got a marten last week,” I whispered. “Finally,” I added, remembering the importance of a hunter’s humility.
Enuk nodded in generous respect, elevating me above droll twelve-year-oldness. The bridge of his nose was black, a huge frostbite scab. His cheeks were scarred black. “Yuay. Tat’s good. I get only fox.” He laid the rock-hard animal on the floor beside the woodpile, careful not to snap the tail off. He slipped outside and got the head half of a quaq trout.
“You want coffee?” Janet murmured from her and Melt’s bed.
“Let’um. Naw.” Enuk cut chunks of the raw fermented fish and dipped them in seal oil. They were so cold they smoked on the table. “Aarigaa.” Enuk sighed and grinned. Janet sat up. They spoke softly in Iñupiaq. Melt grumbled and rolled over toward the wall. Enuk squinted at him and down at his fish.
“A wolv’reen almost gonna eat that fox. Enuk snowshoeing tupak it,” Janet explained to me. “It climb tree, alright. His gun have ice and can’t work.” Enuk asked a question and she spoke again in Iñupiaq. I heard my name and wondered, were they discussing my bruised lip—or only talking about something that had fallen?
Enuk cleared his throat, switched to English. “One time gonna I’m young man, I live in’a mountains. In igloo, like you fellas, Cutuk. Good place same like your camp. Lotta wolf, wolv’reen, link, any kinda animal. Only thing, iñugaqałłigauraq be there. They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even. Let me tupak, gonna all’a time.” He chewed a piece of quaq. “I can’t leave till I get white wolf. Tat one got face jus’ like moon. He look inside you. Gonna anytime. Tat one, he hide easy, gonna see you.”
Abe stirred in his sleeping bag. I glanced into the far corner. Dawna’s eyes were open and dark, asking for answers to questions that weren’t in the room. She hugged her small stained pillow under her chin. It was a store-bought pillow, without a pillowcase, and it leaked chopped yellow foam. Behind her on the wall was a taped and torn poster of the beautiful Wonder Woman. Dents in the shiny paper caught light. The eyes had been colored in with ink and stared, detached from the small perfect smile. I wished I could loop my fingers around Dawna’s little finger, kiss her wrists; but I didn’t know how to kiss and the distance across the shack was too exposed and cluttered with sleeping people who knew everything else about me.
“One night moon shining, I chop hole for water.” Enuk held his hand two feet off the floor, measuring. His fingers were huge and dark, puffy from seventy-three years of freezing and thawing. “Not so thick ice. My fry pan have bad taste an’ I gonna washing it. Something grab me. Right on’a neck. I’m plenty strong tat time. Almos’ gonna I take t’em hands off.” Enuk clenched his hands. His words twinged me with envy. Some Eskimos—like Enuk—inherited the not-too-distant survival days kind of muscles. Much stronger, it seemed, than white-man muscles.
His eyes had gone serious behind the black pools of shadow. His words draped shivers across my shoulders. I dreaded leaving the noisy safety of town and returning home to wilderness nights, vast silence peopled with prowlings in the dark.
“Tat thing let me never breathe. Then it give up. No tracks on ta snow. Tat’s spirit. He fight me cus he’s lost, travel long way from home. Maybe spirit same gonna like us. Mad when they mixed up inside.”
He rubbed his neck and after a minute he grinned, letting the somberness flow out of the room. “Tat time I lose my fry pan.”
“How come you never hook it, Enuk?” I murmured. My chin was on my wrists, the bag clenched tight. Enuk sat up where it was warm. His story seemed pointless; I felt dumb and slightly angry for not understanding why he’d kept me awake.
“I never try hook it,” he said patiently. “Now I been gonna hunt tat place sometimes fifty year; iññuqun, spirit, iñugaqałłigauraq, they never always try bother. You tell me if you see white wolf. Your dad maybe he gonna try forget again.” Enuk and Janet laughed. Enuk leaned back from the table. “Aarigaa taikuu.”
I lay my head down and struggled to keep my eyes open. Enuk’s words sifted down in my sleepy mind. The day of cold air on the trail had left me exhausted, and being around so many people—most who knew us and we didn’t know back—took so much energy. Just trying to talk right, not chew loud or get kicked; it made sense why Abe had left Chicago.
Enuk dug in his moosehide pouch and the light glinted among his treasures. My eyelids fell closed. An instant later he dropped a cold lump in my hand. A brown bear figurine, carved out of ancient mammoth ivory, stood on its hind legs, nose up, whiffing worlds off the wind. How old it must be! It meant so much, and I pulled it into my sleeping bag and held it that way, like it was alive, deserving of eternal respect. With its enchantment, and in the cast of Enuk’s warm eyes, mean things and people could not harm me.
FIVE
ON THE FLATS between river drainages, wolves span out over a mile of tundra and leafy green willow thickets. The pups play and bite each other’s legs. The wolves work west, bruised and hungry after spending the recent night—bright and starless as day—testing a cow moose and her young calf. The calf had appeared small and helpless, eligible to be eaten. It struggled, staying close under its mother’s flank during the final battle. In the end, the cow’s berserk defense of her young left a wolf wounded, stomped in the willows. The pack had closed on the wolf, killed it, and left the creekbed. The famished calf nursed.
Now the wolves turn across the tundra toward their den. They recognize each moose in their territory, test each regularly for weaknesses and vulnerable new offspring. Four of the pack are pups. Playful and only a couple months old, the pups are insatiable. Since May, the black male and gray female have claimed most of the available food for themselves and their litter. They are fat. The young adults in the pack are skinny and starved. Two have left to hunt alone.
Today a third wolf rests, lets the family go on. She stops, trots north, and rests again. Finally she travels, a hundred miles northwest in the first week. The sun never sets. The days are hot and flies buzz around her nose. The sunny nights trill with the call of nesting sparrows and waterfowl. Beaver move out into lakes to evade her. Muskrats dive and disappear. The wolf catches a ground squirrel, a few flightless warblers, a ptarmigan. Everything warm-blooded wanders under the canopy of swarming mosquitoes.
The young wolf swims wide rivers, climbs mountain passes, crosses green valleys ashimmer with cotton grass. In the lee of twin peaks she comes to a snowfield. Seventy thousand caribou stand crammed on the snow, nearly insane and forsaking graze to elude a portion of the insatiable mosquitoes. The wolf catches a slow calf and eats, yards from the mass of animals.
Her stomach is distended and tight. She moves sleepily into the alders of a nearby creek. When she awakes, the brush teems with wolves. The young gray wolf rolls on her back, shows her throat to the unfamiliar pack, makes obsequious sounds left over from her puppyhood.
The wolves growl, stand over her with their heads high. The young wolf is skinny, the marrow in her bones dark red. For lack of threat, luck, reasons unknowable—the pack does not kill the intruder. The group moves toward the caribou. Thousands of animals race and mill. The wolves down a limping bull with swollen joints and soft black velvet antlers. The herd accepts the cost, swells back on the snow to await wind. At the kill there are growls. Suddenly a fight erupts.
By the first snow the caribou’s and the female wolf’s bones are clean, almost white.
SIX
SPRING WAS MY FAVORITE time of year, and it took extra energy to stay in a bad mood. The sun came home to the Arctic and shone tirelessly on the shimmering world of snow. Midwinter diminished into memory and the Darkness of next winter seemed inconceivable. Warm smells rose from the black soil of exposed cutbanks; birds shrieked and carelessly tossed leftover seeds down out of the birches. It was a season of adventure calling from the melting-out mountains, of geese honking after a continent-crossing journey, of caribou herds parading thousands long on their way