Coming into the Country (35 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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“It's a little surprising to me that people exist who are interested in living on that ground up there,” he told me.
“Why would anyone want to take someone who wanted to be there and throw them out? Who the hell could
care?”
Al Ames, who had built his cabin only two years before, harnessed his dogs and mushed Crane down the Yukon to Woodchopper, where a plane soon came along and flew him out.
Crane met Phil Berail at Woodchopper, and struggled shyly to express to him his inexpressible gratitude. Berail, sixty-five, was a temporary postmaster and worked for the gold miners there. He had trapped from his Charley River cabin. He was pleased that it had been useful, he said. For his part, he had no intention of ever going there again. He had abandoned the cabin four years before.
 
 
 
The river people refer to seasons of their year with names like “ducks” and “fish.”
“We'll be in Eagle soon after fish.”
“There's not a lot to do before ducks.”
They hunt ducks in May, and work on things that are needed for the coming winter—a new toboggan, for example, so it will age all summer and be slippery and hard in the fall. New cabins are started, and repairs are made on others. In July, nets are put out for king salmon. There is some use of fish wheels—postcard symbols of the Yukon. A fish wheel is a revolving trap that was invented by a white man but is generally associated with Indians. The big kings weigh as much as sled dogs. Their dense ruddy flesh—baked, smoked, or canned —is one of the supreme gifts of nature. The river people are less interested in kings than in the chum salmon that follow, for while king salmon may be luxuries on the human palate, chum—dried or frozen—are year-round staples for dogs. They are, in effect, gasoline. A team consumes at least a thousand
a year. The river people believe that the health of a sled dog can be measured by the proportion of fish in its diet. When they happen to do odd jobs for one another or engage in barter, they like to be paid in dog salmon. Lilly Allen has given fifty salmon for a quarter of a bear. You try to get your meat around the first week of October, hunting moose and bear while they are still fat. “This is a fat-starved country. This is not the coast. You'll look a long while before you'll see a seal in the river.” You see ice instead, coming down in the middle of the month. At the sight of it, harnesses are brought out and repaired. The ice is light at first, and goes tinkling by, but with advancing cold the floes increase, harden, crash, thunder—until one day a startling silence replaces the sound. Trapping begins, and lasts off and on until April. The Indians used to follow this cycle more than they do now. The river people have taken up where the Indians left off. April is a lag month—not a lot to do before ducks. April is a good time to go out of the country and work on the pipeline, or on something else that yields money for wheat berries, ammunition, and fuel.
Spread out they may be, but the river people are social and gregarious. News moves quickly of a reason to convene. Dick Cook shot a wolf near Eagle not long ago and stewed it in a twenty-one-quart pressure cooker. His ilk in eager numbers gathered around the pot and ate twenty-one quarts of wolf. Not all gatherings are impromptu. To celebrate the 1976 vernal equinox, for example, the river people held a tribal convention just below the mouth of the Nation. It was planned many months in advance and went on for nearly a week. To them, the vernal equinox is a more important date than Easter, just as December 21st is a more important date than Christmas, and in each case by a factor so large it tends to dismiss the comparison. The vernal equinox is the fulcrum of light and dark which holds the promise of warmth to come, of the summer fish runs and garden harvests, the growth of Brussels sprouts and Mary Jane. Nearly everyone grows the latter. The
law does not frown upon the practice in Alaska. In the long northern light, the compound serrate leaves will rise on tall stems to the height of a man, and as whole stands come together, enmeshing, interdigitating, they form colonies of such spiky luxuriance that small segments of the banks of the Yukon appear to have been painted there by Henri (le Douanier) Rousseau.
The specific site of the river people's equinoctial gathering was the abandoned camp of Jim Taylor, who went out of the country in 1933 to die of cancer. By the evidence of what he left behind, he was a far-northern Crusoe. He could have earned an advanced degree in log architecture. He failed at mining, working the gold-bearing placers off the left bank of the Yukon, but he loved the country so much he stayed on, and he paid off his debts trapping. On the right bank near the Nation, he built a cabin that included a dumbwaiter, which served as a refrigerator when it was lowered into a spring. There were two rooms, full of period “Alaska furniture” made from orange crates, Blazo boxes, and egg crates. He built other cabins for shopwork and storage. Where most people chain their dogs to trees or to stakes in the ground, separating them in short-radius confinement, Taylor built long, palisaded, individual dog runs, each including a log kennel and a fragment of a running brook. For times of severe weather, he built an entire cabin exclusively for dogs. It has six rooms, three on either side of a central corridor, and appears to be a small, comfortable jail. Taylor could pull a lever from outside and release simultaneously six chattering huskies. Taylor had the first radio in the country, and miners would come down their streams and cross the Yukon to visit him and hear it. He was a big man, and is remembered as a “good guy.” Surely he would have been flattered that his like in the nineteen-seventies chose to gather in his compound. The main cabin burned some time ago, but the rest is there, intact, the sod roofs shaggy with growing spruce.
It was a council of war and a party, too—a time of talk and music, no booze—a way to keep contacts, to exchange opinions and information.
“The economy's got to go eventually, because they're into using minerals and resources way too heavy.”
“Keep a cache of ammunition. You can't survive without a rifle.”
The ground was white, the brooks and rivers frozen. The people slept for the most part in tents. They strategized about the federal bureaucracy—how to oppose it, how to melt out of its way. They planned a network of cabins for winter travel. They tried, with no success, to agree on a communal bulk food order, and on a way to administer common ownership of a truck for use in Eagle. Their desire to be “tribal” does not approach in strength their need to be self-reliant. For all their garrulity, they are not compact. As they always do, they talked in loops without end about hunting, fishing, trapping, and dogs; knives, axes, the kerf-width of saws; mortises, tenons; steel-cut oats; oars, poles; sleds, toboggans; aluminum boats; trail sets, visuals, tracks on the pan; single trees, spreaders; the collars of stoves; what sort of pups a certain bitch might throw; shelter, clothing, death, and marten bait (grouse wings versus salmon skins versus strawberry jam); and as the talk curved through its long ellipses it turned and returned, as always, to the Yukon, to every gravel bar, rock, rip, eddy, and bend—free or under ice. They baked pies. They argued ethics. Is it wasteful to feed moose to dogs? They tacked up a moosehide. The girth alone covered thirteen cabin logs. There was a common hunt across the Yukon in the Fourth of July flats, and a common mush—a dog Olympiad—far up the Nation River. Competition, open or subtle, is in everything they say and do. Who —figuratively, physically—goes deepest into the wilderness? Who is the most established, the most “dug in”? Who takes the highest percentage of his food from the land? Who has been caught in the deepest overflow? Who has the oldest
whipsaw, the oldest bench screw? Who has the best woman?
A good woman is a subservient woman, or so it seems to the alien eye. As Brad Snow has explained to me, “Women's lib doesn't survive very well in the bush. There's a bunch to do—and responsibility has to be delineated where it fits. The meal has got to get cooked. The meat has got to get found.” Snow, nonetheless, prepares about half of the meals he shares with Lilly Allen. Charlie Edwards, while a star of a hunter, grinds grain and bakes bread at home. But those are exceptions. Cook cooks nothing. By and large, the men seem to be waited upon to an extent that even our forefathers might not have known.
In a good fish year, two moose, two hundred ducks, and seventy-five quarts of king salmon will be plenty for one river couple. The upper Yukon now is considered “full,” saturated with settlers, all space reserved—roughly one person for every five miles. Not everyone on the river gathers for the equinox. Some are not tribally inclined. I was in the Yukon Trading Post in Circle one time when a man about forty came up over the riverbank and bought six bottles of Worcestershire sauce, twelve packets of yeast, a case of matches, some Spam, sardines, hot dogs, three pounds of tea, a hundred and fifty pounds of sugar, a hundred and fifty pounds of rice, fifty pounds of cornmeal, and two cigars. He counted out three hundred and forty-four dollars cash, laid it on the counter, and went back to the river without so much as a word about the weather. Frank Warren—pilot, trapper, keeper of the Trading Post—remarked that he had happened by that man's cabin one day and had thought to pay a visit. It was a small cabin, eight by ten, without windows. As Warren approached, he heard a voice. The man was telling himself a joke. Reaching the punch line, he erupted in laughter. Warren tiptoed away.
Of Cook's mentees, Charlie Edwards seems to be the most wild, in the extent that he prospers away in the woods. As energetic as he is successful, he lives on his rifle for months at a time. “I get so high being out in the woods it's like doing
acid,” he says. “I get high just being straight. I'm happy. I never wanted to work for anybody but myself. I wanted a country big enough so I could move into the woods. I can live good in the woods here on two thousand dollars a year.” He makes that much trapping. His wife, Cheryl, brings back fifteen hundred dollars more from seasonal work in Fairbanks. He saves money by assembling his own ammunition. They live at a creek mouth under twenty miles from Eagle because Cheryl is less comfortable farther away, and, as Charlie elaborates, “It's a hell of a lot nicer when you got an old lady than when you ain't.” They make candles from the wax of their own bees. When they take a moose, they use everything. Cheryl sews Charlie's clothes. He wears moosehide trousers, mukluks of moosehide and fur, a marmot vest, a patchwork parka of beaver, caribou, wolverine, and wolf. “If I get myself another bear, I'm going to have fur pants,” he told me once, and the next time I saw him his pants were hairy and black. He is twenty-five or so and comes from a well-to-do family in Fairfield, Connecticut. He went for a time to Suffield Academy, in Connecticut, where he is remembered (by a faculty member) as “a renegade of tremendous aggressive energy—reaMy into the music of the time. He baked his hash in those little ovens, you know. He was into philosophy, as I recall. He left of his own accord.” Cheryl is dark and slight, and also from Connecticut. Edwards is of middle height, strong, with missing teeth, and a golden ponytail flying behind. They are well dug in. They have a good cabin, a log sauna, and impressive caches, impressively filled. “I couldn't ask for any more out of life,” he says. “I don't care if there's a life after life. I'm having an awful good time in this one.”
From Eagle, Circle, Central—the communities of the country—the river people are watched with absorption, not to mention awe and envy, admiration, contempt, and fear. They are widely looked upon with high esteem, and the reverse, too, since almost no one in the country is shy to put the slam on
any being that heaves into sight, let alone the people of the river. That is to say, some who would not advance a toe into the wilderness will travel any distance by tongue.
“Alaska was one of the few places left where you could do this sort of thing. There is room enough in Alaska. What harm have they done to the country? They trap a little. They put up fish. They're not hurting anything.”
“They're a generation too late.”
“They are unrealistic romanticists, and some are just plain stupid. They are devoid of values—materialistic, selfish people. We are constituents of a society grounded in law. They flout the law to live their romantic life style. They harvest moose, bear, fish—whatever they can get their hands on that they can fit into a pot—without regard for seasons or for sex, or for the law. Anything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims is fair game to them. They are interlopers. Every time they kill a moose or bear and toss it into the pot to feed their dogs, they deprive me of the opportunity to see that moose or bear. When I see something, I leave it to the person after me to see. Frankly, it just tees me off. I consider them to be a god-damned curse.”

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