Not that we had an easy job. We’d have to poke into every slough and stop at every village looking for the gas boat. And though we had no money and nothing to trade, still we’d have to bring back a grubstake or face a mighty lean winter. One thing we decided on: to go on down below Nulato and do some fishing so we wouldn’t have to pay for dog food.
After rowing all day, we got our first good break. A fur trader tied up near the mouth of the Hogatza told Dad he’d heard that a badly damaged gas boat had been pulled off the ice by some Natives at Koyukuk Station. He said he was headed that way and would take us along. We loaded our stuff aboard and tied the poling boat on behind and shoved off. Dad and the trader took turns steering, and since there is practically no darkness that time of year, we made it to the Yukon in three days. Next morning, we found the men who had beached our boat. Dad told them he had no money and promised to come back and pay them the next spring. But they said they didn’t want any pay; they only hoped he could fix the boat up. Alaska used to be that way.
That old boat looked in sad shape. The cabin had been knocked off and a big hole punched in the side, and the decks were awash with a foot of muck. To me, it seemed beyond repair. But Dad went right to work shoveling the mud out, and Sidney and I pitched in. When we’d made a temporary patch for the hole, we dragged it into the water and paddled downriver to Nulato, twenty miles away, where we hoped to get the old Model T motor running again.
People in Nulato were glad to see us again, and felt sorry when Dad told them about our hard luck. It seemed that all the would-be mechanics in the place were down at the landing trying to help us get that motor started. But even after it was all cleaned up, the best they could do was get two cylinders working, and no matter what they tried, the other two wouldn’t kick over. For three days the men took turns at it, but no one could figure out what was wrong. Once I asked Dad if he thought it might be out of time, but he told me to hush; these men knew all there was to know about motors.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I kept watching them work, wanting to change those spark-plug wires so badly it hurt, but scared to open my mouth. Finally, one of the men looked up and, teasing, asked me if I knew what the trouble was. It came blurting out of me like water freed by a broken beaver dam: “I think it’s out of time. I think if you change the plug wires—put number one where number four is—I think it’ll work.”
He grinned at me. “Go ahead, son, try it. You can’t do any worse than us experts.”
Dad, who had been talking to one of the men, came over to watch. My fingers felt like claws as I fumbled those wires around. But when it was done and they cranked the motor, it took off like a clock, and those men slapped their knees and laughed and laughed. And Dad put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed real hard. After that, and to this very day, people would come get me to fix their engines. Sometimes they’d give me a dollar and sometimes not, but it never really mattered. I just like to work on engines.
Sidney and I wanted to stay around the village and have some fun, but the salmon were running and Dad said we had to get going. We spent nearly a week building a fish wheel, which is a rig that sits in the water with eight or ten scoop nets poking out past the rim. The current turns it, like a windmill, and the nets scoop up the fish going by and dump them in a big trough. When it was finished, we stuck it out in front, tied the poling boat behind, and went downriver about twelve miles to a nice camp. We pitched a tent there and spent the next couple of days building racks and a smokehouse.
Then the salmon hit. I had never seen anything like it, the way they came up that river like a red tide, so thick it seemed you could cross on their backs, thrashing for swimming room, jumping high out of the water to clear the deadheads, fighting with their last strength to get back to the lakes where they were spawned, to lay their own eggs there, and to die. Each dip of the wheel brought up four or five fish, and with all three of us working as hard as we could, we were barely cutting and hanging them as fast as the wheel was catching them.
One day, when we’d been there about a week, Pop Russell, the trader from Nulato, pulled in. He and Dad just visited for a while, then he sort of cleared his throat and said he’d been thinking about us and how we were going to make out come winter. He wanted to stake us to an outfit—“Strictly business!” he said: he ran a big string of dogs, and if we’d bring him a load of dried fish, he’d consider that a down payment. We could settle up when we came down with our furs the following spring. Dad reached over and shook Pop Russell’s hand hard, and smiling the way he hadn’t smiled since breakup. He said to Sidney and me, “Boys, we’re in business again!”
Now we really worked! The smokehouse was going night and day, and when the racks were full we built more. By the first of August we had Pop’s fish all bundled and three thousand for our own dogs. We loaded up and went back to Nulato, where Dad said that we’d put in a hard year and deserved a little fun. “I’ll be tied up here a week or so putting the outfit together, so you two find some boys your own age and have a good time.”
We sure did. At first I was ashamed because my clothes were so raggedy, but when I saw that the other kids in the village weren’t much better off, I never gave it another thought. We swam in the river and played a sort of soccer game with a caribou-hide ball, as many on each team as wanted to play, with no time limit and no holds barred. That game will sure keep a person in shape. A young Native who’d been to school in Anchorage taught Sidney and me to pick out a couple of tunes on our “instruments,” and the people would gather around us in the evening and clap their hands and sing. We slept in different houses—everybody made us welcome—and it got so that I liked town living pretty well. I said to Dad: “People aren’t too bad, once you get to know them.”
The chill of autumn was in the air by the time we left. Dad had built a new pilothouse on the gas boat, so we slept aboard that first night. When I woke up, I felt like jumping clear out of my skin—my body itched from a million fierce little prickles and bites. Sidney was already up and scratching madly, and Dad had gone out on deck and torn off all his clothes. “Get out here, you two!” he hollered, and we hustled on deck where he made us strip down bare. I’d never seen him so mad. “People aren’t too bad, eh?” he kept muttering. “They’re lousy. That’s what they are!”
And finally Sidney and I got the drift of what he was saying: sleeping around from cabin to cabin, we’d collected a fine assortment of lice. Now we stood shivering in the cold air, naked as the day we were born, while Dad dug a couple of quarts of coal oil out of the kit. Then we went ashore and he poured it over our heads. “Rub it in good!” he said. “Everyplace!” And when that was done he ordered us into the river.
“Oh, no!” we begged. The water was so cold that ice was already forming along the shore, but Dad wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“In!” he roared, and the three of us went tiptoeing into that frigid water, duck bumps, chattering teeth, and all.
Only when we’d scrubbed ourselves raw would he let us back on the boat. We put on some clean clothes—boy, did that feel good!—and left the old ones right where we’d thrown them on the beach. Those lice must have missed the nice warm bed we’d made for them, but I could still imagine them biting me a week later.
Dad let Sidney and me do most of the steering going back upriver. Not long after we passed the Huslia River, the motor began to knock and smoke badly. As soon as it cooled, we tore it down and found that the number four connecting-rod bearing was burned out. We didn’t have a spare, and Dad was worried that if we horsed around trying to get one up from Nulato the ice would catch us before we made it back home. I looked at that bearing for a long time, then said I thought I could make a new one from the liner. Dad shrugged, as if to say he’d try anything, and I went to work. Four hours later I had it fitted on the crankshaft, and when we kicked the motor in, it ran as smoothly as ever. “You might amount to something someday,” Dad said with a smile.
We stopped at H
ogatza to clean Mother’s grave. As we were leaving, I spotted the old three-horsepower outboard almost hidden by grass down at the landing. It was all rusted and beat up, but I asked Dad if I could take it. He said sure, although it wasn’t worth anything. From then on, I worked on it every spare minute I got, even on the trip upriver. I was to fiddle with that thing for a whole month before I got it to kick over. Then, all excited, I stuck it on the poling boat and went chugging upriver. I couldn’t have gone more than a mile before it spluttered and smoked and conked out altogether. It would never run again either, so all I got for my work was a mile ride. But I sure learned a lot.
We were ten days making it back to camp. When we pulled around the last bend, there stood Old Charlie on the bank, waiting, just as if we’d only gone downriver a couple of miles to do a little fishing. Gosh, we were glad to see him! We pumped his hand, and the three of us tried to tell him everything that had happened, all at once. And Old Charlie just stood there nodding, as though he never doubted that we would do all we’d set out to do— find the gas boat, bring back fish for the dogs and an outfit for winter. And when we finally ran out of breath, he said, calm as could be, “I’ve been scouting the hills. Signs look pretty good.”
They went too fast, those years. Little by little things got more complicated, and the people I loved best dropped out of my life. Old Mom was first to go. One spring a Native came poling up the river to tell us that she was failing and wanted to see her grandsons one more time. Dad took Sidney and me right down to Rock Island Point where she lived. We stopped in Hughes to buy her a blanket, and when she saw it tears came to her eyes and she couldn’t talk. Finally she said that she would have them put that blanket in her coffin, so she would have it always. Then she gave Sidney and me a pair of fur boots and moose skin mittens that she’d made. She held our hands to her mouth for a long time before we left, telling us to be good boys and always to remember our mother. We stopped in Rock Island Point again on our way back from Nulato that summer, but she had already died.
By the 1930s, the price of furs had dropped to practically nothing. Pop Russell wouldn’t even take them in trade—he’d send them outside and give us whatever they brought, which wasn’t much. People said that they were having a depression in the States, and that no one could afford to buy furs anymore.
Still we got along. There was always meat for the pot, and the cabin stayed snug and warm on the coldest nights. We had no rent to pay, no fancy clothes to buy. We had no use for a clock. We lived off the land, and the land was the only thing we had to answer to. As long as we stayed tough and smart, we’d make out.
But then everything seemed to go wrong. Dad got sick with TB, and though he tried to stick it out with us, taking care of the cabin and doing the cooking while we ran the trap lines, you could see him get weaker every day. Finally he went to live in the pioneers’ home in Sitka where he got good medical care and everything he needed. “I’ll be back,” he said to Sidney and me when we brought him to Nulato to catch the steamboat. “As soon as I’m better we’ll be together again. Maybe we can raise a little money and start up a trading post somewhere. A trapper’s life is too hard.”
Sure, we told him, whatever he wanted to do. But we knew he’d never be back, and we were brokenhearted because we loved him so much.
We trapped together for another couple of years, Sidney, Old Charlie, and I, and then the trail got to be too much for Old Charlie, too. He went downriver looking for wages, but times were worse than ever, and all the way to Fairbanks he couldn’t find work. We heard that he died there, some said of starvation.
That same year—it was 1932—Sidney met a Native girl at Koyukuk Station and wanted to get married. I told him to go ahead, not to worry about me. He said we could still go trapping together, the three of us, but I knew better than that. So after the wedding I wished him luck and took off. I was sixteen and on my own.
Chapter Four
Living on the Land
SIDNEY AND I SPLIT the outfit fifty-fifty—guns, traps, and dogs. He took the old gas boat and I took the one we had built the year before, a big, broad-beamed job that we called the Ark. I was supposed to get the cabin, but all kinds of trappers had moved into that country, cheechakos mostly, and that was too much company for me. So I packed my gear up to the old trading post at Hogatza. The fur signs were good there, and it didn’t take much to put the store in shape for living. I didn’t even have to chop firewood: I just tore the old cabin down and burned that.
There were a lot of geese that year, and I ate well. Of course it’s against the law to shoot geese, but any time a white man who’s never set foot out of Juneau or Fairbanks makes a law for the North country, you can be pretty sure it will be a foolish one. For the Native people, getting enough to eat is mostly what life is all about. They have always shot geese, in season and out, and so have I. I have never taken more than I could eat in a few days. I have never killed any game for “sport,” only to bring in meat for the pot or to defend myself.
People say that with all the wildlife in Alaska no one should ever go hungry, but they do. In a dry year, animals will move a hundred miles or more, and that’s a long way to be tracking game. And even when conditions are just right, nature has ways of protecting its creatures. They’re smart. Every hunt is a contest, with no guarantee that man is going to win out.
Take beaver. They’re nice and fat in the winter and make a wonderful meal. But if you get one, you’ve really earned that meal. Beavers build elaborate rooms and tunnels under the ice, and it takes a pen set, a kind of trap, and a lot of hard work to trap them. But when you’re hungry and go hacking through the ice looking for food, chances are they’ll slip away down an escape tunnel while you’re freezing on the bank and wondering where they are. If you shoot one it had better be a big one: the others will stay down until the ice is out of the river.
A moose will keep you in meat for a long time, but that’s a problem in itself. One day that first year I was alone, before the ice had come in, I was nine or ten miles upriver in a canoe when I heard a moose calling. I pulled in by the bank and, after a little while, I answered him. Pretty soon something moved in the brush up ahead and this big buck stepped out on a sandbar right in front of me, looking around as though he owned the whole world. I dropped him with one shot, then paddled up to where he lay, the biggest darn moose I’d ever seen in my life. The more I looked at him the bigger he got, and I knew I’d have my work cut out for me hauling him back to the cabin. When I got his head cut off, I could almost straighten up between his horn spread: it would have been a prize for some trophy hunter from the South 48, but it was a pain in the neck to me.
It took me five hours to skin that thing out, and then I couldn’t load it in the canoe without swamping. Finally I cut two logs for outriggers and fastened the canoe between and drifted on home. By the time I’d got it packed up to the cabin and hung, I’d sworn that if I ever shot another big moose again he’d have to be knocking at my front door.
As it turned out, all the meat was put to good use. Next morning two white men came downriver in a gas boat. They said they were taking the census, which they explained meant counting all the people in Alaska, and asked me a lot of questions. They kept looking at the moose meat, so I told them to take what they wanted. I gave them tea and, when they were getting ready to leave, asked if they would haul a quarter of the moose down to my Uncle Hog River Johnny at Cutoff. I offered them a can of gas for their trouble, but they said it was no trouble. I watched for a long time as they pulled away, wondering why anyone would want to know how many people there were in Alaska. Next thing they’d be delivering mail in the winter!
Uncle Johnny was sure glad to have that meat. He was still talking about it when I took the dogs down to Cutoff to visit him at Christmastime. Next fall, he said, he was going to teach me how to hunt bear, and that was as good an exchange as I’ve ever made.
Bear are worth all the trouble it takes to pack them home. The meat is delicio
us, and the ribs make a good, thick soup. The only thing is, you have to know what you’re doing or the bear you’re stalking may come up behind and tap you on the shoulder—which would leave you short one shoulder.
No two bears are alike. The brown bear is smartest, the grizzly meanest, and the blackie most unpredictable. Sometimes you can pass as close as twenty feet upwind of a black bear and he won’t pay the slightest attention. Another time he’ll track you for miles. Once I was paddling down the river about thirty feet from shore, when a blackie came charging down the bank, jumped in and came after me, thrashing through that water like a hippopotamus. I really leaned on that paddle!
Late one afternoon, while I was setting traps in a little thicket, I heard a terrific roar and looked up just in time to see a cow moose galloping right at me. I yelled for all I was worth and the moose swerved out, missing me by inches. Right behind her came a brownie, in full charge. I dived out of his way—and kept right on going back to my camp while he was busy polishing off that moose. Next day, when I went back to my traps, I took a different route, walking way around to come out at the thicket on the downwind side. And sure enough, there stood the brownie, waiting for me alongside my trail: he’d had a whiff of me as he tore by the day before, and caught the same man-smell from the traps, so he figured I’d be back. He’d have been all over me, too, and before I ever saw him, if I’d come back the old way. I sure admired his brains, and I didn’t really need the meat. But I did have to get to my traps, so I shot him.
On the Edge of Nowhere Page 7