaware, we mushed into the village, I felt the ramifications of Lee’s acceptance into Iñupiaq culture.
We traveled to town two or three times each winter to deliver Abe’s artwork—furniture and paintings—and to pick up mail and gossip, gunpowder, powdered milk, and mail-ordered vanilla extract for snow ice cream. Necessities. We tied our door shut, iced the runners, and hitched up the dogs. We got on the trail as the first twinges of morning twilight painted the Shield Mountains. “Take your mittens off a minute,” Abe suggested, reminding us to go barehanded until our hands went numb, to shock the blood into flowing hot in our fingers for the day.
Two bends west, the river was deep with fresh snow that wind hadn’t shifted and settled. Jerry, Iris, and I took turns spelling Abe. Two of us snowshoed in front of the team, breaking trail. The other ran behind. Only one of us got to ride on the runners, and often that person had to run, too. Frost whitened our furs and the dogs’ faces. I froze my face as much as possible, getting ready to look tough and hunterly in town. At dark the first evening, we cut a dead sapling for a ridgepole and green saplings for spruce boughs to sleep on, and pitched our wall tent where the winter trail abandons the river for three bends. Thoughtfully, Abe pressed the faded canvas of the tent between his thumb and finger. Iris leaned against my shoulder smiling. “He’ll be boiling bone glue, brushing size and ground on our tent,” she whispered. “It’ll only be a matter of time until he needs canvas and cuts it up to paint.”
Jerry set up the five-gallon-can stove and pipe. We spread out caribou skins and ate blocks of pemmican and melted snow and threw dried whitefish to the dogs.
The following afternoon, amid the clamor of hundreds of barking dogs, we slid into Takunak, hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners, wool long underwear and balaclavas. Log cabins and a few plywood houses hunkered along the north shore. Fish racks were pitched along the shore, half buried and glinting with tin coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers’ bad reputations.
He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers’s house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some paniqtuq.” He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.
The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.
“Maybe the Jafco catalog came.”
“Maybe.”
