Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  Joe arrived on June 17, 1901, more than ten months after he’d left Nail Pond. Uncle Pete had staked a claim at a mine. They bought a boiler to thaw the permafrost for digging and gave it a go.

  “The biggest hole we made was in our pockets,” Joe wrote. “Our talents were not in mining.”

  Back home, Peter had been a sailor and a fisherman, and Joe loved the ocean. As good at sailing as they were bad at mining, they knew when to cut their losses and return to the sea. They built a schooner, the Augusta C, named for Pete’s daughter, and began sailing freight and passengers north and bartering with Natives of the coasts of Siberia and Alaska for furs, skins, ivory, and whalebones.

  The new arrangement suited Joe. It moved him closer to the kind of life he’d dreamt about while willing away his childhood sicknesses. By abandoning the quest for gold rather than digging a bigger hole, he’d done better his first year in Nome than most.

  Which isn’t to say that Nome didn’t produce gold. It did—and lots of it. Even today, industrial miners continue to pull it from the ground, and over the past century prospectors have harvested hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold from the area. But Nome’s gold rush was like the Klondike rush before it or like a Vegas casino or any poker game or blackjack table in the world: Most people don’t walk away winners. Between 1899 and 1901, a few dozen lucky prospectors made millions, but thousands more failed. That summer the US Army arrived to put anyone without shelter or sufficient resources on a ship out of town before the deadly winter descended.

  The Lucky Swedes who launched the boom? More lucky than Swedish, by the 1920s their partnership, the Pioneer Mining Company, had taken more than $20 million in gold. But for the vast majority of prospectors, Nome became an experiment in unhappiness.

  Today Nome remains a distant outpost. In January 2012 the unlikely partnership of a Russian cargo tanker and US Coast Guard icebreaker made headlines and history, crossing 300 miles of frozen Bering Sea to deliver fuel to Nome after storms prevented a scheduled autumn shipment. The expense of flying in the fuel would have added to the $6-per-gallon cost already paid by residents. The crews prevailed over engine trouble, language problems, ice more than 6 feet thick, and temperatures in the minus double digits to accomplish its mission.

  A month later, more than 3.5 million viewers tuned in to the premiere of Bering Sea Gold, a Discovery Channel reality show about miners dredging near Nome. The next day, would-be prospectors besieged city offices with inquiries about permitting, accommodations, and the likelihood of striking it rich. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources opened a field office to deal with the stampede and urged officials to prepare for a new gold rush. Times are different—mining technology has improved dramatically, and Nome is more accessible now than when the Bernards arrived upon its shores. But the lure of striking it rich, especially during a economic downturn, shows that at least one thing has not changed over the years: human nature.

  And the original Nome stampede? By 1902 the most accessible claims were depleted. Industrial mining companies moved in with heavy equipment to take control of existing operations, and almost as quickly as it had begun, the gold rush ended. A 1905 fire gutted much of the downtown, and within a few years, the population dropped to about 2,600. Nome was a balloon deflating quietly.

  5

  Cathedral of Stillness

  While I was at my traps on the hill I came upon a herd of 25 caribou on the west bank of the river. I killed seven of them. I did not have a sled to take them home so I had to bury them in the snow.

  It’s difficult to overstate how quiet the forest can be. How you can hear your heartbeat, so loud sometimes you forget it’s your own. Then a raven laughs, a squirrel chatters, and sound surrounds you. Mutable. Fading. Until silence falls again, leaving you alone with your lumbering heart. Most of the animals that call this forest home have better hearing than I, not least the deer I’m after. With each breath, each rustle of my feet, I must sound ridiculous to them even as I try my damnedest to be silent. Overhead, tree branches rattle like bones.

  For all the playing in the woods I did as a child, nothing prepared me for this. This isn’t undeveloped suburban land behind a neighbor’s home, or a wooded plot of Massachusetts town farm. This is the Tongass National Forest, 17 million acres draped like a wet, green blanket across Southeast Alaska. It covers Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands, collectively the ABC’s, home to a handful of villages and logging camps with names like Elfin Cove, Pelican, Tenakee Springs, and Sitka, the small fishing town I now call home. As does the world’s densest population of brown bears—more than one per square mile, nearly 6,000 on those three islands alone. Or, in the shorthand that Mike uses to explain it to me, “a shitload of bears.”

  Deer season just opened, and this is my first hunt. I’ve been here two months, and Mike has taken me two hours northwest of town to a small island on which he’s had good luck in the past. I’m nervous and excited, with a new rifle and deer call but no idea what the hell I’m doing. Two hours ago we left his boat in a cove, circling on anchor in the wind like a dog looking for a place to lie down. We motored his inflatable ashore in heavy rain, dragged it up on the beach, and entered the tree line. We’ve been hiking in silence ever since.

  The woods are dark, the canopy thick. As we climb to a higher elevation, the temperature drops, and soon snow begins to fall. When we reach the fringes of a subalpine meadow—muskeg—Mike stops. The unexpected weight of the .30-06 still feels unfamiliar to me, too much gun for the scrawny blacktail deer but a common caliber locally. “You’re not the only thing hunting deer out there,” the guy who sold it to me said. “If I sold you something smaller, I’d have to sell you a jar of Vaseline to make it hurt less when the bear shoves it up your ass.” In addition to his rifle, Mike carries a holstered .45 revolver that fires rounds the size of AA batteries. Like something Yosemite Sam might shoot.

  Piles of scat litter a game trail that skirts the meadow. You can tell the scat from the mud, even beneath the thin layer of new snow, because it steams in the cold, still fresh. Mike gives the thumbs up and points to a spot about 50 feet away. Wait there, he mouths—and then he leaves.

  His boat is a trawler with a hull that rolls like an egg on a countertop, and I’d like to blame seasickness for the crease in my stomach, but I know better. Mike has hunted here for nearly half a century and feels completely at home in the woods. Not me. I’m overthinking everything, trying too hard. I’m here to learn, and hopefully not to screw up Mike’s hunt in the process. The plan that made so much sense over coffee this morning means nothing to me now that we’re here in the woods.

  It’s simple enough. He finds the deer and spooks them into the meadow. I sit tight and squeeze the trigger when the time comes. I know how to shoot—I’ve hunted birds, shot clays, sighted in my new Ruger at the range north of town—but this is different. With no experience to call on, my instincts are lousy.

  Where Mike pointed, there’s some scrub for cover, a clear view into the meadow, and a still-steaming pile twice the size of the others. I get down on one wet knee beside it and blow the call, breaking the profound silence of the forest, and wait for something to happen. When nothing does—and nothing and still nothing—I start to think that the most difficult part of hunting is patience.

  In “The Heart of the Game,” Thomas McGuane writes, “You stare through the plastic at the red smear of meat in the supermarket. What’s this it says here? Mighty Good? Tastee? Quality, Premium, and Government Inspected? Soon enough, the blood is on your hands. It’s inescapable.” His young son asks why he hunts—what has the deer done to him? McGuane answers, “I can’t explain it talking like this.”

  Some people grow up in a place where deer carcasses hanging from trees signals fall, like red-leafed maples, the World Series, jack-o-lanterns. They know to watch for steel shot in a roasted breast of duck or pheasant and can score a
rack of antlers before they learn their multiplication tables. But move somewhere else—a city where guns signify criminal intent, or the suburbs where deer are sacred garden pests—and they bump their heads against this wall sooner or later. Like Portland, Oregon, for example, where vegans thrive. Tell someone at a dinner party that you’re a hunter and you might as well say you waterboard blind orphans for fun.

  Hunting cultures still exist throughout the United States—just half an hour outside Portland, you’re more likely to find gun racks than bike racks—but the urban-rural divide increasingly isolates them, and in the country’s nonhunting urban population centers a negative association with the primal, sustaining act worsens with each year. Political affiliations further complicate the issue, as does the same broad brush that paints the sins of gun violence.

  It’s not a black-and-white issue, nor a red-and-blue one. And it’s no different whether you hunt for trophies or food—maybe it should be, I don’t know. Let others argue; I don’t need to have that conversation. For me, hunting is deeply personal, like religion, politics, or whom to root for in baseball.

  As long as I eat meat, I want to take responsibility for it. Not every meal, but on occasion, often enough to remind me that every life is worth something, that the food on my plate was a life. I enjoy hunting. It’s the killing I don’t like.

  It’s not something you can put to words. Maybe it’s something you understand intuitively—like faith, love, or depression—or you don’t. But you should have your own feelings about it. Everyone should. There’s room for all of it. Just don’t take it lightly.

  In his essay, McGuane finds himself elbows-deep in an antelope that he’s just shot, dressing it out. “This is goddamned serious,” he tells himself, “and you had better always remember that.”

  Nutrient-poor peat, muskeg resembles muddy bark mulch, with oily puddles, small ponds, and patches of vegetation. A sheen covers it, like someone misted it with oil from a great height. Vegetation grows scattered, clumped. Stunted conifers in a carpet of sphagnum. Shrubs and scrub brush. With each step, the spongy ground threatens to swallow your feet—and then the rest of you. Decay pervades it, and yet so does a beauty hard to articulate, impossible to ascribe to any one feature. The sum of the whole.

  Shaped like a deep, thin harmonica, the deer call is made of some light wood. Balsa, maybe. I blow myself hoarse, unable to produce any sound beyond a wheeze—until I realize I’m holding it backward.

  “Try to sound like a deer,” Mike told me in the boat.

  But what does a deer sound like? I did my homework before this hunt, as if I could learn from a book how to reinsert myself into a food chain as old as time itself, and learned that Sitka blacktails are vocal. They have an extended vocabulary of bleats, grunts, and cries. In a dark forest they can sound terrifying, half human. Worse when scared or wounded. I blow and blow until a sound emerges like a truck with bad shocks. Is that right? Maybe if I were hunting mechanics. My heartbeat a drum troupe, I wonder again if the deer can hear it, if Mike can hear it. Then the wind shifts and the light changes, dragging shadows across the ground, and the woods flicker from foreign to hostile.

  Three months ago I was working an office job, my life confined to a cubicle, a basement apartment, and the highway between them. Now I’m deep in a forest in Alaska, hugging a cold rifle. Is the safety off? Have I locked a round in the chamber? I raise it and aim it toward the meadow, which looms through the scope and changes my perspective dramatically, drawing everything far away close enough to touch. Berries glisten with moisture on the branch. Leaves of devil’s club bend under the weight of the snow. What will a deer look like through this glass? What about a bear? I lift my eye from the scope to command a wider field of view, and watch the muskeg for signs of life.

  Is this hunting—watching and waiting? For some people, that’s life itself, watching the world go by and waiting for something to happen. Maybe that’s why I’ve moved here. Maybe I was tired of waiting for something to happen to me, tired of watching, and took a step to make something happen myself.

  At some point, the sound of my own breathing fades, as does my heartbeat, and the mood of the forest changes again from hostile to beautiful. The colors of the moss on the trees, the way the thin snow adds contrast, the sound of snowflakes alighting on the surrounding leaves. I’ve chased this across wooded lakes and rivers in a canoe, cast a fly rod for it in saltwater marshes, tried to run it down on bicycle trails and country roads, but for the first time it feels like I’ve actually caught it. Maybe we won’t get a deer today. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Looking around, I make a promise to do everything I can to keep this in my life for as long as I can, this forest and wild places like it, this cathedral of stillness, this state of near-perfect quiet.

  Mike comes up behind me and all but squats next to me before I even hear him coming. He walks silently in the forest, a superpower I could practice for years without developing.

  “See anything?” he asks.

  I point to the now-cold pile the size of a medium pizza. “More deer sign. It was still steaming when I got here.”

  “Uh, a deer didn’t leave that,” Mike says, grinning. “A bear did.”

  Later, we find a downed tree on which to sit and eat the sandwiches we’ve brought. Expectations eased, I relax enough to realize how much I’m enjoying myself. None of this comes naturally to me—hunting, running boats, navigating unmarked wilderness—but very little ever does.

  Anyway, it shouldn’t matter. I’ll work at it. Now that I’ve learned about Joe, I know it’s in my blood, and I’ll learn from Mike and anyone who’ll teach me. I moved here to participate in the real world, in the wild, in my own life. My education is just beginning.

  A few months later, the dog whimpers hopefully when she sees me gearing up. Tomorrow I’m leaving before dawn for my first solo hunt, a half-day’s hike toward the island’s spine. I work my way down a list written on the back of a guest check from the Pioneer Bar: two sandwiches wrapped in plastic, tucked into the game pocket of my mackinaw; boots by the door; knife, matches, gloves. The dog is heartsick about not coming with me. Sorry, girl.

  I clean the rifle, a sleek stainless steel Ruger with a synthetic stock, and the house stinks like Hoppes No. 9, an acidic perfume that will curl your chest hair if you breathe too deeply. Before crawling into bed I put new batteries in my headlamp. The forest will be dark.

  Come morning, I grab my coffee and leave without waking my girlfriend, the sulking dog’s glare the last thing I see. Our little chat went right over her head. She loves the woods, loves to run, but hunting deer with dogs is illegal—even if I could use the help.

  A wafer of ice clings to the windshield, the morning beyond it impenetrably dark, hours until dawn.

  Sitka is just 14 miles of road on the western edge of Baranof Island. From downtown, 7 miles go north to end in forest near the ferry terminal and 7 miles south, ending at a gate. Beyond the gate lies a dirt road that winds along the coast to the power plant, off-limits to all but city vehicles, though you can walk or bike it. It’s popular with bears; their scat piles along the dirt road like inuksuit, the rock cairns built by Arctic Natives. Just 14 miles of road, and yet I’ve never lived anyplace so easy to get lost. I can hike from my back door into the mountains, point my boat to sea, lose my bearings in the woods and get lost forever, disappear like melting ice or a star blinking out of existence. If you live here long enough, I wonder, do you ever stop thinking about these dangers, or does thinking about them keep you safe?

  There are other dangers, too. Each day at the paper we write articles about hikers stuck for days with legs broken in a fall, kayakers suffering hypothermia. Hunting brings its own risk. The guy who owned the bed-and-breakfast where my parents stayed when they visited drowned while diving for sea cucumbers. A professor at Sheldon Jackson College and medical technician with the Sitka Volunteer Fire Depart
ment died when the boat she was riding in went hard aground, throwing her forward, en route to a medevac mission for an Alaska State Trooper recruit who severely cut his finger during survival training. The kayak shop owner died when he hit his head on a submerged rock while teaching a class how to roll a kayak. My friend who took over the shop died when he swallowed a gun barrel, driven to depression by who knows what.

  There are lots of ways to die in Alaska.

  Bears walk the fringes of town and often the town itself, lured by a menu of domestic garbage cans, bird feeders, and dogs. My Lab and I have run into them while jogging the trails that ribbon the foot of the mountains. The trails start behind the high school and end in a suburban neighborhood, and bears use them for the same reason we do: It’s easier than bushwhacking your own path through the forest.

  When someone shoots a bear in defense of life and property—a legal circumstance that determines a justifiable killing—the newspaper gets a call. We take pictures, ask questions, and write a public service article about good practices for living in bear country: Did you have a bird feeder? Did you feed your cats outside? Did you leave your trash out overnight? Was your dog tied up long? The dead bears lie stiff and cooling in the back of a Fish and Game pickup, hairy limbs spilling over the sides like a Great Dane in a Dachshund’s bed. Even dead they instill awe. More so when you see them alive, up close, out of context in someone’s backyard, in a driveway, behind a restaurant. A tug captain in Juneau tells me they like to jump on the hood of his car, like kids on a hotel bed. I know hunters who’ve had their deer kill ripped off their backs. Others who have been dragged off themselves. The two worlds coexist tenuously. That’s the price we pay for access to the wilderness—the wilderness gets the same access to us.