When I got back to my camp, I set the barrel up on two gas cans and dumped twenty-five pounds of sugar, ten pounds of cornmeal and two yeast cakes into it. I put a lantern under it to keep it warm. Then I brewed some tea and sat down to watch it.
On the third day it finally began to work and I tore myself away long enough to start building the still. Ten days later it was still bubbling and I’d run out of meat so I had to leave it to do some hunting. On the fifteenth day it looked ready. All the time I was running it off my brain was clicking out figures—if I got three gallons, I could fill the twenty-five catsup bottles and all the jars I’d found around the cabin, and at five rat skins a bottle . . .
Man, I’d be rich!
In my enthusiasm, I put up another barrel. It was half finished before I realized that I didn’t have so much as a tin can to put the brew in. I fiddled around trying to make a small barrel, but it didn’t hold water any better than a fishnet. Finally an idea came to me. I went out to the woods and cut down a birch about eight inches thick. Then I sawed off a two-foot length and took it back to the cabin. Augering, chiseling and carving, I got the thing hollowed out, made a plug for the end and let the whole works sit in water for a couple of days so it wouldn’t soak up any mule. Now I had a homemade keg to carry three more gallons. That would fill thirty or more catsup bottles, and at five dollars a bottle . . .
By now the ice was out of the river. I loaded the Ark and headed downstream for Cutoff at full tilt, counting money in my head all the way. It didn’t take long for the word to spread that Jimmy Huntington was in town with white mule for sale, and now I was everybody’s long-lost friend. In something less than an hour, I’d got rid of all twenty-five catsup bottles and two of the jars. In exchange, I had a fine pile of muskrats, nearly a hundred and fifty of them, all skinned and dried.
I had planned to stay over and sell the mule in my keg to these same men, but they got so drunk on the first batch that I figured it would be a week before they were in shape to start drinking again. Besides, I didn’t think there were that many more skins left in town. So I decided that in the morning I’d go down to the mouth of the Kateel River. There were always lots of hunters camped there, and I’d have no trouble trading off the rest of my brew. I bedded down for the night but couldn’t fall asleep for a long time because of the racket. I lay on the deck of the Ark listening to those men cursing and carousing, and thinking how foolish they were. Every now and then you’d hear the scared voice of a woman, begging her man to come home.
Just after daybreak, when the drunks were sleeping it off, I went around town and picked up all the empty catsup bottles. Riding down to the Kateel, I refilled them from the keg and was ready for business when I pulled into the hunters’ camp. They were glad to see me, too, although they tried to buy my mule for three skins a bottle. There was no argument. I had the mule and they had the muskrats and they went and got them, five skins a bottle.
They had a big tent pitched on the bank. A bunch of them were playing poker there, and they asked me if I wanted to take a hand. I thought: pretty soon they’ll be blind drunk and won’t be able to tell an ace from a deuce, and I’ll walk out of that camp with everything but their mukluks. “Sure,” I said, and threw fifty skins into the bank for chips.
But a funny thing happened. Those hunters were too smart to get drunk. They worked on three bottles of mule, and that’s all. They were saving the rest for a celebration when they got back to their villages, they said. And they had plenty to celebrate, because they were also too smart to draw to inside straights and three-card flushes, and they cleaned me barer than a bear’s belly in spring. In three hours I was stone broke, without a muskrat skin to my name. Not one.
Sick at heart and disgusted with myself, I started back upriver. By the time I got to Cutoff I was tired and really wanted to stop, but I was too ashamed. I kept on going, all the way back to Hogatza, thinking, I’m sure, to get that barrel working again and brew up another batch of mule right away, at least enough to pay for an outfit for the winter. But I kept thinking of the foolishness and fighting that came out of that barrel, and I kept hearing those women in Cutoff calling their men home, and I began to wonder if maybe losing everything was all a man could expect when he made everything on other men’s weakness in the first place. So I took the still outside and smashed it to little pieces with the ax, and that was the end of my short career as a bootlegger.
In 1936, in the spring of the year, I met a girl I liked well enough to marry. Her name was Cecelia Olin, and her people fished in a camp near the mouth of the Huslia River. According to the Native ways, we were both pretty old to be still single—I was nearly twenty and Cecelia was past sixteen and her father invited me to move in with them on the spot. I told him I appreciated the offer but would rather wait another year: that would give me one more trapping season to accumulate some money, so I wouldn’t have to come to my new wife dead broke. Also maybe I could arrange for the minister to ride upriver and marry us in the right way.
But as it happened, that next winter turned out to be the worst for fur I could ever remember. There was practically no mink, and my entire catch consisted of about seventy-five muskrats, which were as many skins as anybody else brought in, either. Furthermore, I never did make contact with the minister, so when I came out of the bush in the spring things weren’t any different for Cecelia and me than they’d been the year before. But now she said she did not want to wait anymore, that if we had no money she would eat fish, the same as I did, and that’s the way it was. Her father gave us a big potlatch and everybody shook my hand and Cecelia said, “Well, I guess we’re married.” And when we woke up in the morning we were.
We planned to go down to the old fishing camp below Nulato. At least my seventy-five skins would pay for a summer outfit, which was a lucky thing: old Pop Russell had died that winter, and people said the new trader wasn’t so good-natured about credit. We hung around Nulato for a few days. Cecelia wanted to get started, but I had a certain feeling and told her to take it easy. And sure enough, the minister came down the river one fine morning and I rushed off to buy a fifty-cent wedding ring and had him marry us properly. Then I felt better.
We were happy in the fishing camp. The salmon were running as thick as always, and whenever we were in real need of groceries or anything, I could bundle up six or eight bales of dried fish and take them to Nulato to trade. It was on one of those trips that I heard how the Territory was hiring men to start work on an airfield just outside the town. I thought about that for a long time. I had never worked for wages, and I didn’t much like the idea of it: a man ought to have only one boss, himself. But summer doesn’t last forever. Unless I could put together enough money to buy a trapping outfit, we faced some tough times. Besides, Cecelia was going to have a baby.
One evening, an old Native and his wife came paddling up the river. We hollered for them to stop, and Cecelia made tea and some nice duck stew for them. The man began to talk about the old days in Alaska, and it reminded me of the stories Dad used to tell. I could have sat there listening to him all night. Then he said that times were changing, that people weren’t satisfied any more to stay in camp and hunt and fish and eat what the land provided. “The young people all want to hang around the towns now,” he said. “They want to eat the white man’s food and drink mule.” He patted my arm. “It’s good to see a couple that still knows how to live off the land. That’s the best life.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt a little guilty because I surely wasn’t all the old Native believed I was. Anyway, I think I was beginning to see that times were changing even more than he imagined. The people had had a taste of store food and they liked it, and was that really so bad? They wanted electric lights and radios and gas kickers for their boats, too, and the young ones would never be satisfied any more to shoot a bear and live alone all winter eating off his ribs. And in the morning, when the old Native and his missus went paddling up the river, I told Cecelia that I was g
oing to take that job at the airport.
It wasn’t too bad. I started out swinging a pick, like all the others, but one day the oiler broke down and I poked around and finally fixed it. The boss was so happy he said I could be the driver of it. I went riding up and down the strip, dumping oil on the stretches they’d cleared and flattened. For this they paid me seven dollars a day, seven days a week, so you can see the money really piled up.
Cecelia liked it, too. We had moved into town and she made some nice friends. She sure wasn’t happy when it got to be September and I told her to start packing for the trip back up the Koyukuk. “They’ll be working on the field until snow falls,” she said. “Why do you have to quit now?”
I didn’t know exactly what to tell her. That since I’d been twelve the first hint of autumn had always turned me north? That trapping was still all I knew and that I had to be ready to trap when the season opened?
“I’ve got enough money for my grubstake,” I finally said. “I have to be back up at Hogatza before freeze-up.
She stomped around for a while, but there was nothing else I could think of to say that might cheer her up. Maybe next year would be different, but I didn’t know that for sure, and meanwhile it was this year and I had to go.
We got to Cutoff in the middle of the month, and I left Cecelia with her parents. I said I would try to make it back before the baby was born, but I could tell that she wasn’t counting on it. Only my father-in-law understood: “You will lose a good week’s trapping if you come down in December. Besides, what can you do for her? She has her mother.”
I was glad to have that advice because, as it turned out, there was plenty of fur that year, and I didn’t want to leave my traps. It was March before I got back, and by then my baby daughter was two months old. They had named her Christine, and when Cecelia put her in my arms I was afraid to breathe, she was that tiny. Then I didn’t want to let her go.
After a while Cecelia said, “You told me you’d come down before she was born.”
“We’re a family now. We need money,” I said. “I figured it was more important to build up a stake for us than to waste a lot of time mushing back and forth visiting.”
She nodded. I think she understood.
In June, we went a hundred and fifty miles up the Hogatza to the mouth of Caribou Creek. I had heard about some abandoned gold diggings that were open for new staking, and since there was supposed to be a heavy salmon run up that way, it seemed as good a place as any to make a summer camp. Now I was really looking to put together some cash. I loved the trapping life but it was beginning to look as though it was over for me—how could a man go off and leave his wife and daughter every winter? And so my father’s old dream of running a little trading post somewhere slowly took hold of me. All I thought about was getting enough money to start.
I spent long hours putting up drying racks and emptying the fish wheel. One day, when the smokehouse was almost finished, we heard a gas boat coming up from downstream, and I sent Cecelia to put up some tea. It was the bishop of the Episcopal Church making his annual trip to the camps and villages along the river. We were sure glad to see him, for now the baby could be baptized. Afterward, he gave Cecelia and me Holy Communion, and we had a nice tea. Then he was off again on his long, lonely trip.
We ate well that summer. There was plenty of bear around the camp, and since fresh meat doesn’t keep more than a few days in the July heat, there was no sense in saving any. We ate the best of the salmon, and one day I shot a couple of geese, and Cecelia made a good stew. It was fine living—except for the mosquitoes. We had to keep a net over Christine.
When the salmon run was past its peak, I walked back out to the creeks. Gold colors showed almost every place I panned, but I was a long way from getting excited. I knew enough from listening to Dad to realize that a man working alone couldn’t take enough out of these creeks even to pay for his labor. The only chance to make a dollar was to get some big mining outfit interested and sell out. I strolled around, taking plenty of time, and staked the eight claims I was allowed, four for me, four for Cecelia. When I got back to camp, I wrote a letter to the Commissioner in Fairbanks telling about my claims, then got in the boat and went forty miles downstream to the mouth of the Hogatza where the mail boat went by once a month or so. I stuck a pole into the bank, hung a gasoline can on it and put the letter inside. I sure hoped they noticed it.
A couple of Eskimos came up the river in a canoe one August afternoon and we made a lunch for them. Things had changed a lot between the Eskimos and Indians since my mother’s day. We didn’t exactly consider ourselves blood brothers, but at least we didn’t shoot each other on sight. These two, a boy of fifteen or so and an older man named Henry, were on their way home to Kobuk, where the Pah River bends north of the Arctic Circle, and they still had a long portage to make. I asked them what they were doing in Indian country, and they said they’d come down to see how the hunting was.
That ticked me off. I know it’s a free country, but I didn’t like the idea of somebody scouting the game and then bringing back a whole pack of Eskimo hunters. But what really got me mad was the older one’s bragging about what a good shot he was with that Luger pistol tucked in his pants. “I killed a bear with it yesterday,” he said. “One shot.”
I asked him where the meat was. I didn’t see it in the canoe. He shrugged. “We left it. No sense packing meat when there’s so much around.”
I just looked at him. I think the younger one knew what was on my mind because he got nervous and edged away from the fire. Finally I said, “The game in this country was put here to feed the people—the Indians. We don’t kill it just to prove what good shots we are, and nobody else is going to kill it for no reason, either.” I stood up and he scrambled back, as if he thought I was going to hit him. “This party’s over, Mister. You can make your camp down on the beach, but you better be way upriver when I wake up tomorrow.”
Cecelia was afraid he’d try to hurt us during the night, but I knew better. I’d seen men like that before—Eskimos, Indians, and white men—the kind that do everything with their mouths. When you make them shut up they’re finished. I felt sorry for the boy, though.
In the morning they were gone. But we weren’t done with them yet, not quite. In that hour of the evening when the mosquitoes are still, Cecelia and I were sitting on the bank smoking and watching the last of the salmon struggle up the river. Suddenly I felt her stiffen beside me and when I looked upstream I saw why: the Eskimos’ canoe had just come around the bend, and the boy was paddling hard toward our camp. There was no sign of the other one.
I got up and started for the beach. Cecelia tried to catch me. “Take your rifle,” she said.
“I don’t need any rifle. They’re in trouble.”
They sure were. Henry, the older one, lay in the bottom of the canoe more dead than alive, his clothes all torn, and his body, too, what you could see of it. Most of him was caked with dried blood. The boy’s face was white as snow, but he kept his voice steady when he asked if I would help them. “He went into the woods after a wounded bear,” he said.
He didn’t have to tell me that. There is a certain look to a man, or what’s left of him, when a bear gets through mauling him. This was it. “Let’s pack him up to the bank,” I said.
He groaned when we fetched him out from the bottom of the canoe. He tried to talk, but it was hopeless: his mouth was torn open from the left corner to the socket of his left eye, and his tongue just flopped around in that big, bloody opening. Cecelia took one look, then shuddered and turned away. I told her to boil up some hot water.
We laid him on a piece of canvas and I cut his clothes off to see if there was any sense in prolonging his agony. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a man who’s tangled with a bear is to speed him on his way. I had a hunch that maybe that was what the Eskimo was trying to ask me for when I lifted him out of the canoe.
His right arm was laid open from the shoulder to the
wrist. His right thigh was torn, too, and full of holes where the bear had bitten him. There were deep claw marks at the back of his neck. Then the bear had really dug in and all but torn the scalp from his head. It looked as though he had a couple of broken ribs, too, but that would have to wait.
When the hot water was ready, I stirred a cup of table salt into it and began washing the wounds. That’s all we had by way of medicine, but I figured it didn’t much matter: if God weren't with this man, all the medicine in Fairbanks wouldn’t help him. When I’d cleaned him as well as I could, I poured more salt into the deeper wounds. He moaned, but that wasn’t the half of it. I had to stuff it into those holes in his thigh, and my fingers went all the way in, and he screamed and passed out. That was the best thing for him since I hadn’t even started to sew up his face.
I was going to use caribou sinew, but when I went to get some Cecelia told me it would rot in his skin and come apart. She said to use the hair from his head and she gave me a bone needle that she used for sewing moccasins. But she didn’t come out of the tent.
I pulled a bunch of hairs out of his head, taking care not to rip the rest of his scalp off. His hair was just right, nice and thick, and I threw it into the boiling salt water, along with the needle. Then I took a good long look at his face and the top of his head, trying to figure out the best way to sew him together. All this time the boy hadn’t said a word, only watching and helping me whenever he could. But as soon as I pulled those two flaps of mouth together and stuck the needle through, I lost my helper for good. He clapped a hand over his mouth and ran for the bushes, and I could hear him being mighty sick.
I sewed away until the sun was low on the horizon, and I couldn’t see too well anymore. Then I called for Cecelia to bring the coal-oil lamp. She wasn’t happy about it, but she stuck right with me, even when she had to hold the lamp close enough so I could see to take the last few stitches inside his mouth. Altogether it had taken nearly four hours. Henry wouldn’t be any beauty—if he lived— but I had done the best for him that I knew how.
On the Edge of Nowhere Page 9