On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  I don’t know what happened to those years. They just flew by. One day the house was full of babies and then all of a sudden the girls were fussing with their hair and mooning over store dresses, and the older boys were putting out their own beaver sets. I still did a lot of trapping and, in summer, freighted supplies along the river in a new boat I’d built.

  One year I missed out on a big shipment because the fur buyer who brought the letter telling me about it couldn’t get to Cutoff until it was too late to do the job. That made me mad enough to sit down and write to the territorial governor and to the man in Washington, D.C., who was supposed to be our representative. The buyer carried the letters out for me, and by June we had a post office. Cutoff was on the map and would get mail every week that a plane could land on the river.

  It seemed to be so easy, after all the years we’d been without one, that it made me take a good long look around our whole village. It was as though I had been blind before and was seeing Cutoff for the first time, and what I saw made me sick. It was a dirty little place, set on a piece of low ground that reeked of swampy water the summer long, dogs tied close to the houses and the walks littered with everybody’s garbage.

  But the thing that bothered me most was that we had no school. I had four kids by then, and another on the way, and I knew the difference between a Native who had a little learning and one who had none. Learning gave you the right to hope for something better. Without it you had a one-way ticket to nowhere, a guarantee that you’d leave this life without a single good reason for having been here. So that summer I made a special trip to Fairbanks to see the bishop of our church. I asked him to get the commissioner of education to build us a school.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “there is no decent place to build a school in Cutoff. The land is too wet. It isn’t healthy.”

  “What if I talk people into moving to higher ground?”

  He thought that one over for a while. Then he said, “If you could do that, I think the commissioner would see things our way.”

  Of course I hadn’t told him that the only high ground around Cutoff was the cemetery hill, eighteen miles away on the Huslia River. Everybody knows that my people are very superstitious about the dead. But I thought if I moved out there first, others might follow. One thing for sure, the bishop was right: every thaw the river flooded and half the kids came down with fever, and the whole village smelled bad until first frost.

  Next spring, as soon as the ice went out, I cut new logs and rafted them down the river. A few of the younger men helped me, and we winched the logs up on the bank, about a quarter of a mile above the cemetery, and I began to work on a new house. As the days grew longer I worked on into the night, staying right there as long as my supplies lasted. Then, when I’d go back to Cutoff, the people would say, “Ha ha. Did you wake the dead? Did you see any ghosts?” They pretended to be kidding but they weren’t.

  “No,” I’d tell them, “I didn’t see any ghosts. But I saw lots of good dry wood for winter right up on the bank.”

  Pretty soon some other men made up their minds to go along with me, and tore down their old houses and floated the logs downriver. Then old Grandpa, the medicine man, said he would come, and of course lots of families followed him. We marked off a nice piece of ground for each home site, fifty feet on each side of the cabin, with plenty of room behind for a cache and a proper outhouse. We made it a rule that all the dogs had to be tied down out beyond the last house.

  “I’m tired of living in a dirty village,” I said. “We have a chance now to build a nice clean one. Let’s not spoil it.”

  My wife thought it was all foolishness. “What’s wrong with the place we’ve got?” she said, and wouldn’t even come down to look at the new house until it was finished.

  The trader gave me a hard time, too. He was a white man, old and cranky, and he didn’t want to start building a new store. He said I was only stirring up trouble. He even sent word to the marshal that I was planning to run a gambling game in the new village, and they sent for me to come to Fairbanks, and I had to go all the way down there to tell the marshal it wasn’t so. As long as I was there I told him something else: “If that old man won’t move his store where the people want to live, we’ll build a store of our own. Then he can go crying to the governor.” Pretty soon the trader changed his mind and came downriver asking who would help him build a new store, and we all did.

  We named our new village Huslia, after the river. Not long after we were settled in, Wien Airlines came and said they’d fly in twice a week if we helped them build a runway. So I freighted their cat and grader down the river, and in six weeks a bunch of us had packed down a nice 4,500-foot strip. Now we had regular air service, too.

  That summer my uncle, Hog River Johnny, died. He had been blind for many years, but he was the last of the real old-time Native hunters, and the people respected him. It was a very big loss to me. He had taught me so much, and now there were no more of my mother’s people left and it seemed as though a whole way of life was behind me. Who knew what was ahead?

  I made up my mind that Johnny was going to have a potlatch to be proud of and went out and shot a bear and a nice bull moose. Some of the other men got some ducks, so when we cooked up the washtubs of meat there was plenty to feed the whole town. I had got word to my brother Sidney, who was working in the gold mines up the Hogatza, and he came down. After the meal we sat and talked about Johnny and our Dad and the old days.

  Since he’d come down for the potlatch, Sidney decided to stay and visit for a few days. That’s why I’ve always figured that Uncle Johnny left us all a great gift, although it was an accident and he would never know about it. Sidney was walking along the riverbank one morning and, having a good eye for such things, he noticed clear water seeping into the silty flow of the Huslia. “I think there’s fresh water under your town, Jimmy,” he said. “I think you can tap it.”

  We went to Fairbanks and bought point and pipes and began driving a well. Now there are very few places in our part of the country where you can do that. Mostly the ground is rock-hard with permafrost. Here, though, using a spring line with a hundred-pound log on end, we punched slowly through. Sidney and I would pull on the line until the log was raised up over the head of the pipe. Then we’d let go. Smash, and the pipe would sink down another half-inch. In a week we were sixty feet down, and there we hit a steady flow of fresh water.

  Do you know what that meant to my people? For the first time in our lives we had running water, good water. We didn’t have to pack it up from the river anymore, where it ran muddy and foul every time there was a frost or a thaw. It was a blessing. Soon nearly everyone had driven a well. The people were healthier, cleaner.

  Finally the bishop brought the commissioner of education to see our new town. They both looked around and I suppose they liked what they saw: we soon had three thousand dollars to buy lumber, windows, and doors for the new school. Of course we had to supply logs and labor, but that was no trouble. By freeze-up we had a nice snug building and a teacher for the twenty-four kids in the village.

  It took a while to round up all twenty-four. Some were sixteen and older and had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse. They decided they were too old to start now. A few of us persuaded them otherwise. Also there were men who took their families out to winter cabins and trap lines, same as they’d always done, and we had to go chasing into the bush to remind them that their kids were supposed to be in school. Not one of them complained.

  In a few years the population of Huslia was twice what we’d started with, one hundred and eighty people. They quit dying of fever and TB, and when a new baby was born we didn’t have to sweat out whether it was going to live or die. I guess word of this got outside: after a while teams of doctors all the way from Chicago and New York were coming around to make tests and ask us questions, and the Army did a study that showed Huslia to be the healthiest village in the whole Yukon Valley.

  Of course I was proud of m
y part in starting up the new town. But it was hard work and took a lot of time, and it hadn’t put a penny in my pocket. Fur was bringing less and less, and practically nobody went hunting it anymore. The people got on relief and made out just as well. Where once the whole country had lived off the trap line, now only two men in all Huslia bothered. I was one of them. I just didn’t see how a healthy man could take money for laying around and doing nothing.

  But my catch was barely paying for my outfit anymore, and I was sure ready to try something different. That’s why, when Don Stickman, a Native bush pilot I knew from the old days in Nulato, asked me to go bounty hunting with him I said yes without thinking twice. He came flying into Huslia with his Super Cub on skis early one winter, and told me we could make some real money going after wolves. The Territory was paying a fifty-dollar bounty for each hide, he said, and lots of guys had made a killing hunting from the air. He’d do the flying if I’d do the shooting, and once we’d paid the plane expenses we could split the rest, pure profit. We just had to take a hundred hides, he said, it was that easy.

  The one thing he forgot to say was that the only bounty hunting anyone had ever heard of before was up on the open arctic slope. Chasing wolves through this timber country was a different breed of cat. Nobody had ever even tried it before. By the end of two days I knew why. Once you spotted a wolf, you chased it at treetop height, maybe sometimes a little below, and then you landed in the nearest postage stamp sized clearing you could find to skin it out. The way I figured it, the wolf was only slightly worse off than we were.

  But we were getting our fair share of hides. The word got out and pretty soon there were other planes bounty hunting, lots of them. And I thought, well, if all these people are doing it, it can’t be so dangerous. And so, although airplane flying is not my idea of a good time, especially when you’re brushing branches out of your eyes half the time, I concentrated very hard on the stake I was building up and popped away at every wolf we tracked down.

  The pilots have a way of describing a crackup. They call it buying the farm. Well, Stickman and I didn’t buy the farm, but it sure looked as though we were making down payments. Once we landed on the side of a mountain—a place where no one who cared anything about his own skin would be chasing a wolf—and we had to jump out and hang onto the wings before the plane slid all the way back down. We took off going downhill—that was the only way—and it was like trying to pull up out of a full power dive. Before we finally did, we came close enough to that valley floor to stir up a snowstorm with our prop wash.

  Another time we got a wolf alongside a little creek and landed on the pond it fed into. I don’t know how Stickman put the plane into that spot: it wasn’t big enough to hold a respectable hockey game. Getting out seemed plain impossible. After we’d found the wolf and skinned him out, Stickman, who usually sees the bright side of things, said it looked a little tight. I said it certainly did and that it would take a can opener to get us out of there.

  Then he got the idea of cutting down some trees on the far side of the pond to give us a little more takeoff room. After we’d cut trees for an hour, he took a good hard look and said that if we pulled the plane as far back up on the slope of the bank as we could, he thought we could make it. I thought he was crazy, but it was either his way or trying to walk out, and it was forty miles to the nearest human being. I started pulling.

  Once we got the plane back another twenty feet or so, Stickman gave me very careful instructions. I was to hang on to the tail with one hand and a tree with the other so the plane wouldn’t start sliding down before he was ready. Just before he gunned the motor, he would yell to me, then I was supposed to jump in. I said okay and got a good grip on the tail. I also said a little prayer that went something like, “Please, God, make sure You’ve given him at least as much sense as You did brass!”

  I don’t know what happened. Maybe Stickman yelled and I didn’t hear him. Or maybe in the excitement he got mixed up. Anyway, the next thing I knew the motor was revved up full blast and the plane was moving and I had a big decision to make: I could let go of the tail or I could let go of the tree because if I held on to both I had a good chance of losing an arm. I let go of both and ran for the open cabin door, diving in just as the plane got up a real head of steam and went bouncing off the slope and onto the ice, full throttle. And there I was as we lifted off and strained to get a little altitude, legs thrashing in air and struggling to climb in. I could have sworn I kicked a couple of treetops. Between my legs, I could see them looming above us as we flew down the swath we’d cut, and I could feel the plane lurch as Stickman threw the nose down over the creek to pick up some flying speed before we stalled out. Fighting the wind, which was trying real hard to pluck me out of there, and Stickman, who kept offering me his hand when all I wanted was for him to keep both his damn hands on the controls, I finally managed to crawl up onto my seat and slam the door shut. When I looked out, we were two hundred feet up and climbing and Stickman was saying, “Gee, I was scared there for a minute.” A fat lot he knew: I stayed scared for a week.

  That did it. Oh, I finished out the season, and we wound up with a hundred and eighteen skins, but then I told Stickman that he’d have to find himself another hero for next year. Bounty hunting, I decided, was not for me. Either you’d plow up the landscape with your teeth and fingernails, which is what happened to the men in three separate airplanes that year, or you’d grow old too fast worrying that you were about to.

  When we’d paid for our gasoline and divided the pot, I had almost two thousand dollars. I could have started up a trading post then and there, right in Huslia. The white trader had died and some people came to me and said, “You open a store here, Jimmy. We need a store here.”

  But I figured two thousand wasn’t quite enough, I needed a little more, just a little bit more. I’d put in one more summer of freighting, I decided, and by freeze-up

  I’d have enough to lay in a really good stock of supplies. That’s what I did. And it was going so well, I had so much business, that I let them talk me into expanding my operation. I leased a big outfit and put on three men—and proved to myself, once and for all, that I had about as much business sense as a bull moose. I was always hauling a load, but my rigs were just too slow to make any real money, and the wages I had to pay slowly bled me white. Anyway, by the time the river froze and I had a chance to sit down and add it all up, my money was gone and what’s more I was in the hole for another couple of thousand.

  That was a bad time around the Huntington house, that autumn of 1956. 1 was forty years old and further from my life’s ambition than I’d ever been. I kept trying to figure out what it all meant. Was it a sign that I ought to give up and quit trying? Should I be satisfied to live out my days like the other people, taking what came and not dreaming of anything more? If that was so then I was in for a lot of unhappiness because I just couldn’t accept it. There had to be a way for me. There had to.

  I was all set to go back up to Hogatza when some of the men came to me and asked if I’d consider having another shot at the dogsled races. They offered to lend me any of their dogs that I wanted, and to make up a pot of money that would at least get me to Anchorage or Fairbanks and back. The races had become really big-time by now. The Alaskan Championship was the high point of the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage every February, and the North American Dogsled Derby was the number-one event in the Fairbanks Winter Carnival soon after. To Alaskans, both of them were like the World Series and the Irish Sweepstakes put together, with the very best mushers from all over the Territory and a few from the South 48 competing. People talked about the races all year, and when they were on you couldn’t get a lick of work out of anyone within reach of a radio or TV.

  I didn’t know what to say. I could understand why these men were after me to do it. It would make them feel more a part of the races. Their dogs and someone they knew would be in it, and they would hear the announcers say the name of Huslia. But what about me? I w
as fifteen years past the best age for dogsled racing, and I hadn’t completely gotten the bad taste of that last try in Fairbanks out of my mouth. And yet, there was the store, a picture so clear in my head I could all but reach out and touch it. If I won. . .

  I thought it over for two days and then went to the men and said I would have a try at putting a team together. If it looked good by February first I would go to Anchorage. Otherwise I’d return the dogs they’d loaned me and we could forget the whole thing.

  Next morning, I started training. They brought me twenty dogs, and I used my own best three. Out of them all, I hoped to get a decent team of twelve and a couple of extras, and the first thing I did was to weed out the weak ones. Both the Anchorage and Fairbanks races are run in three heats on successive days. I set my training runs the same way, twenty-five miles a day for two days, forty miles the third day. Then I let the dogs rest for two days. There was no rest for me. When a man gets to be forty years old his body is not so willing to do the hard work needed to get it in shape. It takes longer and becomes a form of punishment. Yet my condition was just as important as the dogs’, and if I let a day go by without toughening myself it would take me two days to get back to where I was. So every morning I ran three miles before breakfast and did the same in the afternoon, this time pushing the sled. Sometimes I put my little boy Wayne in it to make the run tougher. I jumped rope twice a day, fifteen minutes each time, watched what I ate, and quit smoking. It was brutally hard to make myself do all that, but in a month I was down to a bone-hard hundred and forty-seven pounds and felt as though I could lick my weight in wildcats.