by Bill Heavey
Gwich’in people would later tell me they felt weak and got sick if they didn’t get wild meat regularly. At first, I didn’t understand this. I was from the “a calorie is a calorie” school of thought. But the Gwich’in, as they themselves said, lived in two worlds. Yes, they had satellite TV, Oprah, and the CBS Evening News. The boys in low-slung jeans who hung around the one-room “youth center” had the same sullen look as the kids in Fairbanks, or in Arlington for that matter. At the same time—and this was what so often made them impenetrable to me—they were also only a generation or two removed from nomads who lived in skin tents and maintained miles-long “caribou fences” to drive the migrating animals into corrals built at intervals along the fence, where they could be more easily killed with spears. Some of the fences were believed by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists to have been maintained over countless generations. As for their craving for wild food, there were many reports dating back to the nineteenth century of Gwich’in men and women in missionary hospitals sending word back to their families, pleading with them to bring their native foods so the patients under the white man’s care could regain strength.
While I understood this intellectually, I never really got it at—the pun is inescapable—a gut level. It was more than simple preference or custom. It was as if caribou combined both communion wafer and daily bread. As a modern American, I simply had no cultural correspondent. I did come to a new understnding of the word “caribou.” In addition to the animal itself, caribou was also that for which there was no substitute.
In the eleven days I would spend here, I would come to see that for the Gwich’in the physical act of hunting was everything. In its simplest form, it meant getting out on the tundra; observing a few caribou twenty-five miles away through a spotting scope; trying to guess, from their heading and their manner of travel, where they were going and whether you could beat them to an ambush point along that route in the next day or two; and then killing them. The meat itself was just the hunt’s most obvious product. But at another level, it was hunting—the mustering of knowledge and skill that had no end, more of which had been forgotten than was known by anyone alive—wherein they discovered, defined, and affirmed themselves as Gwich’in. This, I would come to believe, was at least as essential as the meat.
I was told by several people that if you overlaid a map of the range of the Porcupine River caribou herd on a map of Gwich’in traditional homelands, you’d note their congruence, except for one place. That was the caribou birthing grounds, where the oil companies promised their exploration and drilling would have no ill effects. The Gwich’in called it Izhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, “the sacred place where life begins.” It was and had always been off-limits to the Gwich’in. No Gwich’in was thought ever to have seen it, let alone entered it. Certainly no one in Arctic Village had seen it. Charlie Swaney would tell me, “That place belongs to the caribou. It’s where they take their first breath, first step, first bite of food. The forage there is better. There are few bears or wolves. The winds keep the flies away.”
The Gwich’in refused to take part in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, under which the United States paid nearly $1 billion for Alaska Native lands that had been taken over the years. As a woman told me one night, “We’re not conquered. They never conquered us. They think they bought us, and they didn’t even do that. Now they want to buy us again. Money, it goes away as soon as it comes. That land is what has always kept us alive. We can’t sell that.”
I finally met Charlie that evening at his house. Five people were cutting up caribou on a plywood board at a table and sorting it into piles, which were then bagged and taken away. On a tarp on the floor lay whole legs, some with the fur still on, as well as other hunks of caribou waiting their turn beneath the knife. A TV blared from a ceiling mount, but no one seemed to be watching. Charlie shuffled into the room from a back bedroom, looking as if he’d just woken up. He was forty-five, with the black hair and high cheekbones common among Gwich’in, but taller and lankier than most. He touched my hand and accepted a box of Winchester .270 Ballistic Silvertip bullets from me with a slight smile. “I like these 130-grain bullets,” he said quietly. “Flat-shooting.” He said that he had meant to call and tell me not to come on account of the funeral but that he had lost my number. He’d been out hunting and had gotten the news himself only upon returning last night. The hunters had taken six bulls on the first trip and one bull two days ago. There had been two bulls traveling together, but fog rolled in before they could get the second. With navigation impossible, they had to spend the night up on the tundra. But Charlie had forgotten the tent poles and—since there were no trees “on top,” as the tundra above the village was called—they’d spent the night inside the collapsed tent and ended up getting almost as wet as if they’d had no tent at all.
“You can feel the whole mood in the village change when they see that meat come in,” Charlie said. “People know they’re gonna eat good.”
I said that I was sorry for his loss and that I wanted to be the least of his worries. We would talk about hunting after the funeral. “He was looking forward to meeting you,” Charlie said of Albert Joe. “He just got careless.” His voice was empty. He shook his head and looked away.
The death of Albert Joe—a public, profane, silly, and beloved man with a weakness for Spam, a habit he’d picked up during his time in the U.S. Navy—had rocked the village. But it hadn’t hit anyone else as hard as it did Charlie. Albert Joe was twenty years older and had been everything one man can be to another: best friend, best man at Charlie’s wedding, father figure, hunting buddy. Lately, I learned, Albert Joe had been spending most of his time trying to wean the village boys off video games. He wanted to get them up into the country to learn what Gwich’in boys had always learned—to hunt, fish, and run a trapline; to read the weather in the clouds; to triangulate their location by distant peaks on the endless steppe of tundra; to see a caribou and, by noting how it moved, know what it was thinking and where it was going. The thread that tied the Gwich’in and the land together for millennia was coming unwound here as surely and inexorably as it did anywhere else when ancient ways contended with modern ones.
In the last decade or so, Charlie told me, times had been hard in the village because the Porcupine River herd had changed its route. The animals hadn’t showed up in any significant numbers since 1999. That was the last year villagers set up their traditional September camps on the ridge four miles away, just below the tundra. Many children had never experienced those camps, formerly a highlight of the year. Charlie blamed the bad hunting on changed weather. “The winters have been getting colder, the summers are hotter and wetter. There’s something wrong with the earth, and it’s telling us the only way it can.” In the mouth of anyone from my world, these words would have sounded pretentious. Charlie made them sound like common sense. The good news was that this year was looking better. Meat had already been brought into town. There had been numerous sightings, by hunters with spotting scopes up on the tundra, of more caribou on the mountains. Already there were tents being erected on the ridge.
I asked what people did when the caribou didn’t show up. “There are moose upriver sometimes, which they didn’t have in the old days,” said Charlie. “We eat more store food, more noodles. We set nets under the ice on Old John Lake for whitefish, pike, and lake trout. Sometimes you can catch grayling upriver. But it’s not the same without caribou. Fish is better than store food, but it doesn’t make you strong like caribou.”
“The land is turning into a bowl of water,” said a woman at the table. “We’ve had so much rain that the river’s eroding the banks. It’s getting wider.”
“The willow is growing tall,” added a man who had not spoken until now. “Twenty years ago, it never grew above your knees, and now it’s over your head some places!”
“Tell him about the polar bear,” said another
woman.
Polar bear? Polar bears were coastal animals. Arctic Village is a good 100 miles from the sea, with a mountain range in between. The bear had first been sighted up on the ridge two weeks ago. Since then it had been seen three more times outside town. Charlie had seen it through the spotting scope he kept by the window. He’d watched as it ran down a long slope and up another, a distance of six miles, all of it at a run. He thought it was probably trying to escape the same insects that sometimes drove the caribou mad. But he’d never seen a caribou run that far without stopping. “If it can run like that, it can run down a caribou easy.” These people were accustomed to large predators, having lived with brown bears and wolves for millennia. The bears encountered around town were usually the young, curious males, and could be dangerous, especially if they smelled meat. It was understood that no one left the village without a rifle. (Indeed, when I walked up to the ridge camp one afternoon a few days later, mostly for the exercise, I encountered three teenagers—two girls and a boy—just outside the village on their way down from the ridge. “Oh, good,” said the boy, unslinging the rifle on his shoulder and handing it to me. “You can give this back to my mom. She was worried about not having a gun in the tent tonight.” He handed me a bolt-action .30/06 with open sights. “Chamber’s empty but the magazine’s full. You know how to shoot one of these things?” I told him that I did. With that the three resumed walking and chatting. (I found out later that children are taught to shoot well before they write their age in two digits.)
People were fearful, both of this particular bear and of what its presence implied. Not even any of the elders could remember ever having heard of a polar bear near town. Several people at the table vowed to shoot it if it came any closer. To Charlie, the explanation was obvious. “They’re having trouble finding seals, and they’ve gotta eat. So they’re following the caribou now.” He left unsaid a far bleaker possibility that I felt sure was on everyone’s mind—that this might be the start of a whole shift in the natural order of things.
Charlie said he had to take care of a few things but that I should follow everyone else down to Albert’s house, where members of his family were hosting dinner. (In fact, for the three days leading up to the funeral, nearly every breakfast and dinner I ate was held at one of two houses: Albert’s or that of Gideon, his brother.) I walked down and took my place in one of the lines passing by outdoor tables loaded with Gwich’in and store food: fried caribou, caribou stew, and caribou soup. A roasted caribou head—teeth and all—sat in a tinfoil roasting pan. The older people seemed especially fond of it and took their time picking the choice bits of meat from the bones. I helped myself to a tiny piece. Nearby were platters of caribou ribs and salmon casserole with macaroni noodles. There were cases of Pepsi and 7-Up, bowls of Doritos and pretzels, a jar full of red licorice strings, a plastic cup full of cigarettes, a pork roast, doughy store-bought rolls, and heavily iced cakes, most of which were still encased in plastic, as if the wrapping were an important part of the presentation. There was a plate of sliced grilled Spam, which sat untouched, a sort of memorial to Albert Joe. As the line moved, I ate the little piece of meat from the head, which prompted a smile from the woman next to me. “You like caribou eye?” she asked. I smiled and nodded. The meat was surprisingly chewy and satisfying. Upon further discussion, it turned out that I was eating not the eyeball itself, but the “membrane behind the eye.” Another woman, obviously mistaking me for a sophisticate, pointed to a bowl full of blueberries suspended in white goo and proudly said, “That’s Eskimo ice cream.” Then, as if spilling a dinner party hostess’s secret, she whispered, “It’s supposed to be blueberries and whipped caribou fat. But we usually don’t have that much fat to spare. Especially now, so early in the season. So we use Crisco.” I smiled and plopped a spoonful onto my plate to be polite. The blueberries were small and flavorful. But no fruit could disguise the unctuousness of good old Crisco. Another woman, Lorraine Trimble, told me that she had picked the berries. I told her how good they were and asked how much she had picked this year. “Nineteen gallons,” she said proudly. “I’m down to nine gallons now. My kids like to eat them with milk and sugar. And we give them to the elders. Cissy and I”—she inclined her head toward another woman—“we go out and pick all day, all night. We stay near town, but at night it’s spooky, especially with that polar bear around. People get mad at us for going. They come out with guns and guard us.”
While I had been standing in line, a young mother carrying a toddler in her lap drove up on an ATV. The boy clutched a toy assault rifle with both hands and took it with him. Now, ten minutes later, I saw one of the elders, a little peanut of a man in blue coveralls and a baseball cap, emerge from the house. I’d seen him several times around the village. He radiated some kind of self-possession and humility. Whereas most adults passed the town’s young men—the alienated ones in shades and baggy jeans—without a glance, this man always spoke to them. They couldn’t maintain their masks around him, couldn’t help smiling and joking back when he raised his arm as if to hit them. He was carrying the child’s toy gun, which he bungeed to the ATV frame, then went back inside. It was never too early to teach a boy that you didn’t enter someone else’s house with a rifle.
The next morning I encountered Charlie carrying a gas can. “Go down to the river,” he said. The hunting party had evidently gotten two moose and had radioed that they were coming in. He was getting gas for his Argo, an eight-wheel ATV and the only vehicle in town that could handle the tundra. Charlie owned the only one here, but it seemed to be quasi-public property. People contributed toward its gas and upkeep.
The east fork of the Chandalar ran wide, shallow, and muddy past the opposite end of town. I walked to a bank above the river and sat among the others, all of whom were smoking. A man checking a twenty-foot net strung across the mouth of feeder creek let out a whoop when he discovered a whitefish caught in it. He retrieved the large, wriggling fish and banged its head against a boat gunwale. A clutch of women appeared as if by magic, talking excitedly. One cleaned the fish deftly with a small knife on a board laid across an oil drum. The roe, liver, fat, and intestines were set aside. The women crowded around, each wanting a taste of the roe. There was enough for a spoonful each, and they giggled and joked with one another while waiting. One offered me a taste from the communal spoon. It tasted pretty much as I’d expected—mild, fishy, oily, granular, and still cold from the water. It could have done with a bit of salt and lemon juice, but it packed a lot of calories. I guessed it would be a welcome change if you’d been eating only caribou. The woman who had cleaned it wrapped the fish in foil, wrapped the liver separately, and pushed the fat to one side. Then she carefully slit open the intestines, wiped them clean, and wrapped them up. “We call this chiksoo,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she meant the intestines or the whole fish. I was about to ask when one women shushed us. In the distance we caught the mosquito hum of outboards.
The Chandalar is full of oxbows and Arctic Village had zero ambient noise, all of which meant that despite the sound the boats were still far away and wouldn’t arrive for another two hours. When the first skiff finally came into view, carrying one man and two moose—quartered and wrapped in their own hides—it barely managed four inches of freeboard under the load. Just behind came a boat carrying three more hunters with their rifles, tents, kitchen gear, and close to a dozen big jugs of outboard gas. All of the men’s clothing and hands were brown with dried blood. Only their faces were unmarked. Although they were gaunt and tired, there was no disguising the hunters’ pride. Friends called out and they answered laconically. There were hands touching the boats before they touched shore. The hunters off-loaded nothing, not even their own guns. They simply stepped off and the crowd split before them as they walked up from the landing. Charlie had brought a plate of sandwiches. Others had brought trays of Pepsi. The men collected sandwiches and drinks almost without breaking stride. They looked as i
f they wanted nothing in the world so much as to lie down and sleep.
The town’s young men formed a bucket brigade to off-load the meat, grunting as they lifted big pieces of dismantled moose and passed them from shoulder to shoulder, heedless of the blood, and onto the tarp-lined back of the Argo. In less than five minutes the landing was empty of people. The only sign of what had just happened was the dirty red tint of the bilgewater in the skiffs.
In the fifteen minutes it took me to walk back to Charlie’s, ten women had already received the Argo and its load and were breaking down moose quarters on two makeshift plywood tables outside the house. There were more women at the table inside. Alice Smoke, seventy-five, opened a bone the size of a baseball bat with a saw, scooping out marrow with her knife. It quivered, ivory-colored against the knife’s almost black, pitted blade. “Better than Chinese food,” she said happily, and ate from the knife. Then she offered me a sliver. It was surprisingly mild. I’d expected the fatty richness of beef or veal marrow, but this was astonishingly light and smooth. There was an unexpectedly pristine quality to it, not unlike an oyster.
In the meantime, a joint that had been making its way around the table reached us. “You smoke?” one of the women asked, something in her tone suggesting that she feared I might disapprove. “Sure, why not?” I said breezily and took a ceremonial toke from what had become a finger-burning roach. It tasted like crummy pot, but I inhaled and passed the roach to Alice, mostly as a courtesy. I couldn’t quite picture her smoking dope. And even if she did, the roach was little more than a burning cinder. I thought these things primarily because she had the lined face and cheerful attitude of the babushka in Thunder Cake, one of my daughter’s favorite picture books. Alice, it turned out, had obviously not read Thunder Cake, because she took the roach nimbly and proceeded to suck every last bit of smoke from it. Like nearly everyone else here, Alice could probably have kept up with any rapper working today, dopewise. I suddenly realized that the spindly plant by the window, which was the only houseplant plant I’d seen, was marijuana. I knew that many villagers visited Fairbanks regularly. That must be where the dope came from. I was later told that you could count the people in town who didn’t smoke—Charlie was among them—on one hand. Virtually all of these same people were adamant that alcohol remain illegal. “All the guns around here, a small town where you have to get along with people you may not like,” one man said to me later. He shook his head. “If people got drunk, there’d be a lot of fighting.”