The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  The cabin was tucked in the woods at the foothills of the White Mountains, not far off the banks of Beaver Creek. It was a pretty place, bathed now, in late spring, in twenty-two hours of light. Again Heimo was eating ducks—Alaskans who live in the bush are allowed to hunt waterfowl in spring—and beaver, which he learned how to gut and skin from a book he found in the cabin. At first he hunted on snowshoes, but he quickly noticed that wet snow would pile up on the decking of the snowshoes, making walking nearly impossible. He discarded the snowshoes and wore instead an old pair of waterproof but heavy military-issue bunny boots, which lasted him until the snow melted. Though he’d never liked sunglasses, they were essential now in the long light of spring. Early trappers and Athabaskan hunters rubbed soot on their eyelids and around their eyes to protect themselves from the reflection of the sun off the snow. While in Savoonga, Heimo had learned from Herman that before the introduction of sunglasses, the hunters of St. Lawrence Island had used ivory to carve round cups into which they cut small slits and tied the cups around their heads using strips of sealskin.

  Heimo was still a greenhorn, and since he hadn’t wintered in the Interior, he couldn’t call himself a trapper yet, but he returned to Beaver Creek with a newfound sense of purpose. After his experiences on St. Lawrence Island, he was convinced that he could survive Alaska’s Interior, too. Though friendly and outgoing, he didn’t mind being alone. In fact, he relished it—the solitude of the woods, the self-reliance. It was like swimming or diving; a man had only himself to count on, and Heimo looked forward to the challenges. This time he would “make it.”

  By early May 1976, snow was melting in the mountains and overflow was rushing out of Victoria Creek into Beaver Creek, which was misnamed, because if anything it resembled a large Alaskan river. In some spots the overflow was nearly a foot deep. Underneath, the winter ice was beginning to melt away. With twenty-two hours of sun, it was only a matter of time before four-foot-thick fields of ice would come careening downstream like an avalanche.

  That day came May 8. Beaver Creek had begun to break up overnight. Half a mile from the cabin, a house-sized slab of ice jammed, and the river rose, slowly at first. Never having witnessed a breakup, Heimo didn’t know enough to worry. Surely, he thought, the ice jam would be washed away. Besides, he had ducks to shoot. The previous evening he had noticed a large flock of black ducks circling a tundra pond, and he needed more meat. His plan was to jump-shoot them. He would walk to the pond and then crawl across the snow on his belly, surprising them while they swam in the shallows near the pond’s edge. The birds would be dripping in spring fat, and if he was lucky, he’d have enough meat for the rest of the week.

  That was the plan, but when Heimo reached the pond and tried to stalk the ducks, they spooked, flying far out of range. Heimo lay on his back along the pond’s steep bank among dense bushes of Labrador tea, waiting for the ducks to return. They never did. It was late afternoon when another flock of pintails discovered the pond. Heimo could see them through his binoculars, swimming contentedly on the pond’s far side, five drakes and two hens. He crept out of the bushes and circled the lake. They were swimming separately, too far apart for Heimo to kill more than one with a shot, so he held off. He listened to them chatter and waited for his opportunity. Gradually, they swam closer together, and when they were in range, Heimo lifted his gun and shot three times. Four ducks lay dead in the lake. Heimo fired twice more, trying to drop one of the escaping ducks with a wing shot, but missed. He waited twenty minutes for the wind to blow the ducks closer to shore, and then he waded out and collected them. Putting them in his backpack, he began the three-mile walk back to the cabin, feeling good about the hunt.

  A half-mile from the cabin, he heard a sound like a locomotive—the ice rending, struggling to free itself. The sound frightened him, and now he ran, nearly sprinting through the melting, foot-deep snow. One hundred feet from the river, he could see water pouring over the bank: flood. By the time he reached the cabin, the water was already up to the front door. What to do first? Don’t panic, he reminded himself. Don’t panic now.

  His friend’s dogs were tied to their trees, and they were terrified, howling and pulling at their chains. Heimo unleashed them and shooed them off into the woods where they’d be safe. Then he remembered the puppies. Heimo ran around the cabin, yelling and whistling for them. He stopped long enough to listen and heard them whining from where they’d hidden under the cabin. Heimo called, but they were too frightened to move. He thought about sliding under the cabin to rescue them, but it was too late now. The water was too high. Heimo ran into the cabin, grabbed his sleeping bag, and stuffed his coat pockets with packets of macaroni. He came back out, searching frantically for the canoe. “Where’s the goddamn canoe?” Abandoning the idea, he pulled himself up onto the cabin’s roof. Seconds later, the river rushed through the cabin’s front door.

  Horrified, Heimo sat on the roof and watched as the river groaned and labored and launched huge, truck-sized chunks of ice into the air. Suddenly the cabin shuddered as if it might collapse. Heimo held on to the main roof beam like a baby clutching his mother. With every blow, the cabin shook and Heimo held on tighter, knowing that if he let go and was thrown from the roof, he would probably be crushed to death.

  When the ice jam broke, the river let out a resounding yawn and the water retreated as quickly as it had come, as if it were being sucked into an enormous drain. Heimo watched, unwilling to let go of his grip, as if he expected the water to return. An hour later, he warily climbed down from the cabin’s roof to inspect the damage. The cabin yard looked like the scene of a battle. Huge trees had been uprooted and lay scattered around the cabin yard like corpses. Other trees had snapped like twigs. Great brown monuments of ice, looking like tanks left behind by a retreating army, lay melting in the hot sun. Miraculously, the cabin was still standing, but inside Heimo found a dune of silt four inches deep. Too tired to shovel it out, he slept that night in his bunk in the stench of the river’s backwash.

  After the flood, Heimo foraged for duck and goose eggs and caught pike, which had come up into the sloughs to spawn. When the pike dropped their eggs, they left the sloughs, and soon Heimo again was wondering how he’d survive the summer. He was learning that the Arctic is a sparse country, its abundance short-lived. Animals appear in great numbers for brief periods of time, and then they move on.

  By late afternoon the sun was shining. Robins yodeled and tiny ruby-crowned kinglets sang vigorously. Heimo was cleaning two young ducks he’d shot on Victoria Creek. He had already plucked them both; next he’d have to gut them. He grabbed one of the ducks, made a small cut at the bottom of its breast cage, and pulled out the viscera. Leaning back, he launched them twenty feet into the river. Then he heard it— “Slurp”—the unmistakable sound of a fish rising to suck up the entrails, followed by spreading concentric circles on the river’s surface. Heimo gutted the next duck. Pitching the entrails into the river again, he listened. There it was again. Arctic grayling! Beaver Creek was still turbid with spring runoff, but there was no doubt now, grayling were in the river. He hadn’t expected them until midsummer.

  Heimo ran to the cabin to get his rod, tied on a spinner, and threw the lure into a deep pool. Instantly, he felt the strike. He set the hook, reeled in the fish, grabbed it and banged the back of its head on a rock. When it went limp, he tossed the fish onto the ground behind him. He cast again. Boom, another grayling hit. After a long, icebound winter, the fish were ravenous.

  Despite the grayling, by late June Heimo was craving fat again and losing weight. He knew now that he needed more than fish and the occasional duck. He’d have to shoot a bear. Beaver Creek was supposed to be black bear country, but Heimo had never seen anything but tracks and scat. Deciding that he’d have to look farther away from the cabin, one morning he headed up Beaver Creek to one of the side creeks with gear and food enough to last him for three days. He couldn’t paddle against the river’s current. And he’d need the
boat to bring back the meat. Attaching a rope to its bow and stern, he walked with the loop along the bank of the river, straining to hold the rope in just the right place so that the canoe would stay out of the shallows and track into the current in the river’s deeper water, a technique called “lining,” which Heimo was not accomplished at. He was making steady progress until he reached a cutbank where the rush of water had carved out a deep cavern. Heimo didn’t know enough to beware of cutbanks, and sure enough the bank collapsed under his weight with a sudden whoosh of sand and dirt.

  Heimo heard it happening, grabbed for a nearby tree, and held on. Six feet of cutbank hit the canoe, which tipped and then, amazingly, righted itself. Heimo scrambled down the bank and waded into the water to recover his canoe. His camping gear was wet, but worst of all, his bear rifle, his .444 Marlin, had fallen out. Fortunately, he’d had enough sense to tie everything else down. Searching the bottom of the muddy river with his hands, he realized that the rifle was gone for good. He cursed himself for his stupidity and paddled back down the river to the cabin.

  A few days after this mishap, still determined to get a bear, he packed the canoe again with gear and loaded his shotgun with lead slugs. Downriver he shot not one, but two black bears. He gutted and skinned them and then lined the canoe up Beaver Creek, moving cautiously from gravel bar to gravel bar. Heimo had learned that the way to line a boat on a river with cutbanks was to avoid them entirely. Instead, he walked from gravel bar to gravel bar and paddled the short distance between them. With a canoe full of meat, this was a balancing act. He used only one rope, with one end tied to the bow and one end tied to the stern, and he held the rope so it formed something of a V. When he pulled the rope too tightly, the canoe would tack toward the shallow water and ground out. When he grasped it too loosely, the bow would pull out into the fast current. Gradually, he got to where he could line almost entirely by feel. He reached the cabin by evening and butchered the bears under the nearly constant sun. He made most of the meat into jerky (called “drymeat” in Alaska) so it wouldn’t spoil in the summer heat, and was able to feed himself and the dogs for five days on the fresh meat.

  That summer was his first in Alaska, and as Heimo readily admits, he made every mistake there was to make. Nothing came easy. Yet his good spirits were not diminished. Near the end of July, he wrote his friend again.

  Jammie,

  Wish you could be here. Mountains all around. Nobody for 100 or so miles. You wouldn’t believe the mosquitoes up here in the Arctic. 17.65 million of them just flying around my head. Bug spray is useless. You just have to suffer. The summer is no time for sleep. The sun never sets.

  This time Heimo followed his name with “seal hunter,” “wilderness scout,” and now “subsistence hunter,” too.

  CHAPTER 5

  On the Coleen

  In early June 1978, Heimo came to the Coleen River. He had wintered over in the Chandalar River country for two years and could now call himself a trapper, the real thing: “Heimo Korth—Guide of the North” and now “Trapper of the North,” too. Best of all, he was on his own, tied to no one. Keith Koontz and Kenny Miller had given him his start, but when Heimo came to the Coleen, he was a free trapper. John Peterson, who flew Heimo out, remembers that he “looked like a full-fledged mountain man.” Peterson shakes his head in disbelief at the image. “Man, he had hair down to the middle of his back—he hadn’t cut it since he left home—a full beard, and a sealskin headband from Savoonga with an eagle feather in it. And he was wearing the same belt that he had when he first came up in 1975. He’d cut out new notches. He was so fit by that time, there were ten inches of leather hanging below his waist.”

  Paul Herbert, a Fort Yukon Gwich’in who was born on the Porcupine River shortly after World War II and grew up in the woods trapping and hunting, says, “Heimo came up from Wisconsin and he didn’t know jack shit about livin’ in the toolies. Most of the guys didn’t make it. But Heimo was a tough son of a bitch. He was hard core and he learned and pretty soon he knew more about living out there than me or anybody else in Fort Yukon.”

  Where Your Creek meets the middle fork of the Chandalar River, forty miles southwest of the Gwich’in village of Arctic Village, is mountain country. But it is a “hungry” country, too. Although Heimo was tending nearly eighty miles of line and over 150 traps and snares, all on foot, his fur take amounted to nothing more than a few wolves, three or four wolverines, and some fox—hardly enough to pay for his meager supplies. But it wasn’t for a lack of effort.

  Each morning Heimo woke at 5:00 A.M. When he had success on his trapline, he worked on fur for two hours before breakfast. Otherwise, he cut wood. Once every two weeks, he would take a towel bath, heating water in a large pot on the woodstove, waiting until it nearly boiled, then using a towel and a bar of soap to scrub off two weeks of sweat, grease, and grime. And sometimes he would make medicine bags out of small pieces of fur, which he would later sell in Fort Yukon; or he’d patch holes in his clothes using the tanned skins from the ground squirrels he sometimes ate to conserve his food supply. He’d also reserve his mornings for writing letters.

  Jammie,

  Well trappin’ hasn’t been spectacular… . As of today I got 2 wolves, 2 wolverine, 2 red fox, and one ermine. Boy them wolverines are mean sons a bitches, strong too. I’d rather try to fight off 3 wolves than one wolverine… . There’s always something bad about every life and trapping is no exception. It is the fleas on wolverines. Terrible. First one I caught I skinned him out then started to flesh him. About an hour later my head, beard, eyebrows, and armpits were loaded with fleas. I was itching like hell… . So I took a million baths. Threw the clothes outside to freeze, finally got all the fleas off of me… . I shot a moose… . The caribou never came. In caribou country you don’t shoot a moose unless you are absolutely, positively sure the caribou aren’t coming… . Oh also I haven’t seen the sun since the beginning of November. 21 hours of night on my trapline here in the Brooks Range.

  In closing, he drew his friend a map of Alaska, showing him where his trapline was, noting the prominent reference points.

  A few months later, Heimo wrote his good friend again.

  Allo Jammy,

  My catch is almost exactly the same as the first part of the season. It was a hard year for snow. The deep snow pushed the fur out of the mountains where I am. This summer I’m going to take a piece of plastic (10 x10) … and my rifle and walk all over the Brooks Range… . By your address it sounds like it’s a pretty high class apt. you’re living in … I sometimes sleep in a lean-to at -70 just to catch one fox.

  On his typical day, by 8:00 A.M., after eating a breakfast of boiled Dall sheep or moose steaks and drinking the broth for vitamins, he’d check his line, sometimes walking more than twenty miles in a single day. He wouldn’t return to the cabin until late in the afternoon. Upon his return, he’d first load up the stove with wood. After a full day without heat, the cabin would be almost as cold as the outside. After stoking the fire, he’d go out and cut meat for his supper. The meals never changed—fried or boiled steaks, a can of spinach, and bannock—but they were enough to keep him fortified. After supper, he’d read for an hour, usually science fiction and spy novels, lying under a caribou skin for warmth, often submitting to sleep with the book still in his hands.

  What would be drudgery for almost anyone else was freedom for Heimo. “I loved it,” he says. “I was trapping for myself, and I was in the mountains, and I was strong.” John Peterson adds, “Very few people could have done it—same food, no radio, no company, nothing. And it’s a helluva lot of work. But Heimo didn’t need much.”

  If his friend from Camp Mecan had any doubts about Heimo’s intention to remain in Alaska, Heimo put those doubts to rest with a letter he sent from Fort Yukon in late spring.

  Jim,

  I just got back … from Savoonga. I was out there for 2 months. I went whaling with the Eskimos. You asked me if I liked it up here. To put it plain I would die
before I would live down there again. I could never have a job again, 8 to 5. Can’t wait to get out to my home.

  While in Chandalar country, Heimo’s bush education continued. He was tested time and again, but with every test, Heimo became more accomplished, and by the summer of his first year on the Chandalar, he had come to believe in his own abilities. He could survive the extreme cold, the months without sun, the isolation, and with a little luck, perhaps the mishaps, too. Whatever didn’t kill him served to make him stronger.

  Twenty-four years later, Heimo recalls an incident on the Chandalar and laughs at the irony of the situation. It was a hot summer evening without even the suggestion of a breeze, and the air whirred with the sound of mosquitoes. Heimo sat outside by a smudge fire he’d made of green willow branches, which gave off enough smoke to keep most of the mosquitoes away. He was sipping a cup of tea when he saw two figures coming up from the river. Had the light been worse, he would have grabbed his gun, thinking that his smoke rack had attracted two hungry grizzlies. For the last three days, he’d been smoking what remained of his winter meat supply. But he could clearly make out these two forms. There were two people walking toward him. “Evening,” he shouted when they were within one hundred feet of the fire. They returned his greeting. They were poling a raft to a cabin fifty miles downstream—a husband and wife team and two dogs—where they were eager to begin their wilderness experiment, a year in the woods.

  Heimo hadn’t seen another human being in nearly two months, and he was glad for the company. Heimo recalls, “They were nice people. They pitched their tent in my cabin yard for a few days, and I fed them. We ate sheep, pike, lots of drymeat, and, of course, canned spinach, too,” he chuckles. It turns out that the woman had spent part of her childhood in the bush. She told Heimo about it one night while sitting around the smudge fire. She’d also done an epic river trip in the Canadian Arctic with her mother, who wrote a book about the experience, and now, she said, she and her husband were going to try their hand at bush life. They’d spent one winter in a bush cabin, but she confessed that she was concerned that she might not have what it took to stay. The woman asked a lot of questions: Was it hard, did it get lonely, that kind of thing. Heimo confessed that he couldn’t wait to get to town, that he needed a break and was looking forward to seeing people, to drinking a beer, to taking a shower. The kicker for Heimo was that before they left she walked up to him and told him that she didn’t think that he’d last in the woods. “ ‘You don’t have what it takes to make it in the bush,’ ” Heimo recalls her telling him. “At the time, that really chafed me,” he says. “Here, she eats my food, asks me a lot of questions about what it’s like to live out here, and then she insults me. I was ticked. I laugh about it now. She’s living in Arizona or somewhere.”