away caribou hair and dust, washed the floorboards with steaming soapy rags, organized Abe’s paints, used the splitting maul to knock down the spike that froze in the outhouse. She had scrubbed all day, washing the outsides of mason jars, laughing excitedly, squinting nearsightedly into corners.
Another time, two falls ago, before Freezeup, Napoleon Skuq Sr. came upriver in his spruce-plank boat. Nippy had a big eighteen-horse Evinrude. He was proud of it. He boated up every couple of years, his fall trip. Sometimes he brought a cousin, sometimes his sons, Junior and Caleb. Nippy wore a leather skullcap. His eyes around the edges were bumpy and yellow. He arrived drunk, spent the evening telling Abe how to hunt and trap, and traveled on in the morning. Within a few days he came back downriver, his prop dinged, the boat weaving slow in the first ice pans. Caribou legs poked over the gunnels of his boat. He spent the night again, and this time Nippy’s hands had a tremor as he pulled his Bible out of a cotton sugar sack. He spread it soft and sagging on his thigh and under the wick lamp preached about Jesus and sin and a bush that you couldn’t put out from burning. Then he told Abe some more of his hunting stories. He bragged about his son graduating from Mt. Edgecombe boarding school in Sitka.
“I thought your son died,” Iris said softly. Nippy swung his wet eyes on her. “Maybe you thinking somebody else.” He was sitting on the bearskin couch, on the shoulder end, where the hair had worn the least. He glanced into the soup pot, served himself the tenderest fat short brisket bones. He scooped a plop of cranberry sauce on his plate. Iris stood up from the Standard Oil Co. wooden Blazo-box seat that pinched your butt and squeaked. She scraped her gnawed bones into the dog pot and went to fill kettles on the stove to heat water for dishes. After Freezeup, when the ice was thick enough to travel, word came that Caleb Skuq had been stabbed behind a bar in Juneau and died. No one told the whole story in front of Iris, though everyone in Takunak knew it, and they glanced at her differently.
ABE HAD LEFT the unruly puppies, Plato and Figment. They were interested in my bloody nose. I hung around the dog yard, chopping out pissed-in chains and the third-of-a-drum dogfood cooker. The top was sharp and rusty where Abe had cut it with a sledgehammer and his piece of sharpened spring-steel. I ignored the bite of the cold and wandered in a fantasy of myself shooting a charging moose. Jerry’s pen pal wish-girl lay shrieking in the trail. Broken leg. He couldn’t get to her. Calmly I shot. The girl blurred into the dark-haired woman on the front of the JCPenney catalog and had no difficulty jumping up to kiss me repeatedly.
Suddenly Plato sniffed. She barked, and with a worried tail stared north. A flock of redpolls shrilled up in the birch branches and vanished in a gust of small wings. Off the high tundra west of Jesus Creek slid the elongated black speck of a dog team. Travelers! It didn’t matter who, if we knew them or not, what they looked like. Or how much they ate, snored, farted—even if they spoke only Iñupiaq, or Russian. Only that they would talk and be company!
The speck separated into seven dogs and came across what we called Outnorth Lake or Luck-a-Luck Lake or The Lake, depending on the season and the conversation. Enuk mushed up the knife ridge that formed a narrow bank separating the lake from the Kuguruk River. He kicked his snow hook into an ice-hard drift. His dogs flopped down, panting. I sank my hatchet into a dog stake and ran to his sled, gripping the toprails.
“Hi, Enuk!”
He gazed stiffly out of the frosty silver circle of his wolf ruff. He broke ice off his gray mustache and eyelashes. Then he grinned, as if trying earlier might have pulled hairs. He smelled of campfire and coffee. He took off his rifle and hung it carefully off the handlebar of his sled. His gaze flicked over the tracks left by Abe’s team. I stayed respectfully silent while he rubbed the frosted faces of his dogs and bit the iceballs off from between their hairy toes. It was annoying and white to talk too much or ask questions, especially when a traveler first arrived. Shaking hands, also, was a sign of being an Outsider. Enuk wore new tan store-bought overpants. On one hem was the red chalk of frozen blood. His sled tarp was lashed down, too tight for me to poke under without being nosy. Sled tarps had always held secrets, brought packages, presents, fresh meat, store-bought cookies. Old and ratty didn’t matter—sled tarps were the biggest wrapping paper of all.
“When you leavin’, Enuk?” I asked finally.
“Pretty quick.”
“How come? Spend the night.”
Staring north, he pursed his lips thoughtfully. He nodded. “Maybe gonna I spen’a night.”
“I wish!”
“If I know, I woulda’ bring you-fellas’ first class.” His squinted eyes roamed the snow-covered river, willows, and tundra, probing for the tiniest movement of life. He swung back to me. “Anytime they could get you.” I eyed his sled. What was he talking about? Bears? Spirits? “If they want you they get you, anytime.” He noticed my eyes on his tarp. “Ha ha, Yellow-Hair!” He kicked a fast mukluk at me.
He unlashed the tarp and spread it open. “I get lucky.” He nodded toward the mountains. “T’em wolves kill moose young one. Not too far.” I didn’t follow his eyes. The wolf was silver-gray and huge, twice the size of Enuk’s huskies, its hair long and black-tipped. I petted the animal in wonder, feeling splinters of blood frozen deep in the fur. I recognized the clean dog odor. Broken ribs shone in a large bullet hole in the side of his chest. I saw the wolf stumbling, hearing his own bones grating, panting against death pouring into his lungs.
I shook my head to dislodge the pictures.
“Coulda have more, alright. Only thing, smart one in’a bunch. He let t’em others run.” He looped his stringed overmitts behind his back. Barehanded, wary of the blood, he kneaded the wolf’s thin lower legs. “Alappaa! Freeze. Hard gonna for tat way ta skin. I bring tis wolf inside. Wait for your old man.”
ABE AND IRIS RETURNED without meat. We ate the skinny ribs Jerry had boiled. Skinny meat was a sign of a poor provider, but Enuk ate with relish. Afterward he skinned the wolf. When he finished, he folded the skin fur-out. On our floor the naked wolf grinned permanently in the weak lamplight, his teeth and tendons white against dark red muscles. The stomach was hard, and fetid smells were beginning to come out. Enuk had only a little blood on his fingertips. There was a slit in the wolf’s throat. “Let his spirit go other wolf,” Enuk said. “Gotta respect.”
“Do you like wolves?” I asked.
Iris and Jerry peered over the tops of their schoolbooks. Their papers were spread on the wooden Blazo boxes that we made into desks—and also cupboards, shelves, seats, muskrat-stretching boards, and more.
“They got fam’ly. Smart. Careful. I like ’em best than all’a animal. Your dad know. He make tat good picture. Gonna ta white ladies buy tat one more than any kinda wolf skin. Ha! Ha!” Enuk opened the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He flung the carcass into the dark. The furless animal slapped on the packed snow out under the chipped eyes of the stars. In the dog yard one of Enuk’s dogs barked nervously at the thump in the still night. An echo rolled back lonesome from the timber across the river, and the dog challenged it with three quick barks.
“Yep, Yellow-Hair. Tomorrow you take your old man.” Enuk grinned. “Go out back way, hunt moose.” His eyes flicked to his knife, and I wondered what else he was thinking about and whether it was killing more wolves.
“We might.” Abe smiled and looked shy about something. He wiped blood drips off the floor with a holey sock rag. His cheeks and nose burnt with red ovals from frostbite that day on the trail. Iris’s face was marked red, too. They hadn’t seen the right moose—a barren cow, a moose that would have fat meat and its hide fair for snowshoe babiche, sled washers, cold-weather
