by Bill Heavey
It’s about 1 p.m. on January 30, not far below the Arctic Circle. The sun doesn’t really rise and set at this latitude and time of year. It just sort of rouses itself, wanders about the edges of the sky for a few hours, then goes away. But when night comes, as it will in about four hours, it will stay dark for fourteen hours. That’s a long time to be outside.
I’m really tired. Being outside in this kind of cold, no matter how well dressed you are, strains your metabolism. Your thermostat isn’t wired for this. Even Marty, who has been trapping for twenty years, says he loses weight every time he goes to the bush. There’s something about the cold that makes you breathe through your mouth, and the air is so dry that even if you’re not sweating, you lose water fast. Thing is, despite the cold, I am sweating. I’ve been riding for four hours now. As a novice, I had no idea how physically demanding it is. In this kind of country, you ride standing up, the better to react to hidden bumps and holes. And you don’t really steer a snow machine anyway. As I’m finding out, the handlebars are just a purchase you push against while horsing the beast in the direction you want to go.
I’m alone. Which is stupid. But I have a good reason for being stupid. Which is that I can’t keep up with Marty, who I’m starting to believe is an unusually hardy member of the species. This is our third day here. Yesterday, we rode out from his main cabin and followed a trapline about thirty miles up to one of four smaller cabins he has built at intervals along his lines. Marty rode twice that, checking traps on loops off the main trail. We came upon a lynx, an exotic, elegant cat—black ear tufts, snowshoe feet, long buff coat—sitting motionless with one paw in a No. 4 trap. It hardly reacted as Marty approached, dropped the choke wire over its head, and suddenly jerked it tight. The cat’s legs and claws scrabbled furiously for thirty or forty seconds, and then it lay still. It was hard to watch, and Marty didn’t meet my eyes as he reset the trap—its bait of raw caribou hide still good for another set—and tossed the animal in the sled behind his snow machine. “Everything out here lives by killing something else,” he said, still not meeting my eyes, as he pulled the starter cord. We rode on.
Today we were returning by a different route so that Marty could check other lines and do other loops. Again, I couldn’t keep up. Already tired from yesterday, I suggested I make my way back to the main cabin ahead of him. He agreed, drew a simple map on a sheet of my notebook, made sure I had my expedition-weight gear strapped to the seat behind me, and told me to take it slow. Which is how I went off the trail. Slowly.
I have some survival supplies. I’m carrying a few chemical warmers, a couple of KitKat bars, two butane lighters, three paper towels for starting a fire, and a small pocketknife. Riding is such work that I’m only wearing a Cabela’s anorak and lightly insulated bibs over wool long johns. Thank God I also have the heavier duds, a Northern Outfitters parka and bibs. I’m sweating at the moment from the brief hike down to the machine. Sweat isn’t merely inconvenient here. It kills, freezing you fast once you stop and turning you into a Popsicle. I read somewhere how early polar explorers thought the Eskimos lazy, when in fact they simply understood the dangers of sweat. Even thinking feels strangely tiring. I stop for a moment, take a rest. But that doesn’t help, either. So I force myself to resume, to add to the list of things I know.
I’ll get a lot colder before I get warm. There are two reasons for this. Night is one. But more immediately troubling is the fact that in order to put on my expedition gear, I first have to take this stuff off. That means stripping to my long johns, removing my enormous mittens and even my boots. The discomfort is bad enough. The increased risk of frostbite is worse.
I need to get a fire going. It will help Marty locate me, and it’ll beat back the darkness, which I’m starting to fear as much as the cold. I’m on a hillside studded with dwarf spruce trees, many of which look dead or at least pretty dry. That’s good, but I’d give anything for a multitool with a saw blade instead of a blade more suited to peeling grapes. Serves him right, I hear someone saying. Heading out no better prepared than a child. The bigger concern is that I need to get the fire going the first time. I’ve already learned that lighters don’t light in subzero cold. The butane doesn’t atomize or something. I’ve taken to carrying one of the two that are always with me in the pocket closest to the heat of my crotch. But I’ll have to take off my mitts for the moment of truth—turning the striker wheel. I learned the first day here that you have about fifteen seconds—and that’s with liner gloves, not bare skin—before your fingers cease carrying out orders from your brain. What was it Marty said? Something about how if part of you gets cold and then feels warm not to trust it. You’re not really warm, he said. It means your body, in its wisdom, has decided not to continue wasting warm blood on an extremity that has shown itself incapable of using the resource effectively.
Your body says, in effect, “Okay, we’re not sending any more blood to Mr. Nose.”
It’s at this moment that the raven flies over. I am standing there dumbly, trying to remember my own list, wondering what key things I might have forgotten or overlooked, when I hear it. There is the unmistakable wheshk, wheshk, wheshk of down-stroking wings. It’s louder than feathers beating empty air ought to be, and the only sound I’ve heard besides the wind since my machine stalled. I look up and see it, bigger than a normal raven, vectoring in on me. It is at once both full of intention and in no particular hurry. The entire world shrinks to the approaching black bird and me. As it pulls even with me, it dips briefly, then climbs back to its former altitude. And it lets fall a world-weary croonnnk.
The raven’s shadow slides over the snow at my feet and on down the hill, a semaphore from the next world. The appearance of the bird, the dip, the cry—all of these fall within acceptable parameters of bird behavior. But the sliding shadow unleashes a jolt of pure terror. With the sudden clarity that descends at threshold moments, I understand its call. The raven’s mind is not that different from yours or mine. The call is an oral reminder, a raven’s Post-it note: Check back here in the morning to see if this man has become carrion yet.
You’re going to be okay, I tell myself. You’re in no immediate danger. It would be stupid to try to walk anywhere because you’re already exhausted, not to mention lost. You don’t need to get more lost. Marty will come looking for you when he gets back to the cabin. I try to avoid the fact that my survival is totally dependent on Marty. It’s not that I lack confidence in him. He is almost ridiculously competent. But even Marty is subject to mishaps, and if anything should happen to him, I’ll die here. And what I really try to avoid is my own growing awareness of what friendly terms life and death are on here, how easily things slide from the one state to the other. Except it’s a one-way slide. Best not to think too hard on that at the moment.
No Country for Cold Men
My first impression of Marty when we meet at the Fairbanks airport is that he doesn’t make a good first impression. He’s forty-seven years old, maybe five nine, and medium-stocky. He has an unruly full beard and a head of shaggy red hair running to gray. His eyes, magnified by glasses, make him look a little goofy. Wearing a battered Carhartt jacket and beat-up boots, he is leaning against a counter and shooting the breeze with a friend who is also meeting someone from “the outside,” as Alaskans refer to the Lower 48. At first glance, I’m thinking he could be the guy who fixes the vending machines in a bowling alley in Dubuque. We shake hands, pile into his truck, and drive through the night on a snow-slick highway to his home in Two Rivers, a town twenty-five miles outside Fairbanks. When I ask how he came to live in Two Rivers, he shrugs.
“Fairbanks”—a town of thirty-five thousand—“is just too crowded,” he says.
The next morning we are standing in the snow-covered field behind his two-story cabin readying his little Super Cub. Marty checks the engine block heater he plugged in a couple of hours ago and kicks the ice from the plane’s skis. I notice he
’s working over a wad of chewing tobacco, which he hadn’t done last night at the airport, or on the drive back here. He does something to the propeller, tugs at guy wires to various parts of the wings, and unhooks the engine block heater. I ask if he chews often. “Only when I’m excited,” he says. “And I’m always excited when I’m headed to the bush.”
Giving a test tug to a bungee securing the front half of a plastic rifle scabbard to a wing strut, he seems satisfied that it will hold. In the scabbard rests a battered .358 Norma Mag, the go-to rifle that he calls the Bonecrusher. He only uses half of the scabbard because that’s sufficient to protect the rifle in flight. The other half would be just an extra pound of plastic. In a land without roads to its most interesting places, the small plane fills the role the SUV occupies elsewhere. In a land without runways, a pilot lives and dies by the power-to-weight ratio of his aircraft. That’s why Marty loves his 1937 Super Cub, of which only a rivet or two of the original aircraft remains. He says the Super Cub is unrivaled for its ability to take off and land “on a bug fart.” Being somewhat obsessive, he has further modified his by stripping the extra stuff: the radio, the electrical system, the heater, and the original windows. He had his brother, Stitch, who works on planes professionally and lives next door, install the thinnest Plexiglas windows that would pass inspection. He uses a handheld, battery-powered radio in the plane, and the only heat on board is the windshield defroster. You get the feeling that Marty would yank off the landing gear and flaps if he thought he could steer and land without them.
I scrunch my toes inside my boots. They are already numb despite two charcoal heating pads in each.
I recall the famous line about how there are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. I’d be worried flying with Marty if he were younger. But he’s been at it for almost twenty years, and he’d have screwed up terminally long ago if he were reckless. Nevertheless, there’s a glint of wildness in his eyes that his glasses can’t hide. On a hunch I ask what kind of car he drove growing up in Wisconsin. “Just an old 1970 Torino,” he says. “But I dropped a 429 Ford Cobra Jet in it.” He says the speedometer only went up to 120, but one night on the highway he passed a buddy in a 454 Chevelle. The Chevelle’s speedometer went up to 140. Marty smiles at the memory. “He told me he’d had the needle buried when I passed him.” He spits tobacco juice into the snow. “You about ready?”
Just to verify that they are in fact without feeling, I scrunch my toes again. “Yep,” I lie.
Now that Marty shares his cabin with his wife, Dominique, and their beautiful toddler, Noah Jane, he commutes to the bush. But he still spends more time there than not. From November through March, he traps. From April through October he works as a smokejumper, one of an elite group that parachutes into remote areas all over the United States to fight fires, sometimes for weeks at a time. His specialty is rigging cargo, much of it on pallets that get dropped in. It’s demanding, dangerous work. It’s also good money, which is handy, because nobody strikes it rich these days trapping.
With his breath pluming in the minus-30 air, Marty does a final walk around the tiny airplane. Then we shuffle into the heated garage to say goodbye to Dominique. She gives Marty a kiss, then puts her face close to mine. “Remember what I’m saying to you right now,” she says. “Never leave the cabin without a lighter and some paper in your pocket. You got that?”
I nod, feeling like a third grader. In time, I will wonder if Dominique saw something in my demeanor that Marty didn’t. And I will thank her for having spoken to me this way.
Marty and I are airborne almost as soon as he applies power. The skis lift off the snow, the engine buzzes like an angry mosquito, and then we’re at 1,500 feet, basking in some toasty minus-25-degree air. I’m bundled up: parka, bibs, moon boots, and mittens the size of boxing gloves. The cockpit is so cramped I can barely turn my head, and the engine noise precludes conversation beyond a shouted word or two. The defroster clears the windshield, but the side windows are iced over. It’s like sitting inside a loud refrigerator being transported cross-country on a hand truck. When Marty makes a downward stabbing motion and shouts, “Moose!” I gently scrape at the window with the back of a mitten, trying to clear the Plexiglas, but he waves me off. “Easy, Bill!” he shouts. “You blow out a pane, gonna be real cold in here!”
I decide to pass on the moose viewing for now.
Welcome to the Bush
Marty’s path in life took a sharp left turn when he was seven years old and his father took him outside their house in northern Wisconsin to check the trapline he ran. “It was all just so cool, is what I remember,” Marty says. “Being on snowshoes in the woods on a snowshoe trail. Coming up to a trap and the anticipation that you might have caught something. And, of course, the animals themselves. I already knew how cool they were—wild and out there in the woods and somehow surviving. And the idea that you could get to understand them, that you could learn their habits and tracks, where they liked to go, and that you could catch them—that completely got me. I knew right then what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
He would have become a trapper in Wisconsin, except there were too many people and too few animals. He came to Alaska as countless young men do each year: a few years out of high school with no money and less knowledge of what he was getting into. He slept in by-the-week motels or on the floors of friends’ houses. He worked as a logger, construction laborer, and janitor so he could buy traps and a tent and hire bush transports to drop him off for his first forays into the bush. Marty says he’s gone over the same trails thousands of times now but still finds each day different.
After two hours pass in the cockpit, the plane’s skis slap snow in a small clearing along a frozen river. I have an urgent need to pee, so while Marty unloads and cranks up the snow machine he keeps under a tarp at the edge of the strip, I take off my mitts to begin undoing the relevant three zippers. Within fifteen seconds, however—by which time I’m halfway through undoing the second glove—my fingers dissociate themselves from me. They’re attached to my hands but they aren’t mine. Then comes the pain, as if they’re being crushed in a vise. This kind of cold is outside my frame of reference. It’s not about discomfort. It’s about what’s physically possible. I can wait to pee. I can wait until we get back to Fairbanks if I have to.
I stand on the back of the sled and hang on to its posts, legs braced against my duffel, as we take the short, cold ride to the cabin, which sits in a grove of alders. Surrounding it are outbuildings housing snowmobiles, gas, tools, extra food, and other supplies. A dozen or so marten—like mink but a little bigger, brown, and with paler heads and underparts—hang from a beam between two trees. It’s Marty’s catch from three days ago, and each animal is frozen in the twisted posture it assumed when thrown into the sled he tows. Larger predators don’t eat his catch when it hangs outside the cabin because of the lingering human scent. “They won’t risk taking one unless they’re starving,” he says. Lynx, he adds, are “bunny specialists,” their numbers rising and falling with rabbit populations. They have huge feet that allow them to stay atop even lightly crusted snow. Marten eat squirrels and smaller rodents, especially voles, as well as carrion. The two species don’t compete directly, Marty says, and yet they’re never abundant at the same time. This year, for example, has been much better than average for lynx, but only so-so for marten.
Moose antlers are strewn around the campsite. A large cardboard box by the door contains raw lynx skulls. It’s a startling sight: maybe seventy heads, all teeth and eye sockets and strips of red tissue still clinging to the cheekbones. “I get two or three bucks each from a guy in town,” he says. “I think they end up on a website called Skulls Unlimited.”
A large thermometer on the cabin wall reads minus 37. He pushes the door open, and as my eyes adjust to the dimness the first thing I see is a revolver hanging upside down on a nail by its trigger guard over Mart
y’s bunk. It’s situated so the barrel points toward the other bunk, where I’ll be sleeping.
“That thing loaded?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “That’s my trouble gun—a .454 Casull.”
Up here, when trouble comes calling, an unloaded gun is the more dangerous thing to have in the cabin. Marty tells me not to worry: Bears are almost all hibernating in January. This time of year, trouble is more likely to come in the form of a moose on the trail. Moose use the trails for the same reason Marty does, ease of movement. But they get ornery in late January, he says, because they’re tired of the winter and running out of browse. A lot of times they don’t want to cede the trail to a snow machine, and even when they do they’ll sometimes get mad all over again afterward and chase after you. “You never want to break down on a machine,” he says. “But you really don’t want to with a moose on your ass.”
At this moment, I find myself experiencing the strange nature of modern travel, whereby it’s possible to arrive so quickly in a place that operates by such different rules that you can’t quite make sense of it. I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is not just an out-of-the-way place. This is a different kind of reality, a place where death slips in through the narrowest of openings—a lost glove, a minor mechanical problem, a wrong turn.
While the stove slowly drives the cold from the cabin, Marty talks as he pulls out caribou steaks for dinner. He says that frozen creeks are a good way to get around, but that one constant danger associated with them is overflow—the insidious layer of water pushed up by the pressure of the ever-increasing weight of the ice above. The water lies unseen beneath snow . . . until you walk or drive into it. If it’s more than a few inches deep and you’re any distance from home, you can freeze to death in a hurry.
