Coming into the Country (11 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

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Three more tributaries came into the river, and its navigable stretches lengthened through the afternoon. Still, though, we did a lot of walking. Mergansers—a mother and six—fled ahead of us, running on the water like loons. Now and again, big ledges of bedrock jutted into and under the river, damming water, framing pools. Below one ledge, where water ran white from a pool, we stopped to fish. Stell Newman caught an Arctic char. Bob Fedeler caught another. They were imposing specimens,
bigger than the Salmon's salmon. They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws. Sea-run Arctic char. They could be described as enormous brook trout, for the brook trout is in fact a char. They had crimson fins with white edges and crimson borders on their bellies. Their name may be Gaelic, wherein “blood” is
“cear.”
The Alaska record length for an Arctic char is thirty-six inches, and ours were somewhat under that. I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, size zero, and bringing it back felt a big one hit. The strike was too strong for a grayling—more power, less commotion. I had, now, about ten pounds of fish on a six-pound line. So I followed the fish around, walking upstream and down, into and out of the river. I had been walking the kayak all day long, and this experience was not much different. After fifteen minutes or so, the fish tired, and came thrashing from the water. I took out my tape and laid it on him, from the hooking jaw to the tip of the tail. Thirty-one and a half inches. Orange speckles, crimson glow, this resplendent creature was by a long measure the largest fish I had ever caught in fresh water. In its belly would fit ten of the kind that I ordinarily keep and eat. For dinner tonight we would have grilled Arctic char, but enough had been caught already by the others. So, with one hand under the pelvic fins and the other near the jaw, I bent toward the river and held the fish underwater until it had its equipoise. It rested there on my hands for a time, and stayed even when I lowered them away. Then, like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream. The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go.
Floating for a time, we moved on downstream. When Eskimos returning from long summer hunting trips rode down the Salmon River, they travelled on rafts. In June, when they had established their seine-fishing camps along the Kobuk, the men left the women and went off into the mountains in small groups to spend the summer killing creatures whose skins were needed for winter—marmots, lone caribou, caribou fawns (for
undergarments). The hunters had long hours of leisure, and they sat around campfires, as we do, telling tales. They repeated the narratives night after night, yet no one ever told someone else's story; a sense of copyright was inherent, and plagiarism was seemingly unknown. Sons inherited stories from their fathers. Needless to say, many tales had to do with the hunt—hunting the wolf, hunting the caribou, fall and winter hunting the bear. Tramping up the mountains on snowshoes, they searched for signs of denning—watching, in otherwise uniform snow, for a glaze of ice, the product of the vapors of breath. Finding such evidence, they carefully removed the ice, quietly, gingerly, revealing a vent hole. An exploring spear was inserted in the hole and moved about until it touched something soft. Resting there, the spear would slowly move up and down. The hunter then rammed it home, and leaned on it with all his weight as the bear heaved in torment, lifting the hunter off the ground. The modern method is to poke for the bear with a long rod and when contact is established place a rifle by the rod and fire. When the bear is still, the hunters go into the den. Sometimes, living bears are in there, too—new cubs, or full-grown cubs, or a living mother and a dead cub. There is no need for fear, the hunters say, because a bear will not fight in its den. The bear is the animal whose intelligence they respect above all others', and around which they have spun over centuries skeins of ritual and taboo. In times past, the skull of a killed bear was ceremonially touched to the bear's heart and was then placed atop a living spruce and left in the forest with its eye sockets facing north.
With signs of autumn, hunters came down from the mountains to the upper waters of the river. They cut dead spruce, built their rafts, and piled them high with fur. In the upper river, in shallow water, rafts consisted of just a few logs, tied together with thongs of bear hide. The narrow ends of the logs all faced downstream; the wide ends formed the stern. Thus, the raft was a wedge, pointing down the river. Afloat, it was guided with a spruce pole at the bow. When it ran aground,
it was dragged, like a Klepper, through the shallow rips. As the river deepened, the rafts of two or more parties were joined together. The bigger the river, the bigger the total raft—a stable vessel anytime, even in thundering flood.
Some of the wood in the rafts was for winter fires, but most was used for housing, a need that has waned on the Kobuk. Houses now come from the government, in three choices—A, B, and C—at so much a month for twenty years. They are frame structures, gabled, nondescript. They could be garages with windows. In winter the walls sweat, and show a frost line four feet high. Their exterior sheds are not large enough for the storage of meat and equipment. There is a new house today in Kiana made of river-floated logs.
We stopped for the night below a bedrock pool, pitching the tents on a sandy bank under woolly mountains whose ridgelines were a couple of thousand feet above the river. The forest now filled in most of the valley floor and went up the slopes maybe three hundred feet. Bear tracks in the sand by the river were eleven inches long, six inches wide. We fished-take-and-put —catching and releasing half a dozen grayling and several char. Eskimos, on their journeys, now cook char in aluminum foil, which is what we did. The pink flesh steamed in its own moisture, and each of us ate at least two pounds. Looking up from dinner, we saw a black bear, long and leggy, crossing a steep hillside at a slow lope. It stopped to graze for a time, and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly ran and took a crashing leap into a stand of willow and alder, breaking its way through, coming out the other side onto a high plain of pale-green caribou moss.
 
 
 
In the morning there was wind. A front as dank as an oyster was moving in over the eastern mountains. Rain was coming —an uninviting day to frog kayaks in the river. We ate oatmeal,
and then, after coffee, Jack Hession said he thought he'd be going. He had deadlines to meet and simply had to get back to the office. The office—in Anchorage—was six hundred miles away. If there was a wild place in the United States, we were in it, and Hession was about to take off on his own, pressed for time. Terribly sorry, he said. He would have enjoyed staying with us, but he had pressures from home. He had decided to make the trip with us more or less at the last moment, and now he was deciding to leave at the last moment plus one. He would take the mail plane from Kiana, which was something like ninety miles downstream. With a packet or two of freeze-dry and six pieces of pilot bread, he got into his single Klepper and bobbed down the river. The two blades of his paddle wagged like a semaphore, and he was gone. He had no tent. Rain fell through much of the day, and all through the night.
Hession told us, many days later, stories of his solo run. Not long after he left us, he became preoccupied with his thoughts and overshot a channel in a riffle. Near the far ends of pools, where loose-stone deposits had built up as dams, the river would characteristically become fast and shallow and would tumble to one side over a brink of gravel—racing white toward a lower pool. The knack of navigation was to read the riffle, sense the heaviest flow there, and get into it before the broad general current could take the boat a little farther and run it aground; for while much water went down the riffle even more simply disappeared into the earth, passing into the porous basements of high, dry bars of gravel. Often enough, there was just a narrow slot, angling left or right, through which the kayak could proceed, and now Hession had missed such a place, so he would have to backferry—moving, stern first, across the stream, to realign his course and shoot the rip. He was close to a bank. Realizing his mistake, he reached backward with his paddle. He happened to look up as well. On the bank above him were a sow grizzly and a huge two-year-old cub. Across a distance of no more than fifteen feet Hession and the mother
grizzly looked each other in the eye. Staring steadily at her, he slowly moved the paddle, retreating at an angle to the current. He felt helpless, because he could think of nothing to do if the bear attacked. He thought of turning the boat over in order to disappear beneath it, but there was nowhere to hide in less than a foot of water. Therefore, all decisions belonged to the bear. Hession kept on gazing fixedly into her eyes, making no gesture of fear or flight. The bears themselves retreated. But after a few steps they turned, and both stood up on their hind legs, squinting. Hession thought they were going to come for him, after this second look. But they dropped down, turned, and went. He told this story without modulation, without a hint of narrative excitation; and in the same flat manner he went on to say that he had later seen a pair of sandhill cranes and, some time after that, a golden eagle. It was all wildlife to him. When you are the Sierra Club's man in Alaska, the least of your problems is bears.
That evening, when he decided it was time to sleep, the rain was steady and miserable, and he looked around for shelter. He looked for big driftwood. He finally came to an uprooted spruce, washed downriver probably in June. Resting on its root structure, it was partly off the ground. He tipped the kayak so that it leaned against the tree, and put his sleeping bag in the space formed between them. (As an alternative, he might have cut a number of young spruce and arranged them in a circle with their tips together at the top—a form of tepee that the forest Eskimos call “poor people's camp.”) Hession slid himself into place. The rain fell on the boat and tree. “I passed out,” he said, “and the next thing I knew it was morning.” When he arrived at the confluence of the Salmon and the Kobuk, two Eskimos were fishing there. They shared their boiled salmon with him, in a sauce of seal oil. Their Evinrude took him to Kiana.
John Kauffmann and I paddled Snake Eyes the day Hession left, and we spent a lot of time in the river beside it, making
Klepper trails in the gravel. We had to bail frequently, because water was accumulating inside the hull not only from the rain and from our dripping boots but also through leaks in the vulcanized rubber. The shallow river was grinding Snake Eyes down. The hull, advertised to be as “strong as a heavy-duty conveyor belt,” was losing its capability to convey us. We were coming into many deep pools and fine stretches of water now, but the momentum and response of Snake Eyes afloat were not much better than of Snake Eyes aground, so the others—in their maneuverable, shallow-draft canoe and light kayak—often had to wait. On the slope above the left bank we saw a lone grizzly walking north in the rain. Since the river was narrow and bending, the boats were sometimes out of sight from one another. Fedeler, in the single Klepper, saw a grizzly that was gone when the rest of us came along. There was no telling how many bears we may have failed to notice—or, for that matter, how many bears we may have seen twice. The Nikok, a tributary, came into the Salmon from the west, and we stopped for lunch beside it, and cast lures from smooth ledges into deep holes that were clear and green.
After the Nikok, there was more river to float us. The rain turned to mist and put a soft gray light on the hills. No matter what the weather might be, Kauffmann said, the Brooks Range for him was the best of Alaska—in the quality of its light, in the clarity of its flowing water, in the configuration of its terrain. He did not much care for the glacier country—the south. “It's too raw,” he went on. “Up here in the north, you have all the effects of the glacier land forms without the glaciers themselves. You have clear streams.” Studying the Salmon as a national wild river had been Kauffmann's idea. If Kauffmann could have his way, at least a quarter of Alaska would be held as wilderness forever. After his five years of study and planning for Gates of the Arctic National Park—an area twice as large as the state of Hawaii, four times the size of Yellowstone—odds seemed favorable that it would be congressionally
confirmed. Kauffmann's total plans for the park's development—his intended use of airstrips, roadways, lodges, lean-tos, refreshment stands, trash barrels, benches—added up to zero. The most inventive thing to do, as he saw it, was nothing. Let the land stand wild, without so much as a man-made trail.
Kauffmann, among Alaskans, represented only a small arc or two in a wheel of attitudes toward the land. For one thing, he was a “fed” and thus an “outsider,” who—in the view of some —was trying to “grab” and “lock up” prime terrain. Yet he was also an Alaskan. In a state largely populated by aggressive transients, he was at least as Alaskan as most. He had built a home and had become an earnest Alaskan citizen. As such, and not merely as a fed, he did indeed favor locking up land, if that meant saving it for the future of the future.

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