Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  I hold my breath, hoping that the captain will synchronize the boat’s acceleration with the end of my talk. And when he does, the captain and I will both hold our breath and hope that the boat will speed over the water, instead of dragging itself along, jets clogged, plugs misfiring, rpm on the starboard engine only half what it is on the port side, while I stand smiling, bagels and juice in hand, offering refreshments to visitors who have paid good money to see whales, and by God they expect to see whales.

  Harriet offered the last toast of the evening. She stood up, her pink chiffon dress flowing about her, only mildly wrinkled. Her hair was combed back and formed a tight curl along her neck.

  “Well,” she said, looking around and preparing to give her final verdict on the tour. “The dinner was delicious.” I smiled with relief. “I feel like I know Alaska,” she continued. “There were too many trees and mountains, I can see animals better at my zoo. That grizzly bear at Denali Park was so far away, it looked fake. But all in all, it was a good tour.” She held her glass in my direction, indicating approval. Now I understood that Harriet’s painful and relentless annual tours provided stories and memories for forty-eight weeks of a much quieter existence.

  —Chris Klein, “Confessions of a Tour Guide”

  “They told us not to let you go more than two hours without giving you something to eat,” I shout over the jets, pausing again for laughter. The boat bounces and lurches over the waves while I brace myself and balance a platter of twenty bagels and twenty pouches of juice, waiting for some matron from Florida to decide just exactly which bagel she really wants (They’re all the same! Take one! Take one!) and for her husband to decipher what a dadgummed pouch is—a bag of juice? Never heard of it. Juice? You sure this is juice? (Yes, it’s juice. Take one. Or not, I don’t care. Just make up your mind. Please!)

  “On the port side in the far distance is Admiralty Island,” I continue. “The original name for the island is Kootznoowoo, which means ‘Fortress of the Brown Bear.’ That’s a good name for it, because the brown bear population on that island is thought to be one per square mile. At sixteen hundred acres, it has one of the world’s greatest concentrations of bears.” Another pause while I hold up my hands to show my silver bracelets. “The Native people of this area associate themselves with different animals that we then take as our crests. My clan—the wolf clan—considers itself related to the brown bear, so I’m always careful to point it out to you when we go by.” For some reason, this never fails to make them laugh.

  “When I was a girl, my grandmother used to tell me we don’t eat brown bear meat, because to do so would be just like eating our own cousin!” The captain was surprised to learn that I still consider the brown bear my cousin, the Taku wind my grandfather, the spider my neighbor. After being brought the truths of virgin birth, resurrection, and walking on water, why would I now persist in believing a myth? But I let the passengers laugh, the captain preach, the jet engines clog. Every day is the same, every passenger is the same. Every captain is the same. Every moment is unique.

  Just outside Bartlett Cove, a dozen humpback whales have surrounded a school of herring in the deep ocean water. Beneath the surface, one circles a spiral net of bubbles around the fish. The whale constructs the net of bubbles upward from the ocean floor, trapping the herring in smaller and smaller circles, nearer and nearer the surface. Then one humpback begins to circle the net, singing in a high-pitched haunting voice, frightening the herring into a huddled ball of prey that rises to the top.

  We hear the song over a hydrophone that the captain has lowered into the water. We look in every direction, searching for telltale bubbles. Eagles and gulls fly overhead, circling, calling, searching. I watch the gulls. They will know before we do where the whales will come up. “There! Over there!” A dozen whales lunge out of the water, mouths open, pink tongues and baleen and splashing water, gulls diving, passengers gasping, hearts racing. Then they are gone. Back under the water, checking for herring, swallowing the last mouthfuls, yumming their dinner. They surface again, slow and graceful. Their breaths explode and their spouts are a loud wet sticky whoosh. They are powerful, graceful, gentle. They are so close to us, yet oblivious to our presence.

  The whales begin to travel away from us, into Barlow Cove chasing herring. We all want to follow, but the captain has something else in mind. “Be seated, please.” In a flurry of joy and disappointment, thrills and complaints, the passengers are seated. I close the hatches, the jets roar and we’re steaming toward False Point.

  We no sooner round Point Retreat than we are in the midst of two dozen or more boats: whale watchers, sport-fishing craft, commercial fishing vessels, private motorized skiffs. The late sun reflects off the almost calm waters of Lynn Canal. The lighthouse at Point Retreat catches a ray of afternoon sun, Eagle Glacier glistening on the mainland behind it. The beautiful Chilkat Mountains are capped in white and shrouded in patchy, summer-evening clouds. The captain slows the boat, I open the doors to the decks, we pile out onto the aft deck. All around the boats spread up and down the waterway are the dorsal fins of killer whales. There must be more than sixty. In the reflected sun, their fins are dark against the water, black signals rising from the water, moving fast and disappearing, running in the water. The wolves of the sea.

  “It’s very rare for us to see both killer whales and humpbacks on the same trip,” I tell the passengers, “especially humpbacks that are bubble feeding, and especially so many killer whales. We’re very fortunate.” A few passengers are not yet satisfied, but they will never be happy; if nothing else, they’ll complain about the bagels. Most are thrilled to silence, beside themselves with joy. They realize what I’m saying is the truth. This is a rare trip. This is a rare moment.

  The air becomes still. We become quiet. Together, we witness a sight that few people ever see: we are surrounded by killer whales. We are surrounded by freedom.

  Conventional teachings suggest that eternity is something that starts after death, and then goes on—well, forever. But I know that it is this moment that is eternal. One wave moves in a certain manner while that particular killer whale rises above the water and catches one ray of light against the flash of its singular fin, and I stand here on this particular boat, late in the afternoon of this certain day, with these people who have traveled distances near and far to stand here and be captured with me in this moment, which is gone before I blink and which will continue always to exist.

  Before long, the captain gives the signal to be seated for our long return trip to the dock where we will off-load these passengers, refuel and clean the boat, radio the dispatcher for tomorrow’s schedule, and be finished with our work for this day. I will limp home, feet sore, tired, hungry, sick of bagels. I will wash the saltwater out of my hair, lie down on the couch, talk on the phone, fall asleep. I will rise the next day to work again until the summer ends, and then I will return to the university where I am belatedly completing my education. I will see more whales and eagles, I will see rough seas and calm. I will grow older. I will die. And all the while, a part of me will be lost in one moment. Killer whales will surround me forever in an eternal moment that will never happen again.

  Tlingit Ernestine Hayes belongs to the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan clan in Southeast Alaska. Born and raised in Juneau, she moved with her mother to California at age fifteen. She lived outside Alaska for twenty-five years, always longing to be home. Upon turning forty, she vowed to return home, or die trying. It took her eight months to move up the coast from San Francisco to Ketchikan. Along the way she lived out of her car, stood in food lines, slept in shelters. After settling in Juneau in 1989, Hayes enrolled at UA-Southeast as a non-traditional student. The mother of three and grandmother of four graduated magna cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree in communications, at age fifty-five, and has since gone on to complete her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She is now on the faculty of UA-Southeast and lives in Juneau.

  PART THREE

  GOING
YOUR OWN WAY

  PAM HOUSTON

  The Blood of Fine and Wild Animals

  A hunting guide stalks memory and ambivalence in the Alaska Range.

  WHEN I WAS TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD, I FELL IN LOVE with a man who was a hunting guide. We didn’t have what you would call the healthiest of relationships. He was selfish, evasive, and unfaithful. I was demanding, manipulative, and self-pitying. He was a Republican and I was a Democrat. He was a Texan and I was not. I belonged to the Sierra Club and he belonged to the NRA. Yet somehow we managed to stay together for three years of our lives, and to spend two solid months of each of those three years hunting for Dall sheep in Alaska.

  I was always quick, in those days, to make the distinction between a hunter and a hunting guide, for though I was indirectly responsible for the deaths of a total of five animals, I have never killed an animal myself, and never intend to. I had the opportunity once to shoot a Dall ram whose horns were so big it would have likely gotten my name into the record books. I had three decent men applying every kind of peer pressure they could come up with, and I even went so far as to raise the rifle to my eye, unsure in the moment what I would do next. But once I got it up there I couldn’t think of one good reason to pull the trigger.

  I learned about bullets and guns and caliber and spotting scopes, and I was a good hunting guide simply because I’m good at the outdoors. I can carry a heavy pack long distances. I can cook great meals on a backpacking stove. I keep my humor pretty well for weeks without a toilet or a shower. I can sleep, if I have to, on a forty-five-degree ledge of ice. I know how to move in the wilderness, and because of this I understand how the sheep move. I’m a decent tracker. I’ve got what they call animal sense.

  When I was hunting Dall sheep in Alaska it was one on one on one. One hunter, one guide, one ram that we tracked, normally for ten days, before we got close enough to shoot it. My obvious responsibility was to the hunter. It was my job to keep him from falling into a crevasse or getting eaten by a grizzly bear, to carry his gun when he got too tired, to keep him fed and watered, to listen to his stories, to get him up at three in the morning and keep him on his feet till midnight, to drag him fifteen miles and sometimes as much as four thousand vertical feet a day, and if everything went well, to get him in position to shoot a sheep to take home and put on his wall. My other job, though understated, was to protect the sheep from the hunters, to guarantee that the hunter shot only the oldest ram in the herd, that he only shot at one animal, and that he only fired when he was close enough to make a killing shot. A hunter can’t walk a wounded animal down across the glaciers in Alaska the way he can through the trees in the Pennsylvania woods. A bad shot in Alaska almost always means a lost ram.

  I describe those months in the Alaska Range now as the most conflicted time of my life. I would spend seventy days testing myself in all the ways I love, moving through the Alaskan wilderness, a place of such power and vastness it is incomprehensible even to my memory I watched a mama grizzly bear feed wild blueberries to her cubs, I woke to the footfall of a hungry-eyed silver wolf whispering through our campsite, I watched a bull moose rub the velvet off his bloody antlers, and a bald eagle dive for a parka squirrel. I watched the happy chaos that is a herd of caribou for hours, and the contrastingly calculated movements of the sheep for days.

  I learned from the animals their wilderness survival skills, learned, of course, a few of my own. I learned, in those days, my place in the universe, learned why I need the wilderness, not why we need it, but why I do. That I need the opportunity to give in to something bigger than myself, like falling into love, something bigger, even, than I can define. This did not have to do with shooting an animal (though it would have, of course, in its purest form, had we not packages and packages of freeze-dried chicken stew) but with simpler skills: keeping warm in subzero temperatures, avoiding the grizzly bears that were everywhere and unpredictable, not panicking when the shale started shifting underneath my boot soles in a slide longer and steeper than anything I’d ever seen in the Lower 48, finally riding that shale slide out like a surfer on a giant gray wave.

  I listened to the stories of the hunters, the precision and passion with which the best among them could bring the memories of past hunting camps to life. I understood that part of what we were about in hunting camp was making new stories, stories that were the closest these men ever got to something sacred, stories that would grace years, maybe even generations, of orange campfire light.

  But underneath all that wonder and wildness and the telling of tales, the fact remains that in payment for my Alaskan experience I watched five of the most beautiful, smartest, and the wildest animals I’d ever seen die, most of them slowly and in unspeakable pain. And regardless of the fact that it was the hunter who pulled the trigger, I was the party responsible for their deaths. And though I eat meat and wear leather, though I understand every ethical argument there is about hunting including the one that says it is hunters who will ultimately save the animals because it is the NRA who has the money and the power to protect what is left of America’s wilderness, it will never be O.K. with me that I led my hunters to those animals. There is no amount of learning that can, in my heart, justify their deaths.

  If outfitting has a spirit, it seems that spirit must be a bit of an eccentric, enjoying the contrast of hours or days of waiting with minutes of frantic stuffing and packing. Years before, I noticed that if everything in camp was ready to go, the airplane would be late. Consequently, I had started leaving my sleeping bag unfurled and noticed a marked improvement in planes arriving as scheduled. Clients often seemed bewildered when I told them to pack up everything except their bedroll and not touch it until the airplane was on the ground. It didn’t always work, but it did seem to help my clients’ craving for some harmless idiosyncratic behavior in their guides—and better stories when they returned home.

  —Steve Kahn, “The Hard Way Home”

  So when I remember that time in my life, I try to think not only of the killing but also of the hunting, which is a work of art, a feat of imagination, a flight of spirit, and a test of endless patience and skill. To hunt an animal successfully you must think like an animal, move like an animal, climb to the top of the mountain just to go down the other side, and always be watching, and waiting, and watching. To hunt well is to be at once the hunter and the hunted, at once the pursuer and the object of pursuit. The process is circular, and female somehow, like giving birth, or dancing. A hunt at its best ought to look, from the air, like a carefully choreographed ballet.

  French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed that men desire the object of their desire, while women desire the condition of desiring, and this gives women a greater capacity for relishing the hunt. I believe that is why, in so many ancient and contemporary societies, women have been the superior hunters. Good hunting is no more about killing an animal than good sex is about making babies or good writing is about publication. The excitement, even the fulfillment, is in the beauty of the search. While a man tends to be linear about achieving a goal, a woman can be circular and spatial. She can move in many directions at once, she can be many things at once, she can see an object from all sides, and, when it is required, she is able to wait.

  Occasionally there is a man who can do these things (most of the guides I knew were far better at them than I), and he is a pleasure to guide and to learn from. But the majority of my clients started out thinking that hunting is like war. They were impatient like a general, impatient like a sergeant who thinks he should be the general, impatient for the sound of his own gun and impatient for the opposition to make a mistake.

  But the sheep didn’t often make mistakes, and they were as patient as stone. So it was my job to show the hunter that he could choose a different metaphor. If hunting can be like war it can also be like opera, or fine wine. It can be like out-of-body travel, it can be like the suspension of disbelief. Hunting can be all of these things and more; like a woman, it won’t sit down and
be just one thing.

  I wore a necklace in my hunting days, a bear claw of Navajo silver. The man I was in love with, the hunting guide, had given it to me to make amends for one of our breakups, one of his affairs. He gave it to me in a tiny box, wrapped elaborately, like a ring, and I shook it, heard it clunk, thought, Oh my God, Oh my God, he’s really doing it. When I opened it, saw that it was not a ring but a pendant, I was not disappointed. I simply wore the pendant like a ring, confusing the symbolism of that pendant just enough to carry me back into the relationship, and back into hunting camp one last time.

  The next day my Athabascan companions and I traveled some seventy miles out on the tundra in search of caribou. One small skittish herd startled and sprinted into white land and sky, vanishing where there was no horizon. Only one turned our way and gratefully we took her. Dinner and breakfast and dry meat. Land food for the spirit as well as the body.

  —Ellen Bielawski, “Diamond Diary,” Connotations

  It was late August, and much too warm in the high mountains. I’d been dropped, by airplane, 100 air miles from Tok with two bow hunters from Mississippi. We’d made a base camp and climbed from it, up the valley of the Tok River to the glacial headlands. The sheep would stay high in the warm weather, higher, probably, than we could climb. But we tried anyway, crossing glacial rivers normally small but now raging in the heat wave, knowing after each crossing that we wouldn’t make it back across until the weather turned again and the water began to subside. We had our packs, of course, a tent, sleeping bags, a change of clothes and enough food, if we didn’t shoot anything, for a little better than three days.