Read Online Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner - Free Book Online Page B

was sweating. Abe glanced up. He stuffed his chalk in his parka pocket. “Don’t get chilled.”
    â€œYou wanna fight?” asked Elvis Skuq Jr. “I’ll let you cry.” He had permanent residence in my earliest memories of town. From the time he’d been a small boy he’d enjoyed packing my face with snow and whipping my mittens off with a stick, laughing at my smarting red fingers. A scar ran from his lip up under his nose and, I’d long thought, on up to his brain. He was sixteen and towered over me.
    The plane banked and lined up with the airfield. “From where you come?” Elvis repeated.
    â€œUpriver,” Jerry mumbled. I spat out caribou hairs that had wandered out of my hood and collected in my mouth. The plane wheels touched the snow. As it swept down on us, Iris and I jumped behind the sled.
    â€œAiy, sure iqsi.” Kids jeered and dark-eyed adults smiled at our naïveté. A kid whipped my ear with a piece of knotted rope. Laughter came from behind us. A snowball dissolved against my neck. The props roared, warbling with power as the pilots adjusted the pitch. The turning plane flung a wall of snow over the crowd. Around me villagers faded like ghosts. The props whined to a halt. Everyone surged forward. Stevie and Dawna Wolfglove waved. I stood, a member of a group, all of us united in anticipation.
    Woodrow Jr. slapped me on the back. He was in his twenties and carried his son on his shoulders. “How’s the trail from your-guys’ camp? You come to town to fin’ Eskimo girlfriend?” Beside him a pretty woman smiled, her brown face and dusky lashes shining inside her white fox ruff. “I sure want your eyes, Cutuk,” she said. “You should go be my son.” People laughed. I
examined the ground, shifted nervously, pictured myself belaying Woodrow Washington down Feathers’s outhouse to salvage my education.
    The airplane doors swung open. The pilots stepped down, white-faced and cold-looking with their radio earmuffs, aluminum notebooks, and Colt .45s on their belts. Villagers unloaded the boxes and mail bags.
    Dawna stepped close. She smiled. “Hi, Cutuk. When you come?”
    â€œWhile ago.” I looked at my mittens. Dawna had a heart-shaped face. Her wide eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question no one had heard. Her hands were bare and pulled into the sleeves of her white nylon jacket. She wore faded jeans, perfectly frayed around the bell-bottoms. Dawna was fourteen and had recently changed in ways that I found embarrassing to snag my eyes on, and impossible not to. Before last year I had thought she was dumb—the pastime she enjoyed most was cutting up Sears catalogs to make collages, and looking at the photographs in women’s magazines, wishing about cities far from Alaska. Sometimes she looked at the pictures upside down. Her dad, Melt, got mad when he caught her doing that. He ripped the magazines out of her fingers, cuffed her head, and threw her collages into the stove. “Don’t always sometimes try to think you’re something else,” he shouted.
    I figured that, being Enuk’s granddaughter, she should want to learn to scrape skins and sew.
    She leaned forward and put her hands on the cold paper of the stack of brown boxes and peered past them into the interior of the Twin Otter. Her fingers were long and brown. One of her little fingernails was unusually wide, and she kept it tucked out of sight. I thought that one fingernail was the only imperfect thing about her whole person, all condensed into one point, a mere mosquito bite of badness, and I was jealous because my eyes felt wrong, my hair, my speech, my entire skin felt wrong.
    Everyone inched closer to the plane. I fantasized that Abe would step forward and offer to start the airplane. Why wouldn’t he do such things? He must remember how. It would be so easy for him, and I would have friends after that. But Abe was