when there was no pastor in town. He was grumpy except when he shared advice, weather prophecies, or his hunting stories—those things brought out a generosity in him. It was clear that they were better than any another person might own.
He was proud to serve that canned soup made from States cows. Anybody who didn’t see the Dinty Moore label would have assumed from the way he hollered at Janet and opened the can himself that he’d journeyed down to Baltimore, Illinois, or Park Place and hunted those cows all himself.
Abe didn’t like the soup. But he raised his eyebrows politely. “Salty,” he mumbled as if all beef by definition was salty. The meat smashed under my teeth, same as the potatoes. I wondered what a beef did to get its meat large-grained like moose and still mushy as boiled ground squirrel.
My cut lip stung. I set the bowl on the floor to cool. Stevie and I practiced setting his new Conibear trap, made to snap on an ermine’s head and kill it instantly. We forgot we were old and began trying to snap Dawna and Iris, since they seemed to be having more fun than we were, reading a magazine and whispering over the pictures. Jerry sat with the adults, hunched to one side, holding his soup over a Sears order blank he was filling out for Aana Skuq. People came in the door steadily, when we were in town, to have Abe make out Sears orders for them, or explain unemployment papers or taxes. Jerry did it now, relieved to have something to do that made sense to him.
Stevie snapped the trap on Dawna’s foot. She screamed. “Stevie, you dumb thing!” She whacked his head with a rolled-up magazine, hard. “Adii, Mom. Stevie always bother.”
“Ah shuck, you!” Melt hollered. “You kids go play out!” He pointed at the door. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. In the village, people yelled and swore equally at kids and dogs, and neither obeyed. That strange memory flashed, of Melt, young, quiet, friendly, cradling a baby porcupine in our doorway. With a space between his teeth that there was no longer any way of verifying. Had it been a dream? People didn’t change that much, did they?
Stevie sat on the bed with his face turned away, chuckling. Dawna stared at me, her eyes beautiful under black lashes. She wobbled the small mole on her cheek. She wore a pink hooded sweatshirt. The collar was torn around the eyelets. Her neck was smooth and brown. Her gaze looked laughy, but different somehow. I wanted her to be the first person I ever kissed—after I learned how.
She shook her magazine. A square white magazine-seed dropped out. She wrote on it and let the paper fall near my knee. The writing was upside down. I turned it around. Now it was backwards, inside out. I flipped it over and read where the pen had pressed through like braille. Cutuk, don’t listen to that kinnaq thing. You’re my friend and I wish you were my honey. The words were curly and small, unbelievably valuable. I hid the paper in my pocket to read a thousand times upriver.
I didn’t want to go outside in the dark; I slinked back to my stew. It had frozen along the edges. Janet giggled and brushed my arm. “Shh.” She dumped it back in the pot and gave me a warm bowlful.
Abe unpacked our sleeping bags to warm by the stove and got out the lynx skin he’d brought for Janet. Lynx prices had risen to two hundred and fifty dollars at Seattle Fur Exchange, for rich women’s coats, and when Abe got an envelope with a check for four skins he pulled his big traps. We still mailed in fox and rare marten skins, but now if he accidentally caught a lynx he gave it to Janet to use in mitten liners or to let Melt sell. When I was a baby he had traded Janet furs for sewing warm clothes for us, before she taught us to tan skins and sew, before she took us in.
Janet lit another Coleman lamp. It flamed and sputtered. She flipped the generator lever and pumped it rapidly. The mantle glowed, hissing out harsh shadows. “Look, Bun,” she told Dawna. “Abe bring. Aarigaa.” Dawna smiled fleetingly, not even pretending she cared. She stared at Abe, not the lynx. She and Iris went back to admiring skinny white girls in the magazine.
Janet was known all the way to the coast for the mukluks, beaver hats, and mittens she sewed. People paid more than one hundred and fifty dollars for a pair of her ugruk-bottom mukluks. Melt often took two or three pairs to Crotch Spit when he went to get drunk for a few days. Her creations were beautiful, the skin tanned white with sourdough or red with fermented alder bark. Her stitches were tiny, the garments sometimes sparkling with beads. I wondered if my mother could sew. In my stray fantasies where Mom found us and brought presents, there was no great amount of sewing. Probably she was one of the rich women now. Maybe that was why Abe didn’t send out lynx anymore. I wished Janet would be my mother. My imagination loaded a full-color picture: Melt, out on the ice. Suddenly he plunged through and the black current swept him from view.
“Janet! Make fresh coffee!” Melt shouted, still alive, sounding as if he were hollering at a dog about to piss on his rifle.
Treason came in, then Lumpy stomped in from roaming the town. He smelled of factory cigarettes. Woodrow Washington Jr., Lumpy’s young uncle, slipped in with him. He stood by the door.
“Washingtons need caribou,” Lumpy told Melt. Lumpy was taller and thicker than Melt now. He stomped snow off his boots. Melt had always reminded people that Lumpy was Janet’s son, not his. Now Lumpy was reminding him who was bigger.
A moment later, out in the night, the church bell rang curfew. Janet flung Lumpy a look. “Mom, I’m hungry,” he said, ignoring her stern eye. He pushed my head. “Hi Cutuk.” The soup was gone; Lumpy stirred up a glass of hot Jell-O. It was one of Janet’s new glass glasses; at home we had only mugs, and broken-handled mugs for glasses. Lumpy said nothing about me being kicked. He didn’t offer a sip of the sweet Jell-O.
“See that door?” Lumpy whispered. “We got real door, not homemade Kool-Aid kind like you fellas.” I stared, as surprised as the time he ate a tube of Pepsodent when the town was all out of pop and candy.
“Woody an’em need meat!”
Iris and I flung each other corner-eyed glances. Jerry peered up and focused back into the catalogs. Woody Jr. shifted by the door. His eyes were bloodshot. “Alappaa that east wind,” he said, and finally, “Melt, where’s your cigarette?”
Abe patted his pockets. “Here you go.” He drew out his tobacco pouch. Woody moved uneasily away from the door toward the different kind of tobacco.
Melt had stayed molded comfortably in his chair, tuned in to his shortwave radio. We kids dreamed of music and never heard any at home; Iris had been ready to ask Melt if he’d turn it up so the faint songs would reach us. He grumbled, flipped the radio off, handed over a pack of Marlboros. He found one boot. He kicked at the piles behind the stove, hunching over stiffly, searching for the boot’s mate. “You kids! You lose my one-side!”
I hunkered low, discovering interesting aberrations in my thumbnail. Janet slapped Woody on the shoulder. “Cigarette, that’s your food, huh?” She grinned with Abe, took a meat saw off the nail over the kitchen counter, and went out to cut a hindquarter off a frozen caribou.
Melt settled back into his chair. He tossed the boot back into a heap of clothes. “Goddamn kids.”
When Janet came back in her eyes were bright and watery from the cold and she smiled radiantly. “Alappaa!” She handed Woody the unskinned leg. Loose caribou hairs clumped on the fresh cut. “Enough?” He nodded. “Nice-out night!” she told him. “I’m glad you let me go out.”
WE WERE ALL ASLEEP, stretched like mossed-in logs, when the door creaked open. Janet had left the lantern burning on the floor beside the slop bucket; it cast a hissing circle of light. Enuk Wolfglove’s frost-whitened form materialized out of a cloud of condensation that rolled in. He was dressed in furs and held a stiff red fox under his arm. The animal’s frozen eyes squinted in death. I blinked awake and lifted my head off my ropey jeans-and-shirt pillow. It was cold on the floor. My bag had a rim of frost around the opening. I could feel cold air going into my lungs. I watched Enuk in awe, knowing with conviction what I wanted to be if I managed to grow up.
He pulled his parka over his head and opened the door and put it out in the qanisaq the way