The woman turns away, uninterested in him or his commentary. She thinks it ironic that this man named for the coldest month of the year, with a home at the northern tip of a free country, should complain about winter. She’s shivering. She jogs across the lake to keep from freezing while he skins. Her steps crunch in the snow. She hates snow. She pulls back her hood, holds her breath, listens a last time—she hopes—to the tundra.
To her surprise, she hears wolves. She sees specks, running and stopping. Young wolves, waiting for their mother. A sob catches her unaware. Her heartbeat roars in her head. She runs, back toward the dot of the ski plane, her only doorway to civilization here on a planet of wilderness, cold, and encroaching night. She hums, to keep from hearing their cries, and, instinctively, to protect the wolves from the pilot. Far away the narrow shapes turn north and run.
PART I
THE LAND
ONE
IN THE BAD MOUSE YEAR—two years after magazines claimed a white man hoofed on the moon—Enuk Wolfglove materialized one day in front of our house in the blowing snow and twilight of no-sun winter. His dog team vanished and reappeared in the storm. Abe stood suddenly at the window like a bear catching a scent. “Travelers!” He squeezed out his half-smoked cigarette, flicked it to the workbench, wiped ashy fingers on his sealskin overpants. We kids eyed the cigarette’s arc—we could smoke it later, behind the drifts, pretend we were artists like him.
“Poke up the fire?” Abe grinned like an older brother, our best friend, no dad at all. “And hide the vanilla.” His head and broad shoulders disappeared as he squirmed into his shedding caribou-calfskin parka. He banged the door to break the caribou-skin stripping loose and jumped into the storm.
Jerry pocketed the cigarette. He glanced up through his eyelashes. “I’ll share,” he mumbled. Iris and I paced the floorboards, excited about travelers. We were barefoot and red toed. It was getting dark, and stormy, or we’d all have dressed in parkas and hurried outside. Jerry lowered a log into the barrel stove. He got the second log stuck and had to wrench it back out, sparky and smoking. “Goddamn son of a biscuit!” he said, practicing with Abe absent. He was tall and ten—twice my age—and had the good black hair. Also, he remembered cities and cars and lawns, red apples on trees—if that stuff was true. Jerry left the draft open until flames licked the pipe red and smoke leaked out the cracks. He tracked down each spark, wet his finger, and drowned it. He wiped his finger on a log, peered at it, and wet it again. Abe was spanking-strict about fire. That, and no whining.
“It’s Enuk Wolfglove!” Iris said. “Only one traveler!” Through the flapping Visqueen window we watched Abe and the man hunching against the wind, chaining the dogs in the willows near our team. Enuk lived west, downriver in Takunak village, but like wind he came off the land each time from a different direction. Iris squinted, myopically counting his dogs. Abe would be too generous, offering too much fish and caribou off our dogfood pile that needed to last until Breakup. Iris felt bad if our dogs got narrow and had to eat their shit. She was eight now, black hair too, and with blue eyes—but they were weak. She had gotten snowblind, the spring before last when she didn’t wear her Army goggles on the sled back from the Dog Die Mountains. Someday, Abe meant to mailorder glasses.
I broke a chunk of thin ice off the inside of the window and sucked it. “How come they hitchin’ ’em there?” The ice tasted like frozen breath and wet caribou hair.
Jerry peered over our shoulders. “You’re talking Village English. Company isn’t even off the ice.” His voice was tight. People made him nervous. People made all of us nervous, except Iris. Our family lived out on the tundra. Abe had dug a pit, old Eskimo style, and built our igloo out of logs and poles, before I even grew a memory. Eskimos wouldn’t live that way anymore, but for some reason we did. The single room was large, sixteen by sixteen, and buried to the eaves in the protective ground. In the back, over our beds, trees reached into the soil on the roof, and in the storms we heard their roots groaning, fighting for their lives out in the wind. Our walls and roof Abe insulated with blocks of pond sod. In the sod, mice and shrews rustled and fought and chewed and built their own homes, siphoning off warmth and mouthfuls of our food and winnowing it down to tiny black shits. Abe had escaped something, roads and rules possibly. Little things didn’t bother him; Abe liked his meat dried, cooked, raw, or frozen. He didn’t mind fly eggs on it—as long as the tiny maggots weren’t moving.
Once we had a mom. She wasn’t coming back. That’s what Iris said she told Jerry the day she flew away. She had a twelve-string guitar and apparently liked music more than caribou and bears and a moss roof that leaked. She’d left us alone with none of those thousand warm things children with mothers don’t count. Abe never talked about it. He never painted it. Her leaving was the back wall of my memory.
Iris scraped at the ice on the window with her fingernails inside her sleeve. Her bony elbows stuck out of her shirt. “They’re chaining below the willows so the drifts won’t bury his dogs.” She flitted away to hang our parkas on pegs over the wood box, push mukluks and clothes tighter into the corners and under our bunks. Caribou hairs clung to all our clothes. She whisked hair and Abe’s plane shavings and sawdust into dirt corners with a goose wing.
The north wind swept the open tundra and howled into the spruce on the bank where our sod home was buried in the permafrost. The skylight shuddered. Snow laced over the riverbank. The gray wool of moving snow hid the horizons. Overhead the frozen sky purpled with night, and above the wind and frantic branches clung watery stars. Out under the ice, the wide Kuguruk River flowed past the door, through the arctic part of Alaska that our mail-order schoolbooks called barren icy desert. That shamed me, that quick, throwaway description flung from the far rich East, printed in the black-and-white validation of a textbook. My protests only made Abe shrug.
The homemade Visqueen window shivered and whacked. The men chopped a frozen caribou for the dogs. The dogs ripped the skin off the meat and swallowed chunks. They guarded the skin, pinning it down with their claws. When the last bone and meat crystal was sniffed off the snow, they chewed the hair off the skin, ate the skin. Then they curled up to protect their faces and feet.
We heard the men trudging through the drift, up on the eave, down into the trench to the door. The snow squeaked as Abe shoveled, then pounded on the skin door. “Chop the ice along the bottom! Hear me?” Jerry scrambled for the hatchet. “Now get back!” Torn by wind and muffled by the skins, his voice came in mad. I hid behind the water barrel. Abe and Enuk surged in out of the swirling snow. Ovals of frozen skin and drifted-on ice whitened their faces. I stared, longing for frostbite, the scars of heroes. Abe pulled his hood back and his curly yellow hair sprang out; his turquoise eyes shone above his bearded face. “Windy.”
“Alappaa tat wind.” Enuk was a few inches shorter than Abe. His wide face was stiff, his goatee iced. The men grinned and shook snow off their parkas and whipped snow off their mukluks. They eased ice off their whiskers. Iris danced barefoot between them, smiling and scooping up snow to throw in the slop bucket. I wished I could move like her, light and smiling. Behind the water barrel I stood on the dirt and the damp mouse turds, excited at having company.
Enuk’s gaze swung and pinned me down. “Hi Yellow-Hair! Getting big! How old?” His face was dark and cold-swollen.
Travelers all carried names for me, like the first-class mail. None were the ones I wanted. I inched out beside the blasting stove, my eyes down. “Five.” It was hard to look at Enuk—or any traveler—in the eyes after seeing no people for weeks. It was hard to speak and not run and hide again. Enuk’s frost-scarred face betrayed mysteries and romantic hard times that drew a five-year-old boy with swollen dreams. He was muscled
