Four Quarters of Light (47 page)

Mike decided we needed boxes and some help to get the fish untangled before the tide started moving again. He also quietly confessed that although he was surprised at the number of fish he really wanted to get them out of the net before any of the villagers saw what had happened. I looked at him, puzzled. Nobody ever allowed fish to lie on the beach like this. The people here have a thing about taking fish then forgetting about them. Subsistence is a big issue here and food is too valuable to leave for the birds or the bears to pick at. And things like this have a habit of becoming a joke at the steam. I swore myself to silence as I pulled another big salmon out of the net while Mike headed off. Within minutes he was back with Olaf and a truckload of fish boxes. After a few hours with four of us working we dropped the last fish into a box. I now understood why Mike thought Jack might not enjoy being on the ocean, laboriously untangling thrashing fish in a rolling boat.

Back at a shed near the steam, Mike enlisted a few neighbours' help to fillet the fish. In the meantime he phoned some native families to come and share his catch. Obviously Mike had a long time ago understood the Eskimo ethic of sharing.

The next day, Mike and I drove the two and a half miles to the airstrip. There were three other passengers, all young and in various stages of inebriation. The pilot was an Indiana Jones lookalike with a brown leather jacket and carefully crushed fedora. I got the feeling that his attire was chosen to give the impression of a cool, risqué bush pilot who had long since learned to ride the storms of Bristol Bay and didn't care too much about the rules of aviation or recommended flightpaths. When we were all safely buckled into our seats the swashbuckling pilot informed us to expect a few bumps and that if anyone was feeling sick to make sure they used the sick bag in front of them. We knew he was reinforcing the message to one passenger in particular, and he wasn't being too diplomatic about it.

We were only airborne a few minutes when the radio crackled and the pilot turned to Mike, who was sitting nearest to him, and said, ‘We're gonna have to go in low. There's a big heavy cloud
formation above us and a big blow coming off the bay.' The pilot must have believed he had been an eagle in another life for the plane dipped and swooped, powered in and out of cross-currents of air, and flew so low over the tundra that you would have thought the pilot was looking for something he'd dropped on a previous flight. Even Mike, who had made this journey many times, thought the pilot was pushing his luck way beyond the safety limits.

Mike leaned forward and tapped the flyer on his shoulder. The pilot removed the headphones from one ear and leaned back to hear what Mike had to say. ‘I've never been to Togiak this way before,' he said, but the implication of his words was, ‘Do you know what you're doing, fly-boy?' The pilot's answer couldn't have been less encouraging: ‘No, neither have I.' To which Mike could only smile and shrug.

Meanwhile, the least inebriated of the passengers who sat directly behind us leaned over the back of the seat and began to massage Mike's shoulderblades. Mike nervously thanked the lady and suggested that he was just fine. She in turn insisted on striking up a conversation, which Mike found hard to detach himself from. He looked at me pleadingly and I winked back at him, enjoying his discomfort. At one point he tried to extricate himself by pointing out the landscape below, saying it was ‘one vast protein soup', to which I could only teasingly remark that it wasn't half as thick as the soup he had currently got himself into!

The young lady showering attention on Mike didn't seem to be intoxicated like her two companions. They were obviously Eskimos from the village. But the lady in question was very questionable. She was immaculately made up, with plucked eyebrows and shiny black hair that was coiffed to give it body and depth. However, her clothes were straightforwardly masculine. Alaska was a country that didn't discriminate between the sexes and even in the summer it had neither climate nor culture for the latest haute couture. I left Mike to his dilemma and smiled quietly to myself. However feminine ‘he' may have made ‘herself' appear, I knew for sure that this ‘lady' was definitely a man.

We were late arriving at Togiak. Fly-boy admitted that he had got lost and couldn't find the string of small plane wrecks that all the local pilots use to plot their flightpath. Mike explained that the storms and hurricane winds that blast in off the ocean tossed light aircraft about like straws in the wind. ‘Parts get snapped off and the plane goes down like a clay pigeon,' he explained.

I was pondering whether or not to thank him for telling me this when his friend who lived in the village pulled up in his truck. As we stowed my bags, Mike asked about the woman who had travelled with us. His friend, the village schoolteacher for twenty years, looked at our three travelling companions, then back at Mike. ‘No women on that flight, Mike,' he answered with a deadpan expression. Mike was aghast as I laughed aloud and commented, ‘Too many hours sitting in that sauna or out at sea. You've lost it, Mike.' This time Mike laughed, but when I teasingly asked him if this was another incident that he didn't want brought up in the hallowed confines of ‘the steam', he answered with a seriously affirmative ‘No way!'

We only had a few hours before our return flight so we deposited our gear with the local schoolteacher and had a coffee before heading off. The man's name was Bill. He'd arrived in Alaska on the same volunteer programme as Mike, and, like Mike, had chosen to remain. He admitted he didn't rightly know why after all these years. Then, after a pensive moment, he said that as a young man life hadn't seemed to have the same edge to it back home. ‘I suppose you take on the values of the people you live among without knowing it. You share so much with these people that they become family. Also you learn a lot about yourself and what you want to do with life.'

We finished our coffee, and after a brief chat about fishing quotas left to look around. We walked around the village of sturdy wooden cabins that stretched out behind a bank of dunes along the sea front. Boats of every size and description were everywhere. The village contained a well-stocked supermarket, a school and a youth facility and community centre. As villages go, Togiak was enterprising. On the outskirts was the cemetery. A few of the
graves had carved marble headstones, many were wooden, and many more were simply marked by a large boulder. In a close-knit community such as this, everyone knew who was buried where; names and dates were an irrelevancy. Mike explained that there had been many more smaller communities in the Bristol Bay area but that epidemics of influenza and diphtheria had reduced the population and created thousands of orphans. Many people remembered these epidemics and the orphans, although they were pensioners now and were living proof of the tragedy. ‘It almost wiped out the culture of this area completely,' said one. ‘I survived, but now these epidemics and the controls of the fish and game department on local hunting and fishing have all got lumped together by some aggressive young Eskimo rights activists. The traditional way of life had functioned here for thousands of years, but now, with the coming of the white man and his system of government, it's being changed out of all proportion.'

On our way back to pick up our gear and catch our flight, we called on one of the village's oldest residents, Moses Nick. Mike had not spoken to him for maybe fifteen or sixteen years and it was obvious old Moses was not sure who Mike was, but we were welcomed into his house and offered tea and boiled eggs. Moses understood English, but his age and his accent made it difficult for me to follow as he talked about Togiak and how he remembered growing up. He showed us some ivory carvings he was doing, and when Mike asked him if he still played the accordion his eyes lit up and he answered, ‘You betcha.' He hauled himself out of his chair and went out of the room, returning within minutes with a gleaming red and white accordion. Mike had been explaining how early Russian trappers had frequently visited this part of the south-west before the Russian government sold Alaska to America. The mention of the Alaska purchase did not pass by Moses Nick. ‘I ain't never seen no bill of sale with any Eskimo name on that sold any part of Alaska to the Russians in the first place. So how they could sell it to America is way beyond my understanding.' Moses Nick was making it plain to the two white men in his house that the Eskimos owned Alaska and everything
in it. There was no piece of paper, title deed or proclamation of any government anywhere that could prove otherwise.

‘Now, what you wanna hear?' Moses asked. I left the choice up to him, and without further ado he squeezed out a note-perfect ‘Lilli Marlene' and followed it up with a few more German waltzes. His playing might have attracted an old friend who called in. He and Moses chatted away in their Yupik tongue, and as the visitor spoke little English we thanked Moses, took our leave and walked back to Bill's place, to the strains of ‘The Blue Danube'.

On board our flight back to Dillingham, Mike jokingly asked the pilot if he still intended taking the ‘lost' way back. Indiana Jones was unruffled by the jest. ‘No, sir,' he said. ‘The wind blew the cloud cover clean away so it's blue skies straight home.' The engines fired up, and within no time we were homeward bound.

I asked Mike about Moses and his accordion. ‘Music was not intrinsic to their culture,' he said. ‘They had the drum and the chant and even dance, but music in the European sense was alien to their culture. The Eskimos have something much cleverer than music. They have this uncanny skill of studying something by simply looking at it and watching it work or how it moves. Leave them alone with it for long enough and they will dismantle it and put it back together in perfect order. They are superb fixers of things.' He went on to relate how Moses Nick had once seen an accordion being played when he was a very young man working in the cannery. He had been mesmerized by the instrument and had sworn that one day he too would have one. Many years later he bought one in Juneau or Anchorage. He knew nothing about the thing or how it worked. He preserved it for a while until some German tourists sent him some tapes, and within months he could play every tune on the tapes as if he had been playing all his life. I understood what he meant, having spoken to the ivory carver in Nome. It was a short flight and I had opened up the question about his ‘lady friend'.

‘Mike, what would you have done if we had crashed on the trip out? I mean, that “lady” was extremely taken by you.' Mike looked
me directly in the eye. ‘What woman are you talking about? There weren't any women on the flight!'

During the drive back to the cabin I asked Mike about the chance of seeing some bears. I explained to him how I had told my son Jack before we left Ireland that we were all going on a bear hunt. I told him how
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
was my son's favourite bedtime story, and that although we had seen some bears in Denali I wanted something a bit more experiential than looking out of a tour-bus window. His answer was immediate: ‘Go to Katmai. You'll see plenty of bears there and you'll have to do it on foot. There are no buses. But it's the best time to catch them. Whole families of bears will be feeding at the river falls and in the lakes, piling on the fat for the long hibernation.' It seemed the perfect place.

That evening, Audrey and I pored over the map. We could take a short flight to a place called King Salmon and from there catch a floatplane to land us on one of the several lakes in the Aleutian Range of mountains that ran through the Katmai Reserve. From there, we would have to return to King Salmon, dogleg back to Anchorage, then over the Alexander Archipelago to stay over in Juneau and Sitka. We were both conscious of the changing weather and the need to complete the last quarter before the first snows returned. It all seemed so hectic.

‘It's a lot of hopping on and off planes,' Audrey pointed out, ‘especially with all our bags, the two of us, two kids, two sets of buggies—'

‘And two sets of antlers.'

Audrey stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Two sets? What do you mean, two sets?'

‘Well, there's a set of moose antlers waiting for me in Anchorage. I'll arrange to have them shipped on to Juneau and from there to Dublin. I picked them up while I was up north, just forgot to mention it,' I said sheepishly.

Audrey looked at me with a long, silent glare, then slowly shook her head.

As our small six-seater floatplane descended on the mountain lake I turned to Jack and Cal. ‘Look, boys, there's a bear standing by the edge of the water.'

Our pilot instantly asked, ‘Where?'

When I pointed out the large brown bear ambling peacefully along the lakeshore he immediately hoisted the plane into an ascent and circled over the lake, quickly explaining to me that Katmai was brown bear country and the bear always had right of way. As the bear was near where he intended mooring the floatplane, we had to hang around until he moved on. It didn't take long. The brown bear looked over his shoulder twice as he moved lazily along the lakeshore. We were an alien irritant in his world and he dismissed us with appropriate disdain. Eventually we landed on the still waters with all the grace of a snow goose, and motored to our mooring pier. Babies, buggies and bags were all unloaded and we set off into bear country.