Read Online Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner - Free Book Online

coffee-can lids on strings, spinning in the breeze to scare ravens and not doing a very good job. A hundred and fifty people—including the only two other white boys I knew—lived in Takunak. The village was securely connected to America (when the weather was good) by a weekly mail plane from Crotch Spit, a town on the coast. At the highest point of the ridge the log church squatted beside the frame schoolhouse. The close positioning allowed the church to siphon electricity uphill from the school generator. Abe usually made some comment about the
high-voltage donation, throwing a different light on schoolteachers’ bad reputations.
    He geed the dogs up the ridge to Feathers’s house and post office. He stomped the snow hook in and unbuttoned the sled bag. “Have some paniqtuq.” He handed us kids dried meat to chew. Abe pulled his parka over his head and laid it on the tarp. His Army sweater was messy with caribou hair. He disappeared inside, carrying our library box and a sugar sack of letters. A Coleman lantern was burning inside. Around us, chained sled dogs shrieked and pawed the snow. Jerry stood with an axe handle swinging in his mittens, vigilant over our eight dogs. “Lie down,” he growled. He was nervous and not attracted to the village the way Iris and I were. He had the good brown eyes and black hair, but his continents of interest—the wilderness and the Outside—lay in two opposite directions from Takunak, and Jerry saw no common borders.
    The dogs stretched at his feet, panting, their ears up and fatigue forgotten in the thrill of town. Iris and I huddled close to each other, talking with our eyes on the ground.
    â€œMaybe the Jafco catalog came.”
    â€œMaybe.” I toed a splintered board, nails up on the packed snow. We felt sliced by hidden eyes behind cabin windows. Behind a cache—and heaped sleds, machines, caribou hides, fishnets, and broken chain saws—we could see a cabin, Nippy Skuq’s. Farther east, beyond a thicket of willows, stood Woodrow Washington’s upright-log house, and along the ridge more cabins we didn’t know, and heaps of machinery and fifty-five-gallon drums. Through some mystical arctic grapevine, everyone in town knew we’d arrived. Everyone had a curtain cracked in case we had a spectacular dogfight, unusual mail, or a wrong way of walking.
    Abe stepped out and lowered an armload of packages into the tarp. “Box of clothes, from January Thompson. You’ll have to write and thank him.”
    I looked at pictures in my mind, this friend of Abe’s, this wolf-bounty man, January, fat and with a shotgun in his hairy fingers. Had he been a friend of my grandfather’s? Had he learned from him how to fly airplanes, and taught Abe?

    â€œAbe!” Iris moaned. “Don’t you know we’re embarrassed here in town to wear salvaged Army clothes?”
    â€œSalvation Army. Not the military.” Abe grinned down at the moose- babiche sled ropes he knotted. “The mail plane had to turn back yesterday. Tommy Feathers says it’s supposed to land pretty quick. You kids like to go over and watch?”
    â€œYeah! Let’s!” Iris and I said.
    â€œWait. There’ll be lots of people,” Jerry cautioned. He chewed the string on his hood. “Just reminding you.”
    I pictured the crowd at the airfield, and kids throwing iceballs at my head. The De Havilland Twin Otter like a stiff frozen eagle sliding down the sky, legs out, its tunneled stomach ready to regurgitate strangers and Sears packages. And everyone staring at us, because everyone was part of the village except us, and no one had ever learned not to stare.
    â€œSome kinda luck!” I tried to sound confident. “We got here just in time.”
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    WE SLEDDED TO the upper end of the village and stopped at the airstrip, behind the last cabin. Our dogs curled there, resting while we tore open the mail,