Coming into the Country (55 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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He falls silent and pensive, then suddenly changes direction. “My father was building the steeple for the church here in the city when he heard that I was born. My father was married in the church. He went through the door there on his last journey. Now the Bible group wants the church. The church belongs to all of us. I couldn't see trading it to a group that made me unwelcome. These people came here as missionaries for their own kind of Christianity, but they have not had much luck, particularly with me. As a group, they have not helped Eagle.
They keep the town dry. That is not the way to deal with the problem of alcohol. The only way is through regional school boards, through education—teaching in the classroom what alcohol does to you. If a town votes dry in Alaska, it applies for five miles around. The Village is three miles. The people there are outside the city limits and can't vote here in town. After the last vote, the boozers—we thought the votes got miscounted. We'd have still lost, but it would have looked a little better. I don't believe that everyone who comes here from now on is going to be a religious type. Eagle may become a wet town soon. Then I really think the amount of drinking might go down. You heard what happened today? There was going to be a vote on alcohol in the meeting of the Village Council, but the meeting had to be cancelled, because almost everyone but Michael David was drunk.”
 
 
 
Mike Potts, who is white and from Iowa, lives in Eagle Indian Village and is married to Adeline Juneby. He first saw the country in 1971, when he was twenty. His father flew him in here in his Comanche 400. Approaching Eagle in early summer, they looked down on the headwaters terrain of the North Fork of the Fortymile, and Potts, impressed, asked his father to fly low. They crossed spruce forests and clear, dendritic streams—Happy New Year Creek, Eureka Creek, Bear Creek, Comet Creek, Champion Creek, Slate Creek, a great many more without names. All around were mountain summits. Without circling twice, Potts decided that he had at last found his own territory, the piece of the world he had dreamed of, and he laid claim, in his plans and in his imagination, to something over a million acres, over two thousand square miles of land, in which, from the air, he could see no evidence of humanity. In half a dozen years that followed, he would encounter
only two people there—and they prospectors, passing through, not to return.
When Potts was seven, he saw a picture in an encyclopedia of a trapper on a trapline, and decided he wanted to be a trapper, too, and live off wild country. He grew up in West Des Moines—in a big, comfortable house on twenty acres of wellkept grounds—and went in summer to Vermilion Lake, in the Quetico-Superior. He became a hunter, a canoer. In his early teens, he put up on his bedroom walls sectional aeronautical charts that covered the north of North America from Labrador to Alaska. “I would sit there for hours and dream, thinking where I was going to go.” His heroes by that time were the mountain men of the eighteen-twenties and thirties. He had begun to collect a small library on them—“Bill Sublette, Mountain Man,” “The Fur Hunters of the Far West”—and the same books are now in his cabins. He has read them all four times. The day after his high-school commencement, he left West Des Moines for Alaska. He was scarcely seventeen. He had a pickup, given him for graduation. His driver's license was five days old. (“I was one scared kid.”) He had six hundred dollars, five hundred of which his sister had paid him for a quarter horse he owned. He had a couple of guns, his books on the mountain men, and little more. (“I was not loaded up with supplies.”) He stayed scared, he says, for one day. He spent a year in southeastern Alaska and two in the Wrangells, trapping, looking after horses, working for big-game guides. Eventually, he heard things that attracted him to the upper-Yukon country. His father, a real-estate appraiser, happened to come to Anchorage on a business trip and flew him north to see it.
In Eagle, Potts learned that the last trapper who had worked his utopian drainage had left it ten years before. He quickly made friends in Eagle Indian Village, and—not an easy thing for a white to do—found a place where he could stay there. The Junebys took to him—in a sense, adopted him. Soon he went into the mountains, to prepare for the trapping life. He
fixed up a cabin forty miles from Eagle. In the fall, he killed a moose and cached it for the winter. It gave him a sense of plenty. A bear took the moose. He killed rabbits, but there were not enough. As the cold weather came on, he lived for weeks on flour, rice, and beans. He set out traps, but nothing much entered them. Three hundred and fifteen dollars would be his income for the winter. All but one of his dogs died. “It took me time to catch on to the country. It is always difficult when you are learning. I was trying to learn to live like an Indian, and do things better than most. My basic mountain education fell in that year. Bob Stacy, one of the older men in the Village, went out there with me for a while. I owe him a lot. A white man thinks he's great in the woods—and he brings his snow machine. Indians live with the woods instead of fighting it. The white man thinks he has to pack everything in there. An Indian will pack very little and use the woods. The old people in the Village say, ‘The driftwood sleeps at night.' They see everything as alive.”
Potts saw himself as “in college.” He almost took his final exam one night that first winter. Making a trip alone across a high divide, he overestimated the distance he could cover and had to stop far short of a cabin in which he meant to stay. He had shot a wolf and skinned it out. Considering himself to be in no hurry, he used up the light of the day. The sun set at four. The best route to the divide climbed two thousand feet in the two and a half miles before him. Slowly, on snowshoes in the dark, he attacked the steep ascent. His dogs had very little “go power.” They were “half sick and half starved.” He was hungry, too. He had no food with him and had not eaten all day. He was counting on the cache at the cabin. He decided, finally, that he would have to stay where he was. He had no tent. The temperature was twenty below zero. He saw a thick drift of snow against a clump of stunted spruce. He dug a kind of grave in the snow, almost down to the ground. He lined the bottom with spruce boughs and placed over them the pelt of the wolf.
He took his lead dog in with him, leaving the others in harness. Across the top of his excavation he placed his snowshoes, which more than reached from side to side. Over the snowshoes he spread his tarp. He had a few candles. He lighted them, and melted some snow. The water was his dinner.
Potts, who is now established and successful, with cabins all over his trapping estate in addition to his principal home at the edge of the Village, told me that story in response to a question. I asked him if in all the seasons he had spent in that wilderness he had ever been afraid. “Yes—once,” he said, and added at the end of the tale, “There was some uncertainty there. But I wasn't frightened to where I didn't have my head.”
Potts is a big man, attractive, not wiry but hard. Now that he is twenty-five, his hair is disappearing on the top but hangs in long strings on either side. His eyes, bright and a rich blue, are so alert and dilated that they suggest anxiety until you hear the voice that calmly and confidently follows their gaze. His jacket is of fringed and beaded moosehide. His skin, where it shows, is as tan as his wife's. She is short and roundly soft in form. Her voice is light and slow.
Potts feels a world of difference between him and the whites of the river. While they are his good friends, his regard for them does not always stop shy of contempt. He will eat their boiled wolf and listen to their stories, but he is of the mountains and they are of the river, and “to get things to their cabin all they have to do is float them down.” He continues, “In this day and age, few people would make the effort to go out where I go, to the North Fork. It is mountainous country. It isn't the Yukon, where you've got snow machines and a lot of people using the route. The mountain country is a lot tougher—and just myself breaking the trail. Long ago, when more people were out there in the mountains, it was a different type of man. There was no welfare and Social Security type stuff then. Nowadays, even on the river, people give up. They go hungry for a day and they quit. If it looks too hard, they can give it
up and try something else: be a bum, like a lot of these people in Eagle.”
 
 
 
Dick Cook, acknowledged high swami of the river people, does not share Potts' view of Potts. “He feels that he is living in the bush,” Cook says. “But really he is living in town. All he has out there in the mountains is a few traps, and airdrop supplies.” Cook is eating his breakfast, which begins with slices of moose sausage in bear casing, set in a bed of fried rice, prepared and served to him by Donna Kneeland. He sits in the larger of two chairs in his cabin, vaguely fifty miles into the wild from Eagle, and points out that we are as remote as we would be if the cabin were on Potts' trapline. We are nearly six miles from the Yukon as well.
The chairs are side by side, like thrones, against a windowless wall. I sat in Dick's chair once, and Donna warned me off it. Now I am in the other. With her plate in her lap, Donna is on the floor before us. Outside where Donna saws wood is a nine-pound maul, which she uses to split green spruce for her sheepherder's stove. In its tiny oven she bakes bread and pies.
“In this country, two people are necessary for each other,” she says. “There is a purpose in what I do here. When Dick comes home, I have fixed his food.”
“Out here, Donna is needed. Women in town are useless,” says Cook.
“Women's lib, that's not me. Women's lib is women being like men. They are barking up the wrong tree. I'm helping Dick, not doing these things for the sake of being like a man. I can't be like a man. I couldn't haul a soaked moosehide out of the river. It's too heavy. But I haul fish. I cut and sew caribou socks. I train the puppies to pull a sled. Are we going to start planting the garden today?”
“I'll decide that this afternoon.”
Clamped to a shelf is a hand-cranked grain mill, an import from Latin America, which carries in raised letters its own identification: “Molino Corona—Landers Mora & Cia., Ltda.” Many people in the country have mills like this one. A young woman in Eagle said to me that because her mill came from Latin America she found the C.I.A. part “spooky.” Making flour by stone friction is tough on the arm, a prizefighter's exercise, Donna's job. She seems amused when I take it over.
On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle. Steam meanders upward past a slot window, low and wide, covered with clear soft plastic. The view is of segments of tree trunks. The cabin is on an island in a white rushing stream and stands in a grove of what for this country are specimen spruce. Some approach six feet in girth. For logs and lumber, Cook has selected the trees in a way that preserves the aesthetic of the grove. The cabin logs are not peeled—a practice he looks upon as repellently suburban.
The shanty that Dick and Donna use on stopovers in Eagle is only a little up from squalid. Old mattresses drape its roof, old wolf gristle lies on the cluttered floor, and many tons of junk are in profusion on the ground. Their fish camp down the Yukon can be discouraging, too—a dirty, fetid, lightless cabin astink in aging salmon. These more manifest habitations long ago earned Cook a reputation as a sloven—among people who have never been here. This secluded cabin (his home of homes) is neat and tidy—in fact, trig. For years, he was content with half of it, with ten by ten feet. Now, with Donna, he has added a second room, which is two steps lower-split-level. Down there is the bed, made of rough planks covered with the hide of a moose. They ate their Thanksgiving dinner sitting on the bed—roast of moose he had shot, with a sauce of cranberries she had picked, potatoes and rutabagas they had grown, alfalfa sprouts with vinegar and oil, “pumpkin” pie from Hubbard squash. Visitors sleep on the floor. The dogs, on their chains,
are spaced among the spruce. They are usually quiet, but we hear them yelp, howl, or mutter from time to time. Curving overhead near the ridgepole is a curing pair of sled shoes, made from white birch. In very deep cold, steel runners stick to snow as if they were crossing sand. The cabin door is covered with a moosehide. Under the eave and the window, outside, is a workbench equipped with carpenter's tools and construction implements of high quality and extensive choice, all of them neatly, not to say meticulously, arranged. Around the cabin are Swede saws, a whipsaw, steel barrels, snowshoes, sleds, a shovel, a rake, a pickaxe, wedges, a crowbar, a hand sledge, axes, traps, the “Alaska Maytag” (basically a tub and plunger), a wall tent, a construction wheelbarrow with inflated tires, and any number of dozens of other things. We are as far down the Yukon from Eagle as New York City is down the Hudson from West Point, and the largest vehicle that can carry things the six miles up this tributary stream is a canoe. Dick means to bring a full-size cookstove soon, and an antique Singer sewing machine that belonged to his grandmother in Ohio. He says that half the work he has done, over the years, has been “hauling things in.”

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