Enuk shook water droplets out of his wolf ruff. I tried to contemplate the way I knew grown-ups did, to poke at his words with sharpened thoughts. I wondered if he’d restart the tale the following night—or in a year. I felt I should comprehend something profound about shooting dogs, but I couldn’t get past thinking that the books on the shelf over Abe’s bunk, the soapy dishwater and coffee grounds in the slop bucket—and our team sleeping buried down by the river—all were blatant proof that we owned too much, lived too comfortably. I needed tougher times to turn me Eskimo.
Our low door was built from split spruce poles, insulated with thick fall-time bull caribou hides nailed skin-out on both sides. The hinges were ugruk skin. “Better chop the bottom loose,” Abe suggested. He reached in the wood box for the hatchet. Enuk pounded with his big fists until the condensation ice crumbled. He yanked inward. The wind and swirling snow roared, a hole into a howling world; the wind shuddered the lamp flame. A smooth waist-high white mirror of the door stood in his way. Chilled air rolled across the floor. Enuk leapt up and vanished over the drift into the night gusts.
Chunks of snow tumbled down. I had a flash of memory—summertime, green leaves. Enuk, and a strange man. The man had combed hair. And a space between his teeth that he smiled around and showed us how to spit through. He cradled an animal in calico cloth. A baby porcupine! The man seemed to be Enuk’s son Melt. But how could that be? Melt was mean and smiled like indigestion. Mixed up behind my eyes was that baby porcupine dead in a cotton flour sack, a ski plane taking off, and me crying, unable to convey the tragedy of my blue Lego spiraling to the bottom of the outhouse. These memories seemed valuable, as unreplaceable as that Lego had been, but the roar of the wind sucked my concentration into the dark.
Abe scratched snow aside trying to close the door again. “Need to use the pot?” he asked.
Iris did and I did, and we hurried. There was nowhere to hide—it was how Abe had first explained the word vulnerable—with Enuk coming back momentarily. Breaking trail to the outhouse would have involved digging out the door, getting all dressed in overpants and parkas, finding our way, digging out the outhouse door, trying not to crap on our heavy clothes. Then tracking snow in the house; wet furs; trying to get the door closed again; firing up the stove. Abe didn’t encourage any of it. Embarrassment counted as nothing. It mattered to him as much as the color of margarine.
Abe slammed the door, and again. His hair and the collar of his flannel shirt were floured with snow. He grinned. “Glad I don’t have to go to work in the morning.”
“What he gonna do?” I asked, instantly ashamed of the excess of Village English in my voice.
“Check the dogs.” Jerry clacked checkers together, matter-of-factly. “Abe, can an animal catch rabies and get those symptoms in one night?”
“Maybe not. That virus takes a couple weeks to infect your nervous system.” Abe picked up the book he’d been reading that morning—The Prophet—turned it over, peered at the spine thoughtfully, and put it back down. Abe eyed his thumbnail and bit it. “I had to shoot a rabid moose that charged in the team, long time ago, in the Helpmejack Hills.”
“Does a person forget their friends?”
Iris crossed her eyes. “Jerry’ll never skin another fox’s face.”
“I bonked that rabid one that scared you,” Jerry growled, “chewing the door. You were going to stay inside until Abe got home.”
A second rabid fox had screamed insults to our sled dogs and snarled in the window at his warped reflection. After that incident my imagination encountered them all winter, during the bad-mouse year, foam dripping off their narrow black lips. Nights mice and shrews streaked across my pillow and gnawed at my caribou-hide qaatchiaq, and I lay awake doubly frightened that something as invisible and unaccredited as mouse spit could carry such consequences.
Jerry chewed his cheeks, cataloging Abe’s answers. Jerry remembered poems, songs, definitions. I believed that he wanted to be the healthiest, the smartest, and the best, in case our mom came back. He was all that, and had black hair—things that I thought should come to him with smiles.
Iris’s eyes flashed. “Guys, I say that’s what happened six years ago. Abe caught rabies! He thought he was walking to the store in Chicago to buy tobacco, next thing he noticed a new baby, lots of snow, and us kids gathering masru. He’s maybe still got ’em.”
I looked down, ashamed; I hadn’t seen a city. Jerry didn’t smile. “You win.” He rolled up the birchbark checkerboard, with every other square peeled to make the board pale white and brown. Under the dull roar of the wind, in the leftover silence, I had a sudden flash—Jerry was thinking our mother may have caught rabies.
A gust shook the stovepipe. Abe shut the draft on the fire, lit a candle to place by his bed. He pissed in the slop bucket. He rubbed his knee. “One of you kids lay Enuk out a qaatchiaq.” Steam rose out of the bucket. I stood up, rattling the lamp on the table, disturbing the shadows.
The door burst open. Enuk jumped in. A thought startled me: Would a person tell if he had been bitten? People might run away. Someone would stand across a valley and sink a bullet in your head. What if a dog bit me and died later; would I have the courage to tell? Enuk rubbed his hands together close to the stove. He grabbed my neck from behind. He laughed near my ear. “What you’re laying out qaatchiaq for, Yellow-Hair? You gonna nallaq? Nice night, le’s go hunt!”
TWO DAYS PASSED. The wind fell away and Abe shoveled out the door entrance. We climbed up the snow trench into a motionless thirty-below day. The old marred snowdrifts had been repaired and repainted. A scalloped white land stretched to the riverbanks, across the tundra to the orange horizon. The cold sky seemed crystalline, dark blue glass, in reach and ready for one thrown iceball to bring it shattering down.
In our parkas and mukluks, we kids ran back and forth examining the new high drifts and sliding off cornices. Abe helped Enuk find his sled and they dug at it. The snow was hard, and it chipped and squeaked under their shovels. They iced the sled runners with a strip of brown bear fur dipped in a pan of warm water. They were careful not to get any water on their mukluks. Iris and I stood together while Abe and Enuk harnessed his seven dogs. Jerry stayed in the safety of our dog yard. He mistrusted strange dogs. Often they snapped at him, though he never lost his temper and clubbed dogs with shovels or rifle stocks the way other people did. I vowed when I grew big enough to handle huskies I wouldn’t miss a chance to help a traveler hitch up.
Enuk stood on the runners with one foot on the steel claw brake, his hands in his wolf mittens holding the toprails. The dogs lunged against their towlines, yelping to run. Our dogs barked and scratched the snow. There was little room left in the yowling for last words with company. Enuk said something and nodded north. We stepped close. “Next time, Cutuk? Be good on ta country.” He swept away, furrowing snow to dust with his brake.
We hurried out on the river to watch him become a black speck and disappear far off downriver. Dark spruce lined the far riverbank. In my mind I could see the village and barking dogs and the people there, and Enuk’s grandchildren, Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove, with their mother, Janet, to kiss them and make caribou soup with yellow seashell noodles.
Jerry kicked snow. Abe put his hand awkwardly across my shoulder. I flinched. Abe and Jerry and I didn’t touch—unless it was rough, tickling or king-of-the-hill wrestling over a cornice. Abe turned toward the house. “If the trail stays firm . . .” He wiped his nose. He liked us to be happy, and we usually stayed that way for him. “Maybe next month if the trail’s okay, we’ll go to town? Nice to have a traveler, wasn’t it?”
I tried to ignore the splinters of comfort at the thought of people. I was going to be a hunter; the toughest hunters traveled alone. I kept my mouth shut and broke the tiny tears off my eyelashes. Abe hated whining. He believed that excess comfort was damaging, that