Coming into the Country (58 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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“Shar-cho,”
said Adeline Potts, means “big bear,” means in her language the brown—the grizzly—bear. “Why don't you cook a bit?” said her husband. “I'm getting hungry.” Across the grain, he had sliced a pile of steaks, and she cooked them in their own raging fat. The Potts' log cabin is fourteen feet square, no more, but “big enough, and not too hard to heat.” A double bed, of planks, is in a corner, and above it the bunk of Adeline's three-year-old son. There is a small chest of drawers, a small cookstove, a half-drum heat stove, two benches, a table in a corner. Four rifles ride the ridgepole. The logs were cut in forests upstream, and yanked to the Yukon by Oddball and Patches, huskies who fill in as horses. Oddball is Potts' lead dog and is as white as a cue ball. The house in which Potts grew up, in West Des Moines, looks out from big Naugahyde chairs at handsome landscaping through picture windows. On the wall is a painting of snow-capped mountains—a stag in the foreground, its head held high. On the walls of Potts' cabin are posters of chiefs. “Tah-Me-La-Pash-Me. Dull Knife. Cheyenne. 1828—1879.” “Oh-Cun-Ga-Che. Little Wolf. Cheyenne. 1820—1904.” Adeline would not eat the bear. She cooked, in supplement, a platter of moose. She will eat lynx, she said, which is “just like turkey,” and wolf, which recalls canned beef. But not this, never this meat. There might be taste but there was terror in the bear. Mike ate happily and hugely, fat and lean. “This is a fat-starved country,” he said. “The Lower Forty-eight has to have cottage cheese, skim milk, and so on, because they have too much fat. The people there
are fat. Up here, this is a fat-starved country, and you take fat when you can get it. I got five pounds of lard from this bear.” The moose was tough. I ate little of it. The grizzly was tender with youth and from a winter in the den. More flavorful than any wild meat I have eaten, it expanded my life list—muskrat, weasel, deer, moose, musk-ox, Dall sheep, whale, lion, coach whip, rattlesnake … grizzly. And now a difference overcame me with regard to bears. In strange communion, I had chewed the flag, consumed the symbol of the total wild, and, from that meal forward, if a bear should ever wish to reciprocate, it would only be what I deserve.
Potts makes two thousand dollars in a winter's trapping. He has worked on the pipeline three weeks for the same. He prefers trapping. For $11.27 an hour, he once operated a chain saw that helped to clear the pipeline's right-of-way. When he goes out into the mountains, he is often accompanied by Michael David, who now runs lines in adjacent terrain. In the eyes of some people in the Village, including older ones, such endeavors in the wild are retrogressive. Adeline's father, Willie Juneby, is just amused. “My dad thinks we're crazy sometimes.” The Hungwitchin have historically been nervous about certain high ground in the area where Potts goes to trap. They call it the Devil's Chair, and fear for Adeline if she is there. Septembers, Potts puts out nets for the running chum salmon. He dries them and packs them, and eventually has a chartered plane drop hundreds of pounds of fish in the mountains, where he caches them for his dogs in winter. The plane, out of Tok and costing eighty dollars a trip, also drops flour, salt, sugar, matches, candles, tea, coffee, tobacco, milk, baking powder, rice, Mapleine, jello, and canned goods in heavy double bags. Potts does not otherwise seek assistance. With sled and gear, moving up and over his mountains, he has broken trail for as much as nineteen straight hours through deep blown drifts at sixty below.
In spring, he puts out a net for pike and grayling, in an eddy
up the Yukon where schools collect. His whole family gets into his canoe—a lovely eighteen-foot Chestnut—and goes up to discover the daily catch. Oddball pulls the canoe. He stands in harness on the edge of the river, and a long rope runs from the middle of his back over water to the bow quarter thwart. Potts speaks. Oddball advances. The canoe—carrying, say, five hundred pounds—begins to slide upstream. Steering with a paddle, Potts keeps the bow a few degrees off the grain of the current, maintaining tension on the rope. The mighty Yukon drives one way, mighty Oddball the other. Oddball defeats the river with ease. He jumps logs, he swims around sweepers—responding to remarks from Potts. The trip is not slow. The canoe fairly rips along. Caught by the gills, pike and grayling are waiting. (“Stay close to Potts,” Jim Scott has urged me. “If for nothing else, for the northern pike.”)
We cleaned them, late one evening, under a rainbow that vaulted from an orange northerly sky. Sonny Potts, half Eskimo, with wide soft eyes too deep to plumb, watched his adoptive father scaling a fish. “Is that a mother?” he asked. “Does it have beans in it?”
“We'll see,” said Potts, a smile flapping the wings of his mustache. He slit the fish forward from the anus, spilling beans.
Sonny's father was Ray Foster, an Eskimo of Noorvik, who left a wife and many children to marry Adeline, and who now lives with the widow of Tony Paul. Potts was checking I.D.s and stopping fights as a temporary bouncer in a bar in Fairbanks when Adeline happened in, divorced and depressed. Mike talked her away from her troubles and the bar, and back to Eagle Indian Village. He is said to have stabilized her life. When he is in the Village, she is comforted and easy. He causes her to feel at home. She is not a little bitter. Of the whites of Eagle she has not much good to say. “They just want to cut us down. They gossip behind our backs. They feel superior. They give false grins.” She is the first woman who has ever served on the Eagle Village Council. She has tacked a “Thanksgiving Prayer” to the rafters of her cabin. “Dear Lord,
we thank You for poverty, starvation, infant death, a 44-year lifespan, diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and v.d. We thank You for alcoholism and suicide … .” She and Potts feel as strongly as Michael David about the white bootleggers of Eagle. They once attempted to “turn them in.” The response in Eagle was an instant story that Mike Potts was a habitual user of the hardest kinds of drugs. “The truth is,” he says, “I've never even bought a lid of grass.”
He is subject to worse gossip than that, as are the three or four other whites who live in the Village and are married to Indians. The essence of what is said is that in marrying into the tribe they knew what they wanted, and that was franchise. With the Bureau of Land Management chasing people away from all parts of the federal domain, the choices for the arriving settler, for the would-be modern pioneer, are to live in trespass in defiance of the government, to make an arrangement with the Indians, or to fold one's tent and try to rent in Eagle. The Hungwitchin are reluctant to enter into most arrangements. Marriage is one they have to accept.
“You get the husky-dusky maiden, you see, and then you spin off the benefits from the native claims—the Village land selections, the corporate profit-sharing, the direct payments coming down from the Alaska Native Fund.”
“We call them land-claim bridegrooms.”
“They are romantics, too, remember. Back to Mother Indian. They love sleeping in dry caribou skin and eating jerky.”
Mike Potts appears to be only mildly disgusted by all this. He came into the country for what is here; others have come for what is not. While he has been turning into a seasoned performer—relaxed in the pleasure of his chosen life—these others have been turning into hecklers. He shrugs them off and hits the trail. He is teaching his young brother-in-law Benny Juneby the skills of the woods, including the handling of dogs. (There are six dog teams in the Village, of which three belong to whites.) He divides his game with the Village. He has often shot a moose and ended up with the least of it. He is good at
getting meat. Once, in the mountains, he shot three moose in a day. Two wolves were on the first moose, about to pull it down. Everywhere he looked he saw wolves, like shadows flying through the trees. When he fired, the wolves vanished. The moose staggered into the North Fork of the Fortymile. Potts was downstream, and the current delivered the meat. In the same area, a grizzly chased Oddball not long ago and was within ten feet of destroying him when Potts fired true enough to stop the chase. There is game, at times, much closer to the Village. The long tall bluff across the Yukon is a natural fence, and unfortunate is the animal that walks beside it. There is no good direction for escape. A black bear once came out of the woods between Potts' cabin and the Village school, went down to the river, and swam across. Michael David, Potts, and Tony Paul crossed the river in Tony's boat with a .44 handgun and a .30—'06. They were waiting onshore under the bluff when the bear came out of the water. Grizzlies have died the same way, and moose, and caribou. Caribou have been low in the country, have been all but gone in recent years, and Potts is restless to find them. He talks more and more of the Porcupine drainage, a hundred miles north, where the herds in the mountains move like rivers, thirty miles long.
“Potts' only problem is that he's white. He has difficulty coping with that. He fancies himself a male Sacajawea. He's not looking for monetary gain.”
“He brings a lot more meat into that Village than he eats.”
“He is from Des Moines, Iowa, and he keeps the Village Indian.”
 
 
 
Now alone in mountains nearly a hundred miles west of Eagle and at least thirty from the nearest human being, I am puzzled by the hour of the day. I have no idea what it is. There
has been no dark of night or visible sun. I don't wear a watch. I am like that Frenchman deep in the caves who hadn't a notion of the hour and slept and ate only according to need. I wonder: Could I have prepared and eaten three full meals in only two hours? In twelve? Fifteen? If I could see the sun, the sun would not help. I have neither a map nor a compass with which to assess its position, and now, at the summer solstice, it rides so low above the mountain ridges and dips so briefly behind them that 4 A.M. looks much like nine and noon. All of that is academic anyway. There is a leaden overcast, and the wind is driving a light, cold rain. Tracks are everywhere—wolf, grizzly, caribou. The mountainsides in surrounding view—sixteen doming tundra balds—are green and white, holding the winter and the summer in quilted fields of snow. In this remote landscape, as wild as any in the country—where not so much as a cabin stands in half a million acres around—my only companions are a backhoe and a bulldozer.
The nearest tree is a mile away. In fact, there is just one small colony of spruce in this otherwise treeless high terrain. The bowl the mountains form is a circumvallate world of what appear to be upsweeping lawns, and in fifteen or twenty square miles I can see—or, at least, I imagine I am capable of seeing —almost anything that moves. With my monocular I look around, scan the middle ground, glass the hills. “Schizomotive” is the word for this situation. I regularly check the landscape in hopes of seeing what I am reassuring myself is not there. Moving around from place to place, stopping to use the monocular, I am like a watchman with a Detex key. I would give a lot to see caribou, and more to see a wolf. I am content with the bears I have seen, and prefer that they keep their distance—notwithstanding this big fella on my shoulder, a Winchester .308.
At my request, Ed and Stanley Gelvin flew off and left me here in late afternoon, close to the confluence of two brooks in their gold-claims valley. They had things to do at home.
They said they would return soon after eight o'clock this morning. (I am assuming this is morning.) I began listening for them while I was making breakfast. I have recently finished lunch. Since Stanley and his father are as punctual as they are industrious—and are never unmindful of the high investment and short season here at the claims—I have about concluded that I ate breakfast in the night in the belief that it was morning and have since had lunch for breakfast; they should be here anytime.
They have been working twelve hours a day. When they chose the site for the airstrip, the longest and naturally flattest place was across meanders of a stream. With the D9, Stanley set the stream to one side, gave it a straight new bed, and spread its gravels beside it for the runway. I have since caught many grayling in the new version of the stream, which has fine pools and flows clear. Removing the tundra from a wide swath of ancient channels, Stanley dozed more gravel onto the strip, then packed it down—seventeen hundred feet. Welding steel —using twelve-foot H-beams and angle irons—Ed created something that weighed a couple of tons and resembled a carpenter's plane. He dragged that up and down with the backhoe, making the runway smooth. There was not a lot I could do. I threw small boulders off the field. When it was complete, the Cessna 206, their single-engine workhorse aircraft, could land. It can carry, among other things, three or four fifty-five-gallon drums full of diesel fuel. Because the airstrip consists of stream-bed gravels, it contains, in all likelihood, gold. Long-range plans include another airstrip, to be made from tailings. Then this first airstrip can be run through the sluice box and deposited in a bank. There is a poplin wind sock, flying east. Ed sewed it at home. Its color is camouflage green.

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