It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  Nearby, another elder, Maggie Roberts, was busily chewing something. She cut and offered me a piece of leg tendon. “Babiche, we call it,” she said, still chewing away happily. “Good for constipation.” The taste was meaty but faded quickly, leaving me with tendon that I chewed for twenty minutes without appreciably altering its structure. Finally, I discreetly palmed it and dropped it into a trash can. The babiche must have brought back memories, because Maggie began talking of how when she was little, her parents still traveled seasonally, following caribou, moose, Dall sheep, small game, and fish. Her father hadn’t wanted to live in Arctic Village or any settlement, she said. Once alcohol came, there was trouble too often. Mostly they were living in seasonal cabins by then rather than traditional wooden-frame skin huts. “If we found a place with a lot of caribou, we’d stay there,” she recalled. “You’d make a rack of dry willow and hang meat on it. We’d make a fire underneath it and smoke it. We didn’t have tarps in those days. We’d make a roof of spruce bark so it wouldn’t get wet when it rained.” When they’d smoked the meat enough to preserve it, they’d move again, the family’s dogs carrying everything: food, blankets, tents, the various parts of their stove, the caribou skins the family slept on. Dogs were seldom used to pull sleds. “That didn’t happen until after the white people came. The Russians, I think, were the first ones here. We traded furs with them. Before that we didn’t have pots and cups.” She said this the way someone in my world might mention having run out of eggs or hot sauce. I checked myself again, aware that these people and I lived in the same world but had arrived here by very different paths.

  Sometimes, she continued, the men would go up in the mountains to hunt. “The dogs carried the meat down, maybe forty pounds each, in leather packs on their sides. The men would send them down from the mountain. ‘Go to grandma,’ they’d say. And they’d come to us. And the women would send them back with tea or tobacco if we had any. ‘Go to grandpa,’ they’d say. Just those words. And the dogs, they knew what it meant, they’d do it.” I checked myself again. What could it have been like to be people so closely attuned to the animals we keep as pets, to set one a task like that and know it would do it? I knew only that I didn’t, couldn’t, know. She worked as she talked, guiding her knife through a haunch, the haunch growing ever smaller as the pile of boneless meat in the middle of the table grew bigger. I was hoping she would tell me more. She did. It was as if the babiche had unlocked her memory. One time her mother made new boots for her father. He had been wading waist-deep out in the river, tending his fish traps. The water had been cold and he’d had to come out frequently to dry off and warm himself before going back in again. Her mother decided that she needed to make him better boots. “We didn’t have rubber in those days,” she said. “I mean that we knew what it was, but we didn’t have any rubber ourselves. So my mother, she took skins she’d tanned. It was the skin from the caribou’s lower leg, which is the strongest part, you see. She sewed them good, real tight, with babiche. And then melted the moose fat, you know, and just worked that in for a long, long time to waterproof them. After that, he didn’t get wet.” My mind reeled a bit. I knew that I was very tired. I couldn’t quite believe that I was hearing this, that a tiny woman was telling me of hunter-gatherer life when she was a child; of dogs that carried heavy loads miles up or down mountains at a word; of a woman who tanned leather, sewed watertight boots of caribou skin, and waterproofed them with moose fat.

  And there was more. She just vaguely remembered going hungry once or twice when game was scarce. It wasn’t famine-hungry, she said. They hadn’t had to eat their dogs or anything like that. But she remembered that she and the other children got only a bite or two of ground squirrel each and some broth. Their mother kept the cabin warm, told them to drink water, and not move around too much. Maggie said she herself must have been very small because she could barely remember it. “But my father, oh, he was always talking to us about the famines in the old days. About coming across a tepee and there being no sound and of the whole family lying inside like they were asleep. But dead. ‘So you have to learn to do things for yourself, to hunt and fish and trap,’ he’d say. In famines, you know, people would try to eat anything. They’d even boil old hides. Usually they couldn’t eat that, but they would try. My parents, when they’d butcher a caribou, they’d throw the hooves with some of the leg attached over a branch or a tree. That way it could be found, even in the snow, if there wasn’t anything else to eat. You could make soup from that and it would keep you alive.”

  She described her favorite dish when she was a child. “We’d get some caribou bone marrow, some ground meat, and bone grease. That’s the stuff that floats to the top after you boil the pounded-up bone joints for a long time. You skim that off and set it aside. First you whip up the raw marrow. It starts out red, then turns pink, and finally white. You have to whip it a long time, you know. Then you add the bone grease. You keep stirring that, whipping it up over the fire. After a while it looks almost like whipped cream. And then you add in the cooked ground meat until it’s all mixed up real good. Then you let it cool off, just like a cake, and cut it up into slices. That was a real treat.”

  I stood watching this small woman quietly chewing moose sinew as she cut meat. She was tiny not only physically—maybe five feet tall—but also in her aspect. She had no need to call attention to herself or to be counted. I thought of the men I’d met who had large egos and taught “survival skills” and could scarcely disguise their hunger for recognition. And then I looked at this tiny woman who knew more about animals, plants, privation, survival, hunting, fishing, trapping, and dogs than they or I ever would.

  The only male fool enough to hang around a group of busy women, I was soon pressed into service loading cardboard boxes—which fell apart under the meat’s weight—and helping deliver them to houses around the village. I didn’t know the name of the woman I was following and knew by now not to ask if she didn’t say. I rode behind her on her ATV and carried boxes into houses and put them in the chest freezers most people in Arctic Village had. Some people were home, some weren’t. I had no idea who got meat, who didn’t, what kind, or why. And I never saw the matter discussed. There was obviously a system that everyone knew and understood, for I never saw any hint of discussion or dissent. It was known, just not to me.

  I was slowly waking up to how completely I’d misread these people. I’d been trying to break the ice rather than warm it. My eager handshakes and attempts at engagement had been intrusive, uncouth. Direct questions were proof of my crassness. Direct questions about sensitive topics like what the Gwich’in “believed in”—questions I’d actually asked—were proof that whatever advantages “Englishmen” had over Indians, such as firearms, matches, and immunity to disease, we had the manners of wolves. And when my gregarious bluster hadn’t worked, I had doubled down on the only tactic I had, which was the very thing working against me. Listening to Maggie Roberts, I realized that what I should have been doing all along was trying to make myself small.

  The Gwich’in believed that there was a time when men and animals lived in peaceful intimacy. It took me a while to realize that this was not a folktale or metaphor. To the Gwich’in, this was historical fact. Only after the communion between people and animals was severed had the human race sorted itself into different groups—some fished, some farmed, some traded. The Gwich’in, it was agreed, were the ones who followed and hunted the caribou. Gwich’in people and the caribou had a special connection, a partial knowledge of each other’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Every caribou was thought to have a bit of human heart in it. And every Gwich’in had a bit of caribou heart. Although the original bond had been broken, that sense of ­relationship—to animals generally and to caribou specifically—was still operative in these people in a way it hadn’t been for me and mine for so long that I couldn’t begin to grasp what had been lost.

  Charlie told me at one point that it was ba
d luck to shoot a raven, which could bring bad weather—or worse. It could cause sickness to come. It could make game to go away. While ravens might steal food from you, they were fundamentally on your side. “They’re very smart birds,” he said. “They’ll tell you sometimes if the weather’s changing. They’ll squawk in a way that means that caribou or other animals are coming.” Likewise, Marion, up on the ridge smoking caribou meat on a rack of dry willow sticks loosely covered with a blue tarp to trap the smoke, told me that she didn’t shoo the birds known as camp robbers away from the meat. (The bird, the gray jay, aka “Whiskey Jack,” is a “scatterhoarder.” It chews its food into a ball coated with sticky saliva, causing it to adhere to the place where it is stored, often a fissure of bark or the underside of a tuft of lichen.) “There’s a story about them we tell. This man was out in the bush and he got lost and was starving. So these two camp robbers come to him and start singing nearby. And so he goes to them and they fly to the next bush and sing some more. And that’s how they led him back to his village. So we don’t mind sharing food with them because they helped us.” I had no idea how deeply Marion, who repeatedly tried to sell me matchstick-sized joints of pot for ten dollars, believed this. My few attempts to inquire more deeply were invariably deflected, as if such things shouldn’t be subjected to the blunt instrument of everyday conversation.

  Maybe that deflection was necessary because, in the broad sense, engagement with the natural world was the heart of what it meant to be Gwich’in. In my world, love of the outdoors was channelized. One developed an “interest”: birding or kayaking or backpacking. For these people, the daily act of securing your own food—and the wide awareness of every part of the natural world that task required—were what it was to be alive. There was no division of “work” and “play.” There was only living. One of the men I was to meet later, Jonathan John, would come the closest to describing this full-on engagement. “My grandma said we used to live just like animals, because animals were all that was in our brain.”

  Four days later, one day after the funeral, we were finally going hunting. I rode up to the camp in the back of the Argo with Charlie and two other men, Jonathan John and Roy Henry. The plan was to go out “on top” the next day. “Up until a couple of days ago, the bulls’ antlers were still in velvet, still soft,” Charlie had told me. “Until their antlers are completely hard, their big concern is protecting them from injury. You understand? They know they’re gonna need those antlers to fight with other males during the rut and to fend off predators. They’ll go off by themselves in the densest cover they can find.” Now their antlers had fully hardened. I didn’t know how he knew this, but there was no doubt in his voice. “Oh, now they’ll go anywhere,” he said, sounding as excited by their sudden mobility as if it were he whose antlers had suddenly hardened. Right now, Charlie said, was the time to hunt—while the bulls were fattening up for the rut, traveling widely in search of the best grazing. This weeks-long mating season wouldn’t start for more than a month. By then the bulls would be so focused on mating that they would cease to feed, their flesh becoming so stringy and rank with hormones that not even the dogs would eat it. By the end of the rut, just as winter was closing in, the average bull would have lost 30 percent of his body weight.

  At camp that night, I fell in love with ground squirrel, much to the consternation of my hosts. I had approached the fire, where I saw more cooks than usual tending to something there. Seeing me, Marion had said, “You want to try ground squirrel, eh, Bill?” It was a breezy challenge and she all but winked at the others. I didn’t know what ground squirrel was but I knew that I’d better accept. Sure, I said. She reached down to the ground beside her and produced a recently gutted rodent. It was lacking a tail but considerably larger than the squirrels at home. She tossed it unceremoniously into the fire. The air instantly reeked of burned hair. She rolled the thing from side to side using two sticks, then flipped it out onto the ground, evidently to cool. When it finally stopped giving off smoke, she picked up the blackened, hairless lump in one hand and, using the back of a knife, gingerly scraped the singed fur from the warm carcass. That was it for prep work. I flashed on Martha Stewart dressed in a crisply ironed chef apron holding a singed ground squirrel in her hand, wondering how the hell she was going to fill up the rest of the show. Marion dropped the squirrel into a pot of boiling water with a handful of salt. “Takes about an hour,” she said.

  Ground squirrels were like Ball Park Franks—they plumped when you cooked ’em. Though unlike hot dogs, this thing had a head. The only unblackened parts of the head were its yellow incisors, which became more prominent as flesh burned away and the head and body became bigger. The squirrel looked angry in death, as if ready to inflict one final bite.

  After an hour, Marion poured off the water, twisted off a leg, and plopped it onto my plate. The fat alone was extraordinary, nearly half an inch thick. The squirrel looked as evil as ever but the smell was appetizing. I put a forkful of the dark meat in my mouth. I couldn’t believe how sweet and rich it was. It really didn’t need anything but salt. I ate some more. It was unlike anything I’d ever had, but great barbecue was the closest correlate. “Marion, this is great!” I said. She exchanged looks with the women. This was not what they had expected. One woman joked, “He’s becoming Indianized.” Another teased me. “You’re like the elders,” she said. “They love ground squirrel, so we usually take them some.” I protested that I, too, was an elder, but evidently they were not entirely happy that the joke had backfired. Despite my pleas, I was offered no more of the delicious meat.

  We did not go hunting the next day. Nothing up here happened in a hurry—the Gwich’in themselves joked about “Indian time.” Morning coffee and cigarettes gave way to more coffee and more cigarettes. Charlie went back into town to fetch someone who had radioed up wanting a ride to camp. Just before leaving, he saw the look on my face. “When you hurry is when you make mistakes,” he explained. I nodded, indicating that I got it. Mistakes in this world, even small ones, could be fatal.

  The next morning, after pancakes with syrup, fried caribou, and coffee, it was time for . . . more cigarettes. Nearly every adult smoked, and when the village ran short of tobacco it became the chief topic of conversation. Then another pot of coffee. Finally, just after noon, Charlie, Jonathan John, Roy Henry, and I loaded up. We each had a sleeping bag, rain gear, and extra layers. It was clear and in the fifties, but the weather “up top”—the treeless tundra that rose only a few hundred feet higher than the village but was an entirely different world—could change especially fast. Everyone but me had a rifle. Charlie had the tent and had remembered the poles. We had food in a cooler and some logs. “Not much to make a fire with on top,” he explained.

  We finally started up toward the tundra, passing caribou antlers, some half sunk into the soft ground, which was carpeted with moss, sedge, and lichen. Caribou antlers were proudly displayed by hunters in my world, but I’d seen none on display anywhere in Arctic Village. “We don’t pick them up,” Charlie said over the Argo’s growl. I asked why—wincing when I heard the bluntness of my own words—and Charlie shrugged. “That’s just how we do,” he said. “Some of these antlers,” he flicked his head at a set turning the color of old grass, “are older than I am.” A few years ago, he told me, there had been a woman from the outside who, despite the objection of her hosts, collected antlers and brought them into camp. Then, still ignoring the Gwich’in, she took them to town. They told her she had been unwise and would be even more unwise if she took them away. She flew home with them. “Last year, I heard that she took sick,” he said. “And then she died.” He shrugged. “Some people don’t believe it when we say not to take them.” I was almost sorry I’d asked. I’d spent time in remote areas of foreign countries, including Iran, Mongolia, and Nicaragua. None of them had felt anywhere near so alien. None of those landscapes had the power and presence I was feeling here. I wasn’t just in another cult
ure. I was in another world, one governed by forces I was ignorant of. I did know that these forces scared me. I tried to sound casual when I said, “Charlie, just so you know: I’m not messing with any antlers.” I couldn’t tell whether he nodded in reply or was just jolted by the particularly hard bump we hit at that instant.

  After half an hour, we had reached the ridgetop and descended into the tundra, passing a small lake on our right. We stopped and climbed to the saddle between two hills and then up the taller one, stopping just below its summit. We found a windbreak there, hundreds of carefully piled stones. There was no telling whether it was recent or ancient. We sat in the lee of the structure and looked out over the endless steppe of tundra. It was the largest swath of earth I’d ever seen, literally hundreds of square miles of land rolling gently away until it rose to the first of three or four waves, each taller than the last, of the Philip Smith Mountains, part of the Brooks range. The tundra was luminous with the fall yellows and reds of berry bushes—blueberry, cranberry, salmonberry, bearberry—along with the variegated greens of willow, sedge, and grass. These plants topped out at three feet. It had probably looked like this 5,000 years ago. Land that had never felt the blade of a bulldozer or plow, never been broken by roads or roofs, never cut by wire or pipe. I could see three distinct weather fronts battling for dominance: on my left, rain, a gray curtain that blocked the horizon; in front, a netherworld of fog; on my right, shafts of bright sunshine from an unseen source. Between the fog and sun, fifteen to twenty-five miles away by my eye, was a short, wide rainbow more vivid than I’d ever seen. It rose from the ground like the blade of a sword someone had stuck there. It felt like God’s workshop, a place where He tinkered with the weather. I could have drunk it in all day.