scraped with another hide underneath, to pad the skin and keep the ichuun from tearing holes. We then spread on sourdough, folded the hides skin to skin, put them under Abe’s qaatchiaq to let the sourdough soak in overnight, and later dried and scraped the skins again to finish tanning. The windows dripped condensation. Outside in the twilight, big snowflakes fell. We hauled in wood and kicked the door shut tight and stuffed a jacket at the base of the door to keep cold air out. Abe lit the Coleman light. He pumped it and hung the hissing lamp from a nail on the ridgepole. Shadows twirled and came to rest. We got out an early-fall hide that Iris had sourdoughed earlier. The hair was short, thinner, and soft. We scraped it and worked the skin in our hands until it was tanned and white. Jerry traced new insoles for all of our soft-bottom and ugruk-bottom mukluks. Iris cut them with Abe’s razor. In silence we sewed ourselves caribou socks, then swept up the hairs. Abe hunched over his easel, silent. Caribou hairs clung to his sweater. Outside, the snow piled up.
“Should I boil meat?” Jerry murmured. Iris and I soundlessly raised our eyebrows, yes in Iñupiaq.
Jerry put leg bones and water into the cannibal pot. While it simmered, we used Abe’s powder scale to measure 4832 gunpowder, and reload .30-06 ammo with the Lee Loader. Iris sighted down a completed cartridge. “Boy, fresh moose heart would be good, wouldn’t it?” She covered a grin, swinging her gaze to Abe.
“Look!” Jerry said. “You forgot to prime this one. You’re wasting!” We glanced at Abe. Wasting was the baddest word in our family. Jerry bit the lead. He pried the bullet out and dumped the gunpowder back in the scale. The bullet copper was dented but would still be good enough for finishing off a caribou if it was too alive to get with a knife. “Here! You’re not supposed to get the inside of the primer sweaty, ’kay?”
I crossed my arms, checked my muscle. Actually, we had plenty of food: seasonings and sugar and fifty-pound sacks of flour, powdered milk, rice, and beans. Jars of rendered bear fat for shortening. Most of a quart of vanilla. And there was a keg of salted salmon bellies, and piles of quaq in the dogfood cache. We could eat that. It was good with seal oil, and in the seal oil were our prized masru and pink tinnik berries. We wouldn’t go hungry.
IN LATE JANUARY, Abe took his rifle off the peg behind the stove. We kids scattered for overpants and parkas. He blew dust off the bolt and scraped his thumbnail along the stock where frozen snot or dog spit had dried. His hair and beard were unruly. His turquiose eyes squinted with a grin. “Iris? Feel like coming along?” He nodded and laid the gun on the floor across his parka and mittens. Jerry and I slumped. Abe boiled water, filled his thermos, and slid it into the caribou-hide insulating tube. We fidgeted, out of the way, while Iris got bundled and ready.
They hitched the team and went east, hunting for an acquiescent moose to contribute both dog food and people food. The caribou herds were far south in their wintering grounds. It was cold—cold enough that the kerosene had jelled and wouldn’t pour into the lamp—and the dogs did not lunge to run.
Afterward, Jerry wandered back inside to rewrite a letter to his pen pal in New Zealand, romancing her long distance. Mice rustled and scurried on the floor. His pen rustled the paper. He liked to write letters and poems. And his diary, too. I figured he was faking talent. We kids didn’t say it—that would be bad luck—but we hoped we’d inherited a little of Abe’s specialness. We grew up watching our dad; for months on end he was the only one to watch, to teach us about our world, and tidbits of the city world. We watched his left hand, the one with good genes, hoping to recognize the first twinges in our own hands.
I hauled armloads of wood. Jerry went out to cut meat for dinner. The house was quiet. The table and chairs and floorboards seemed gray, dingy, and bare with no one about. Curiosity pushed my honor aside—I slid a thumbnail in where the edges of his diary’s pages were smudged. My eyes scrambled over the words . . . only you who watched mothers fly away, after the cold will be my sisters and brothers . . . I dropped the book. Quickly I placed it back on the table. I laced my mukluks. Fumbled into my parka. Hurried out behind the woodpile and pretended to scan the tundra for life.
Jerry hung the bow saw on a nail. His mukluks squeaked on the snow. He carried sawed caribou ribs inside. They were skinny ribs, thin and with signs of wolf lips and shrew turds on them. He came outside, no jacket. His brown eyes looked rolled back like a village dog held down by its last six inches of iced-in chain. “That’s mine.” There was red meat sawdust between his fingers. Jerry’s big square fist swung. My face seemed to crack open. Behind a snowbank I leaned over. Blood hung in coagulating red icicles off my nose. I tried to forget the words in the diary. And the jealousy that Jerry might have what I didn’t—a share of Abe’s gift.
Iris, too, had something. Something completely different, though. It wasn’t something you could talk about. One spring a white-lady social worker skied down the river towing a plastic sled. She was from the distant big city of Anchorage, and how she got upriver we didn’t know. She wore bright blue windbreakers and windpants, and had a black backpack, an orange aluminum foil space blanket, and dehydrated space meals and Swiss chocolate bars. She was very beautiful and had heaps of wavy brown hair and didn’t seem to get cold. Her name was Wax Tiera, and we adored her though we suspected her of being an alien. The odd thing was, the day before she showed, Iris cleaned the entire igloo in a way we had never before done. She swept 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