Alaska (151 page)

'You never know whether you've learned it or not till you're tested by reality.'

It was under these conditions that Jeb Keeler left the East Coast for Alaska, taking with him his two hunting guns, his outdoor gear and the admonitions of his two advisers.

Katz, his Yale mentor, had said: 'Act honorably'; Markham, his Phoenix mentor, had said: 'You can make a potful of money.' He intended to do both and bag the rest of his Alaskan Big Eight in the process. As a start toward his ambitions he already had that fine caribou and a first-class law degree. What he needed now were the seven other animals and an opportunity to put his legal talents to use in some constructive and rewarding way.

WHEN JEB REACHED JUNEAU TO ESTABLISH HIS LAWYER'S credentials at the state capital, he found that Poley Markham had eased his way by enrolling him as a member of his firm, which enabled Jeb to skip the local bar exam and get to work within five days of leaving the airport. As Markham had warned, the big jobs were taken, but two of the best-run Native corporations, Sealaska in Juneau and massive Doyon 923

in Fairbanks, found minor assignments for him, and it was while working at these that Jeb learned the basics of serving as a consultant in Alaska.

He had performed well in protecting the corporations' assets in a contract with a Lower Forty-eight construction firm, and was about to submit his bill when Markham flew in from Phoenix to supervise a business deal for his operation on the North Slope. 'I'd be interested in checking your papers,' Poley said. 'We want to keep things consistent.' When he saw Jeb's proposed bill he gasped: 'You can't submit a bill like that!'

'What's wrong?'

'Everything!' and with a bold pen he struck out Jeb's modest figure, multiplied it by eight, and shoved it back: 'Have it retyped,' and when the new bill was turned in, it was paid without demur.

As he worked about the state on these minor jobs, Jeb discovered that Markham had served a long apprenticeship in such trivial work before landing his present job with one of the major corporations. He had been everywhere and had apparently offered Eskimo, Athapascan and Tlingit the brotherly kind of help their small corporations needed in the early days. Jeb found that when he mentioned Markham's name in the little villages, Natives invariably smiled, for in his congenial way Poley had given these villagers not only guidance but .also a sense of worth. He had convinced them that they could manage their sudden wealth, and one weekend when Jeb had business in Anchorage, he listened attentively as Poley outlined his understanding of the enviable situation in which lawyers from the Lower Forty-eight found themselves: 'Take the average village corporation, and there's more than two hundred of them.

There's certain things they have to do, the law demands it. And there's nobody in the village able to do it. They have to incorporate, and you know the paperwork that requires. Then they have to hold elections for officers, with printed ballots and all. But they can't do this before they have a complete enrollment of their members, and to achieve that they must have forms and addresses and letters. When we know who's entitled to the stock, the stock has to be printed and issued and registered, and that requires lawyers.

'Now the fun begins, because the village has to identify the land it's going to select, and that requires surveyors

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and legal conveyances and filings with the government. Then we have audits for which we have to hire C.P.A.s, the compiling of minutes, the arrangement for public meetings, and most demanding of all, it seems to me, keeping the public and the members informed regarding the operations of the new corporation.

'This is a lawyer's paradise, and .not because we made it that way. Congress did.

But since it's here and the money is in the bank, we're entitled to drag down our share. What is our share? Well, the government gave the corporations nearly one billion dollars. I'd say we were entitled to twenty percent.'

'That would be two hundred million dollars!' Jeb gasped. 'Do you mean it?'

'I sure do. If you and I don't take our share, somebody else will.'

'You personally? What do you expect, I mean in real terms . . . what's possible?'

'What with one thing and another, I'll draw down not less than ten million.'

'Just what do you mean, Poley, ”one thing and another”?'

'Oh, nothing really. Just the way all these deals shake out. But I do have some interesting things on the back burner, north of the Arctic Circle,' and Jeb realized that he was never going to obtain a clear picture of how this big, amiable man operated.

He was about to conclude that Poley's manipulations tightrope along the edge of legality, when the Phoenix lawyer threw his arm about Jeb's shoulder and said with a laugh: ”The rule I follow is the rule you should follow: ”If even eight cents in hard cash is involved, leave a trail of written receipts a yard wide.”'

'I don't intend to steal.'

'Nor do I, but three years down the road some bastard will be trying to prove you did.'

Upon reflection later Jeb realized that Poley had not said forthrightly, like Professor Katz: 'Do nothing dishonorable.' What he had said was: 'No matter what you do, leave a trail of paper proving that you didn't do it,' but his attention was diverted from these moral euphemisms when Poley snapped his fingers and asked suddenly: 'Have you flown north to touch base with Afanasi? You haven't? How are you progressing on collecting your Big Bight?'

'Just that caribou you helped me bag.'

'Good. We'll fly up to Desolation and try to bag your walrus.'

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'Didn't you say walrus was illegal for guys like us?'

'Yes and no.'

Poley insisted that Jeb clear his desk and accompany him to Barrow, where he introduced him to Harry Rostkowsky and his well-battered one-engine Cessna 185. 'Are we going to fly in that?' Jeb asked, and Poley replied: 'We always have. And two weeks from now it's going to fly your walrus head out.'

When Jeb learned that the distance from Barrow down to Desolation was only forty miles, he hoped that he could avoid flying in Rosty's crate, but when they were aloft, Poley pointed down to the bleak tundra below, with never a tree in sight, just mile upon mile of hummocks, near-swamps and shallow lakes: 'No road down there. Probably never will be. Up here you fly or you don't go.'

In preparation for landing at Desolation, Rostkowsky flew well out to sea, banked to the left, and as he came in low over the village of some thirty houses, a store and a school that was in the process of being built, Jeb saw to his amazement that despite the thousands of acres of unused land, the settlement was perched at the far southern tip of a spit of land exposed to the sea on one side, a large lagoon on the other. 'Snug, eh?' Rostkowsky shouted as he buzzed the place twice to alert the villagers, then dropped skillfully onto the graveled strip and taxied up to where people were beginning to assemble. Before anyone left the plane, he opened his window and tossed out two bags of mail and several parcels; then he unlocked the door and told his passengers: 'Yep. With God's help we made it again.'

When the citizens of Desolation saw their old friend Poley Markham climbing down, they began moving quietly forward, but no one made any gesture of excited welcome, and Jeb thought: If they treat an old friend with such reserve, how do they greet someone they don't like? But then he looked past Poley to the meager houses of his first Eskimo village and saw, standing off to one side, a short, round man in his mid-forties whose bare head showed that he wore his graying hair in a Julius Caesar cut, short and combed straight forward over his dark brow. Nudging Poley, he asked: 'Is that Afanasi?' and Markham said: 'Yep. He's not much for show.'

When all the villagers had greeted Markham, for he had performed many charitable services for this village, the two men walked over to greet the Eskimo who would be their guide for the walrus hunt, and Poley said: 'This is my young friend Jeb Keeler. Lawyer . . .'

'Don't you know anyone who works for a living?' Afanasi asked, and the men laughed.

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In the days that followed, Jeb discovered that this quiet, capable Eskimo who owned the only truck in town was distinctive in a score of ways: 'You had two years at the university?' Yes. 'And you worked in Seattle two years?' Yes. 'And you subscribe to

Time

magazine?' Yes, three weeks late. 'And you're the head of the local school board?'

Yes. And then came the question that perplexed Keeler but not Afanasi: 'Yet you prefer to live according to the old traditions of subsistence?'

In uttering this tremendously important word, Jeb Keeler catapulted himself right into the heart of contemporary Alaska, for a great battle had begun, and would continue during the rest of the century, between those Native Alaskans who accepted the inevitability of getting most of their food from store-bought cans but who also wanted to improve their lot by bagging a seal or a caribou now and then in the ancient manner, and those forces of government and modernity which sought to hammer the Native peoples into an urban, money-economy lifestyle. In the halls of Congress the struggle had been described as perpetuation of the reservation versus mainstreaming, and while this disjunction was relevant to the condition of the Indians in the Lower Forty-eight, in Alaska, which had never known formal reservations, it was not: here the struggle manifested itself as a choice between ancient subsistence versus modern urbanization.

Afanasi, having experienced the best of both systems, strove to be an eclectic: 'I want penicillin and radio, but I also find great spiritual gratification in the subsistence way of life,' and Jeb was captivated when he learned what this entailed: 'You're going to hear a lot about subsistence if you work in Alaska, Mr. Keeler, so you better get the definitions lined up. In the Lower Forty-eight, I'm told it means just getting by with the help of government handouts. Subsisting on the poverty level. In Alaska the word has quite a different meaning. It refers to noble patterns of life that go back twenty-nine thousand years, back to when we all lived in Siberia and learned how to survive in the world's most difficult ambiance.'

Vladimir's use of this unusual word, and his vocabulary in general, caused Keeler to ask: 'Are you an Eskimo? You have such a wide-ranging vocabulary.' Afanasi laughed: 'I'm about as pure an Eskimo as you'll find these days,' which prompted Keeler to ask: 'But what about your Russian name?'

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'Let's go back five generations, counting me as one. That's not difficult if you're an Eskimo. A Siberian married an Aleut woman, and they had a son who became the well-known Father Fyodor Afanasi, a spiritual light in the nonh. Rather late he married an Athapascan woman from a mission station where he had worked. His church sent him up here to Christianize the heathen Eskimo, who promptly murdered him. His son, Dmitri, became a missionary himself, as did his son, my father. Me? I had no taste for missionary work. I thought our problem was the challenge of the modern world. But you asked what I was? One-sixteenth Russian without being able to speak a word of that language.

Same percentage Aleut and equally illiterate there. One-eighth Athapascan, and not a word of that language. Pure Eskimo, three-fourths, but when I say that twelve of my ancestors were pure Eskimo, only God knows what that really means. Maybe some Boston sailor blood in there, maybe some Norwegian.

'But whatever the truth, I'm an Eskimo committed to a life of subsistence. I want to help my village take a whale or two each yeai. I want to go after polar bears and walruses when I can. I want two or three caribou when they come stampeding by.

And we also live from the ducks, geese, seaweed and salmon. And what's important these days, I wint to range pretty far afield to garner what I need to eat. And this puts me in conflict with outside hunters like you. I don't want you flying up here to kill off my game for trophies, taking the head back south and leaving the carcass to rot.'

It was as succinct a summary of what subsistence meant to an Eskimo or an Aleut or an Athapascan as Keeler would hear, and in subsequent days \

vhen he and Markham went far out among the ice floes to hunt for walrus under Afanasi's direction, his respect for this pattern of life was intensified. One night as they cooked their evening meal in a tent pitched three miles from land, he said: 'I've always considered myself a hunter. Rabbits as a kid. A deer in New Hampshire. But you're a real hunter. You hunt or you starve.'

'Not really,' Afanasi said. 'I always have the option of going to Seattle or Anchorag^

and working in an office. But is that a viable choice for an Eskimo? Someone like me who has known what it means to be out here on the ice? Come back when we're on a whale hunt and see the entire village join in the ceremony of tharks to the whale.

Then as we

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butcher our catch, everyone, even the oldest women, stands by to receive their share of the ocean's gift, whale blubber, the essence of life.'

On the fourth day out on the ice, when they had moved to the farthest edge where blue open water showed in the distance, Poley Markham spotted what he believed was a walrus hauling himself onto the ice, and when Afanasi put his Zeiss binoculars on the spot he confirmed the sighting. Then, with a mastery learned from his Eskimo uncles, he directed his team of three into an approach which enabled the youngest member, Jeb Keeler, to put a heavy bullet into the great beast's neck, but just as Jeb fired, both Afanasi and Markham, standing well behind him, fired also, to ensure that a wounded animal was not left to perish in the deep. The three shots were so beautifully synchronized that Jeb was unaware that the other two had fired, and when he ran up to the fallen beast he exulted as if he alone had slain this admirable specimen, but he had scarcely reached the walrus when Afanasi started homeward to inform the villagers that a walrus had been taken.

Jeb and Poley stayed out on the ice that night, protecting their kill, and in the morning they were awakened by a file of villagers, men and women alike, who had come to butcher the catch and haul the fine, nutritious meat homeward. It was a triumphal day, with even the children participating in the rejoicing, and when the meat was distributed several youngsters were on hand to run portions of it to those who were bedridden. In the afternoon a dance was held, with the head of the walrus and his monstrous tusks occupying a place of honor, but now a shadow descended upon the celebration because a young Eskimo sidled up to Keeler and said: 'You know, you can't take the head home with you.'