Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  When we got to the glacier at the head of the valley we hadn’t seen any recent sheep sign, and this told us that the sheep would be higher still, lying with their bellies in a snowfield, not even needing to eat until the weather cooled down. We were wet and tired, hot and hungry, but we dropped half our gear, the tents and bedding, and climbed higher up the rocky moraine that flanked the glacier. We climbed through tangled forests of alder that grew, it seemed, horizontally out of the rocks, climbed over the soggy mounds of tundra, squeezing into it with our boot tips and fingernails when it got too steep. Our socks got wetter, our breathing more labored; for hours we climbed and still no sign of the sheep.

  The hunters—I forget their names now, but let’s just call them Larry and Moe—were nervous. We were all nervous. The packs were too heavy, the air was too thick, the sun was too hot, and we’d come too long and too far not to have seen any sign of the sheep. We collapsed on the top of a rocky outcropping surrounded by tundra. Larry amused himself by shooting arrow after arrow at a ptarmigan (a fat bird with fuzzy white après-ski boots on) who, as slow and stupid as that particular bird can be, let the arrows whiz by his head. Larry couldn’t hit him, and the bird refused to fly away. Moe poked at a hole in the ground with a long stick, worrying whatever was inside. I went into my pack, looking for food, and found, buried between the cans of tuna and dried apricots, a rock—quartz, I believe—weighing six or seven pounds.

  “You sons of bitches,” I said to Larry and Moe, who had been watching me, smirking.

  That’s when the ground hornets finally got angry enough to come out of the hole in front of Moe. Maybe wasps know who in the crowd is allergic to them; these wasps seemed to. Four of them, anyway, came straight for me, and stung me on the hand. The first-aid kit, the shots of epinephrine, had made it as far as the mouth of the glacier and no farther, and that was at least four hours away.

  I sat quietly and listened to my heartbeat quicken, my breathing accelerate into a frenzy. This is how it’s all going to end, I thought, hornet-stung, and trapped on the glacier with Larry and Moe. Then self-preservation took over. I ordered Larry to carry me on his back over to the glacier, ordered Moe to scout ahead and find a place where the ice had melted and the water had pooled. I tried to exert no energy as Larry climbed with me across the moraine and onto the glacier. Moe whistled that he had found a pool several inches deep, and Larry laid me in it while I did my best to breathe through the ever-smaller opening that was my throat.

  I lay in that glacial pool until I was so numb I wasn’t sure I could feel my torso. Eventually, the adrenaline subsided and my throat eased back open. My hand, my whole arm, was swollen to five or six times its normal size. I wrapped myself up in what remained of our dry clothes and tried to chew on a granola bar but I had no appetite. The late Alaskan summer night was bending on into evening, the sun rolling sideways along the horizon and threatening to go below it. It would get cold soon and the night wind off the glacier would start. No one wanted to say what we all knew: that we had to get back down to the mouth of the glacier by nightfall, had to get to our sleeping bags before it turned cold. Larry couldn’t carry me the whole way. And I wondered, if I couldn’t make the climb back down through the tundra and rock and alders to where our gear lay, would it be the right thing for them to simply leave me behind?

  “Let’s give it a try,” I said. “If we go now we can go slowly.” This wasn’t true, but I spoke with authority and the boys believed me. We’d be climbing back through those alders at the worst time of day. Our range of vision would be cut way down, the rocks and tree trunks would be slippery with dew, and the grizzly bears would be moving. “You guys sing real loud now,” I told them. “Let’s give the bear the opportunity to do the right thing.”

  We moved across the tundra and back down into the alders. With every step, every tightening of muscle, my arm exploded in pain and my head swam. My pulse increased, my throat tightened, and I had to drop back a little and rest until it began to open again. Eventually the fall got so steep and the alders so thick that there was nothing to do but lower ourselves through the branches with our arms, like children on a jungle gym. The pain in my arm reached a certain level of excruciation, and then moved on into numbness, the way a blister will if you keep walking long hours after it has popped. We could hear animals moving near us in the alder, big animals, and every now and then we’d get a whiff of dark musk.

  “Sing louder, goddammit!” I shouted ahead to the boys, who were scared into silence by the noises beside them, and bent on getting back out in the open to the relative safety of the place on the glacier where we’d left the tent. They broke into a halfhearted round of “King of the Road,” and I could tell by their voices they were moving much faster than I could, and would soon leave me out of screaming range.

  That’s when the heavy chain on which I wore my bear claw caught on an alder branch, just as I bent my elbows and swung my legs down to the next-lower set of branches, and my head snapped up and I was nearly hanged there, by the strength of that chain and the weakness of my arm and the force of gravity pulling me down. I gasped for breath, but there was none, and so I lifted my good arm up to the branch above me and did something I never could do in gym class, a one-handed chin-up, and repositioned my feet and unhooked my necklace from the alder branch.

  I took the bear claw in the palm of my hand and felt the coolness of the silver, and I felt my strong heart pumping, sending blood to every part of my body, including my misshapen arm, and I realized I’d had it wrong all along about the necklace. That I had relied on somebody else’s set of metaphors to understand it. That it had nothing to do, finally, with an engagement ring or the man who gave it to me, that it had, finally, nothing whatsoever to do with a man. And that whatever role that man had played in taking me to the Alaskan wilderness in the first place, he had nothing to do with why I stayed, nothing to do with all the things my seasons with the hunters, with the animals, had taught me, nothing whatsoever to do with the strength and tenacity that was getting me, bee-stung and frightened and freezing, down that near-dark Alaskan hill.

  I wore the necklace differently after that, and years later, when the clasp on it wore paper-thin and the pendant fell one day into my coincidentally open hand, I replaced it with pieces of eight from the seventeenth century that I found near a silver mine in Bolivia, and I wait now to discover the meaning of this new/old silver I wear.

  It’s been years since I’ve guided any hunters, though I have returned to the Alaskan wilderness, with a camera or a kayak or a pair of cross-country skis. I am a far better outdoors-woman for my years guiding hunters, and even more important, I have a much deeper understanding of my animal self I also have the blood of five fine and wild animals on my hands, and I will never forget it. And this is perhaps why, like the hunters, I need to keep telling my story, over and over again.

  Pam Houston is the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, and A Little More About Me, from which this story was excerpted.

  HEATHER VILLARS

  On the Pack Ice

  Everyone helps when a whale is harvested, even strangers in town.

  THERE IT LAY: THE BOWHEAD WHALE. A CREW OF INUPIAT hunters had killed it. A trailing line of Barrow’s community had pulled on ropes as thick as wrists dragging the whale onto shore like some great tug of war on track-and-field day. The tail and fins were lopped off. Long scorings lashed the whale’s slate gray skin, perpendicular to the length of its body as if the crew were slicing a large loaf of bread. The hunters had pressed lines into whale skin like a baker might press her knife into a pan of brownies, estimating where her final, even cuts will be.

  I arrived on the back of my friend’s snowmachine. A resident of Barrow, Jeremy maneuvered the machine across five miles of frozen ocean left from winter. Ahead of us, leading the way, was Jeremy’s cousin Craig, a biologist who studies bow-head whales for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management. My friend Toby brought up the rear
, a loaded rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Toby and I were in Barrow for three days. A bargain airline fare brought us from Anchorage for the spring whale hunt. In May, Inupiat whaling crews camp on the edge of the Arctic Ocean as they have for thousands of years, waiting for the spring migration of bowhead whales. Captains and crews harpoon and harvest the bowhead to feed their community for another season.

  Barrow sits at the northernmost point of Alaska, some 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle. At this latitude, Barrow’s 4,500 residents are kept in the dark during the winter; for three months each year, the sun never breaks above the horizon. My first night in Barrow, May 10, marked the new season of light. The sun would not set again until August 2.

  An icy glossary: floe—a large piece of floating ice; fast ice—ice attached to the shore; ice-blink—a pale yellow reflection on the sky, indicating ice at a distance; ice pack—large body of near-solid ice extending across the whole sea; lead (leed)—a strip of navigable water opening in the pack; pressure ridge—formed when ice under pressure rises up, breaks apart, and forms a jumbled barricade of fractured ice pieces, difficult and often dangerous to travel through.

  —Ellen Bielawski

  When Toby and I first arrived, Jeremy took us on a walking tour of the town. I wanted desperately to run out onto the pack ice, to touch the ice cubes that stood tall as storage sheds, wide as my outstretched arms, pointed and randomly placed like rubble from a collapsed building. I hiked around the coastal edge of town, my footsteps piercing the snow’s icy layer with a satisfying crackle, until Jeremy told me I wasn’t allowed. Polar bears, he said. We shouldn’t be out on the ice without a rifle. In all that whiteness—white sky, white snow, white ice for miles—it would be too easy for a bear to sneak up on us. Plus, he explained, with the whale hunt on, people were cleaning out their underground storage of last season’s muktuk. With all that whale meat lying around town, waiting for garbage day, the polar bears were in picnic fervor.

  On the second day of our visit, Craig got the radio call that a whale had been landed. We all headed out onto the ice—that giant, forbidden playground—three snowmachines in a loud humming line. The frozen Arctic Ocean seemed endless. Ice lay in large chunky piles across the landscape, glowing in the morning sun. From town the ice field looked like a giant meringue ladled out upon the state’s edge, one huge baked Alaska waiting for the end of dinner to make its debut on the dining room table. I had never seen anything so rare and sparse and beautiful. Every few moments I saw trails of arctic fox footprints in the snow, the only sign of life except for the loud squawk of sea gulls overhead.

  After an hour on the snowmachine, with the tracks of other machines our only guide, we came to one of several whale camps along the edge of the ice. The Arctic Ocean was a glistening blue sheet stretched taut against the floe edge.

  The shoreline teemed with activity. Men cut through the segmented scorings on the whale’s skin to slice strips of whale skin and blubber, each a foot wide and up to six feet long. The skin was thick, a pencil-lead gray, the fat beneath rosy pink, mottled with blood. The Eskimos call this muktuk. It’s a very healthy food, rich in niacin, iron, calcium, even vitamin C.

  The crew harvested the muktuk like this: one man flung a hook as big as my hand into the scored flap, and pulled on the connected rope. The skin and fat, eight inches deep, peeled off as smoothly as a nonstick Band-Aid. Another man, standing on top of the whale, wielded a long dowel-handled blade, cutting behind the strip of muktuk as his partner yanked it away. Their actions reminded me of skinning chicken breasts. With a bit of tension on the skin, and a bit of slicing from underneath, it comes free easily. When enough of a strip was free, one or more men grabbed the muktuk with their hooks, dragging the giant slice off to the side. A pile of slices, each as big as a man’s leg, grew high.

  A group of women carved some of the blubber from a piece, leaving the dark gray half-inch of skin and two inches of fat. They boiled this, cutting it into four-inch strips, the fat turning a pale white. They call this unalluq. When it was ready, the women offered large steaming pots of the boiled whale to the crew: the first warm taste of the successful hunt.

  Jeremy, Toby, and I tried to stay out of the way. I felt like an outsider, a white person and one of the few not from Barrow. I was there to watch, not to judge, not to interview. Jeremy had given Toby and me a lecture on not being too overeager with our cameras. I tried to be respectful. And to keep my mouth from dropping open in awe.

  Craig and two colleagues were busy measuring the whale—tail length, fin length and width, body length—each measurement penciled onto the clipboard in Craig’s rubber-gloved hands. One of the scientists sliced a six-inch stripe through the wall of the whale’s stomach, dipping her specimen cup inside. When full, the cup steamed with the whale’s partially digested lunch.

  Craig told us this whale was a runt, small for its age, though it was the biggest animal I’d ever seen, bigger than a VW bus. It was probably only five years old, a baby, Craig said. Scientists think bowhead whales don’t become sexually mature until they’re eighteen to twenty years old. But they’re not certain. Scientists, it turns out, don’t know a lot about bowhead whales. With each specimen cup, each list of statistics about a harpooned whale, they were excavating the natural history of these mammals, piece by steaming piece.

  Meanwhile, Toby and I stood quietly, eyes wide, taking it all in. After a half hour on the sidelines, Toby chatted up one of the crewmen working to harvest the whale. A longtime Alaskan fisherman himself, Toby respects Inupiat whaling customs. He, unlike me, has seen blood and death. He knows that we are often kept alive by killing our animal cousins. Toby asked the man if it would be O.K. to take pictures. The man said yes, don’t get stepped on.

  The crew butchered the entire whale in a matter of hours. The snow steamed red with lost life. The hunters rejoiced, their white parkys stained the color of cherries. I watched a group of women perched amid the pile of small intestines. They wore rubber gloves with elongated plastic sheeting stretched to their elbows and secured there with elastic, like a shower cap. One woman used a knife resembling an ulu—a half-moon shaped Inupiat knife that I had associated more with tourists than with Native food preparation. This knife’s blade measured about a foot along its curved edge, with a characteristic wooden handle sprouting from its center of the straight edge. The woman wielding the knife cut apart the thin membranes that connect the intestines’ sausage-like casing to itself in accordion folds, a beautiful, if gory, tangled embrace. Another woman fed the recently freed tube of intestines into the hands of a third woman, who piled them neatly into a plastic bag. I thought back to the lessons I learned in history class about Native peoples, how they use every part of the animals they kill, how they respect what they take from the land. Hints of this surfaced there on the pack ice: of community, of challenge, of respect for the animal—these centuries-old customs being carried out before me. After the scientist collected her data from the stomach, the Native women flopped the organ into a plastic bag.

  While the adults worked, kids circulated among them with thermoses of coffee and stacks of Styrofoam cups. Other kids passed buckets of fried chicken, then bowls of steaming fry bread, then kettles of tea. Toby, Jeremy, and I declined. We were not there to eat these people’s food. We weren’t really even invited.

  What I’ve learned—what I grew up with and maintained—is sharing. You don’t get the whale. It comes to you. That’s what I’ve been taught. There’s just so much respect for the whale. Once it’s landed everything is taken. Things like, you put the whale’s skull back into the water. That, in itself, asks for the spirit to come back next spring. And you still do that to this day. A lot of things we do are not written, but passed on.

  —Rex Allen Rock, Sr., Whaling Captain, Pt. Hope in Growing up Native in Alaska

  Small children climbed around on the pack ice, playing king of the mountain. An orange flag on a long, wooden stake flapped in the cold wind coming
off the Arctic Ocean, its center a white and red symbol resembling the Mercedes trademark. Jeremy told me the flag belonged to this whaling crew and marked this camp as its own. Later, at other camps, I saw different flags, with different symbols and colors, each announcing a team’s territory.

  The sun blazed down on us, pushing the temperature to a high of 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Weeks of camping along the floe edge, where ice, snow, and water all reflect the sun, had darkened the whaling crew’s faces to the color of rich soil. The crew’s fur-lined hoods waved in the wind. Sun gleamed off their reflective sunglasses.

  Watching, I noticed the odd convergence of history and technology on the ice. We traveled by snowmachine. Inupiat no longer need a dog team to pull their muktuk-laden sleds back to their village. Many whaling boats are still lined with sealskin, and many whalers use paddles instead of outboard motors. No longer do the whaling captains use hand-carved stone arrowheads and harpoons. Instead, they use more accurate and lethal shoulder guns. But the tools used to butcher the whale are not tools from Home Depot. They have the customary dowel handles of hoes and shovels, but each is tipped with rounded metal blades, some with pointed tips like scythes, others round and symmetrical like ulus. Even with the ease that modern technology provides, the hard work of spotting and landing the whale, then cutting and loading the meat still remains.