a dark silvery feel, a feeling that the wolves were friends, with each other, and with the night. I thought Abe’s paintings of wolves were better than his other paintings.
During those weeks the fire in the barrel stove often burnt down to ashes. The cold waiting beyond the door and walls hurried in. Our last caribou shrank to a backbone, neck, and one shoulder. We peeled the back sinew—for thread for sewing—and made frymeat out of the backstraps before boiling the backbones. Abe didn’t care what was for dinner. He sipped his tea and answered some of our questions, not all of them. We asked few. He was in a place for artists; we didn’t know the language. We kids simply knew Abe wouldn’t hunt and kill meat until something changed. We were allowed the few .22 cartridges to shoot ptarmigan and rabbits and foxes—if we could find any—but not allowed to take the big rifle or its ammo.
Jerry and Iris and I sling-shot mice gnawing in the food shelves, and split wood and chipped five feet through the river ice and hauled buckets of water. We heated water on the stove and scrubbed our gray laundry in the galvanized washtub, mopping with a shirt at water that came out the leaks. The two windows steamed up. The black water we hauled outside and poured down the slop hole. Steam rose and the ice popped and crackled. The second week we splurged and hauled extra buckets and took baths in the washtub. It was my turn to use the water first. That meant I had less to kneel in because we kept the last kettle boiling to add as the tub cooled. Abe squatted in the tub last. His fingers and forearms were smeared with paint. The surface of the water grew oily. He stood naked by the fire and dried.
We studied our schoolbooks, administered exams to each other: spelling, phonics, math, English, biology. With his hands floury from making bread, Jerry drew circles, explaining cells and cell walls, mitochondria and osmosis. On the bearskin couch we read books out of the library box and flipped through Harper’s magazines, scrutinizing glossy pictures advertising giraffe-legged women smoking cigarettes and sleek gray automobiles called Cougars.
“Someday I’m going to have a Chevy truck,” Jerry declared.
“Don’t be boring!” Iris bent his fingers off the page. “I’ll have an ocean-blue convertible. And smoke Virginia Slims!”
“You never seen ocean. Except in Crotch Spit. That was frozen. It doesn’t count.”
I kept quiet. I was the one born in the native hospital in Crotch Spit. I’d never seen a real car—only the dead red jeep where kids in Takunak played tag and bounced on the burnt seat springs.
We put the magazines up and scraped caribou hides with the ichuun. You always scraped with another hide underneath, to pad the skin and keep the ichuun from tearing holes. We then spread on sourdough, folded the hides skin to skin, put them under Abe’s qaatchiaq to let the sourdough soak in overnight, and later dried and scraped the skins again to finish tanning. The windows dripped condensation. Outside in the twilight, big snowflakes fell. We hauled in wood and kicked the door shut tight and stuffed a jacket at the base of the door to keep cold air out. Abe lit the Coleman light. He pumped it and hung the hissing lamp from a nail on the ridgepole. Shadows twirled and came to rest. We got out an early-fall hide that Iris had sourdoughed earlier. The hair was short, thinner, and soft. We scraped it and worked the skin in our hands until it was tanned and white. Jerry traced new insoles for all of our soft-bottom and ugruk-bottom mukluks. Iris cut them with Abe’s razor. In silence we sewed ourselves caribou socks, then swept up the hairs. Abe hunched over his easel, silent. Caribou hairs clung to his sweater. Outside, the snow piled up.
“Should I boil meat?” Jerry murmured. Iris and I soundlessly raised our eyebrows, yes in Iñupiaq.
Jerry put leg bones and water into the cannibal pot. While it simmered, we used Abe’s powder scale to measure 4832 gunpowder, and reload .30-06 ammo with the Lee Loader. Iris sighted down a completed cartridge. “Boy, fresh moose heart would be good, wouldn’t it?” She covered a grin, swinging her gaze to Abe.
“Look!” Jerry said. “You forgot to prime this one. You’re wasting!” We glanced at Abe. Wasting was the baddest word in our family. Jerry bit the lead. He pried the bullet out and dumped the gunpowder back in the scale. The bullet copper was dented but would still be good enough for finishing off a caribou if it was too alive to get with a knife. “Here! You’re not supposed to get the inside of the primer sweaty, ’kay?”
I crossed my arms, checked my muscle. Actually, we had plenty of food: seasonings and sugar and fifty-pound sacks of flour, powdered milk, rice, and beans. Jars of rendered bear fat for shortening. Most of a quart of vanilla. And there was a keg of salted salmon bellies, and piles of quaq in the dogfood cache. We could eat that. It was good with seal oil, and in the seal oil were our prized masru and pink tinnik berries. We wouldn’t go hungry.
IN LATE JANUARY, Abe took his rifle off the peg behind the stove. We kids scattered for overpants and parkas. He blew dust off the bolt and scraped his thumbnail along the stock where frozen snot or dog spit had dried. His hair and beard were unruly. His turquiose eyes squinted with a grin. “Iris? Feel like coming along?” He nodded and laid the gun on the floor across his parka and mittens. Jerry and I slumped. Abe boiled water, filled his thermos, and slid it into the caribou-hide insulating tube. We fidgeted, out of the way, while Iris got bundled and ready.
They hitched the team and went east, hunting for an acquiescent moose to contribute both dog food and people food. The caribou herds were far south in their wintering grounds. It was cold—cold enough that the kerosene had jelled and wouldn’t pour into the lamp—and the dogs did not lunge to run.
Afterward, Jerry wandered back inside to rewrite a letter to his pen pal in New Zealand, romancing her long distance. Mice rustled and scurried on the floor. His pen rustled the paper. He liked to write letters and poems. And his diary, too. I figured he was faking talent. We kids didn’t say it—that would be bad luck—but we hoped we’d inherited a little of Abe’s specialness. We grew up watching our dad; for months on end he was the only one to watch, to teach us about our world, and tidbits of the city world. We watched his left hand, the one with good genes, hoping to recognize the first twinges in our own hands.
I hauled armloads of wood. Jerry went out to cut meat for dinner. The house was quiet. The table and chairs and floorboards seemed gray, dingy, and bare with no one about. Curiosity pushed my honor aside—I slid a thumbnail in where the edges of his diary’s pages were smudged. My eyes scrambled over the words . . . only you who watched mothers fly away, after the cold will be my sisters and brothers . . . I dropped the book. Quickly I placed it back on the table. I laced my mukluks. Fumbled into my parka. Hurried out behind the woodpile and pretended to scan the tundra for life.
Jerry hung the bow saw on a nail. His mukluks squeaked on the snow. He carried sawed caribou ribs inside. They were skinny ribs, thin and with signs of wolf lips and shrew turds on them. He came outside, no jacket. His brown eyes looked rolled back like a village dog held down by its last six inches of iced-in chain. “That’s mine.” There was red meat sawdust between his fingers. Jerry’s big square fist swung. My face seemed to crack open. Behind a snowbank I leaned over. Blood hung in coagulating red icicles off my nose. I tried to forget the words in the diary. And the jealousy that Jerry might have what I didn’t—a share of Abe’s gift.
Iris, too, had something. Something completely different, though. It wasn’t something you could talk about. One spring a white-lady social worker skied down the river towing a plastic sled. She was from the distant big city of Anchorage, and how she got upriver we didn’t know. She wore bright blue windbreakers and windpants, and had a black backpack, an orange aluminum foil space blanket, and dehydrated space meals and Swiss chocolate bars. She was very beautiful and had heaps of wavy brown hair and didn’t seem to get cold. Her name was Wax Tiera, and we adored her though
