Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  Jerry: “Another clear and cold night, 21° this morning. Larry started to glass at 7:15 A.M. Larry started raking and calling about 8:50 A.M.” Raking is beating an old moose antler or this hard plastic tube on the brush. It copies the bull moose when he is raking his antlers. He also called by sort of moaning into the tube. It supposedly sounded good to a moose.

  Jerry: “Peter spotted a bull moose down in the flats. We quickly got together our gear and lunch and started down the mountain. After a rough and rugged ¾ mile we set up on a small ridgetop in the cover of some spruce. We saw him, he was a big bull (Larry estimates the antlers at more than five feet wide). He had 3 cows at least with him and was 500–600 yards away. Larry called him across one meadow and into a strip of trees. If he came out on our side of the trees, I was in a position for a 300-yard shot.”

  Huddled there, all three of us intensely focused, trying to be as silent as a moth flying, watching that glorious bull, so huge and yet so able to disappear. I could see it so clearly in my binoculars, its ears moving better than the most sophisticated radar dish, wondering where was that rival bull raking the brush. That rival was the expert Larry. The bull, I could tell, wanted to come and fight, beat back any rival, but didn’t want to leave his hard-gained cows. We whispered to each other—it was hard to whisper to Jerry. We crouched there for what seemed like an hour, though it may have been only twenty minutes.

  Jerry: “Unfortunately he turned around in the trees and went back to his cows. Why be greedy for another cow and a fight or risk getting shot? We then circled to a hill to the north of them about 300–400 yards from the area they were in. We stayed there from 11:00 to 4:45, calling every 30 minutes, but nothing showed.”

  We hiked back up the mountain, a rough, demanding hike. Larry and I glassed some more and spotted a cow and possibly a bull.

  Jerry: “Tomorrow we hope to locate my bull again. It’s all I can handle to make the trip down to the flats and back. Anyone thinking moose are easy or dumb should try hunting Grizzly Flats.”

  It was now Tuesday, September 19, a balmy twenty-seven degrees, Jerry recorded.

  Jerry: “At 8:15 A.M., Larry is raking above camp trying to locate a bull for us to stalk. The regular coffee ran out so we are down to instant, quite a hardship on me. Larry and Peter located the 64'' model and his three cows but they are deeper in the trees, 1½ to 2 miles away, and not an option for today. Also saw a 57'' bull with one cow. We have until the 25th when the season ends for one of them to make a mistake. As tired as I’ve been, I haven’t had sore legs the next morning. My back is normal also. I’m making this diary as complete as possible for my family, friends, and fellow hunters as my memory (plus many other things) isn’t as good as it should be.” That represents one of the many inspiring characteristics of my father-in-law. He didn’t say “isn’t as good as it used to be.” He still demands excellence from himself and all body parts.

  Another day passed. The longer we stayed, surprisingly, the less interested I was in the world out there. I could not have cared less about world issues, the news. I was concerned about my family but felt spiritually connected to them, enough to know if anything was wrong. I worried less about time passing and grew more patient. We were like a pack of wolves or pride of lions just waiting on the ridge for our chance. Jerry seemed to be in the same state of mind. For such an entrepreneur, it is not easy to let anyone else take over.

  Jerry: “Weather has changed overnight. Temp now at 44° and looks like rain. Larry has seen the big bull again and we are planning our stalk, lighter clothes but including rain gear. While waiting for word to head out, I will catch up on notes I made using a 180-grain bullet as a ‘lead pencil.’ It’s 8:45 A.M. and Larry has decided it’s time to try a stalk on the big moose and his harem. Larry estimates they are about a mile and a half down in the flats. Another factor to consider is the bull is distracted by being challenged by the smaller bull who has only one cow. As we work our way down the mountain, Peter and Larry glass at every bench. When Larry would rake the brush and call, it got him really excited. I guess he now thought he had two challengers.”

  As we descended, walking as fast and silently as we could, I was surprised how fast Jerry moved. Larry was in front, the alpha male, then Jerry, then me. We tried not to get our feet too wet in the swampy spots, but there was no way around them.

  Jerry: “Larry has insisted that he carry my JanSport pack over the frame of his big pack. Being that the guide is the absolute boss on a hunt, I accepted. His reason was valid, he wanted the old man to be as fresh as possible for the shot. Peter was instructed to carry my rifle. We moved along slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible through shoulder-high alders, hip-high willows, and low cranberry bushes, besides that we were walking on tundra and crossing swamp.”

  We were flying down the hill. Jerry was moving like a thirty-year-old.

  Jerry: “After we got down to the flats about one mile down, there were only low elevation points to glass from. At one of the passes Larry realized Peter didn’t have my gun. I was stunned, Peter was embarrassed. Peter ran back and luckily found it lying on a game trail we were following through some thick alders, which had apparently brushed it off his shoulder.”

  I almost got sick to my stomach when I felt on my shoulder for Jerry’s favorite rifle and it was gone.

  Jerry: “I regrouped with my .308 Norma Mag. We moved on a couple hundred yards to a nice little knoll.”

  Excitement alternated with worry. Things seemed to be all wrong. We hadn’t seen the moose in twenty minutes; we had to go down from the top of one knoll, cross a creek, and go up game trails any way we could to the next knoll. Any second the bull could crash through into some opening, or maybe it had already disappeared. I was glad Jerry has a strong heart. We snuck to the top of the next hill.

  Jerry: “Larry spotted the bull and a couple cows on a ridge to our right. I got in position by a small spruce and whispered I could make the shot if he stepped into the clear.”

  I heard “the whisper” from quite a distance away.

  Jerry: “He did and I aimed for high on the front shoulder, which was a good thing because I estimated the range at 250–300 yards and it turned out to be 350 yards, plus.… Larry instructed Peter to stay put and he guided us to the area where the moose had disappeared. After a few minutes I spotted a palm and he was dead at 10:58 A.M. on our sixth day of hunting at Grizzly Flats. Larry was the real hero, his instincts and moose experience are what got the job done, plus his ability to communicate with an old man that can’t hear in these type of whispering situations or see real well. The moose measured 65¼'' across his antlers. He was 81'' from top to back to bottom of his hoof. He was 9'3'' long from tip of nose to backside of rump. He had very good palms with four frontal or brow tines on both sides. After skinning him and cutting up meat and storing it away from bones and gut pile on wood limbs and hanging antlers in tree, we got back to camp at 6:10 P.M.”

  There was a fantastic moment when we all met at the fallen moose. “The old Michigan farmer” was almost glowing with his moose. As is always the case with me, I felt a moment of reverence, almost a sadness, for the life taken. The whaling captains always thank God when they get a whale. I silently thanked him for what he’d given Jerry. I took pictures. Then the hardest of our work began. Jerry actually carried huge pieces of the moose meat over to our cache area fifty yards away. A moose gut pile as the guides call it is one of the most dangerous spots in Alaska. In time a grizzly would come and then it would be his or hers.

  Jerry and his moose below Grizzly Flats. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  Larry, with a small amount of help from me, made seven round-trips to the moose over the next couple days, packing out anywhere between 100 and 140 pounds of moose meat per load. Nothing is wasted. Larry estimated the bull weighed 1,500 pounds.

  Jerry: “Was I nervous? No. Was I excited? I tried to be, but I think the only way that will happen is if I can see one of my many grandsons or granddaughters
kill a nice whitetail at our UP cabin. I think satisfaction (or accomplishment like the end of planting season) is the best way to describe the moose kill.”

  A few days later, after all Larry’s loads carrying the moose up the mountain, Jerry was beginning to think about home. It was Friday, September 22.

  Jerry: “It’s time to get out of here. I hear a plane now, hopefully one of Jim’s. Larry’s about out of whiskey, Peter’s socks stink bad [I had hung them to dry right by Jerry’s bunk], and my Hershey’s bars are gone.”

  We were flown out of Grizzly Flats one at a time by John. Chris, the camp pilot, was now back flying for FedEx, his vacation over. I remembered as we took off from the bushes what Chris had said about trying to fly like a competitive gymnast. Each landing, each takeoff, striving for a perfect ten, almost never achieving it, but you never stop trying. The only difference is a gymnast always has the same apparatus.

  We walked back into the lodge and hugged Denise and Jen, the fabulous cooks who didn’t belong to the Spam Fan Club, and told Jim of our success. He was proud for Jerry and yet concerned for all the rest of his guides and clients from all over the world who were still out in the bush. But then the weather turned against our leaving.

  We waited another day, and although pilot John said there was a good chance we would have to turn around either in the pass or at Cook Inlet or even Anchorage, we would give it the old Alaska try. We would fly in the Cessna, and Tony O. would fly the floatplane with three guides in it, Chad, Macen, and Larry. It was no problem taking off; the fog was farther east. We got deep into Merrill Pass and had to turn around. John and Tony, who was flying below us, were talking to each other; it looked as if they were too low. John had said you need to maintain altitude in case you need to slow way down to turn. Slowing down, I assumed, made you lose altitude. They decided to go back and try the pass to the north. We got through, and this time Jerry was looking around as if we were on a ride around a soybean field.

  We came out of the Alaska Range and Cook Inlet was before us. John was listening intently to someone on the radio in a Beaver on floats. The pilot had just come from Anchorage and was heading west, where we’d just come from. He couldn’t get back into Anchorage, he said; he was going to land on one of the many lakes below and just wait it out. We did not have that option. I could see a rolling, blockading bank of fog and clouds lying on the water in front of us. John wondered out loud whether he should go back. Tony said he was going to head in the opposite direction we should be going and go south down the coast. Maybe, he said, there would be an opening, a way to see our way across the inlet to the other side, then head north up that coast to Anchorage. Over there was the Kenai Peninsula and more places to land. There was nothing that I could see on this side to land on without it being a crash landing. John brought the Cessna down to below three hundred feet. I could tell he was concerned, but at least Jerry didn’t seem to be.

  We made it to Anchorage, just another minor moment in the life of Alaska. Everyone was just fine. We landed and taxied to the place John tied down his plane. Waiting there was Larry’s wife and his new daughter, and Rita, Julianne, and Dorothy. We tried to tell them about our adventure as they told us about theirs. They had taken off on the Alaska ferry and just gone wherever they felt like. They loved it, ended up in Cordova.

  Jerry: “After a good night’s rest, we boarded a crowded 757 at 9 A.M. for the trip home. We are due to arrive in Lansing at 9:15 P.M. Alaska was a very rewarding experience in many ways. I have never talked with anyone who was disappointed with it.”

  As Mom and Dad walked out of sight down the entryway to their Northwest jet, I saw tears in Julianne’s and Rita’s eyes. Whenever Julianne felt the urge to cry, she would always look at me to see if I was too. I was. There went two of the finest people in the world, whom we loved dearly and whose lives would never be the same since they’d come to Alaska.

  23

  Leaving Alaska

  We drove back to Seward as if we’d been living here all our lives. I got aggravated with some tourists driving too slowly, just as I had driven when I’d first arrived. Then I saw that they were looking up this valley to a glacier at the end of it. The clouds had parted and the sun was shining just on the glacier; it was raining on either side. This cathedral was slowing them down.

  Rita, Mom, and Julianne had packed up most of our stuff while Jerry and I had been hunting. We had arrived here with one giant duffel each, and now we would need a U-Haul and every bit of room in the Explorer to get it all home to Tennessee. Aaron would drive; it would take him six days. Into that U-Haul, Aaron and I squeezed two massive sets of caribou antlers with the skull still attached. Rebekah and I had found one in Unalakleet on the tundra; Eleanor’s husband, Johnny, had given us the other. There was a Haida drum made for me by Tony, Tina’s sister’s boyfriend. Painted on the deerskin drumhead in black and red was the eagle spirit. It looked as if the eagle had swallowed a man whose head was where the main body of the eagle should be. A friend from the world of ice had given me another Eskimo drum whose skin was made of walrus intestine.

  I hadn’t wanted to buy it, but we loaded up the cheapest TV we could buy at Fred Meyers. The kids had to watch their stuff, I needed to watch Saturday Night Live now that it was good again, and Rita needed her cooking shows. There were some “finds” from Seward’s garage sales; we’d given away all we could here in Seward, including a couple bikes. Right before we left, I returned Joe Tougas’s blue Schwinn mountain bike to him. It had done a lot to release my freedom-loving soul, which had become too sedentary. There were tubes with prints and posters. One was Rita’s, entitled “Salmon in Seward,” celebrating what a chef can do with a silver salmon. Another was from Juneau announcing the 1999 Alaska Folk Festival. We had a small box of Hobo’s CDs and a couple fishing poles Jed, Luke, and Aaron had used. There were three boxes of super-cold-weather gear I’d worn mushing with Jeff King. I now had someone I could always pull for in the Iditarod and the Kuskokwim 300, and if I ever got a job repairing walk-in freezers, I’d have the right clothes and boots.

  Rita had labeled several boxes Fragile. Inside were wedding presents from back in July when our daughter Brooke and her husband, Trey, had been married on Fox Island here in Resurrection Bay. At first they’d said they were going to get married, just themselves, in Jamaica, but then Brooke talked Trey into having the ceremony in Alaska. We rented a boat called the Alaska Sunrise; Trey’s mother, sister, and niece came from Tennessee, and our whole family except Jed was there. He was in school. It was Luke’s job to film the ceremony with our video camera; I was taking pictures. The captain of our boat, Tim Fleming, would also perform the ceremony. In Alaska, because as we now know everything can be so far away, anyone can marry anyone. Tim wasn’t just anyone—he was one of our favorite people in Seward.

  The surroundings on Fox Island were profound, perfect for a wedding. On the way out to the island we passed a humpback whale and her baby. The baby was leaping out of the water, breaching over and over. We took it as a blessing for Brooke and Trey. That was the closest to Seward I’d ever seen a whale. We had the wedding on an outside deck; mountains were everywhere, better than any wall, and the sounds of the sea on the pebbled beach were our organ music. We left, and Brooke and Trey stayed the night on Fox Island. They found a heart-shaped rock on the beach, and they brought it home as a remembrance of the place where their new life together began.

  There were several boxes of slides that Rebekah and I had taken while exploring together and apart. Rebekah was already back in school at Belmont University. She had E-mailed right before we left, trying to explain how Alaska had affected her and thanking me for the opportunity. She wrote to me, “Dad, I suppose I should listen to you more often. Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself. I guess it’s the cut-from-the-same-cloth thing. Love, Rebekah.” About Alaska, she wrote:

  “Remembering Alaska. Now I sit here and know what Alaska did for me. She made me brave. She made me soar
. She made me drink myself into her innermost caverns and unbeatable mountain caves. She held me at first and I won her at my best and now we together have a truce and memories for a lifetime, things I will hold on to until I grow old and cannot remember my name or my children or how I once traveled the worlds of ‘The Last Frontier.’”

  Luke after a fantastic trip fishing for silver salmon. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  In those boxes there were pictures and video and voice interviews on minidisk about everything that had captured us in Alaska. Tina and the totems in Hydaburg; my first king salmon; Eric and Dean of Deering; Jeff King’s retired lead dog Kitty; Cordovan’s Per, Andy, and Neva; Harvester Island; Julianne and Rita standing beside the snow machines on the way into Eric Jayne’s in the Brooks Range. There was Oliver Leavitt and crew on the edge of the land-fast ice, the blue-blooded woman from Unalakleet; Jerry and his moose; Luke holding up one of the huge silver salmon he’d caught; Jed sitting on top of Mount Marathan; and so much more. There were boxes of books, like Our Boots: An Inuit Woman’s Art, The Wolves of Mt. McKinley, Bibles, and on and on, mostly bought at my favorite used-book store, Title Wave, in Anchorage. Once Aaron and I got everything crammed in, he put his collection of bald eagle posters on top of it all.

  Rebekah and me. PHOTO BY ELEANOR SARREN

  Rita and Julianne got out their charm bracelets to wear on the plane ride home. Added to them since we’d been here in the last year and a half was a bear with a salmon in its mouth, a sea otter, a puffin, a swimming salmon, and the supreme orca.