I got the boy to help me fix his bedroll on the ground and lift him in. We put a mosquito net over him, and sat there for a little while listening to him struggle for breath. The boy asked me if I thought he was going to die. I said I didn’t know, but that there wasn’t anything more we could do about it, either way.
“I’m sorry I ran away,” the boy said.
“Forget it. Next time you won’t.” I asked him how it had all happened.
They had come on the bear about twelve miles up the river, he said, a big blackie slapping salmon up on the beach. Before the boy could stop him, Henry had that Luger out and shot the bear in the side. The bear went roaring into the woods, and Henry went in right after him, not even waiting until the bear had stiffened up some so it couldn’t move so fast. The boy had to tie up the canoe, then followed with a .22. He heard the bear charge and Henry screaming, and he’d run toward them, firing the rifle in the air and yelling as loud as he could. It worked. When he reached the place where his partner lay, the bear was gone, scared away. But the damage had been done. Henry was ripped and mangled as only a bear can do it, and the boy dragged him back to the canoe and made for the nearest help, our camp.
“Even among my people he is known as a big mouth,” the boy said now, looking at the ground. “But he is one of my people. I thank you for him.”
“Let’s wait to see if there’s anything to thank me for,” I told him. “Anyway, there’s one good thing: I don’t think he’ll be coming down this way to hunt anymore.”
Very early in the morning the boy shook me awake. “I think he is dying now,” he said.
I went out to have a look. Henry’s breath was coming in noisy little rasps. He seemed to be choking and was burning up with fever. I put my arm under his shoulders and raised him as much as I dared. Then I sent the boy for some water, and managed to get a couple of spoonfuls into him. Once he’d swallowed whatever was backed up in his throat he breathed a little easier.
I made the boy some breakfast. His eyes were dark with strain and exhaustion, and I guessed he’d stayed up all night, watching his friend. He wanted to know if I thought it would be better to put Henry in the boat and take him down to the Yukon, maybe to the hospital at Tanana.
“That’s a three-week trip,” I said, “and he wouldn’t last three days on the river. His only chance is to stay right where he is.”
We built a lean-to over him to keep the sun off. The boy squatted right by his side, hour after hour, wiping the sweat from his face and shooing the mosquitoes off. On the third day the fever broke and Henry opened his eyes. “My chest hurts,” he said.
I was surprised that he could talk. His face was so swollen that you couldn’t tell where his mouth ended and his eye began. I tore some strips of canvas and bound up the broken ribs. Then he wanted to see himself in a looking glass. I told him he looked better than before but that he’d have to wait until I took the stitches out to see. Cecelia cooked up a fish broth and fed it to him, and he seemed to enjoy it.
On the fourth day we helped him get to his feet so he wouldn’t stiffen up. He could move pretty well with only a little support. Next day I pulled the stitches out and gave him the looking glass. He didn’t look so bad: the scar was nice and straight, except that I didn’t get the corner of his mouth quite right so that he seemed to be forever grinning at something. But he was satisfied.
“Where’d you learn about sewing up a person?” he asked.
“By working on you,” I said. “The hard way. Same as you learned about hunting bear.”
He had nothing to say to that.
In another ten days he felt strong enough to travel. Of course he was in no shape to make that portage over to the Pah, so I told them to go downriver and have the doctor at Tanana make sure I hadn’t done anything wrong. When they left, Henry shook my hand and said, “If you’re ever in my country, I’ll try to thank you the right way.”
At the end of August Cecelia and I went back to Cutoff. There was no letter waiting for me with good news about my claims so all I could do was go back up to the winter cabin at Hogatza and trap fur again. This time, though, Cecelia said that she and the baby were going with me. “It can’t be any worse than staying alone,” she told me.
We went by dogsled not long after freeze-up, Christine all wrapped in blankets and fur. It wasn’t too bad: it never got much colder than twenty or thirty below, and there was a fair number of mink around. When the trapping tapered off we decided to go back to Cutoff for the Christmas potlatch, and to stock up on some supplies.
But there was bad news waiting for us at Cutoff. The store had burned down and, except for some fresh meat the men brought in, there was no food in the whole town— no flour for bread, no potatoes or canned vegetables and, worst of all, no milk for the babies. Nor would any come in until breakup, unless someone went and got it.
That night Cecelia and I talked it over. I remembered that the Eskimo boy had told me about a trading post not far from Kobuk. If I got some other men to go with me, we could take three or four dog teams up and bring back the things people needed. It was probably a hundred miles each way, but with good weather we could do that in a week. Meanwhile, Cecelia and the baby could stay with her parents.
There was no shortage of volunteers. None of us had ever been up in Eskimo country, and this seemed like a good opportunity to look it over: we had skins to trade, and since the one called Henry owed me his life, his people ought to be pretty nice to my people. Early next morning five of us driving four teams headed out. We didn’t know the way so we just followed the Dakili River north, then crossed over the divide to the head of the Selawik. That was the end of the timber country. Up ahead the snow and the slow rolling hills stretched out to the sky. It seemed as though you could see forever, and there was nothing to see, only that endless white land. We were just about at the Arctic Circle now and figured it was fifty miles more to the Kobuk.
We camped under the last trees and cut enough firewood to carry for the trip. In the morning, when we’d been on the trail about three hours, we saw our first caribou. They were less than half a mile away, a good-sized herd of them, moving slowly across the hills in front of us. I led the teams into a hollow and told three of the men to keep the dogs quiet and out of sight. The other man and I grabbed our rifles and started trotting toward the herd, bent low to the ground so they wouldn’t spot us. We didn’t know the first thing about hunting caribou—you just don’t see them in our part of the country—but we meant to give it a try because the people in Cutoff would need all the fresh meat they could get.
When we were still three hundred yards away, the herd turned in our direction. We hit the ground and, lying prone in the snow, lined them up in our sights. I thought: this is too good to be true. It was. Whether the dogs had caught the caribou smell or were excited by something else, I never did find out, but all at once you could hear them howling clear across the tundra. My partner and I each had time for one quick shot before the herd swerved to the west and took off like a brown blur on the snow.
We stood up to see if we’d had any luck when, suddenly, the howling was right on us and we spun around to see two teams of dogs flying by, sleds and all. They were hell-bent for those caribou—and the caribou were hell-bent straight down the Selawik Valley with not a tree or a rock or a bush to slow them down. I have never seen game travel so fast—and the dogs were gaining on them!
Our troubles had only begun. Down in the hollow, we could hear the other men fighting to hold the rest of the dogs in, and we ran for all we were worth to give them a hand. We had already lost two teams, and if the other two got loose in this godforsaken land we’d really be in for it. I dived for the nearest sled and dug my heels into the snow to brake it. But those dogs had gone absolutely crazy.
They yowled and pulled for all they were worth, and the towline broke and away they went and all I had hold of was the sled. I jumped to my feet—too late. The last team had just broken away from the three men hanging o
nto it. We now had forty-six dogs running wild across the open tundra.
For a while we just stood there, five dummies trying to work up the ambition to take out after our teams on foot. Then the dark specks strung out along the white valley seemed to grow darker, bigger. The caribou had begun a cautious swing to the left.
“We must have dropped their leader,” I said. “They’re coming back.”
We came running up out of the hollow and, from the next hill, saw the dead caribou: one of the two shots we’d fired had made a lucky hit. When we got close enough we could see that it was the leader. He had a tremendous rack of antlers and the scuffed, hairless neck of a fighter. The rest of the herd was a mile away, the dogs maybe four hundred yards behind them, and they were still coming on.
I sent the other men to hide behind the crest of the hill and I dropped down behind the dead animal. I made myself hold fire until the herd was less than fifty feet away. Then I opened up, squeezing off shots until my rifle was empty. Back up on the hill, I could hear the others pumping away just as hard, and I saw three, maybe four caribou drop. But it was like trying to turn back a blizzard with a fly swatter. By the time the leaders veered off, the rest of them were all over me—and those crazy, yapping dogs came swarming right up their backs.
The other men, unable to shoot anymore for fear of hitting me, were running off the hill with their knives out.
I never had a chance to go for mine. All I could see was flashing caribou hooves and I burrowed in under the dead one trying to protect myself.
Then the dogs hit—forty-six raving, rattle-brained malamutes, tangled in their tow lines and fighting and biting anything they could sink their teeth into. One of them even went to work on my leg and that was his big mistake of the day. I clouted him on the head with my rifle stock and jumped to my feet, just as wrought up as the dogs were now, swinging at every one I could reach. Pretty soon I had half of them laid out, and all the fight had gone out of the others. The caribou were gone and I stood there in the sudden deathly quiet, breathing so hard it hurt and feeling the sweat soaking my underclothes. All around, where the men had fought the caribou with their knives, the snow was splattered with blood. We had killed six of them. The dogs were flung over a fifty-foot area, but they weren’t going anyplace, not even the ones who were still conscious. They had their lines so hopelessly snarled that it would take us an hour just to separate the teams.
My legs turned all rubbery and I sank down in the snow. Man, I thought, we were a great pack of hunters! Losing our dogs! Fighting caribou with knives! I made up my mind to warn the others that we’d better just keep this whole mess our little secret—as soon as I could talk again.
One of them had made a fire and brought me some melted snow to drink. That was a big help. “I was on my way over to give you a hand with the dogs,” he said. “But the way you were swinging that rifle around I figured I better stay put.”
That reminded me of my leg. I hiked my pants up to have a look and found three neat little holes where teeth had gone through. I stuffed some table salt in them and tied the leg with a strip of flour sack, and it hardly bothered me at all.
I sat there coaxing my strength back while the other boys untangled the dogs. They were sure quiet now, pretending to be friendly as pups. After the lacing I’d given them they’d have jumped a foot if anybody said, “Boo!” Once they were straightened out, all of us went to work skinning out the caribou. We cached the meat and marked it for the return trip, then had some tea and a lunch and set off again.
We had to make only one more camp. By that first afternoon, we’d come on an old dog-team trail and followed it straight to the river. Next day we were in Kobuk.
The people seemed friendly enough. They poured out of every house and alleyway and swarmed around us, jabbering and gaping as though we’d come from another world. In a way, I suppose, you could say that we did. One thing for sure: this place and its people, the first Eskimo town we had ever been in, was as strange to us as we were to them. Everything was different. You didn’t see a single thing made of wood. The houses looked just like the round igloos you see in picture books. Later I found out they were actually built up with squares of sod, and that snow blocks were laid on for extra protection. Even their dogs were hitched in a different way.
Suddenly, in that great babbling mob, I heard someone call, “Jim Huntington!” It was the boy who had been in our fishing camp the summer before, looking twice as big in his parka and wolverine ruff, grinning as he elbowed through the crowd and pumped my hand. “What are you doing up in this country?”
I told him we were after supplies, and he said the trading post was only eight miles up the river and would have everything we needed. Then he said, “Now you come to my house and eat a meal.” I tried to explain that I had to take care of my dogs, and that there were four other men with me. But it seems as though you don’t tell the Eskimo anything when you’re in his country: you just do what he says. The boy said something to his people in their language, and the next thing I knew our dogs were led away and each one of my friends was being escorted to a different igloo.
We had to bend real low to get into the boy’s house, going through a long tunnel that came out in a fair-sized room lit with a seal-oil lamp and full of the people of his family, from little tots to a grandmother who must have been old when the Russians owned Alaska. Everybody kowtowed to her. The boy told them who I was and then we sat down to eat—dried salmon, muktuk, caribou meat, crackers, and a good strong tea. The old grandmother asked me how come I was so far from home. I told her about the store in Cutoff burning down. I said I came to buy shells and food and milk for my baby.
She rolled a cigarette and lit it, never taking her eyes off me. “What’s the matter with your wife, no more milk?” she said. “How old him baby?”
“She is a girl baby. She is two years old.”
“How long you and wife stay together?”
“Three years.”
“Three years, only one baby come? Ha! Maybe you don’t stay home enough. Maybe you work too much.”
I told her I was out on the trap line most of the time.
She blew smoke in my face and said, “Maybe you stay home two moon. After that, ha, some more baby come. Then you don’t have to buy milk in store.”
I said I would give it a try. I figured I had to be polite to her. I even thanked her for the advice. But I was sure desperate to change the subject. I turned to the boy and asked, “How’s your friend Henry? What did the doctor in Tanana say about my sewing job?”
The igloo got very quiet. I thought for sure I’d put my foot in it again. Finally the boy spoke: “The doctor said you did a good job. There was no more he could do.”
I felt better. I said, “Well, where is the great bear hunter? I’d like to say hello.”
The boy shook his head. “Right after the first frost he took a team out on the river. Nobody could tell him anything, that the ice was still thin. You know. He went in less than a mile from here—dogs, sled, and all. The only thing we ever found was the hole.”
Man, that made me mad—after the way I’d worked to keep that man alive! But all I said was, “That’s too bad.”
The grandmother spoke up again: “He was looking for death. If not bear or ice, he find some other way to die. He a man who not meant to grow old.”
I nodded. She was a smart old lady, after all.
Pretty soon some other people came and said that now I had to go eat in their house. Just to be nice I ate some more muktuk and drank some more tea. I had no more than finished when they took me to another house, and still another, and in each one there was a big feed. It got so that all I could manage to get down was the tea. I drank so much tea that I felt as though my back teeth were afloat. I asked them where the bathroom was, but they didn’t seem to understand. I tried every word I knew —privy, restroom, toilet—but all I got was a blank look, so finally I told them in plain English what I needed.
They laug
hed and laughed. “Oh, anyplace outside,” they said.
I went outside, but there were kids playing around everywhere so I kept going until I’d walked all the way to the river. And there were still people around. Pretty soon I came across two of my buddies with the same problem. “Say, where’s a guy supposed to go in this place?” they asked.
I told them that the Eskimos had given us permission to use any part of the arctic land for that purpose, and I stood there as though I were admiring the view and did what I had to do; not one person even looked up. Later I discovered that the Eskimos always did the same. They weren’t troubled by any two-faced modesty, and let’s face it, in a land where there wasn’t a bush or a bit of cover, that makes a lot of sense.
As I wandered along the riverbank looking for our dogs, a big, strong-looking man with a vaguely familiar face came up to me. He said that my bedroll and things had been taken to his house, that I was to spend the night there. In the morning, he would put me on the trail to the trading post. I told him that that was okay with me, it didn’t make any difference where I stayed, but that I had to buy some dried fish for my dogs first.
“Dogs already eat,” he said. “We take care.”
I thanked him—that was really service! We walked by the dogs on the way to his house and I got the barest wag of their tails as I passed, that’s how contented they were. His house was bigger than the others, and it had more people in it, including a whole flock of kids belonging to the unmarried daughters. The Eskimos saw nothing wrong with this. In fact, they told me later that a girl didn’t have much chance of marrying until she’d proved she could have babies.
I saw my bedroll in the tunnel so I sat down on it to put my moose skin slippers on. No sooner had I pulled my mukluks off than one of the daughters, a nice-looking girl of seventeen or so, took them from me, brushed them clean, and hung them up. When I rolled a cigarette, she got me a saucer for an ashtray. I told her thanks, and she sat by my feet without looking at me. But I’ll be darned if she wasn’t blushing!
On the Edge of Nowhere Page 10