Julie of the Wolves (10 page)

The guidepost of her ancestors, the North Star, would soon be visible and would point her way when the birds had all gone South.

Softly across the distance a wolf barked, then another. The first bark was one of inquiry, a sort of “Where are you and what are you doing?” The answer was a casual “I am here.” The next call, however, was disquieting. The wolf seemed to be saying there was danger in the air. Miyax looked around to see what it might be. Then the wolf changed the subject and shifted to a joyous howl. As the others joined in she recognized the hunt song of her pack. Amaroq’s rich tones rose and fell like a violin; then came the flute-like voice of Silver. Nails’s voice arose, less strong than Amaroq’s, bringing variation to the theme. Cupping her hands behind her ears, she listened intently. Yes, the pups were singing too, sounding very mature and grown up—until Kapu added his laugh-bark.

She listened for Jello to sound forth. He did not. The concert ended abruptly and she heard other sounds in the dimness. A lemming screamed in death, and a flock of migrating eider ducks called out their positions to each other.

Suddenly something moved. She bolted out of bed and grabbed her club. The grass crackled behind her and she spun around. Sedges bobbed to say it was only the wind.

“Ayi!” She was disgusted by her fears. She kicked a stone to change something, since she could not change what she was doing, as Kapugen advised. Feeling better, she slid back in her sleeping skin. “I guess,” she said to herself, “that the sun’s been up so long I’ve forgotten the sounds of the night.” As she waited for sleep she listened to the polar wind whistle, and the dry grasses whined like the voice of the old bent lady.

“Jello!” she screamed, sitting bolt upright. He was almost beside her, his teeth bared as he growled. Then he picked up her pack and ran. She jumped out of bed and started after him, for her very life was in that pack—food, needles, knives, even her boots. The wind chilled her naked body and she stopped to collect her wits. She must act with wisdom. She must think! Her clothes, where were her clothes? They, too, were gone. No, she remembered they were safe in the bladder bag under the caribou skin.

Quickly she pulled them out and clutched them to her chest, but they were of little comfort. She could go nowhere without boots; nor could she make new ones. Her needles and ulo, the tools of survival, were all in the pack. Shivering, she slid into bed and cried. A tear fell on the grass and froze solid.

“My tombstone.”

She lay very still wondering how long it would take for life to leave her.

When she opened her eyes it was daylight and the warm yellow of the land gave her hope. She could eat her caribou skin if she had to. Rolling to her stomach, she smelled something sweet and recognized the scent of wolf urine. It had been dropped at the edge of her bag and was frozen but fresh. Someone had greeted her during the night. It could not have been Jello for the scent did not have the bitter odor of an angry and desolate wolf. Furthermore, it was sparsely given, not the dousing given to hostile objects. It must have been Amaroq. She sniffed again but her nose was not sensitive enough to read the other messages in the urine that meant “all is well.” Yet its light and loving scent gave her a sense of security and she smiled at the sun, dressed, and put her mind to inventing boots.

Wrapping the drag around one foot and her sleeping skin around the other, she clomped awkwardly through the grass in a wider and wider circle hoping that Jello, having eaten her meat, would have abandoned the pack. She did not care about the food anymore. Her ulo and needles and matches were more important to find. With them she could make shoes, hunt, and cook. She marveled at how valuable these simple things were, how beautiful and precious. With them she could make a home, a larder, a sled, and clothes. And the cold air was equally precious. With it she could, like her father, freeze leather and sinew into sleds, spears, and harpoons. She would not die here if she could find her ulo and needles.

As she carefully searched the ground she began to think about seal camp. The old Eskimos were scientists too. By using the plants, animals, and temperature, they had changed the harsh Arctic into a home, a feat as incredible as sending rockets to the moon. She smiled The people at seal camp had not been as outdated and old-fashioned as she had been led to believe. No, on the contrary, they had been wise. They had adjusted to nature instead of to man-made gadgets.

“Ayi!” she gasped. On the side of a ground swell lay Jello, his body torn in bloody shreds, his face contorted. Beside him lay her backpack!

Instantly she knew what had happened; Amaroq had turned on him. Once Kapugen had told her that some wolves had tolerated a lone wolf until the day he stole meat from the pups. With that, the leader gave a signal and his pack turned, struck, and tore the lone wolf to pieces. “There is no room in the wolf society for an animal who cannot contribute,” he had said.

Jello had been so cowed he was useless. And now he was dead.

Slowly she opened her pack. The food was gone but her needles, ulo, and boots were tucked in the pockets where she had put them. They were now more wonderful to Miyax than airplanes, ocean liners, and great wide bridges. As she put on her shoes she checked for her man’s knife and matches. They were there, too. Life was hers again! Slinging her pack to her shoulders, she placed a stone at Jello’s head and turned away.

“You’ve got to be a super-wolf to live,” she said. “Poor Jello was not.” She left him to the jaegers and foxes.

“Amaroq, wolf, my friend,” she sang as she walked along. “Amaroq, my adopted father.”

Reaching Point Hope seemed less important, now that she had come to truly understand the value of her ulo and needles. If she missed the boat she could live well until another year. Her voice rang out happily as she sang and followed the birds and her compass.

O
NE EVENING AS SHE LOOKED FOR A CAMPSITE
, she felt lonely. To amuse herself she thought of the hill where the white house stood in San Francisco. When it seemed almost real enough to touch, and very beautiful, it vanished abruptly; for the tundra was even more beautiful—a glistening gold, and its shadows were purple and blue. Lemon-yellow clouds sailed a green sky and every wind-tossed sedge was a silver thread.

“Oh,” she whispered in awe, and stopped where she was to view the painted earth. As she dropped her pack it clanged out a frozen note, reminding her again that autumn was over. The season had been brief; the flash of bird wings, the thunder of migrating herds. That was all. Now it was winter, and the top of the soil was solid. No blue sea would be lapping the shores of Barrow; instead the Arctic Ocean would be a roaring white cauldron forming icebergs that would join the land with the polar cap.

She was not afraid. Singing her Amaroq song, she gathered grass and rolled it into cylinders. With deft strokes she chopped a hole in the icebound lake, soaked the grass sticks, and laid them out in the air to freeze. Hours later they had snapped and crackled into ice poles. She cut the drag in two pieces and, pushing the poles under one piece, she erected a tent.

Inside her shelter she cut a long thread of hide and twisted it into a snare. A snowshoe rabbit trail ran along the lake and she set off to find the resting place of the one who had made it. The air was cold and she blew her breath into the wolverine trim of her parka hood. There it hung and warmed her face.

Amaroq called and she called back, not to tell him she needed food as she had once done, but to tell him where she was.

A lemming burst out of the grass near her foot and she spun around to look for its nest and young. Not finding them, she turned back in time to see a fox ripple like a ribbon as he pounced and sped off with the lemming. She grinned, made a mental note to be quicker, and walked carefully along the rabbit trail. Finally she came upon a concave dish in the ground—the roost. In it the rabbit would hide from enemies or rest when not eating. She spread her snare, elevated it with an ice stick, and paid out enough hide-line to be out of the sight of the hare.

Flat on her stomach she watched the roost. Minutes turned into hours and the pinks and greens of sunset colored the frozen prairie. Suddenly down the trail, ears back, feet flying, came the rabbit. It made a sharp turn and plopped to a halt in its roost. Miyax yanked and caught its left hind foot. She killed it quickly, and ran back to camp.

The grass rustled and she turned around. “Kapu!”

He was trotting down the rabbit trail with a leg of caribou in his mouth. His head bucked as he fought the awkward weight of the meat.

“Kapu!” she repeated. He wagged his tail, took a better grip on his burden, and trotted up to her. He dropped it at her feet. With a skip and a leap she told him in wolf language how glad she was to see him. He replied by dashing around in a small circle, then in three big circles. Finally he stopped and wagged his tail.

“Is this for me?” she asked pointing to the leg. He spanked the ground with his front paw, leaped to the side, and spanked the ground again. With a grin she reached in her pocket, found a strip of caribou hide, and thrust it at him. Kapu snatched it, and with one pull not only wrested it from her, but sent her sprawling on her back. Tail held straight out, he streaked like a rocket across the lichens, turned, and came back with the hide. He shook it in front of her, daring her to take it away.

“You’re much much too strong for me now, Kapu,” she said and slowly got to her feet. “I can’t play with you anymore.” Shaking the hide, he danced, barked, and then ran over the tundra until he was but a speck in the distance.

Miyax laughed, and dragged the caribou leg back to her tent. She cut it up and built a small fire. She skinned the rabbit, saving the fur to line her new mitten.

As the stew cooked, the crackling cold inspired her to dance. She stepped forward on the vast stage at the top of the world and bowed to her immense audience. Curving her arms out, bending her knees, she hopped on one foot and beat time with the other. Then she glided and shifted her weight, gracefully executing a combination of steps which the bent woman had danced long ago at seal camp. When she came to the refrain, however, she did not do the dance about evil spirits, but improvised—as Eskimos do at this point. She told the story of a young wolf who had brought the lost girl a shank of meat, and ended the performance with a Kapu-like caper. She spun laughing to a stop. She was warm. Her blood tingled.

“Ee-lie,” she thought. “The old Eskimo customs are not so foolish—they have purpose. I’m as warm as the center of a lemming’s nest.”

As the sky darkened, Kapu came back. He barked softly.

“I know what you want,” she called, holding out a large piece of cooked meat. Kapu took it so gently from her fingers that she could not even feel his teeth. As she watched him run off into the night, her eyes lifted to the sky. There, twinkling in the distance, was the North Star, the permanent light that had guided the Eskimos for thousands of years. She sang:

Bright star, still star,

Lead me to the sea ...

Hastily, she cut the remaining half of her caribou skin into four strips and a circle. Cracking open the ice on the lake, she weighted the pieces with stones and sent them to the bottom.

Around midnight she awoke to hear her wolves in the distance talking softly among themselves—probably paying tribute to Amaroq as they moved along the trail, she thought. Peering out of her tent she saw that the star was gone. A cold flake struck her nose, melted, fell into her fur, and froze. The wind blared, the wolves called joyously, and Miyax snuggled deep in her furs. Let it snow. Kapu had known it was coming and had brought food for her.

She slept until daybreak, saw that it was still snowing, and dozed, off and on, through the white, wild day as the weasels and foxes did. That night the sky cleared, and at dawn she crawled out of her skins. The tundra was white with the snow that would lock up the Arctic till June. The cold had deepened.

After breakfast she cracked open the lake ice again, pulled out the water-soaked circle and laid it out on the ground. Using her man’s knife, she turned up the edges, tied them in place, and let the cup freeze in the air. As it hardened she stepped into the bottom, tramped it into a bowl, and then cut two holes in one side. Through these she ran leather thongs and tied them together.

Next she took two strips of skin from the water and held them in place while they froze to the bottom of the bowl, in the shape of flat rockers. Then she stood up. Her sled was done.

Working quickly, for she had only a few hours of daylight, she formed tear-shaped hoops out of the last two strips. These she laid out to freeze. When they were solid she webbed them with hide, made loops for her toes, and put on her snowshoes. They crackled and snapped, but kept her up on the drifts. Now she could travel the top of the snow.

She cut the rest of the caribou leg into bite-size chunks and stored them in her sled. Then, adjusting her mittens in the darkness, she took a bearing on the North Star and started off.

Her icy sled jingled over the wind-swept lakes and she sang as she traveled. The stars grew brighter as the hours passed and the tundra began to glow, for the snow reflected each twinkle a billion times over, turning the night to silver. By this light she could see the footsteps of the wolves. She followed them, for they were going her way.

Just before sunrise the wolf prints grew closer together. They were slowing down for the sleep. She felt their presence everywhere, but could not see them. Running out on a lake, she called. Shadows flickered on the top of a frost heave. There they were! She quickened her stride. She would camp with them and do the dance of the-wolf-pup-feeding-the-lost-girl for Kapu. He would surely run in circles when he saw it.

The shadows flattened as she walked, and by the time she reached the other shore they had turned into sky and vanished. There were no footsteps in the snow to say her pack had been there and she knew the Arctic dawn had tricked her eyes. “Frost spirits,” she said, as she pitched her tent by the lake and crawled into bed.