ORDINARY WOLVES

A first novel, a Milkweed National Fiction Prize winner, offers an unsentimental yet very passionate take on the collision of Eskimo and white culture, as well as the encroachment of materialistic civilization on Alaska’s unspoiled wilderness at the end of the 20th century.

After his mother flees back to the Lower 40 never to return, Cutuk (Calvin) is raised along with his older sister and brother by his father, Abe, in an igloo in northern Alaska. Abe’s attempt to live intimately with nature, with as few civilized distractions as possible, makes him an oddity not only among his educated peers but to the native Inupiaq residents of the nearby village of Takunak, who are happy to accept accouterments of modern life like TVs and snowmobiles. Under his father’s tutelage, Cutuk grows up steeped in knowledge of and love for the natural world but also finds himself wanting to fit in with a community. After home-schooling, Cutuk finishes high school in Takunak, where he falls in love with Dawna, the granddaughter of his idol Enuk Wolfglove, who disappeared while hunting wolves. But, in the village, Cutuk feels like a second-class citizen because he’s white. As a lonely young man, he decides to explore the city life that has drawn away his siblings. His brother has moved to Fairbanks, while his sister has attended college in Anchorage (though she ends up a teacher in Takunak). While the myriad details, complete with glossary, about surviving in the Alaskan wilderness and the daily village life among the Inupiaq are engrossing, Kantner’s description of Anchorage through Cutuk’s innocent yet intelligent eyes is equally compelling. After years in the city, Cutuk, with mixed results, returns to Takunak. He eventually finds himself back on the land, alone but with Dawna’s future companionship a possibility.

A man’s novel full of nature lore and the mechanics of hunting and surviving, but also richly poetic and emotionally engrossing.