On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  We ran back to the cabin for more ammunition and Dad was waiting for us at the door. “Well, you’ve had your fun,” he said, “and now we don’t have any more ammunition to waste. From now on you’re to quit treating those things like toys. They’re supposed to bring in meat for the pot, and once you waste a shot you can never call it back, not even when you might need it real bad. Now go in and clean those rifles good.”

  It was a lesson I never forgot, like a lot of things I learned that winter. And next day when Sidney and I went out to hunt rabbits, I was hoping so hard I’d see one that they kept popping up in my imagination behind every tree and rock. Upriver a little way, we separated, Sidney heading into the bush and me following the beach around a little half-hidden slough. And at the far end I saw six ducks.

  I dropped down, trying to shush the pounding of my heart, and crept up on them, foot by foot. They never saw me. They just sat there in the warm sun until I was close enough for a shot. I got up, scared to breathe, and tried to line one up.

  But the gun swayed so badly that I couldn’t even put the barrel on them, let alone the sight. Suddenly that rifle felt like a ton of lead in my hands, and the ducks got all blurry in my eyes and I just knew they’d spot me in another second and take off. Part of me wanted to yank off a shot and send them scurrying and get it over with. But the other part was remembering what Dad had said.

  I lowered the rifle and looked around for a place where I could get down on one knee and still have a clear shot. Forcing myself not to rush, I got into position again. Now I was better braced and, holding my breath, I put a nice plump mallard in my sight and squeezed the trigger. The whole world seemed to explode, the ducks honking and beating their wings as they took to the air, the shot echoing all up and down the river. And as I stumbled to my feet and ran around the slough, I saw my mallard lying still on the water, not two feet from shore, shot neatly through the neck.

  Oh, the feeling that was! Holding my prize out in front of me, running home as though the frozen ground was made of rubber and bounced me along in ten-foot strides! What would I say when I got there? How should I look? And finally bursting into the cabin and forgetting everything, stammering, looking dumbly at the duck, then at Dad and Old Charlie. And Dad, so proud he couldn’t hide it, saying, “What’ve you got there, son?”

  And finding my voice at last. “It’s a duck, Dad. Meat for the pot.”

  When the river froze and the snow fell, we began scouting the bush for fur signs. We walked eight or ten miles a day, taking a different route each time so we’d know our way around the country, and saw plenty of mink and fox tracks. Dad said it looked good. Then we had to cut dog trails to the places where we planned to set out with the trap lines. This was hard work, chopping trees and hacking the brush out of the way, and it always felt good to stop for some lunch and sip tea by the fire while Dad and Old Charlie talked about trapping and the old days in Alaska.

  When there was enough snow on the ground, we hooked the dogs into two teams and began taking them out on the trail to toughen them up. They’d been tied down for so long that they ran as though we were whipping them, jerking the sleds wildly, their breath steaming on the frosty air as they yipped and pulled in their harness. Once, early on, when we were still testing different kinds of traps, we caught a mink and brought it back, although you could see that the pelt wasn’t prime yet. I guess we shouldn’t have because when Old Charlie was skinning him out, he cut the scent bag by accident and stunk us all out of the house.

  By November first, all the traps were set. A week later we split into two teams, Old Charlie and I taking three dogs, Dad and Sidney the other four, and we went out to see how we’d done. For a first set, we hadn’t done badly at all. From the two trap lines, each about six miles long, we brought back five mink, two foxes and a lynx, and we all had a busy night skinning.

  The winter flew by. Every few days, we’d take off to check the traps, and whenever the catch thinned out we’d move them to a new place. The pile of skins in the cache grew higher and higher. Dad and Old Charlie were mighty happy, for the price of fur was way up in that year of 1928, and since they owed no one a cent, everything they made could go into next year’s grubstake. Meanwhile we had plenty to eat. Sidney and I brought in our share of rabbits, and once Old Charlie shot a fair-sized bear that kept us in soup and meat for a long time.

  Around Christmastime it got good and cold. The thermometer outside our front door dropped to sixty-five below zero and stayed there for more than a month. If the sun sneaked out during the few hours of daylight, it might warm up to minus forty-five, but the sun seldom sneaked out. Weather like that is too tough to travel in, so we stayed close to the cabin. We read that stack of magazines so hard that we knew each one by heart, and we cleaned our rifles until you could practically see your reflection when you looked in the chamber. Old Charlie taught Sidney and me how to make a rabbit snare, which didn’t exactly thrill us: snares saved ammunition, but hunting was about the only fun we had during those freezing cold weeks.

  Late in January it began snowing, and it didn’t stop until it dumped three feet on top of the old fall. The cold spell was over, but now we had to go out and break trail to the trap lines and dig up our catch. That took us ten days but it was sure worth it: we had caught thirty-six foxes, seventeen mink, and twenty lynx.

  By this time, Sidney and I could handle the dog teams well enough to run the trap lines alone. It was on one of those trips that I foolishly followed a marten track and got into serious trouble, proving that there are some things you can only learn the hard way.

  It was a fine morning and when I spotted the tracks I thought what a nice surprise it would be if I came home with a good thick marten pelt. So I put on my snowshoes and staked the dogs and took off, positive I would catch up with the marten before long, as I knew they moved very slowly over the snow. The thing is, I knew just enough to foul me up: the part I hadn’t learned was that when the snow is deep, a marten will burrow into it as soon as he sniffs danger, and you can turn blue waiting for him to come out. That’s what happened to me. I shuffled along in his tracks for more than two hours, around a hill and along a creek that bent back on itself, and just as I caught sight of him—whoosh !—he dove into the snow and that was that.

  I hung around there for a little while—I sure wanted that skin—but when the sun started down I decided I’d better head back. Thinking to save time, I crossed the creek and went up over the top of the hill. Only it turned out to be the wrong hill, and after I’d followed a long, bare ridge for a mile or more, I knew I was pretty well lost. What worried me most was getting caught out there by darkness. I had no food, nor anything to make a fire with, and one night in the open can be a long time in that country. I was pushing on, straining to see a familiar landmark, when suddenly a wolf showed up on the ridgeline, thirty feet in front of me.

  At that range, the sight of a timber wolf—a big, dirty-gray creature, teeth grinning in a bullet-shaped muzzle— is enough to stop you in your tracks. As a matter of fact, the real temptation is to turn around and run. And in the instant that I saw the thing, I did break stride—then forced myself to keep going. For there sprang into my mind the two rules Dad had given me about wolves: when you see one, look for others, for mostly they travel in packs; and when you show them you’re afraid, you give them the courage to attack.

  There was certainly truth in the first part. As I moved skittishly ahead, feeling the cold sweat of fear gathering under my parka, I could see that there were at least twenty other wolves waiting for the leader, the one in my path, to make his move. They crouched on the high ground to my left, and ranged beneath the crest of the ridge on the right, and they never took their shining black eyes off me.

  Without raising my rifle, I kept the muzzle pointed at the big brute in front of me, and my finger circled the trigger. Now we were so close that I could hear his agitated breathing and I know he heard mine. I could surely kill him at this range, but pumping away
with a single-shot rifle, I wouldn’t get many rounds off if the rest of them came at me. So I just kept walking and, at the last instant, the wolf gave ground, grudgingly, snarling at my heels as I edged past him.

  But he wasn’t finished with me, oh, no. He dropped back ten feet or so and began following in my tracks, panting, his big head swinging from side to side. And as he moved after me, so did the pack, swarming around on both sides of the ridge, crowding nearer as their leader got braver and closed the gap between us. I knew it couldn’t go on this way much longer. Now that my back was to him, he was full of fight, barking at my heels and running at me in frenzied little dashes that stopped just short of my ankles. Soon—next time or the time after—he wouldn’t stop. And once he hit me I’d go down—he outweighed me by thirty pounds - and the instant I was on the ground the others would close in and that would be that. And so, thinking the whole thing through and realizing that it was suicide to stop and impossible to run, I decided I’d better have it out with them then and there, while I was still on my feet. I swung back from the waist and at pointblank range put a .22 slug right between the leader’s eyes.

  That’s when I really learned about wolves, how cruel and cowardly they are. The sound of the shot stunned them for a moment. Then, instead of coming at me, they ran at the safer prey—their dead leader. Inflamed and half-crazy, they fell on his body and began tearing it to pieces. I never stopped and, except for that one quick look, I didn’t turn around.

  In a little while I came down off the ridge and doubled back toward the creek. When I found my old tracks, I did what I should have done in the first place: followed them back in the direction I’d come from, retracing my steps over all that wandering way the marten had led me. It was just about dark when I finally reached the sled. Tired and mighty thankful, I tumbled in and hollered for those dogs to take me home.

  The days started to get longer—spring was coming. To kill time, Sidney figured out how to make a violin, copying a picture in one of the magazines. He hollowed out a piece of tree stump for the box, used wire cable for the strings and a willow branch rubbed with spruce pitch for the bow. It didn’t sound too bad, either. Of course we didn’t know the first thing about playing a tune, but it was sort of nice to saw away on the thing and make something that sounded like music.

  I kept looking at a picture of a guitar, and pretty soon I decided I had to have one. There was no tree around big enough for the box, so I cut out a gasoline can, carved the arm from a piece of birch and put them together with some sawed-off ten-penny nails. The thing would only take two strands of cable for the strings, but since I didn’t know what I was doing anyhow, one string would have been plenty. Every day that it was warm, Sidney and I would go down by the bank to “play” our “instruments,” and as far as we were concerned, finer music had never been made. But that was only our opinion. One morning Dad came down to look at the ice in the river and said he guessed it might go out any day.

  “How come?” I asked. It was early spring, and the ice looked solid as rock.

  “With all that noise you’re making, I don’t see how it could stand to stay much longer,” Dad said.

  One day Old Charlie came in and announced that something had been stealing his fish. He thought it might be a bear, but couldn’t tell for sure because we’d all been tromping through the snow around the fish racks and you couldn’t see a track. We moved the dogs close to the racks and, sure enough, that night they set up a terrific racket. But by the time we ran out, the bear, or whatever it was, had gone—and taken another line of fish with him. The dogs hadn’t scared him one bit. This went on for three nights, and Old Charlie kept getting madder and madder, mostly because of the nerve of the thing, but also because we were running pretty low on fish by this time. On the fourth night, Old Charlie said he was going to take his rifle and sit outside, even if it took until daybreak.

  Dad had a better idea: “Why not let the kids make a big snare trap? Set it about three feet off the ground, and if it’s a blackie, he should put his neck right through it.”

  Sidney and I went to work. We used quarter-inch cable, and put the trap at the edge of the brush where it came closest to the fish racks, and at just the right height. Then we all went off to bed. This time our visitor didn’t come until the sky was beginning to lighten. As soon as we heard the dogs, we jumped into our boots, Old Charlie grabbing the .30-.30 as we rushed outside. At first all you could see was what looked like a windstorm in the willows —they were really flying around. Then, in the middle of all the action, we made out a thrashing mountain of brown fur. Old Charlie didn’t waste any time. He pumped two shots into it, and suddenly everything was quiet. But when I started running toward the brush, Dad stopped me:

  “Take it easy, son! You want to be sure with a brown bear.”

  A brown bear! Sidney and I had caught a brown bear in our snare! The biggest animal in Alaska—the biggest meat-eater in the world, I guess. Because of his huge size, we’d snared him, not by the neck, but by the front paw—he’d gone to shove the trap aside and got caught.

  Old Charlie moved up and put another shot in his head, then we all crowded close. That bear looked enormous to me, one of his paws as big around as my whole body. Dad said he’d weigh in at a thousand pounds, which is a lot of brown bear. And it’s a good thing Old Charlie hadn’t wasted any time with the rifle: the bear had fought the cable so hard that he’d unraveled it in two places and would have busted free in another minute, and mad at the world. We spent the morning skinning him out, but he smelt so strongly of fish that none of us would touch the meat. The dogs liked it, though.

  Waiting for the ice to go out, we decided to build a poling boat. We went back up on the hill where the timber was tall and broad around and we built a saw pit. Then we chopped down a good straight spruce, peeled it, and whipsawed the planks we’d need. In a couple of weeks we had a fine poling boat. Dad said it would be a big help when we loaded up to take our skins downriver.

  Actually, we were going to need it long before then — and it was a good thing for all of us that we had it. Well into May there was still a lot of snow on the ground and on the river ice, and that was a bad sign. Carrying all that snow, there was every chance that the ice would jam when it finally went out, and that the river would flood.

  One afternoon, we heard a great rumble upstream. It was an angry sound, like thunder rolling at you out of the sky. Dad and Old Charlie, who knew right away what it was, ran for the bank, and Sidney and I followed. Half a mile up the river, a blue-white wall of ice had been shoved fifty feet out of the water, massive chunks under terrific pressure, groaning against one another as they were forced up from a winter-long lock on the river. The ice was going out, and it was going fast.

  “Get everything out of the cabin,” Dad said sharply. “Put what you can on the roof. Put the rest in the cache.”

  We ran. And while we packed blankets and cans of beans out, Dad and Old Charlie tied the poling boat to the cabin and began piling stuff into it. And even as we worked, the ice came thundering down the river past us, reaching high above our heads, and geysers of water shot up over the bank. We knew we were in for it. The dogs whined and pulled on their chains, and Old Charlie undid them two at a time and tied them in the boat. Then the ice jammed up just below the cabin, a heaving dam building from bank to bank, and the river came tearing over the land in a wild rush.

  “Into the boat!” Dad yelled, and Sidney and I jumped in from the roof of the cabin and hung on for dear life.

  The water surged under us, lifting us, and fingered out toward the woods. It swirled around under the cache and knocked over the fish racks, and still it kept rising. Dad clung to the line, the boat pitching madly, until we were level with the top of the cabin door. Then he cut loose and shoved us into that wild torrent, he and Old Charlie paddling toward the woods for all they were worth. Chunks of ice slammed against us, and the dogs howled, and Sidney and I crouched down on trembling knees and didn’t look at e
ach other.

  Dad was steering for the winter trail back of our clearing, it was the only open area in all that drowned land for as far as we could see. Trees thrust just-budding crowns out of the wild water, and caught masses of ice in their branches and in grinding whirlpools around them. Dad held to the trail—it seemed so crazy to be riding among the treetops—and pushed on by the outpouring river, we made it back to the hills that once looked down on all that land and were now lonely little islands poking up out of the great flood.

  We stayed there for eight days, living off the few supplies we’d brought along, and sleeping on the cold ground. Old Charlie wanted to take the boat back to the cabin and get some more stuff, but Dad said it was too dangerous. Then the jam broke and the water went down and we picked our way back. The few things left in the cabin were a soggy, silty mess. Of all the stuff we’d stashed on the roof, only the guitar and fiddle and a case of navy beans were left. Sick at heart, we walked to the cache—and it was gone, gone with our meat and the whole stack of furs. Gone was a whole winter’s work.

  Dad and Old Charlie didn’t say a word. They just walked around a little, not coming close to each other. Then they went back to the cabin.

  It took three days for the ice to clear out of the river. Then it was safe for us to paddle downstream to the slough where we’d propped the gas boat the autumn before. No one said much about it, but we were worried that it might have been damaged by the flood. The slough was still choked with ice when we got there. Uprooted trees floated in the shallow water, and the beach looked as though it had been torn by a great windstorm. And there was not a single sign of the gas boat. It was gone, too.

  That night, Dad and Old Charlie talked the whole thing over and made some tough decisions. We had to try and find the gas boat and, somehow, we had to put together enough of an outfit to see us through the next winter. Since we couldn’t all fit in the poling boat on the three hundred-and-fifty-mile trip down to the Yukon, Old Charlie volunteered to stay behind with the dogs. He’d live off the land until we got back, he said, and spend the time tidying up the cabin and building a new cache and racks. It was the bravest thing I ever saw a man do. When you’ve spent a year trapping, coming in out of the bush becomes an obsession: you dream about the taste of store food and the warm feeling of swapping stories with the other men, and I sure felt sorry for Old Charlie when Dad and Sidney and I pushed off from the bank and left him standing there, all alone.