Ordinary Wolves Read Online Free

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!”
    Â 
    Â 
    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