depending on the season and the conversation. Enuk mushed up the knife ridge that formed a narrow bank separating the lake from the Kuguruk River. He kicked his snow hook into an ice-hard drift. His dogs flopped down, panting. I sank my hatchet into a dog stake and ran to his sled, gripping the toprails.
“Hi, Enuk!”
He gazed stiffly out of the frosty silver circle of his wolf ruff. He broke ice off his gray mustache and eyelashes. Then he grinned, as if trying earlier might have pulled hairs. He smelled of campfire and coffee. He took off his rifle and hung it carefully off the handlebar of his sled. His gaze flicked over the tracks left by Abe’s team. I stayed respectfully silent while he rubbed the frosted faces of his dogs and bit the iceballs off from between their hairy toes. It was annoying and white to talk too much or ask questions, especially when a traveler first arrived. Shaking hands, also, was a sign of being an Outsider. Enuk wore new tan store-bought overpants. On one hem was the red chalk of frozen blood. His sled tarp was lashed down, too tight for me to poke under without being nosy. Sled tarps had always held secrets, brought packages, presents, fresh meat, store-bought cookies. Old and ratty didn’t matter—sled tarps were the biggest wrapping paper of all.
“When you leavin’, Enuk?” I asked finally.
“Pretty quick.”
“How come? Spend the night.”
Staring north, he pursed his lips thoughtfully. He nodded. “Maybe gonna I spen’a night.”
“I wish!”
“If I know, I woulda’ bring you-fellas’ first class.” His squinted eyes roamed the snow-covered river, willows, and tundra, probing for the tiniest movement of life. He swung back to me. “Anytime they could get you.” I eyed his sled. What was he talking about? Bears? Spirits? “If they want you they get you, anytime.” He noticed my eyes on his tarp. “Ha ha, Yellow-Hair!” He kicked a fast mukluk at me.
He unlashed the tarp and spread it open. “I get lucky.” He nodded toward the mountains. “T’em wolves kill moose young one. Not too far.” I didn’t follow his eyes. The wolf was silver-gray and huge, twice the size of Enuk’s huskies, its hair long and black-tipped. I petted the animal in wonder, feeling splinters of blood frozen deep in the fur. I recognized the clean dog odor. Broken ribs shone in a large bullet hole in the side of his chest. I saw the wolf stumbling, hearing his own bones grating, panting against death pouring into his lungs.
I shook my head to dislodge the pictures.
“Coulda have more, alright. Only thing, smart one in’a bunch. He let t’em others run.” He looped his stringed overmitts behind his back. Barehanded, wary of the blood, he kneaded the wolf’s thin lower legs. “Alappaa! Freeze. Hard gonna for tat way ta skin. I bring tis wolf inside. Wait for your old man.”
ABE AND IRIS RETURNED without meat. We ate the skinny ribs Jerry had boiled. Skinny meat was a sign of a poor provider, but Enuk ate with relish. Afterward he skinned the wolf. When he finished, he folded the skin fur-out. On our floor the naked wolf grinned permanently in the weak lamplight, his teeth and tendons white against dark red muscles. The stomach was hard, and fetid smells were beginning to come out. Enuk had only a little blood on his fingertips. There was a slit in the wolf’s throat. “Let his spirit go other wolf,” Enuk said. “Gotta respect.”
“Do you like wolves?” I asked.
Iris and Jerry peered over the tops of their schoolbooks. Their papers were spread on the wooden Blazo boxes that we made into desks—and also cupboards, shelves, seats, muskrat-stretching boards, and more.
“They got fam’ly. Smart. Careful. I like ’em best than all’a animal. Your dad know. He make tat good picture. Gonna ta white ladies buy tat one more than any kinda wolf skin. Ha! Ha!” Enuk opened the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He flung the carcass into the dark. The furless animal slapped on the packed snow out under the chipped eyes of the stars. In the dog yard one of Enuk’s dogs barked nervously at the thump in the still night. An echo rolled back lonesome from the timber across the river, and the dog challenged it with three quick barks.
“Yep, Yellow-Hair. Tomorrow you take your old man.” Enuk grinned. “Go out back way, hunt moose.” His eyes flicked to his knife, and I wondered what else he was thinking about and whether it was killing more wolves.
“We might.” Abe smiled and looked shy about something. He wiped blood drips off the floor with a holey sock rag. His cheeks and nose burnt with red ovals from frostbite that day on the trail. Iris’s face was marked red, too. They hadn’t seen the right moose—a barren cow, a moose that would have fat meat and its hide fair for snowshoe babiche, sled washers, cold-weather mukluk bottoms.
“We might look again tomorrow.” Abe folded the cardboard he had laid out for Enuk to work on. “You do a real nice job, Enuk.” Abe sounded as if he would have an impossible time skinning even a caribou legging. Abe had taught me to skin and dry foxes, perfectly—better than any fox I’d ever seen skinned in Takunak. Their pelt was papery, difficult not to tear with the sharpened metal tube ichuun, difficult not to tear when turning the dried skin back fur-out. And though we often used only the thick warm fur for mittens, he made me skin to save the toenails, tail, eyelashes—out of respect to the animal whose life we’d taken.
Often, Abe helped me make birch and babiche snowshoes that few in Takunak remembered how to make. Or one time he helped write a letter to the substitute president, Gerald Ford. But he would never pick up an axe like he was tough. Never talk or hold a gun that way. Never brag, “I’m goin’ after bear.” Any bear we got walked up on its own and still Abe didn’t want to kill it. Around travelers, Abe’s modesty trimmed off too much of the fat. Apparently things started getting out of balance back with his dad. Tom Hawcly had been a sport hunter, a menacing species to have in any food chain. He left our grandmother in Chicago and roamed off to Barrow to be a pilot, the owner of two Super Cub airplanes, and a guide for polar bear hunters. The story was exciting enough, and romantic—up to the part where they found him smeared dead on the sea ice. People along the Kuguruk River hated sport hunters and guides as much as they did schoolteachers. Frequently they were one and the same. I was thankful that Barrow was a long way north. And that people thought of white people as having no relatives.
Enuk finished skinning out the paws. He talked of shooting his first wolf when he was ten. His dad had taken him to check a tiktaaliq fish trap. A lone wolf was there on the ice gnawing yesterday’s frozen fish blood. The wind was behind the wolf. Enuk’s father handed him the rifle.
I listened to Enuk’s low voice and lusted to gun down a whole pack, to stockpile prestige. Somehow, I had to learn to stop worrying about wolf pain. Abe had to stop molding me into an unhero.
Abe slapped his pants, fumbled in his big pockets for tobacco and papers. He glanced over the table and workbench, and eventually gave up. To Iris he said, “Otter, boil water? When Enuk’s washed up maybe you’ll make a splash of tea?”
Iris set her math book on the wood box. She smiled at Enuk. The frostbite was pretty across her cheeks and nose. “Nine times eight, Cutuk!”
“Huh? Seventy-two.”
“Twenty-one times eleven.”
“Two hundred and thirty-one.” My thoughts softened; I pictured happy otters playing, sliding along day-old ice, stopping to nuzzle each other.
Iris dripped the dipper on my head as she danced barefoot toward the water barrel. She peered close, to focus out of her weak eyes. “Cutuk? Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.”
I flicked her leg. The religious poster—the one Abe tacked out in the outhouse, the one the Gospel Trippers had left when they passed through last winter—said a family was supposed to say it: “I love you,” I whispered, at my hands, too softly, the only time in my life. Iris, with her black hair and surprising blue eyes, full of smiles where I had storms, she never heard. She was in her own thoughts. What were they? I should have asked, but kissing, saying the word love, and talking