up half the day and burnt that strip of fire.
I held my breath. Listened to the silence. The land at cold temperatures waited in molecular stillness; sound traveled far, though very little of it lived here anymore. My heart boomed. My ears filled with a waterfall of ringing. The land’s thousand eyes watched. I knelt and tried to concentrate on the fire and the smoke, sweet with the smell of warmth and company. A noise startled me.
From a lone spruce on the far side of the lake a raven cawed. “Caaawk,” I answered. I glanced behind. The watchful bird cawed again, urging me to leave the fat meat to him. I saw him standing on my face, feasting on my eyes. I saw him on Abe’s face and I hummed quickly and fed the fire.
THE PASTEL SKY HAD DARKENED. In the south a last strip of orange and greenish blue lingered. The walls of blackness grew and leaned close over my head and joined. An icy east breeze thinned the smoke. The night cold was a monster now, merciless, pinching my face with pliers, sneaking fingers under my parka. It didn’t seem possible to keep my cheeks thawed, and they froze over and over again. The flames sizzled the two-foot-long moose ribs I speared on a stick, burning the crisp fat while the ends froze. In the flickering light my pile of dry willow shrank. I scratched my neck to steal glances behind. The raven had gone.
When the ribs were nicely burnt, I gnawed on the meat pressed between my mittens. I worked a bone clean, tossed it into the dark. Back home it was Jerry’s day to bake bread; probably he was sliding loaves out of our oven box in the bottom of the barrel stove, rapping the brown bottoms to hear the hollow done sound. I wished for a hot slice, and walls behind my shoulders, and Iris’s teasing squeezes.
Jaws crunched a bone.
I dropped the rib and snatched the rifle. The dark was made of dots, walls of eyes. A scream tore the night.
A fox! Was it rabid? I hissed out a hoarse fox bark. Silence rang back. I barked again. To the left I heard a soft thump. Then running feet and the quick sounds of a chase. My stomach tightened. The wolves had come!
If the fox was crippled the wolves would eat him. I wished bad luck on him until I remembered that Enuk would say he could wish the same on me. Above, aurora wavered, green smoke ghosting in the dark, quick pale brush strokes, the bottoms tinted pink, twinging up in the black. The fire had sunk, hissing and steaming down on the lake ice. I knelt forward to salvage some coals. Smoke stung my eyes. Snow squeaked. The darkness moved into shapes. Slowly, I turned my head. Behind stood more.
The chik-chunk of the rifle loading sounded as loud as river ice booming. I aimed over the dark shaking sights. My thoughts scattered down terrified trails. The pack couldn’t have forgotten that a man had shot one of them yesterday. Now I would never get to be Eskimo, or see a 747, or know for how many years President Nixon had to go to jail. I tried to place myself in a future story to milk heroism out of my bad luck, but all I saw were clumps of bones and yellow hair. A voice I hadn’t heard whispered, “Shoot! Shoot!” I gripped the gun. I was ten. My chance to be Enuk! People in the village would know it the next time they teased, “Catch any weasel in your trap, Cutuk?”
The steel trigger froze through my fox mitten liner. I yanked back. The gun lurched. The black wolf I’d aimed at sniffed his paw.
The safety. I flipped the lever. Now Abe’s disappointed face floated in the way. I looked over the barrel, tried to aim. The northern lights had dimmed. It was harder to make out shapes. Abe wouldn’t cuss or even kick things around. He would help skin the wolf. That was the thing about Abe, he’d help someone else before he helped himself. The thing about me was I couldn’t accept that all people were not like that. I saw Abe as a boy, searching for his dad’s shirts. I clicked the safety back. The wolf lifted his nose and howled. The pack joined.
Fear and elation skated on my skin. Were they cheering? Or voting? I felt cruel for lusting to kill one. I had eaten; I had a warm wolf ruff on my hood—but the gnawing inside was jittery and big, a hunger to kill and be great for it. It wasn’t good, it was mean, but it felt glued all over inside me.
The harmony ceased. The wolves stood, listening. Finally, miles east, upwind, across the tundra, I heard the snap of branches, and fainter still, runners squeaking on cold snow; eventually came a low mumble that I knew as Abe’s encouraging “Atta boys. Good girl, Farmer. Haw over now. Haw over.”
The wolves circled, their claws tacking the hard snow. I aimed, barehanded now, my fingers burning on the metal. Under the green luminescence from the sky the wolf pack fanned out north across the lake. The animals I’d wanted to kill mingled and faded. That wolf—how many miles and years had he walked under this smoky green light? Walked cold, hungry in storms, wet under summer rain; walking on this land I’d always called my home. He knew every mountain, every trail along every knoll so much better than I ever would. And the wolf, I only knew him dead. I didn’t want to be an Outsider. Not here, too. How was it that I’d never considered carefully that an animal would know infinitely more about something than I could?
The whisper of their feet disappeared under the sounds of the coming dog team. Two people pitched and clawed inside me. One whispered in awe: “They were so close.” The other mocked: “You dummy! Ten years old, same age as Enuk, and you didn’t shoot.” My fingers screamed in the pain of warming. I hunched over them, humming to hide the anguish. Abe had said to watch, but he was a painter. He read books and watched the sky too much. Enuk said to respect the wolves, but he’d have shot as many as he could. Even the last one. Under my skin, so well I knew, in the village “could have” meant nothing without the mantle of a dead animal. I wanted the stars to drop some silver stranger, an alluring alien like Wax Tiera, to tell me what I should think. But there was only the dark, the cold, the miles and miles of snow.
THREE
THE MOON IS BEHIND THE LAND, narrow and nothing to hunt by. The pack moves south in the dark, spread out in pairs and alone, toward the kill. Tension is in the pack, a missing sibling, and quick snarls. A wolf noses through a line of willows. Pale light ripples overhead. He drops onto a lake. Three big pups trail him. They stop often to nose each other and sniff mouse tunnels. On the lake they stand, their long gazes pointed at a dancing orange hole in the night, and the scent of smoke and blood and man and dog. The wolves circle. A fox streaks past. The pups give chase in the dark.
The pack halts out of the flick of firelight. They sniff the man’s sweaty fear and the charred bones. They hear his quick breathing. The large wolf tastes something else, a scent sealed into his puppyhood and the loss of his mother. The scent makes him yawn in apprehension. After a time he leads the pack away from the danger of this kill. Past their own kill with man’s scent there now, too. Away into mountains.
FOUR
BRUCE LEE ARRIVED in moving color on the back wall of the Takunak church house in February 1978, the year I turned twelve. Takunak had been converted by missionary Quakers, but everyone under seventy, regardless of whether they spoke English, lined up at the cabin door to be baptized into the glory of ninja. Mr. Lee’s style of instant gratification leapt the language barrier and left John Wayne piddling in the dust. He was an overwhelming success—the movie took in two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. Three glass windows in the school were broken the following night with throwing stars of frozen Cream of Wheat.
A week later, when, unaware, we mushed into the village, I felt the ramifications of Lee’s acceptance into Iñupiaq culture.
We traveled to town two or three times each winter to deliver Abe’s artwork—furniture and paintings—and to pick up mail and gossip, gunpowder, powdered milk, and mail-ordered vanilla extract for snow ice cream. Necessities. We tied our door shut, iced the runners, and hitched up the dogs. We got on the trail as the first twinges of morning twilight painted the Shield Mountains. “Take your mittens off a minute,” Abe suggested, reminding us to go barehanded until our hands went numb, to shock the blood into flowing hot in our fingers for the day.
Two bends west, the river was deep with fresh snow that wind hadn’t shifted and settled. Jerry, Iris, and I took turns