he had laid out for Enuk to work on. “You do a real nice job, Enuk.” Abe sounded as if he would have an impossible time skinning even a caribou legging. Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes, perfectly—better than any fox I’d ever seen skinned in Takunak. Their pelt was papery, difficult not to tear with the sharpened metal tube ichuun, difficult not to tear when turning the dried skin back fur-out. And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect to the animal whose life we’d taken.
Often, Abe helped me make birch and babiche snowshoes that few in Takunak remembered how to make. Or one time he helped write a letter to the substitute president, Gerald Ford. But he would never pick up an axe like he was tough. Never talk or hold a gun that way. Never brag, “I’m goin’ after bear.” Any bear we got walked up on its own and still Abe didn’t want to kill it. Around travelers, Abe’s modesty trimmed off too much of the fat. Apparently things started getting out of balance back with his dad. Tom Hawcly had been a sport hunter, a menacing species to have in any food chain. He left our grandmother in Chicago and roamed off to Barrow to be a pilot, the owner of two Super Cub airplanes, and a guide for polar bear hunters. The story was exciting enough, and romantic—up to the part where they found him smeared dead on the sea ice. People along the Kuguruk River hated sport hunters and guides as much as they did schoolteachers. Frequently they were one and the same. I was thankful that Barrow was a long way north. And that people thought of white people as having no relatives.
Enuk finished skinning out the paws. He talked of shooting his first wolf when he was ten. His dad had taken him to check a tiktaaliq fish trap. A lone wolf was there on the ice gnawing yesterday’s frozen fish blood. The wind was behind the wolf. Enuk’s father handed him the rifle.
I listened to Enuk’s low voice and lusted to gun down a whole pack, to stockpile prestige. Somehow, I had to learn to stop worrying about wolf pain. Abe had to stop molding me into an unhero.
Abe slapped his pants, fumbled in his big pockets for tobacco and papers. He glanced over the table and workbench, and eventually gave up. To Iris he said, “Otter, boil water? When Enuk’s washed up maybe you’ll make a splash of tea?”
Iris set her math book on the wood box. She smiled at Enuk. The frostbite was pretty across her cheeks and nose. “Nine times eight, Cutuk!”
“Huh? Seventy-two.”
“Twenty-one times eleven.”
“Two hundred and thirty-one.” My thoughts softened; I pictured happy otters playing, sliding along day-old ice, stopping to nuzzle each other.
Iris dripped the dipper on my head as she danced barefoot toward the water barrel. She peered close, to focus out of her weak eyes. “Cutuk? Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”
I flicked her leg. The religious poster—the one Abe tacked out in the outhouse, the one the Gospel Trippers had left when they passed through last winter—said a family was supposed to say it: “I love you,” I whispered, at my hands, too softly, the only time in my life. Iris, with her black hair and surprising blue eyes, full of smiles where I had storms, she never heard. She was in her own thoughts. What were they? I should have asked, but kissing, saying the word love, and talking about feelings weren’t what Hawclys did, and I was embarrassed and went outside for a few minutes in the dark, to stand barefoot on the snow and listen to the night beside the naked wolf.
THE STOVE DRAFT FLICKERED orange lights on the peeled poles of the ceiling. The orange melted through my eyelids to clutter my dreams with flames. Pitch smoldered, sweet and resinous on top of the stove.
Enuk lay on his qaatchiaq. His legs stretched out of sight under the table. Iris’s black hair curled across my face. I brushed it aside and pulled our pants and shirts under the covers to warm them. I gripped the corner of the sleeping bag tight to keep the chilly morning out. For years Abe had promised to order me my own sleeping bag. Like Iris’s glasses, it was another thing we’d have to go out into the world and find for ourselves. Iris took up more room this winter. She was bigger. Her breasts were growing, disconcerting to me when I accidentally brushed them.
“You elbowed me really hard in the eye last night.” Her voice was sleepy. She wore one of Abe’s flannel shirts, faded and thin. She smelled of flannel, candle wax, and soft skin.
Jerry’s bed was head to head with ours along the back wall. I wasn’t sure if he was awake on his caribou skin. It was dark in the room, except for firelight. Abe banged the coffeepot on a round of firewood. He swore softly when a chunk of frozen grounds crumbled on the floor. He toed the grounds against the wood box. Iris leaned her chin on her wrists. “Daddy slobbest. What will he do without us?” Her words made me shiver. Firelight glowed on his broad white chest and arms. He crumpled a painting, stuffed it into the stove. The stiff paper caught and flared. For cash Abe made furniture to sell in Takunak, and occasionally he mailed one of his paintings to Anchorage. Never his best. I lay fantasizing; he was an outlaw artist with a notorious past, his name would be legend in the places I traveled.
His bare feet rasped on the cold boards. Outside darkness painted the windows black. The roar of the stove grew, and frost in the safety dripped and hissed. Kettles began to whine. Enuk yawned and rose. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. His body was stout and muscular. The sun had never seen it, and his skin was smooth and pearly brown as a young man’s, except on his thick hands and face where weather and time had stained their stories.
They sipped coffee. Abe lit the lamp. He took the cannibal pot off the stove and put it on the table. We knifed out hot meat and gravy and ate it with bread and the frozen sliced canned jam that Enuk brought. A fly buzzed, one wing frozen to the ice on the inside of the window. The door was frosty around the edges. It was still dark outside. The dogs howled.
Enuk put down his cup. “Today I get old.”
Iris pattered her fingers on his shoulder, as unconcerned as if he were a shelf. “Are you a hundred?”
I watched her hand. Jerry was watching, too.
“Jan’wary twenty-one, nineteen hunnert an five. How many tat gonna? Seventy?”
“Seventy-one!”
“Not so many. I still hunt best than my son.”
“My birthday was the fourth,” I said, thinking how perfect it would have been to be born seventeen days later, on Enuk’s birthday. “We’re not sure we celebrated on the right day. That day was warm and it snowed sticky; you remember, was that the fourth?” I trailed off. The mouthful of numbers felt white.
Enuk ignored me and retrieved his frozen wolf skin from outside the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He eyed the skin for shrew chews. His leather pouch lay beside his mug on the table. It had sounded heavy when he plunked it down. “You fellas have tat.” He nodded at the can of jam. “Cutuk, t’em mooses waiting. You gonna hunt?”
I studied Abe’s face for a sign.
“It could be cold.” He sharpened his knife, three flicks on the pot, three flicks back. “Real cold.”
“I’ll put my face under the tarp when it freezes.”
“Tat a boy!” Enuk said.
DOWN AT THE RIVER it was minus a lot. My nose kept freezing shut on one side. The dogs uncurled and shook frost off their faces. They stood on three legs, melting one pad at a time while the other three quickly
