by Bill Heavey
That evening at the crawfish boil, about a dozen people sat around a table covered with plastic in Mike Bienvenu’s house. In the middle was a huge pile of crawfish, bright red from their immersion in the pot outside. They were accompanied by links of smoked sausage, half ears of corn, potatoes, onions, and Zatarain’s Crawfish, Shrimp, and Crab Boil seasoning. You ate everything with your hands and threw the crawfish shells to your immediate left. We were eating the freshest possible crawfish. They tasted like the best shrimp, with a similar richness and texture. After a while, you were literally up to your elbows in the food. When the phone rang, there was a general shout for somebody in the backyard—the only place anybody was likely to have clean hands—to come in and answer it. Two men at the table were debating hull styles for crawfish skiffs, a discussion that quickly moved to a level I couldn’t follow.
Jody told about taking us out, how I had earned the rank of master baiter and how Bayou Land was going to drop the price to $1.25 a pound even though crawfish were still scarce. “And, listen, we were about to head in when Michelle said the bunker I’m using are shad and how she likes to eat the fish and the eggs, too!” The people around the table went quiet for just a moment and a couple of them shook their heads, as if thinking that a certain level of ignorance was to be expected from outsiders. They were, of course, all too polite to say anything.
I didn’t get it. These were Cajuns, after all. But not one of them disagreed with the assessment that bunker were strictly fish bait.
Suddenly, it hit me. The fish we used for bait were shipped down from Cape May, New Jersey. They weren’t from here and couldn’t be found anywhere near here. And that alone was enough to make them suspect. Because if God had meant for man to eat bunker, or shad, or whatever else you want to call them, He damn sure would have put them in the Basin.
MIKE BIENVENU’S DUCK IN BROWN GRAVY
“First of all you gotta take the feathers off, and then you take the guts out.” (Laughs). “You can cut it in pieces or cook it whole, it’s easier to brown if it’s in pieces. Season it good with red pepper (cayenne) and salt—make it red all over with the pepper. Then you take the point of your knife and you stab it all over the breast and on the legs, because you want that seasoning to get in there good. Get a black iron pot and put little bit of grease in, not a lot of grease but enough to cover the inside where the duck won’t stick too much. And then you just put it on medium high heat, about 6 or 7 on an electric stove. Throw him in there and get him good and brown all over, keep turning him til he’s nice dark brown. And then you put a little water in there, not much, just enough to keep from sticking, and you put a lid on. And you let it keep on til the duck gets nice and tender. Once he’s tender you cut you some onions and bell pepper, and throw that in there with a little bit more water. Then you cover it up again and cook it till it surrenders. The main thing is to season it, and you want to brown it good. And if you got a black iron pot then you shouldn’t have a problem.
“It’s kind of trial and error. You do it a few times, you start to pick up a few tricks. You get the feel of it, how to add some little bit of water just to keep it from sticking. Not too much.
“A duck to me takes, from the time you start until you finish, about three hours. You want to cook it long because you don’t want to fight it when you eat it, you know? You put the cover on it, that’s going to smother it and help tenderize. When you cover it, the pot is going to get hotter. And the duck is going to keep browning in the pot till the very end when you add the bell peppers and the onion. I don’t know how you all like that, but the reason we put the bell peppers and all in at the end is so they don’t cook down to nothing. So when you put the gravy on your rice that you’re going to eat it with, you still have some onions and peppers in there. But that’s it. And basically that is how we cook everything. Everything we eat, we cook like that. The key to it is to season it and brown it, and then you got it.”
Chapter Nine:
People of the Caribou
As the single-engine Caravan floated down toward the gravel runway, black-haired women driving red ATVs appeared, racing over the field, each pulling her own personal dust cloud behind her. Two minutes later, I unfolded myself from the plane and stood squinting in the bright five p.m. sun, thinking that sunglasses would have been a good idea. I’d just landed in Arctic Village Alaska, which lies 100 miles north of the arctic circle. Even in late August, the sunshine lasts fifteen hours a day. The women were dismounted now, having parked the half-dozen ATV’s in a semicircle behind the plane. They fell to the task of unloading freight with an economy of movement that bespoke long experience. The plane had held only eight passengers, but it had been carrying a lot of food in its belly. There were dozens of boxes of frozen chicken nuggets, pork chops, hamburger, and bacon. The big boxes that weighed almost nothing held cartons of Marlboro Reds and Doritos. There were even a few boxes of frozen vegetables. All of this was headed for Arctic Village’s only store, a two-room affair that also sold snack foods, soda, and the more popular calibers of rifle ammunition.
One of the women, seeing me idle, gave me a nudge with her shoulder. “Get busy,” she said. I did, crabbing my way under a wing and passing boxes back. Within five minutes the unloaded plane was nothing but a black mote in the sky and a diminishing mosquito whine. Within seven, only two ATVs remained. And that was only because the two drivers—who resembled each other with a twenty-year age gap, suggesting they might be mother and daughter—were arguing about something in Gwich’in. After a while I realized it was me. The younger, having delivered a final rebuke, secured her baby behind her on the seat and roared away. The older—a short woman with straight black hair—scowled and ignored me as she adjusted the many bungees holding the load of boxes on the vehicle’s rear rack. The silence went on forever. The Gwich’in, I was to learn, didn’t view silence as a hole to be filled. It was just silence, as natural to them as noise is to us. I could see the village in the distance, a mile or more away down a rough gravel road. It was a long way to hump a twenty-five-pound backpack and a sixty-pound duffel with wheels designed for the polished floors of airports. It dawned on me that maybe they had been arguing over which of them—if either—should give the stranger a ride into town. I stood there, neither smiling nor not smiling, neither looking at nor ignoring my potential ride. With the airplane now gone, there were no sounds at all. No birds, no animals, not even any wind. I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into this time.
I’d returned home from the Atchafalaya Basin with a new sense of how deeply the act of getting your own food and livelihood from the land could connect you to that land. Looking back, I realized that the least enjoyable outing of the trip had, in some ways, been the most telling. The hours that Michelle and I had spent catching crawfish with Jody had, for us, been pure tedium. That was because we were outsiders. And, like all outsiders—even those who had decided to come to live in the area and become what Jody and his friends called “pretend Cajuns”—we would never understand the swamp. To Jody Meche and the dwindling number of others who had been born to it, who loved it and understood its rhythms and moods, a day in the swamp was anything but boring.
I hadn’t intended my trip to Arctic Village as a counterpoint to the Atchafalaya Basin. I wasn’t that smart. But had I been looking for maximum contrast, I couldn’t have found two more divergent places. Ecologists considered the Basin the most productive land in the northern hemisphere, while arctic tundra, which started in the hills just above Arctic Village and seemed to roll on forever, was the equivalent of a very cold desert. This was because the subsoil, anything below the first ten inches or so, was permanently frozen, permafrost. The only plants that survived here were low-growing—dwarf shrubs, sedges, grasses, moss, heath, lichen. Like the Basin, the endless tundra did hold some large critters. There was an enormous herd of caribou, as well as moose, wolves, bears, and many smaller animals. But as an elk guide had once
told the hunting party I was in as we rode into camp, “Boys, there are a hell of a lot of elk in this country. But there’s a hell of a lot of country here, too.” In short, the protein density per square mile was a tiny fraction of what it was in the Basin.
I could say that I’d come because, like the Cajuns, the Gwich’in found their traditional way of life under threat from the oil companies. In the Basin, I’d been told repeatedly, the oil companies had made wild crawfishing so difficult that none of the men that I spoke with wanted their children to take up the life. The “inconvenient witnesses”—Mike Bienvenu’s description of how oil companies viewed the remaining crawfishermen—were dwindling in number. The Gwich’in were facing an even greater threat from the same people, who were intent on doing whatever it took to get to the billions of gallons of oil thought to lie beneath the coastal shelf of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). I knew this only because a journalist had told me about a story he’d done on the situation. The Gwich’in, he said, were increasingly finding themselves alone in resisting the oil lobby. Even other Indian tribes, who had already taken oil company money, were pressuring them to give in. So far the Gwich’in had held firm. One reason, he explained, was that they believed they have been following a single herd of migratory caribou for 20,000 years. The Porcupine River herd, numbering about 120,000 animals, was the largest in Alaska. And the place where the oil companies most desperately wanted to drill was the caribou calving grounds along the ANWR coastal shelf. The potential adverse effects of drilling there—even if nothing went wrong—might well mean the end of the Gwich’in way of life. The margin of survival in the Arctic, my journalist friend had explained, is razor-thin. One study estimated that even a 5 percent reduction in caribou births could lead to the demise of the entire herd.
The truth was that I’d been half-listening to the guy for most of this story. The world has never lacked tragedies in the making, and the plight of this particular tribe had no claim on my sympathies. Who were the Gwich’in anyway, and why had I never heard of them? The only Alaskan people I’d ever heard of were the Inuit or Eskimo, and I wasn’t entirely sure who they were, or even whether this group subsumed others. The Gwich’in, it turned out, were Indians of the interior. They were an Athabascan tribe, a name given to a large number of indigenous peoples whose languages had common roots. A little later, however, hearing of my project, the guy mentioned that the Gwich’in he’d visited in Arctic Village were among the last subsistence hunting cultures in North America. He suddenly had my full attention. He went on to say that he knew Charlie Swaney, one of the community’s best caribou hunters. The caribou’s migration to their wintering grounds usually brought them near Arctic Village around the first of September. This happened to be the time of year, before the rut, when the animals were at their healthiest and fattest. It was August when he told me this.
I suddenly become terribly interested in the Gwich’in. Within days, I had called Charlie Swaney. Within a week, I had cultivated him over a number of calls. At last he had given me permission to visit and write about the hunt. And here I was, standing on the edge of the town’s airstrip, knowing little more than that I was in a place where I would be, once again, an outsider. Had I known just how much of an outsider, I’m not sure I would have gone.
The woman finally looked at me like a problem she could no longer ignore, sighed as if her troubles would never end, and said, “Okay, get on.” I introduced myself. She touched but didn’t shake my hand. Her name was Joyce. When she asked, I told her I was staying with Charlie Swaney. I had his name and, as gifts, commodities my journalist friend had said to bring: Marlboro cigarettes, a couple of big red tubs of Folger’s coffee, cash, and two boxes of .270 bullets.
I got on behind Joyce, careful to hold onto the ATV’s frame rather than any part of her. Five minutes later, she let me off by an unpainted plywood house surrounded by fifty-gallon barrels full of trash and junk. Lying amid the nodding foxtail grass were derelict snowmobiles, scrap lumber, and rusted engine parts. Six or eight dogs, each staked before its own tiny house with just enough chain that it could stand on the house’s roof, howled at the intruder’s scent. The dogs were smaller, skinnier, and more hostile than I’d expected. Several—particularly the nearest, missing a good chunk of its right ear—looked like it would do anything for the chance to remove my legs.
“Charlie know you’re coming?” Joyce asked abruptly. Yes, I said. Of course. Why? “Because his best friend died day before yesterday. Albert Joe. Accidentally electrocuted himself. He was gonna go huntin’ with you guys. Now the whole town’s getting ready for a funeral.” With that she gunned the four-wheeler and was gone. No wonder people hadn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet. This was not good. Not good at all. I’d been traveling for two days straight to get to a place where I probably wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms under the best of circumstances. And this was far from that. There was just one problem. It was too late to turn around.
I sat down on a huge wooden spool, the kind commonly seen on construction sites, that was lying on its side in the grass. I had no idea what to do. I waited. I looked at the fox grass that nodded in the wind and at the discarded machinery that didn’t. I tried to ignore the dogs. After twenty minutes or so, an ample woman in a brown Columbia Titanium jacket shuffled out and yelled at the dogs. I had gotten Charlie’s wife, Marion, on the phone several times when trying to reach him. She hadn’t been inclined to talk much to me, but I’d finally persuaded her to tell me her name. “You must be Marion,” I said brightly. I was way out of my comfort zone. In my ignorance, I doubled down on what turned out to be the exactly wrong tactic, a sort of desperate extroversion. I introduced myself to Charlie’s wife and nearly forced some of my welcome gifts on her—a carton of Marlboro Reds and a tub of coffee. I told her that I was sorry to hear about Albert Joe, who turned out to be Marion’s uncle. I later found out that there were basically three families in the town—the Tritts, the Franks, and the Johns.
“Charlie’s sleepin’,” she said. “He went out hunting Wednesday and got back late last night. Ya bring a tent?” I hadn’t. I hadn’t planned on camping. “Ya goin’ ta stay here then?” Marion asked. Her tone was less than inviting. “If it’s convenient,” I said, in a tone so cravenly ingratiating that even I found it offensive. Evidently it was not convenient. She pointed at a house nearby rented by her son, Rocky. Rocky had gone upriver to hunt moose. They were going to need meat for all the people coming in for Albert Joe’s funeral from Gwich’in villages scattered across northeast Alaska and the western Yukon. She told me to put my stuff there and come back in a couple of hours.
The house was one big, dusty room, with a mattress on the floor, a card table and three stools by the window, and a central woodstove but no wood. Pop-Tarts wrappers and Rockstar drink bottles littered the plywood floor. On the far side of the room was a Nintendo Wii connected to a small monitor. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the mattress and lay down. I was exhausted but hyper. I had thought this would be an adventure. I suddenly had no idea what I thought I was doing here.
If nowhere had a middle, this was a contender. Arctic Village is one of the most isolated communities in North America, well above the Arctic Circle on a bend of the east fork of the Chandalar River. The nearest hospital was in Fairbanks, 290 miles south. Fort Yukon, another Gwich’in town and the only settlement of note, was 120 river miles away. To the north lay the first ridges of the Brooks Range, the 700-mile chain of mountains that runs across northern Alaska and into the Yukon Territory. The town sat on land whose status was—and still is—in dispute, but was run largely by and for the Gwich’in. A town council governed. The residents didn’t buy hunting licenses or tag the game they killed. They hunted according to traditional seasons. There were no roads leading here, thus few cars or trucks. In the summer, the river was navigable by shallow-draft motorized skiff, but only locally knowledgeable people attempted it and it was no cakew
alk for them. Basically, everything came by charter plane, and this effectively tripled the price of goods. Gas, at the time, was ten dollars a gallon. A pound of ground beef was six dollars. There was no alcohol, and no running water except at the Washeteria near the school, where residents could get treated water, wash clothes, and bathe. There were no motels, restaurants, or theaters. The one store carried little. Unsponsored outsiders weren’t allowed. And, as I was discovering, just because they let you visit didn’t mean they had to like you.
It was a tough place to make a living, and nearly half the population lived below the poverty line. The only work was seasonal—mostly firefighting and construction. Nobody could afford “store food” year-round. The state’s own website, the Community Information Series, characterized the local economy as “subsistence-based.” Two-thirds of the meat eaten here was bush meat, primarily caribou, at least in good years, when the herd’s migration route brought it close to town. People also ate ground squirrel, hare, ptarmigan, porcupine, muskrat, beaver, lynx, Dall sheep, waterfowl, fish from the Chandalar and Old John Lake, and the occasional moose found farther upriver by hunting parties like the one Rocky had gone on.