On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  Three hours later I had come to the patch of willows just outside the town. I knew I’d make it now—if I hollered loud enough they’d hear and come get me—but I wasn’t about to stagger in there near-frozen and half-dead. I broke off some dry branches and made a fire. I melted snow for a tea. And as my strength came back I thought about my mother and the end of her long journey. I wondered if I had her courage, if I could have gone on another nine hundred miles—if I could still do anything useful with my life.

  It was past two in the morning when I knocked on my friends’ door, waking them out of a sound sleep so that they looked at me as though I were a ghost. The husband read the thermometer outside the window: it was sixty-four degrees below zero. Not once in the past month, he told me, had it ever crept above fifty below. His wife cooked me a hot meal, and we talked in whispers so we wouldn’t wake my kids. I wanted to see them, but even more I wanted to close my eyes and go to sleep in that nice warm house and sleep for a long, long time.

  It didn’t seem that I’d slept at all when I heard Wayne’s voice crying out, “Daddy’s back! Daddy’s back!” Then they were all yelling and clambering over the bed, jabbing me with their knees and elbows as they squirmed to get the spot next to Daddy. And I thought, well, I can sleep tomorrow. Right now it was sweeter to hold them near me and look at their faces and listen to their nonsense.

  And suddenly, as I did, it was as though a part of my mind cleared of the fog that had hold of it and I could look out on all my tomorrows. I saw myself going to work to rebuild the cabin and, in summer, using my marten-catch money to take the kids down to Anchorage where I’d get a job. I was well known in Anchorage now; surely there would be work for me. Maybe I’d freight a little, or even pilot the bigger boats—nobody knew these rivers the way I did. In the winter I could trap again, slowly building my stake until I could put that store together one more time. Maybe I’d even marry again. These kids deserved a mother, and I deserved a friend.

  I sat up straight in the bed, looking dead ahead of me into that future that once more seemed possible. The kids fell quiet and I pulled them close. Then I said, “Let’s get up and going, you guys! We’ve got work to do!”

  That’s about the way it turned out—the job, the piloting, the new store, all of it, and, in 1962, a fine wife. I still get scared when I think how easily I could have given it all up back there in those dark days after the fire. And so I treasure this good new life, and I tell my people that it can be done, almost anything can be done. No one ever promised me, or promised any man—Indian, Eskimo, or white man—that life was easy in this country. You had to fight for whatever was important to you. You had to be tough. Maybe it’s a little harder for a half-breed. Maybe it takes a little longer. But it can be done.

  Afterword

  NEXT TO THE LAST TIME I saw Jimmy Huntington, he was a patient at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage and I thought he was dying. He looked terrible, slumped down into his pillow, shrunken. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked, trying to be ready for the worst.

  “They say I got a cancer in my nose.”

  Not ready for that, I fumbled my way into a chair, looking away. Then I looked back and said, “What are they doing about it?”

  “So far, nothing. When I ask why they don’t just take it out, they roll their eyes and give me doctor double-talk. They say, ‘Ah, it’s not as simple as that.’” He raised his head from the pillow and snorted, “That’s bull”—using both syllables.

  He was not a happy man. Jimmy was, above all, plainspoken. Beating around the bush was not his style; weasel words unnerved him. Cancer was one thing, one of life’s dirty tricks, okay; but being patronized was not to be borne. And he must have been miserable in that hospital, penned up in the middle of the biggest city in Alaska when he could at most tolerate a bush village and was only truly at peace under the big sky.

  It was the spring of 1967. I had known Jimmy only a couple of years but we had written a book together, the story of his life, and there were no secrets between us. I never asked a question he didn’t answer with the straight truth that was his trademark. And he asked plenty of his own questions, poking around in my past until he knew almost as much about me as I did about him. And when you have gone through all that with someone and still friends, you’re good friends.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Jim?” I asked, thinking maybe he wanted to send a message to his children, some final thoughts.

  “I wouldn’t mind some candy,” he said.

  “Candy,” I repeated dumbly. Was that what he’d said? Candy?

  “Yeah. You know nobody comes to this place for the food.”

  I offered to go get it right away but he said, no, tomorrow would do. It would give him something to look forward to. I only hoped they wouldn’t have moved him out to the morgue by the time I came back with it. But no, when I showed up the next day he was sitting up in bed and looking more like himself, maybe not yet ready to get dressed and go out to check his trap lines, but better. “Hey, waiting for candy sure seems to pep you up,” I said.

  “I hope you brought enough,” he answered.

  It was typical. I could tell that he had thought the thing through and as there was nothing he could do about the cancer, he turned his attention elsewhere: What was I working on? How were the sales of our book doing? He told me he was going to give “those guys” another week and then he was going home.

  And, remarkably, that’s just what he did. I never found out what happened to his cancer; he never even mentioned it again. But with or without it, Jimmy went on to live his life, another auspicious and productive 20 years of it.

  My work took me a world away from Alaska, and though we stayed in touch and I always kept track of him and his life in politics, I never saw him again. But if I sit down with a drink and open one of his letters, there he sits, spinning stories like the ones in this book— deploring politicians, extolling Alaska, planning a moose hunt down the Yukon in his flat-bottomed boat.

  He stayed what he was, a hunter and a trapper. And having grown up and lived all his life in Huslia or one or another of the Native villages along the Yukon and Koyukuk river basins, his concerns were those of the people scattered over that immensity of interior Alaska, a sweep of land bigger than any state, and more sparsely settled.

  But it didn’t end there. Jimmy had been gifted with rare common sense and the ability to make clear the issues that mattered to his people—subsistence, schools, land claims, fish and game laws. People listened when he spoke. And as his name was recognized and respected nearly everywhere in the state—not only as an Alaska sled-dog racing champion, the original Huslia Hustler, but as a wilderness man who cared about the wilderness—there was hardly a time through the ’60s and ’70s when he wasn’t serving on some fish or game regulatory board.

  In November 1974, he ran for election to the Alaska state legislature as a write-in candidate and won—but didn’t find out about it until well into December because he was off in the bush running his trap lines. Then, before the legislature convened, when he was back out trapping in temperatures that dropped past 50 below zero, he was hit by a massive heart attack. Somehow he made it back to Huslia on his own and was flown to Anchorage for open heart surgery. He had to take his oath of office over a hospital telephone.

  But if Jimmy got off to a late start in the House of Representatives, he caught up fast—to the considerable discomfort of a good many of his fellow lawmakers. He was one of only a bare handful of Native Alaskans in the legislature, and none spoke out more eloquently about problems of the Native people, nor more bluntly on their behalf against vested interests in the Lower 48 and in Anchorage and Fairbanks. He once famously told legislative colleagues that there were among them people making laws for the North country who knew nothing about it. “Some of you people from Anchorage,” he said, “when you turn north on Lake Otis Parkway, you think you’re in the wilderness.”

  Veteran Alaska newsman Bill
Tobin tells of Jimmy’s letter to the Anchorage Times about the notorious 1976 legislative session in Juneau that had stretched out for more than 100 days, at the taxpayers’ expense. “We are not only dragging our feet down here,” he wrote, “we are dragging our ass.” A few days later, according to Tobin, he stood up and told the dumbstruck House that their long-winded orations were “uncalled for and damned foolishness. . . you’re all just squirming around, thinking of how you can fool the public.” No one rose to argue the point.

  He never gave up fighting for the people of Alaska, not even when heart trouble slowed him down and then laid him low. “I’ll be back,” he told his kids that night of February 21, 1987, when the medical evacuation plane came to fly him out to the hospital in Fairbanks. But it was not to be. He died in mid-flight, leaving seven children, eight grandchildren and a uniquely Alaskan legacy. He was 72.

  “His life was a full one,” said the Times in an editorial. “He served well. Alaska is richer because he was here.”

  I am only sorry he is not here to see this splendid new edition of his life story.

  * * * *

  Lawrence Elliott

  Lawrence Elliott, who has written several books and numerous magazine articles, was Reader’s Digest correspondent for Alaska and western Canada when this book was written in the mid-1960s. Elliott now lives in Luxembourg.