whitened our furs and the dogs’ faces. I froze my face as much as possible, getting ready to look tough and hunterly in town. At dark the first evening, we cut a dead sapling for a ridgepole and green saplings for spruce boughs to sleep on, and pitched our wall tent where the winter trail abandons the river for three bends. Thoughtfully, Abe pressed the faded canvas of the tent between his thumb and finger. Iris leaned against my shoulder smiling. “He’ll be boiling bone glue, brushing size and ground on our tent,” she whispered. “It’ll only be a matter of time until he needs canvas and cuts it up to paint.”
Jerry set up the five-gallon-can stove and pipe. We spread out caribou skins and ate blocks of pemmican and melted snow and threw dried whitefish to the dogs.
The following afternoon, amid the clamor of hundreds of barking dogs, we slid into Takunak, hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners, wool long underwear and balaclavas. Log cabins and a few plywood houses hunkered along the north shore. Fish racks were pitched along the shore, half buried and glinting with tin coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers’ bad reputations.
He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers’s house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some paniqtuq.” He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.
The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.
“Maybe the Jafco catalog came.”
“Maybe.” I toed a splintered board, nails up on the packed snow. We felt sliced by hidden eyes behind cabin windows. Behind a cache—and heaped sleds, machines, caribou hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq’s. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington’s upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn’t know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we’d arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.
Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You’ll have to write and thank him.”
I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe’s, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather’s? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?
“Abe!” Iris moaned. “Don’t you know we’re embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”
“Salvation Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose-babiche sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it’s supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”
“Yeah! Let’s!” Iris and I said.
“Wait. There’ll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”
I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.
“Some kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”
WE SLEDDED TO the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail, letters and yellow envelopes containing units of our correspondence schoolwork. We skipped the teachers’ handwritten encouragements, glanced at the grades, and stuffed them back into the sled to peruse at home.
“Do well?” Abe asked.
Figment writhed his head back and forth, slipped his collar, and stretched gingerly back toward the sled, wagging for a bite of paniqtuq. Abe’s blond hair was tousled, his mouth full of the dried meat. One of his front teeth had a piece of meat caught in it. He had a stub of pink pastel chalk in his mitten, sketching on the canvas sled tarp. He glanced at Figment. He raised his hand, palm down. Figment pointed his nose at the snow, glanced beseechingly one more time at Abe, and curled up.
“All As.” Iris giggled between her mittens. She swung her eyes at Jerry. “Sorry.”
“C in math.” His voice was deep, his windpipe strong and smooth in his neck. He liked some of the high school courses but hadn’t yet discovered an excuse for the existence of geometry. I was in eighth grade and felt the same about all schoolwork. Abe claimed that people in other parts of the world would fight to have an education. I didn’t argue, but in my experience with people—Takunak—it had always seemed they fought instead of getting an education. I had skipped two grades: one because Jerry taught us everything as he learned it; the other because Woodrow Washington Jr. had broken into the post office when everyone was across the river waiting for a forest fire to pass Takunak, and he’d thrown my first-grade supply box down an outhouse hole. By the time mail got through I was halfway into Iris’s second-grade lessons, frozen to the wall from the year before.
I jogged back and forth to get my blood moving and warm; in town the importance of never appearing cold far outweighed a school grade from a stranger in a place called Juneau.
“Better off learning what you want to know.” Abe swung his leg over the toprail. “Don’t let anyone with a degree talk you into happiness insurance.” We stared at him, and then kicked snow, embarrassed. A drone came out of the western sky.
“There!” Iris spotted the speck. Above the cabins, smoke from stovepipes rippled, strained thin by a cold east breeze. “They’re coming!”
Who would they be? Maybe the yearly dentist with his grinders and pliers. A hippie with a Kelty pack. Or people returning from jail or from shooting ravens in National Guard war games. The Twin Otter roared overhead, an alien bird deciding if we were fat enough to eat. The town dogs loosed a stirring ground wave of howls. The dot turned in the sky. Villagers boiled from houses and the school. Kids raced up and leaned at the toprails of our sled, spitting, stepping carelessly on our load of mail, camp stove, and gear. Our dogs wagged and stretched back. The kids jumped away.
“Hi Jerry. Hi Iris. Hi Cutuk,” kids said. In the village young people said hi and someone’s name, all as one word.
“Hi Cutuk. Bywhere you fellas’ mom?” a small boy asked.
“When you go around here?” another boy interrupted.
“Today.” We spoke uncertainly, not recalling all of their names. The kids wore bright tattered nylon jackets and cold stiff jeans. They would freeze before maiming their profiles with furs and skins. It wasn’t a good feeling, the way everyone knew us. We were white kids, had only a dad, and lived