Coming into the Country (56 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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An amazing percentage of the cargo stands on the cabin shelves. Books everywhere. Books on carpentry, blacksmithing, metalcraft, guns, leather, taxidermy, trapping, woodcraft. “American Indian Medicine.” “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.” “A Room of One's Own.” “A Field Guide to Animal Tracks.” “The Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music.” “Desert Solitaire.”
I tell him I like that one very much.
“You have a right to your opinion. The author's mistake is that he tries to express the meaning of nature. When you are writing about nature, you are writing about God, and it cannot be put into words.”
“Shooter's Bible.” “The Holy Bible.”
“Meat killed first three days after full moon said to keep better,” says a note neatly written on a wall calendar. “Harvest
roots and fruit in third to fourth quarter. Mushrooms best on full moon.”
When Dick and Donna are away, the cabin door is always left standing wide open. Blankets are tacked across the windows. Breakable objects are put under the floorboards, in a small cellar. Roughly half the times they are gone, they return to evidence of the presence of bears. Donna picks up a can of Crisco that a bear examined on a recent visit. As the bear held the Crisco and studied the label, a claw punched through the side of the can. The hole is of the diameter that would be made by a .45-calibre bullet. “When you live with nature, you have to share with nature, whether you like it or not,” says Cook. “The cabin is bear bait. Bears know when we're not here, because the dogs are gone. The damage bears do is part of living here.” Since breaking and entering is their most expensive habit, the cost is lowered by masking the windows and opening the door, suggesting to a bear the best way in and out, so the bear will not demolish the cabin.
Bears are on my mind today, because tomorrow I have to walk out of here alone and I hope for no encounters on the way. I have arranged with Sarge Waller to come down the Yukon in his boat and meet me at Cook's fish camp. The six miles from here to there have been travelled enough to create a sporadic trail—segments of beaten thoroughfare that tend to disappear, now into sedge tussocks, now into knee-deep muskeg, now into heavy thickets. As Nessmuk said, “The trail … branched off to right and left, grew dimmer and slimmer, degenerated to a deer path, petered out to a squirrel track, ran up a tree, and ended in a knot hole.” Getting lost will not be possible, though—not with a wall of hills on the right and the stream on the left and less than a mile of ground between. My apprehension is focussed wholly on bears, of which I am more wary than I was at one time. A while back, I confided this fear, in a general way, to Jim Scott in Eagle. I told him I had heard John Ostrander saying how bears are not long out of their dens
these days and are walking around mean and vicious. “Don't listen to these terrorized people,” said Scott. “Don't let them spoil your fun, you know what I mean? When you walk out from Cook's cabin, your chances, in effect, of encountering a bear will be roughly equivalent to your chances of encountering Jesus Christ.”
Jack Greene strongly counselled me not to go into the woods without a gun, and offered me one of his. I thanked him but refused. Having never hunted, I have almost no knowledge of guns. Arriving here, I came in with Dick and Donna from the fish camp, backpacking, the sled dogs running circles around us in the woods—a noisy, armed safari. Snoopy—brother of Chipper, the lead dog—had a forty-pound pack on his back, too. When Dick put it on him, he at once walked into the Yukon. We had come perhaps three-quarters of a mile when we passed a big mound of scat. “Maybe we'll get a bear!” Donna said. “It can happen anytime.” The thought seemed to quicken their appetites. Like a traveller checking his wallet, Cook instinctively felt for his rifle. He had left it at the fish camp. He dropped his pack and returned for the gun. Donna and I sat down by the spoor. “A woman needs a lot of confidence in the man she is living with out here,” she said. “I have superconfidence in Dick. When I wanted to go out with a man and live in the bush, I wasn't about to go out with someone from a university. The trouble with some people living out here together is that neither of them knows a whole bunch.” When Dick returned and we proceeded, we soon passed another pile of bear scat, fairly new—and, a half mile later, one that was even fresher. Now, on the morning before I leave, every bear story I know keeps running through my mind, every newspaper headline—“HIKERS DRIVE OFF BEAR SUSPECTED IN EARLIER DEATH,” “RIFLE OFFERS PROTECTION FROM BEARS”—and every bearchew feature in
Alaska
magazine, with color pictures of discharge day at Anchorage hospitals, people's eyes awry, their faces like five-year-old baseballs. When I told Tom Scott of my own travels in the Brooks
Range, with unarmed but ecologically experienced companions (Sierra Club, Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, National Park Service types), he said, “Pardon my saying so, but those gentlemen are fools. Alaskans are thought of as being gun-happy, and maybe that is what they are, but nearly everyone carries a gun in the woods”—including his father, he went on to say, regardless of Whom he might expect to meet there. And here I am about to walk through the woods the distance merely from Times Square to LaGuardia Airport and I am ionized with anticipation—catastrophic anticipation. I may never resolve my question of bears—the extent to which I exaggerate the danger, the extent of the foolishness of those who go unarmed. The effect of it all, for the moment, is a slight but detectable migration of my internal affections from the sneaker toward the bazooka, from the National Wildlife Federation toward the National Rifle Association—an annoying touch of panic in a bright and blazing day.
I profoundly wish it were winter. The country has seemed more friendly to me then, all the bears staring up at the ceilings of their dens. The landscape is softened, in illusion less rough and severe—the frozen rivers flat and quiet where the waves of rapids had been. Dick goes out on the levelled stream and lays down harnesses on the snow. The sled is packed, the gear lashed under skins. Everything is ready for the dogs. They are barking, roaring, screaming with impatience for the run. One by one, Donna unchains them. Out of the trees they dash toward the sled. Chipper goes first and, standing in front, holds all the harnesses in a good taut line. Abie, Little Girl, Grandma, Ug—the others fast fill in. They jump in their traces, can't wait to go. If they jump too much, they get cuffed. Wait another minute and they'll have everything so twisted we'll be here another hour. Go! The whole team hits at once. The sled, which was at rest a moment before, is moving fast. Destination, Eagle; time, two days.
The bluff above the stream is pastel tan, the sky rich blue. “Great day!”
“The snow could be a little drier!” Cook shouts. “In this god-damned country, no matter what the conditions are you wish you had something else!”
With a bit of time behind them, the dogs steady down. Gradually, Little Girl's tail comes up, begins to wag. She is goldbricking. Richard O. Cook stops his team. He walks up and down the line. “All right, you all know what is happening. You know who I'm after. You all know who I mean. No, not you, Grandma. You're O.K., girl. You are doing your work. You have not yet started to fake. No, not you, Chipper. You, either, Ug.” He comes to Little Girl.
“You
know who I mean. You know what is going on,” he says, and whumps her very hard on both sides of her butt. Dick does not pull back when he hits his dogs. He really belts them. But he is never cruel, he would not gratuitously beat them down. They are all exuberant animals, not a chronic cringer among them, and the full warm context of his relationship with them is something wonderful to see. The sled moves again. Little Girl's tail is low and wagless, and her chest is on the leather.
“Females are temperamental, flighty, not nearly as steady as males,” he says. “I have two. If I didn't need them for breeding purposes, I would have none in my team.”
Dick has sometimes handed the sled over to me for two and three miles at a time, he and Donna walking far behind. On forest trails, with the ground uneven, the complexity of the guesswork is more than I'd have dreamed. We come to, say, a slight uphill grade. I have been riding, standing on the back of the sled. The dogs, working harder, begin throwing glances back at me. I jump off and run, giving them a hundred-and-fifty-pound bonus. The sled picks up speed in reply. Sooner or later, they stop—spontaneously quit—and rest. Let them rest too long and they'll dig holes in the snow and lie down. I have learned to wait about forty-five seconds, then rattle the sled, and off they go. I don't dare speak to them, because my voice is not Cook's. If I speak, they won't move at all. There are three main choices—to ride, to run behind, or to keep a foot on the
sled and push with the other, like a kid propelling a scooter. The incline has to be taken into account, the weight of the sled, the firmness of the trail, the apparent energy of the dogs, the time since they last rested, one's own degree of fatigue. Up and down hill, over frozen lakes—now ride, now half ride, run. Ten below zero seems to be the fulcrum temperature at which the air is just right to keep exertion cool. You're tired. Ride. Outguess the dogs. Help with one foot. When they're just about to quit, step off and run. When things look promising, get on again, rest, look around at the big white country; its laden spruce on forest trails; its boulevard, the silent Yukon. On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed. According to Harry David, dogs run faster in moonlight, because they are trying to get away from their shadows.
Now, at Cook and Kneeland's cabin, with the snow off the ground and the bears upon it, I am too abashed to confess my fright, although Cook, I have noticed, is rarely unarmed. Donna works at a muskrat skin. Dick assembles bee frames at his workbench. His hives look like cabinets and were made from the trees above. I examine his .22. “Is it loaded?”
He says, “Every gun here is loaded. A baseball bat is better than an unloaded gun.”
And Donna says, “You may not get your meat if you're not ready.”
Cook's bees gave him a heavy stinging last week, when he was already suffering from abscesses around his teeth. So, for the first time in twelve years, he prescribed for himself a course of penicillin. His first-aid supply also includes ammonia inhalers, a thermometer, tape, gauze, a scalpel, hemostats, sutures, Empirin Compound with Codeine No. 4, Darvon, paregoric, Pontocaine, and morphine.
One knee of his trousers has ripped out, possibly for the hundredth time. His long johns poke through. “We'd better learn to Indian tan or we're not going to have any clothes.”
“I didn't even know how to split wood when I came out here,” Donna says. “In this country, you can't afford the luxury of sitting around waiting for a man to cut firewood, of not being able to do it yourself. Someday he may be late.”
“Someday he may not come back,” Dick reminds her.
“I know. I think that every time you go out.”
Donna hangs up some skins for airing—moose, caribou, two bearskins. One bear was shot by a stream near here, the other down at the fish camp. She hangs up the pelt of a wolverine. “The wolverine is the most verbally abused animal in the country,” Dick says as he works on his bee frames. “And unjustly so. It's one of the finest animals out here. People say a wolverine is ‘ornery,' ‘mean,' ‘vicious,' ‘worthless.' They say it can't live with another wolverine. No animal is considered lower. My experience is entirely different. The wolverine is powerful. It hunts with its mate. If one is injured, the other will stick by it. Wolves are affectionate, too. They are really beautiful animals. I have come to know and love them. This year, I have a mating pair on my line. Two years ago, I had a whole pack. The nonbreeders pack up, so they won't get in the way of the sex game. Around the first of March, twenty-five of them went right by the cabin here. Wolves are easy to shoot in mating season. They're in love, I guess. They run in pairs. They don't pay attention to what they're doing. Indians call animals their brothers. You soon realize here that your life is no more important than the animals'. Animals give up their lives, and you will, too. You can't have life without death.”
Through apertures in the tall spruce I can see far down the stream course, and even to the low hills on the opposite side of the Yukon. They are blue with distance. I wish I could jump that distance. It is the whole of the walk out of here, and then some. The hills appear to be on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Toward 6 P.M., Donna serves creamed squaw candy (smoked salmon) on whole-wheat biscuits. Resuming his work, Dick soon discovers that he is running out of foundations—the sheets of wax on which bees build their combs. He must have
more foundations, he says, and the nearest supply is in Eagle.
“Come with me and Sarge tomorrow!” I tell him, the idea striking like sunlight. I can already see him on the trail before me, his rifle gently bobbing on its sling. Cook begins to think out loud. He must have the foundations. He must also plant his garden. He cannot go to Eagle and leave behind him an unplanted garden. This near the Arctic Circle, the margins of germination, growth, and harvest are extremely narrow. Even a couple of days can make a fatal difference. He and Donna live, in significant measure, on their crops. On the other hand, the bees have come all the way from Texas and are not easily replaced. He needs the honey. Possibly, enough of the more critical seeds and plants could be put into the soil tonight, and even early tomorrow morning, to free him to go with me and Sarge. “I want to do that if I possibly can,” he says, and my heart soars like a hawk. “But we will have to work like bastards planting the garden tonight.”

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