iceball to bring it shattering down.
In our parkas and mukluks, we kids ran back and forth examining the new high drifts and sliding off cornices. Abe helped Enuk find his sled and they dug at it. The snow was hard, and it chipped and squeaked under their shovels. They iced the sled runners with a strip of brown bear fur dipped in a pan of warm water. They were careful not to get any water on their mukluks. Iris and I stood together while Abe and Enuk harnessed his seven dogs. Jerry stayed in the safety of our dog yard. He mistrusted strange dogs. Often they snapped at him, though he never lost his temper and clubbed dogs with shovels or rifle stocks the way other people did. I vowed when I grew big enough to handle huskies I wouldn’t miss a chance to help a traveler hitch up.
Enuk stood on the runners with one foot on the steel claw brake, his hands in his wolf mittens holding the toprails. The dogs lunged against their towlines, yelping to run. Our dogs barked and scratched the snow. There was little room left in the yowling for last words with company. Enuk said something and nodded north. We stepped close. “Next time, Cutuk? Be good on ta country.” He swept away, furrowing snow to dust with his brake.
We hurried out on the river to watch him become a black speck and disappear far off downriver. Dark spruce lined the far riverbank. In my mind I could see the village and barking dogs and the people there, and Enuk’s grandchildren, Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove, with their mother, Janet, to kiss them and make caribou soup with yellow seashell noodles.
Jerry kicked snow. Abe put his hand awkwardly across my shoulder. I flinched. Abe and Jerry and I didn’t touch—unless it was rough, tickling or king-of-the-hill wrestling over a cornice. Abe turned toward the house. “If the trail stays firm . . .” He wiped his nose. He liked us to be happy, and we usually stayed that way for him. “Maybe next month if the trail’s okay, we’ll go to town? Nice to have a traveler, wasn’t it?”
I tried to ignore the splinters of comfort at the thought of people. I was going to be a hunter; the toughest hunters traveled alone. I kept my mouth shut and broke the tiny tears off my eyelashes. Abe hated whining. He believed that excess comfort was damaging, that whininess was contagious. Stern lines would gather at his mouth and grooves would form above the bridge of his nose. “You an Everything-Wanter now?” he’d growl. And then I would wish for my mother with her black hair and flashing eyes.
But the truth that made me squirm?—she’d left me few memories. All I was certain I remembered of her was that man January Thompson, a fat Outsider, a wolf bounty hunter with a blue and gold airplane on skis, bouncing on the ice, lurching into the sky. I pretended a memory but in the tiny honest slice of my mind I knew I had cannibalized whole hindquarters off Jerry’s stories. Jerry was almost five when they left the lower States. “We came in Abe’s blue truck,” he’d say. “The license plates said North to the Future. You were almost three, Iris. ’Member?” That was all. But it stung. That history didn’t include me. The Hawcly past before the Arctic was another planet, a sunny place of Sunkist lemons and green grapes drying into raisins—instead of meat drying into meat—a place that I’d never walked and couldn’t put roots to even in memory.
Jerry once told how my mother had a yellow car, with a built-in radio. I wondered why so many of the stories had cars. Did all the cars have radios? When he related these things, Iris and I squeezed together on the bearskin couch, curious about that stranger down in the States who wasn’t coming back, but somewhere still lived. It was all strange, but seemed normal, too, the way she was a fairy tale that kept fogging over, while Enuk, even vanished downriver, stood in my life as sharp as a raven in the blue sky.
Abe and Jerry and Iris tramped up to the house. I lingered in the dog yard, playing with Ponoc and the others. They stared downriver, howling occasionally, forlorn and dejected about not following Enuk’s team. It was a chance to play with the dogs without getting scratched and licked off my feet. I ruined it by slipping Ponoc a stray chip of frozen moose off the snow near the dogfood pile. Sled dog brains kept to narrow, well-packed trails of thought, and food lay at the end of all the trails. They howled and gestured with their noses, wagging and protesting the inequitable feeding. My heart grew huge for them, my happy-go-lucky friends, always delighted to see me, prancing and tripping over their chains. How endless the land would be without their companionship.
Suddenly I saw the dog yard empty, the strewn gnawed bones, the yellow pissicles and the round melted sleeping circles, all drifted white; only the chain stakes remained stabbing out of the snow like gray grave markers. A mouse ran out from under the meat pile, dropped a turd, and disappeared down a round hole. I backed away from the lunging dogs. Maybe they were already infected.
Ponoc bit a wad of caribou hair off his stomped yard and tossed it playfully in the air. His pink tongue flicked between his teeth, his mouth muddy with hairs. I spat between my teeth. Maybe in my huge future I would have to shoot a whole team of my own dogs. The thought of the years ahead flooded hot in my chest. I raced up to our igloo, to my brother and sister and father, there eating paniqtuq and seal oil and red jam. Food that would make me Eskimo.
TWO
WHEN I WAS TEN, on a night shortly after the sun returned, a pack of wolves raided our peoplefood pile. Along the bank to the east, beyond our pole cache, the wolves worked over it all except one frozen caribou—a skinny carcass that we too were leaving till last. Our dogs howled and barked in the dark. By first light at ten o’clock the pack had vanished, leaving a pawed circle of meat dust and cracked bone chips in the reddened snow, and tracks leading in too many directions onto the windblown tundra.
The faint scent of clean dog hung in the clawed holes. Abe hunched down, kneading his yellow beard, happier than if he’d discovered gold in the gravel at the bottom of our water hole. Snow clung behind his knees to the creases of his overpants. He examined a wolf turd, long and gray with twisted caribou hair. In his hand the shit looked as capable of magic as a tube of Van Gogh Basic White.
“Should have come out to check the barking,” he muttered. “Like to have the scene in my mind.” He stood and stared off north, spraying a square of his powerful imagination against the sky. He often leaned against trees, absorbed in the pastel glow of evening. “Been years since the wolves took much from us. Usually too wary. Hope we don’t get people-company next couple days.”
A raven flew overhead, heading north. We eyed it.
“We’re low on meat.” Jerry melted his cheek with a bare hand. Black hairs were sprouting on his jaw. I itched with distress when his hand wandered to the icicles on his downy mustache. “Wolves’re always coming by. Why’s it a big deal?”
I kicked the snow ground, embarrassed for both of them. I was ten years old, behind schedule on shooting my first wolf. “Let’s go after ’em.”
Abe didn’t hear.
For the next two weeks Abe read on his bed. Suddenly his book would drop and he’d rise, practically walking through us to his easel. He worked in oil. The turpentine fumes left us breathless and lightheaded. Tubes of his paint had frosted to the wall under his workbench, and he swore. He glared over his shoulder at the dim light, paced, peered, his mouth puckered. At night he tossed on his qaatchiaq, lit candles, rose to sigh at his work, and one night he tore the canvas free and stuffed it in the stove.
The second painting became a staked dog team, witnessing a pack of wolves borrowing caribou. Each dog’s face held a different expression. Some merely whined, sitting, suffering the thievery patiently. Others stood on their sinewy back legs, lunging against their chains. Their mouths were outraged barks. None of the dogs were of our team—they lived in Abe’s past or in his imagination. A black dog closest to the wolves jumped so hard his chain flipped him upside down, and Abe painted his curled claws, hinted at
