Ordinary Wolves Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  IÑUPIAQ GLOSSARY

  PROLOGUE

  PART I - THE LAND

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  PART II - CITY

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PART III - HOME

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  Acknowledgements

  The Milkweed National Fiction Prize

  MILKWEED EDITIONS

  JOIN US

  Copyright Page

  TO MY MOTHER, WHO WAS THERE

  IÑUPIAQ GLOSSARY

  aachikaaŋ watch out! danger!

  aana grandma

  aaqqaa something stinks, smells bad

  aarigaa an expression of satisfaction

  aatchuq to give

  adii an expression of hurt, disappointment (modern pronunciation)

  aiy ugh

  akutuq Eskimo ice cream, whipped fat with berries and fish

  alapit to black out, to be drunk, to be unaware, as when delirious

  alappaa it is cold, to get cold

  arii an expression of hurt, disappointment (elder pronunciation)

  atchiq to name

  atchit to lend something to someone

  atikłuk traditional pullover shirt

  babiche rawhide strips (French word)

  bart buddy, friend

  bun daughter (slang) (Iñupiaq word: “panik”)

  guuq it is said, someone once said (an ending to a sentence)

  ichuun skin scraper, flensing tool

  igamaaqłuk half-dried fish or meat

  iġitchaq pluck feathers

  iŋaluat blind intestines

  iññuqun unknown prowler or woodsman, commonly confused with “ iñugaqałłigauraq”

  iñugaqałłigauraq small, strong, troll-like mythical men

  iqsi to be frightened

  itchaurat lacy intestinal fat

  ittukpalak whipped fish-egg and cranberry pudding

  kaŋiqsivich do you understand?

  katak to drop, to fall

  kinnaq a dumb person, a crazy person, a fool

  kuukukiaq common snipe

  maatnugun soon, in a little while

  malik follow, accompany

  mamillak waterproof mukluks (modern usage, plural: “mamillaks”)

  masru roots, Eskimo potato

  miġiaq to vomit

  milluk breasts (modern usage, plural: “milluks”)

  mukluks skin boots (slang) (Iñupiaq word: “kammak”)

  muktuk whale skin and blubber (Iñupiaq word: “maktak”)

  naataq great horned owl

  nallaq go to bed

  naluaġmiu white person (modern usage, plural: “naluaġmius”)

  niqipiaq Eskimo food

  nulik to have sex, mate

  pakik ransack, dig in someone’s stuff

  paniqtuq dried meat, dried fish

  patiq marrow

  qaatchiaq skin mattress, traditionally caribou hide (modern usage, plural: “qaatchiaqs”)

  qanisaq entranceway, storm shed

  qayaq small Eskimo hunting boat (English word: “kayak”)

  qilamik quickly! hurry!

  quaġaq fermented sourdock

  quaq frozen meat or fish, often aged or fermented

  qusrimmaq wild rhubarb

  siġḷuaq cold storage built in the ground, cache on the ground

  siulik northern pike

  suvak fish egg (modern usage, plural: “suvaks”)

  taaqsipak black person

  taata grandpa

  taikuu thank you

  takanna down there

  tiktaaliq mudshark

  tinnik bearberry

  tulugaq raven

  tupak to scare, to be frightened

  tuttu caribou

  tuuq ice chisel

  ugruk bearded seal

  ukpik snowy owl

  ulu women’s curved knife

  uqsruq seal oil

  usruk penis (common usage: walrus penis bone)

  utchuk vagina

  uvlaalluataq good morning!

  yuay lucky you

  PROLOGUE

  ON THE DRIFTED SNOW of a lake in the tundra a wolf lies dying. Blood splotches her trail down a bluff, out onto the lake. Her punched tracks zigzag. She lies on her side, panting, one eye open to the sky. A ski plane soars against the blue. It swoops low, a giant buzzing eagle coming to pluck the wolf away. The tundra glares brighter and brighter in the wolf’s eye until land and sky have no detail, and then a wing slides to a stop over her. Its shadow is black. The buzzing is insane now, a tiny angry blizzard, drifting snow. It stutters to silence. In the silence the wolf hears her pups of the spring, their howls yipping mournful and confused, across the land, and the distance of death.

  Two humans bend over her. The larger one is dressed in down overpants. A down parka spans his barrel chest and stomach. A wolf ruff is sewn on his hood. Moosehide mittens hang from wool strings around his neck. The female beside him wears caribou mukluks with ugruk bottoms, and she too has a strip of wolf fur on her parka. She is skinny, her hair black and her face gaunt. Her eyes shift and water, and flick south to the orange horizon, impatient to climb back into the sky, to escape to lands the sun doesn’t abandon.

  The man leans and touches the wolf’s eye. “She’s dead.” The eye doesn’t blink but the man wonders if she can still see out. He’s wondered about other wolves, hundreds. He scratches his throat. He pulls a down engine cover from the fuselage and toggles it over the cowling. “Long flight ahead. Don’t got room for you and this hundred-twenty-pound animal. Best skin her.” His glance runs along the skyline, and then over at the woman. He flicks open a knife. “Coupla’ more days, sun will be gone. Then the damn Darkness.” He bends and slits the wolf from front foot to elbow and across the chest.

  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 in the forearms in the way of a skinned wolverine. He didn’t eat most store-bought food, except Nabob boysenberry jam. When he was out hunting with his dog team and snowshoes he carried a can of jam. He’d chop it open and—after dried meat, or frozen meat, or cooked meat—around his campfire he’d suck on chips of frozen jam. He also carried his little moosehide pouch. Inside were secrets; once he’d let us hold gold nuggets, lumpy, the diameter of dimes. We handed them back and they disappeared in the folds of leather. The day I turned old I was going to be Enuk. Small discrepancies left footprints in my faith, such as the fact that he was Eskimo and I seemed to be staying naluaġmiu. But years lined up ahead, promising time for a cure.

  Our last human visitor had been Woodrow Washington, a month before. Woodrow had a mustache and one tooth on the bottom, one on top. They didn’t line up. Not near. His closest worldly ties were with the bottle, and that left him narrow and shaky. Though he hunted like everyone, his concentration and shots tended to stray. When he showed up, Jerry always hid the vanilla. Sober, he was nice and extra polite. “Tat Feathers boy, he suicide.” Woodrow had brought news and stayed only long enough for warmed-up breakfast coffee. “He use double-barrel, backa their outhouse. You got fifty dollar? I sure need, alright?” Abe gave him the money. Abe leaned on his workbench and rubbed his ears. Harry Feathers was—or had been—a shambling teenager with blinky eyes and acne. He talked to Abe when Abe was snacking our sled dogs in front of Feathers’s post office. It seemed as if maybe nobody else listened to Harry.

  Woodrow had been disappointing comp
any. We had only what money was in the Hills Bros can, but I blamed him more for not spending the night. And not bringing our first class.

  Jerry served boiled caribou pelvis, in the cannibal pot, and pilot crackers, salmon berries, qusrimmaq, and the margarine that travelers had left—without the coloring added. Abe didn’t allow something for nothing; yellow dye was poison; the color of food was nothing. We all carried sharp sheath knives forged out of old chisels and files and used them to cut at the fat and meat on the pelvis bone. Afterward, for a while I forgot my shameful blue eyes and yellow hair when Enuk leaned back on the bearskin couch. He hooked his thumb under his chin. His gaze slid away, beyond the leaning logs of the back wall. His pleasant face might have said aarigaa taikuu, but what he did say was, “Tat time it blowing same like tis, up Jesus Crick I kill my dowgs.” I wiped my greasy hands on my pants and climbed onto his words as if they were a long team to pull me away to the land of strength and adultness.

  He whittled a toothpick out of a splinter of kindling. He let the chips spin into the darkness under the table to mix with the caribou hairs and black mouse turds that carpeted our hewn floorboards. Eskimos weren’t like Franklin and Crazy Joe or other naluaġmius who occasionally came upriver; Enuk’s story was just to fill the night and he wasn’t afraid to let silence happen between words. Time was one bend of open water to him and he hunched comfortable on the bank, enjoying what the current carried.

  With the stick, Enuk picked his teeth. He had most of his teeth, he said, because he never liked “shigger” or “booze.” I didn’t know what booze meant and was scared to ask, vaguely convinced it might be something frilly that city women ordered out of the first half of the Sears catalog. I sat on the chopping-block stump and stared up into his face.

  Abe threw a log into the stove. Sparks hissed red trails up around his shaggy head and flicked into darkness against the low ceiling poles. The poles around the five-gallon-can safety hung with dust tendrils from past smoke. Smoke and the oily odor of flame spread in the room. Abe filled a kettle, making hot water for tea. Mice and shrews rattled spoons on the kitchen boards.