hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq’s. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington’s upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn’t know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we’d arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.
Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You’ll have to write and thank him.”
I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe’s, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather’s? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?
“Abe!” Iris moaned. “Don’t you know we’re embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”
“Salvation Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose-babiche sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it’s supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”
“Yeah! Let’s!” Iris and I said.
“Wait. There’ll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”
I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.
“Some kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”
WE SLEDDED TO the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail, letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers’ handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.
“Do well?” Abe asked.
Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of paniqtuq. Abe’s blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.
“All As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”
“C in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn’t yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn’t argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought instead of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he’d thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris’s second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.
I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school grade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.
“Better off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don’t let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.
“There!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They’re coming!”
Who would they be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.
“Hi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said hi and someone’s name, all as one word.
“Hi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas’ mom?” a small boy asked.
“When you go around here?” another boy interrupted.
“Today.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn’t a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived out in what they called “camp”—but few knew even from what direction we appeared. Out of town simply meant out of touch, out of money, the opposite of lucky. No family from Takunak lived in “camp.”
My cheeks were red, in the village a shout of weakness. I fingered the frostbite burns on my nose, hoping they had darkened into the scab badges of a hunter. I pulled my caribou parka off over my head, squaring my shoulders, exhaling as if I was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don’t get chilled.”
“You wanna fight?” asked Elvis Skuq Jr. “I’ll let you cry.” He had permanent residence in my earliest memories of town. From the time he’d been a small boy he’d enjoyed packing my face with snow and whipping my mittens off with a stick, laughing at my smarting red fingers. A scar ran from his lip up under his nose and, I’d long thought, on up to his brain. He was sixteen and towered over me.
The plane banked and lined up with the airfield. “From where you come?” Elvis repeated.
“Upriver,” Jerry mumbled. I spat out caribou hairs that had wandered out of my hood and collected in my mouth. The plane wheels touched the snow. As it swept down on us, Iris and I jumped behind the sled.
“Aiy,sure iqsi.” Kids jeered and dark-eyed adults smiled at our naïveté. A kid whipped my ear with a piece of knotted rope. Laughter came from behind us. A snowball dissolved against my neck. The props roared, warbling with power as the pilots adjusted the pitch. The turning plane flung a wall of snow over the crowd. Around me villagers faded like ghosts. The props whined to a halt. Everyone surged forward. Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove waved. I stood, a member of a group, all of us united in anticipation.
Woodrow Jr. slapped me on the back. He was in his twenties and carried his son on his shoulders. “How’s the trail from your-guys’ camp? You come to town to fin’ Eskimo girlfriend?” Beside him a pretty woman smiled, her brown face and dusky lashes shining inside her white fox ruff. “I sure want your eyes, Cutuk,” she said. “You should go be my son.” People laughed. I examined the ground, shifted nervously, pictured myself belaying Woodrow Washington down Feathers’s outhouse to salvage my education.
The airplane doors swung open. The pilots
