the night beside the naked wolf.
THE STOVE DRAFT FLICKERED orange lights on the peeled poles of the ceiling. The orange melted through my eyelids to clutter my dreams with flames. Pitch smoldered, sweet and resinous on top of the stove.
Enuk lay on his qaatchiaq. His legs stretched out of sight under the table. Iris’s black hair curled across my face. I brushed it aside and pulled our pants and shirts under the covers to warm them. I gripped the corner of the sleeping bag tight to keep the chilly morning out. For years Abe had promised to order me my own sleeping bag. Like Iris’s glasses, it was another thing we’d have to go out into the world and find for ourselves. Iris took up more room this winter. She was bigger. Her breasts were growing, disconcerting to me when I accidentally brushed them.
“You elbowed me really hard in the eye last night.” Her voice was sleepy. She wore one of Abe’s flannel shirts, faded and thin. She smelled of flannel, candle wax, and soft skin.
Jerry’s bed was head to head with ours along the back wall. I wasn’t sure if he was awake on his caribou skin. It was dark in the room, except for firelight. Abe banged the coffeepot on a round of firewood. He swore softly when a chunk of frozen grounds crumbled on the floor. He toed the grounds against the wood box. Iris leaned her chin on her wrists. “Daddy slobbest. What will he do without us?” Her words made me shiver. Firelight glowed on his broad white chest and arms. He crumpled a painting, stuffed it into the stove. The stiff paper caught and flared. For cash Abe made furniture to sell in Takunak, and occasionally he mailed one of his paintings to Anchorage. Never his best. I lay fantasizing; he was an outlaw artist with a notorious past, his name would be legend in the places I traveled.
His bare feet rasped on the cold boards. Outside darkness painted the windows black. The roar of the stove grew, and frost in the safety dripped and hissed. Kettles began to whine. Enuk yawned and rose. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. His body was stout and muscular. The sun had never seen it, and his skin was smooth and pearly brown as a young man’s, except on his thick hands and face where weather and time had stained their stories.
They sipped coffee. Abe lit the lamp. He took the cannibal pot off the stove and put it on the table. We knifed out hot meat and gravy and ate it with bread and the frozen sliced canned jam that Enuk brought. A fly buzzed, one wing frozen to the ice on the inside of the window. The door was frosty around the edges. It was still dark outside. The dogs howled.
Enuk put down his cup. “Today I get old.”
Iris pattered her fingers on his shoulder, as unconcerned as if he were a shelf. “Are you a hundred?”
I watched her hand. Jerry was watching, too.
“Jan’wary twenty-one, nineteen hunnert an five. How many tat gonna? Seventy?”
“Seventy-one!”
“Not so many. I still hunt best than my son.”
“My birthday was the fourth,” I said, thinking how perfect it would have been to be born seventeen days later, on Enuk’s birthday. “We’re not sure we celebrated on the right day. That day was warm and it snowed sticky; you remember, was that the fourth?” I trailed off. The mouthful of numbers felt white.
Enuk ignored me and retrieved his frozen wolf skin from outside the door. Cold-air fog rolled in. He eyed the skin for shrew chews. His leather pouch lay beside his mug on the table. It had sounded heavy when he plunked it down. “You fellas have tat.” He nodded at the can of jam. “Cutuk, t’em mooses waiting. You gonna hunt?”
I studied Abe’s face for a sign.
“It could be cold.” He sharpened his knife, three flicks on the pot, three flicks back. “Real cold.”
“I’ll put my face under the tarp when it freezes.”
“Tat a boy!” Enuk said.
DOWN AT THE RIVER it was minus a lot. My nose kept freezing shut on one side. The dogs uncurled and shook frost off their faces. They stood on three legs, melting one pad at a time while the other three quickly froze. Abe’s leader, Farmer, stayed tight in a ball, melted into the packed snow. Her wide brown eyes peered out from under her tail. The hair on her feet was stained reddish brown. She was a gentle dog. I coaxed her to the front of the team where she shivered with her back arched, tail under her belly and pads freezing. Abe and Jerry harnessed the big, hard-to-handle dogs. The snaps were frozen. The harnesses were stiff and icy and hard to force into dog shapes. Our dogs weren’t accustomed to company; even cold, they showed off to Enuk’s dogs, tugging and barking, tangling the lines.
A quarter mile downriver, Abe waved a big wave good-bye to Enuk. Abe geed the dogs north, up the bank below the mouth of Jesus Creek. The snow on the tundra was ice hard, scooped and gouged into waves by wind. It creaked under the runners. Morning twilight bruised the southern sky. Shivers wandered my skin. I yanked off a mitten and warmed frozen patches on my cheeks. The cold burnt inside my nose. My fingers started to freeze. I wondered what thoughts walked in Abe’s mind. I felt as cumbersome and alone as a moon traveler, peering out the fur tunnel of my caribou hood, beaver hat, and wolf ruff.
Farmer led toward the Dog Die Mountains. They were steep mountains, the spawning grounds of brown bears, storms, and spirits. They beckoned like five giants, snowed in to their chins. Occasionally we crossed a line of willows that marked a buried slough or a pond shore, and a dog or two would heave against his neckline and mark a willow, claiming any stray females in the last ten thousand acres.
“Is that a moose?” I said.
The dogs glanced over their shoulders, faces frosty and alarmed at my shout.
“Might be a tree,” Abe said softly.
My moose mutated into one of the lone low dark trees that grip the tundra, hunkered like a troll, gnarled arms thrust downwind. Abe had more careful eyes than I did; they grabbed details, touched textures, took apart colors. I slumped, cold on my caribou skin, stabbed by love for my dad. He didn’t have to say “might be a tree” when he knew. Plenty of the dads in the village would holler, “Shudup. You try’na scare everything again?”
On a ridge, Abe whoa’d the dogs. He took out tobacco and papers. His bared hands tightened and turned red. I looked away, pretending for him that they were brown. He was too naive to know that red fingers were not the kind to have. The smoke smelled sharp in the smell-robbed air, comforting. The southern horizon glowed pink and for a few minutes a chunk of the sun flamed red through a dent in the Shield Mountains, like a giant flashlight with dying batteries. The snow glowed incandescent. I sprinted back and forth, melting fingers and toes. Abe glassed the land.
“Hmm. There she is.”
Through the binoculars the moose stood silhouetted, black as open water. We mushed closer. A deep moan floated on the air. Abe braked the sled. He shushed the dogs. They held their breath, listening. Then the pups yowled and tugged, the scent stirring their blood.
“Must be that cow missing her calf,” Abe said.
“They can sound like that?” I’d heard loons laughing manically, the woman-screams of lynx, ghoulish whimpering from porcupine, but I hadn’t heard a mourning moose. I was proud of Abe, proud of his omniscient knowledge of the land.
“Never heard anything like it before,” he said, pleased.
We jounced on.
“Abe, why do you think greatness is bad?” My question startled both of us. I stiffened, mortified. He snapped ice off his mustache. “I mean—. Burning your best paintings. And acting like you don’t know how to hunt when travelers are bragging.”
When Abe spoke, he used his historical-problems-with-the-world voice. He had a degree in art and history; Iris often teased that his degree was history. “This book I’m reading, the author argues that our heroes aren’t heroes at all and have traditionally—”
I stopped listening and watched frost-laden twigs pass. Abe liked to mull things over until he got them