In his debut novel, Ordinary
Wolves, Seth Kantner has woven a world where hunger,
death and beauty go hand-in-hand. The book is set almost entirely
on Kantner’s native Alaskan tundra, but don’t expect
naturalist hyperbole. There are no splendid sweeping landscapes,
big animals are either food or a threat, and cold is a given.
Consider an early description of the Arctic night,
narrated by his semi-autobiographical hero, Cutuk Hawcly: “The
walls of blackness grew and leaned close over my head and joined.
An icy east breeze thinned the smoke. The night cold was a monster
now, merciless, pinching my face with pliers, sneaking fingers
under my parka.”
But Cutuk knows no other world. His
taciturn artist father whisked his family away from the
“everything-wanters” of his native Chicago further back than
Cutuk’s memory reaches. In Alaska, they’ve carved out a
spartan life in an igloo, a day from the nearest village.
As the story crunches through the realities of remote northern life
— tips on skinning and cooking northern wildlife abound
— Cutuk falls victim to teen angst. Clad in traditional
mukluk boots, he’s desperately unhip compared to the local
Eskimo teens, who eat canned soup and wear jeans.
He
makes social inroads, joining in beer-soaked Lysol-huffing parties
and scoring his first wolf kill. But it leaves him empty inside,
perhaps because his coming of age is paralleled by the unrelenting
creep of industrial society into his icy home. “Snowgos” overtake
sled dogs, and his friends and siblings heed the call of the city,
drifting south to Anchorage. Cutuk joins them, but is soon dreaming
of home, where the snow is never black with soot.
Cutuk’s lost innocence carries the book forward, but the
strength of Kantner’s novel is his unvarnished take on life
and the people of a tough land. This is an authentic tale from one
of the last wild and irony-free American places, where wolf-hunters
and environmentalists not only get along, but often share the same
skin.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline An honest take on a tough land.
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