The “hog” name comes from an interesting coincidence of geography and history. Pronunciation of the Athapaskan name Hogatzakaket was difficult for early miners, and they shortened it to Hogatza, now the official name. About 1907 a prospector struck gold on Clear Creek, a tributary to the Hogatza, and this started a stampede of miners there. One man took horses and pigs to Clear Creek. He planned to fatten the pigs and butcher them for food. When the first snow arrived, his horses starved, but the hogs survived for some time on the salmon that he caught.
Eventually Hogatzakaket became “Hog” River. Some people call it “Hog” because of the hogs that were once there, others call it “Hog” as a short version of Hogatzakaket or Hogatza. Today Clear Creek is important mainly as a salmon spawning stream.
For the early summer move to Hogatza, Dad dismantled our log store and home and made them into a raft. On it he loaded everything we owned—sled dogs, trading goods, household items. To me, the raft was as big as an island. We drifted down the winding Koyukuk River with two Koyukon Indians, Little Sammy and George Attla, Senior, who manned twelve-foot sweeps, or long oars, to keep the raft in midstream. Little Sammy was married to one of my aunts, Sophy Sam.
We drifted several days through rolling hills and spruce forests. A mile below the mouth of Hog River, Dad picked high ground as the site for our new home, and we lived in a tent while he worked at reassembling our trading post and cabin from the raft logs.
Even before the trading post was rebuilt, trappers, miners, and rivermen arrived, eager to buy or barter for supplies—coffee, flour, salt, shovels, webbing for dog harness, ammunition for hunting, clothing. At the time, steamboats plied the Koyukuk River, and from time to time Dad replenished his supplies from them. Woodcutters who lived on the river constantly sawed firewood from the riverbank forest for the greedy boilers of the steamers.
During the summer I began to worry about the potato garden we had planted at Hughes. I pestered my father until he agreed to take me with him on his potato digging trip to Hughes in early September after the first frost. My dad, my uncle Weaselheart, and I made the upriver trip in Dad’s small riverboat powered by a three-horsepower Evinrude single-cylinder outboard motor, one of the first produced. It weighed more than 100 pounds. To start it, Dad grasped a spool-like wooden handle bolted to the flywheel and spun for all he was worth. He had to be cautious, for once the engine started, that spinning handle was hazardous to hands and arms.
Because the Evinrude didn’t run very well on that trip, I had my first lesson in cussing when Dad used a few words I had never heard before. At Hughes I dug a satisfying two-gallon bucket full of potatoes out of the hill I had planted, and Dad’s potato hills produced several bushels. We loaded the harvest into the riverboat, covered them with a tarpaulin, and kept a lighted kerosene lantern under the tarp to keep them from freezing as we returned downriver.
That winter, when I was four, my mother told me I could accompany her trapping if I learned how to set a trap. I spent hours practicing with a No. 0 Newhouse single-spring trap, and then my mother took me with her on her short traplines. She taught me how to keep my hands, face, ears, and feet warm on the trail, and how to avoid getting overheated and then chilled. Too, she taught me patience. She often left me with the sled and dogs while she set traps. Once she hurried off chasing a porcupine, calling “I’ll be back soon.” She was gone for hours, but I stayed with the sled, waiting patiently.
I caught one marten and some squirrels in my traps. My mother taught me how to skin the little furbearers, and, though I cut some of the skins, my skills improved with time.
In February, Dad decided to travel by dog team the twenty miles to the mine at Bear Creek to take orders for supplies, and he took me with him. On the trail he became ill, and we had to stop. He was afflicted with a chronic internal inflammation that persisted most of his adult life. When it flared up, he suffered terribly. We camped in the open, although the temperature was well below zero. Before lying down that night, Dad cut a large pile of firewood, enough to last the night. He must have remained awake most of the night while I slept. Before daylight, which arrives around ten o’clock in February, he knew that he had to have help. “I can’t cut any more firewood, Sidney,” he said. “I’m too sick.”
I was too small to cut wood for the fire he needed to keep warm.
“Can you go get help?” he asked.
“Sure, Dad,” I replied, full of confidence. I had become accustomed to being alone in the woods and had no fears.
Wrapped in a wolfskin robe, Dad lay within arm’s reach of the fast-diminishing pile of firewood. At daylight I set out in the direction of the mining camp, an experienced “man” of four. As I left, I saw tears running down Dad’s pale pain-wracked face. He worried about me, and he felt guilty having to send me for help, but there was no other way.
I walked for hours through tall, snow-burdened spruces. My little snowshoes creaked, barely breaking the silence that always seems deeper during deep-snow time. Occasional red squirrels scampered near, launching sudden avalanches of snow from overloaded spruce branches. Sometimes the little creatures scolded as I passed. Chickadees flitted about, chirping cheerfully.
As the sun dropped below nearby ridges, I was still walking. I had eaten only a few bites of dried salmon for breakfast, and I was hungry. I wanted to stop and rest, but I was afraid my dad might die. Near dark I came to a fresh dogsled trail in the deep snow. Gratefully, I followed it for perhaps half an hour before coming to a Y. Confused about which way to turn, I started to yell. Soon I heard the warning bark of dogs that heard my cries.
I headed toward the sounds of the dogs. My tired legs could barely lift my snowshoes as I forced myself forward. The dogs continued to make a ruckus. Then all was silent. Darkness descended. I yelled again and again.
At last I heard a man call, “Where are you?”
I yelled again and moved toward the voice. I came to a deep prospect hole that yawned in the earth, abandoned by miners. Its sides were frighteningly steep. Cautiously, I walked around it, continuing in the direction of the man’s voice.
Then a man called out from sixty feet behind me. It was Dominic Vernetti, a miner we knew. I ran to him as fast as I could move my little snowshoes. He swooped me up and held me tightly, and I pressed my face into the warm fur of his parka hood.
“Where’s your dad?” he asked.
“He’s sick on the trail. I’ve come for help.”
“You’re alone?” he asked, astonished.
“I been alone all day.”
My words brought tears to his eyes. He carried me to his sled and then drove me to the mining camp. On the way he told me his dogs had alerted him by barking, and then he had heard my distressed voice, so he’d harnessed the dogs to search for me.
I told my story again to the other miners, and several left immediately to rescue my dad. Joe Notti fed me and covered me up on a bunk, and I passed out.
The miners nursed Dad for many days before he could take to the trail again. When he could travel, he was busy selling trading goods to miners, arranging for shipments, watching the flow of people to and from the mine to determine the best areas of commerce. The Hog River gold strike had fizzled, and he planned to move the trading post again. My mother hated to leave.
At April’s end, while Dad stayed with my younger brother, Jimmy, and baby sister, Marion, my mother took me on a spring muskrat trapping trip. We left Hog River with a five-dog team early in the morning and traveled on the frozen Koyukuk River for seven miles to a point across the river from Sam Dubin’s store, operated for him by Jack Sackett. There, we left the river and followed a portage for several miles.
Muskrats were scarce, so we spent two days cutting into the top of a beaver house—the old Koyukon method of harvesting beaver in winter—and caught several beaver. I also caught a few muskrats. After we’d been out ten days, we decided we’d better head home. Most of the snow had melted, leaving much bare ground, and there was up to a
foot of water covering the ice on lakes. The heavy sled pulled hard on the bare ground, so we meandered, hitting all the ice and snow patches we could find. I had to walk most of the time to lighten the sled. About a mile from the Koyukuk River as we traveled through a portage, we met Jack Sackett, who’d grown worried because we’d been gone so long.
Sackett was a U.S. marshal at Nome during the gold rush there. He also lived at Candle, and on the Kobuk River during that time. He had been there when my mother had made her journey from Nome to the Koyukuk. About 1918 Jack arrived in Koyukuk country, and stayed for the rest of his life. He loved to yarn about his early years; one of his favorite stories was about my mother’s long trek.
We accompanied Jack to Dubin’s store, where he fed us. Ice on the Koyukuk River was still solid, although the water was rising. We were only seven miles from home. Even pulling our light load, our heavy-coated sled dogs were exhausted by the time we had covered five miles—it was too warm for them. We cached the sled and all our gear on the riverbank. A couple of feet of water flowed atop the river ice near the shoreline. Breakup was near.
Mom stuffed our essentials and the muskrat and beaver skins we had collected into two dog packs and a pack for herself. After cutting some short logs and tying them together into a raft, she poled us and the five dogs out to the solid midstream ice. Then she fastened packs on the two oldest dogs and put leashes on them, “So they won’t get into trouble,” she explained.
Off we headed, walking on the solid ice, dodging water puddles. Our speed was limited by how fast my short legs could move. I was tired, and the day had been long.
Dad spotted us coming as we rounded the point a mile below the cabin. To bring us off the midriver ice, he launched a small log raft he had made. Marion and Jimmy rode with him. Seeing them come down the river gave me new life. As they neared, I took off running, still clutching a pack dog’s leash.
“Don’t let the dog go,” Mom yelled in warning, still holding the leash of the other pack dog.
She was too late, for I turned loose of the leash. The other loose dogs caught him, and the four animals tangled in a big fight. By the time Mom had waded in and broken up the fight, the pack was torn, precious muskrat and beaver skins were scattered, and a couple of the dogs looked satisfied as they licked their chops. Eating had been skimpy for the dogs for several days. There had been food in that pack.
While we were away Dad had worked on his small riverboat, caulking and painting it, and tuning up the three-horsepower Evinrude motor. Because my mother missed her three oldest daughters so much, he had promised to go downriver to the mission schools at Anvik and Holy Cross on the Lower Yukon to bring them home.
There were no schools or missions on the Koyukuk River and if parents wanted their children to be educated, they had to send them great distances to the nearest teachers. Edith, my half sister, was at the Catholic mission at Holy Cross, 540 river miles from our Hog River cabin, because her father, Victor Bifelt, had been a Catholic. She had been away for three years. My half brother, Fred, in his teens, now lived with Old Mama at Hughes. Dad was Episcopalian, and Elsie and Ada, my older sisters, were at the Episcopal mission at Anvik, also on the Yukon River, thirty-five miles from Holy Cross. They had been away a full year. It was difficult and expensive to travel that great distance for visits, or for the girls to come home.
“I’ll never see those girls again,” Mom had mourned during the previous winter. So intensely had she longed to see her daughters that in March she had considered making a dog team trip to the Lower Yukon. But Old Mama and Dad talked her out of the long, hazardous trip. At the time the Koyukuk and Lower Yukon Indians weren’t on the best of terms.
“I’ll take the boat down and get the girls right after breakup,” Dad promised.
Spring came early in that year of 1920. Geese flew over by the thousands in flock after flock of unbroken formations that extended clear to the horizon. Millions of ducks blackened the sky. On my fifth birthday, May 10, I received my first gun, a single-shot Savage bolt-action .22 rifle. I spent hours learning to shoot it, supervised by my mother or dad.
Dad waited three days after the last ice of breakup had drifted down the Koyukuk River past our cabin. Then early one morning, he loaded his boat with gasoline, camping equipment, and food. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks,” he promised, pushing off. Starting the motor, he waved and soon disappeared around a bend, leaving Mom, Jimmy, Marion, and me alone at our Hog River cabin.
While he was away, my world turned upside down.
3
THREE BABES ALONE
Dad was scarcely on his way downriver when my mother put the three of us into our little boat and rowed us about a mile upstream. The water was high, and we could float through a portage to several lakes, following the route of the winter trail. We hunted with a .22 rifle, and bagged two muskrats. We set a fishnet and caught several pike and one big whitefish.
It was June, and we enjoyed the long hours of warm sunshine and had a wonderful time. I was five, Jimmy was three, and Marion was a year and a half. That night, we camped by one of the lakes.
After returning the next morning, Mother pulled our boat up on the bank broadside to the beach, for the river was still rising. We played in the sunshine most of the rest of the day, while Mom worked at tanning the beaver skins that she and I had taken in April.
Supper that night was rice and fish we had caught the day before. Whitefish have a hard gristly part in their gut that looks as if it has tentacles all over it, which is a favored delicacy of Koyukon Indians. Mom fried and ate this part.
That whitefish gut killed my mother.
June in the Koyukuk country is light twenty-four hours of the day, and that evening we kids played outside until late. Mom called us into the cabin and told us she wasn’t feeling well. “Go upstairs and go to bed,” she said. She was sitting on the floor at the back of the house, with her feet and legs across the threshold outside the door. She had a smudge burning, because there were many mosquitoes.
When I awoke the sun was low, so it was probably some time after midnight. Jimmy and Marion were also awake. “Sidney, mosquitoes are biting us,” complained Jimmy. The whine of the pests was incessant, as they swarmed in our bedroom. Mom hadn’t come upstairs to change Marion’s soaked diaper.
“I better go get Mom,” I said. Jimmy started to go downstairs with me, but Marion screamed, not wanting to be left alone. Finally, between us we managed to change her diaper, then we all went downstairs. The stairs were too steep for Marion, so Jimmy and I held her as she sat and slid down one step at a time.
We found our mother lying at the bottom of the stairs, half out the door, as she had been when we had gone to bed. Her eyes were closed. Most of her tongue protruded from her mouth, and it was bitten almost in two.
“Wake up, Mom,” I pleaded, frightened, as I shook her shoulder. Her skin felt cold. I couldn’t wake her.
Marion was hungry and yowling. I began to realize that Mom was dead and that I, as the oldest, was now responsible for my little brother and sister.
I managed to put kindling and wood in the woodstove and light a fire to heat milk which I poured into Marion’s bottle as I had seen Mother do many times. Marion lay on a couch and stopped crying as she sucked on her bottle. For our breakfast I cooked some oatmeal, but I made it too thick and it burned. It tasted awful, but we were hungry, so we all ate some.
Outside, our five sled dogs, tied to their houses, howled a lonely, sad sound. Jimmy and I fed them some dried salmon and gave them water, but they continued to howl in a low, forlorn way, almost constantly that day. I believe they sensed my mother’s death.
We spent hours trying to awaken Mom. She wouldn’t wake up, so we decided to try to move her inside. The house was full of mosquitoes and they almost ate us alive. Poor Marion’s little face and arms were swollen from the bites.
“Pull harder, Jimmy,” I shouted in frustration, as the two of us tried to move Mom.
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�I’m pulling as hard as I can,” he said, half crying.
After tugging for a long time, we managed to work Mom’s body back into the house and we shut the door. Mosquitoes continued to pester us, and finally I angrily said, “I’ll fix those mosquitoes.”
I lit a smudge—some bracket fungus that grows on birch trees, an old Athapaskan remedy. The fungus, gathered and dried early in the year, smolders when lit, and the pungent smoke repels mosquitoes. Sometimes, to repel mosquitoes when traveling, the fungus is burned in a can fitted with a long handle.
I had the right idea, but I lit two pieces instead of one, and my smudge made too much smoke, driving us out of the house, and we couldn’t return until the house was cleared of smoke. It was a warm, sunny day, and our mother’s body had started to decompose. Ugly blue blowflies laid eggs on her. Frightened and horrified, we covered her body with blankets, trying to contain the terrible smell and keep the flies away.
Earlier that spring Mom had stretched a tarpaulin over a pole on the riverbank where she cleaned fish, tanned hides, and did other chores. Under the tarp, she had put a mattress on the ground, creating a workplace where she could comfortably sit to do her tasks. We had taken the tarp with us in the boat when we had gone on our overnight picnic. I decided to make a shelter with it, so Jimmy and I pulled it from the boat and with difficulty wrestled it back over the pole and tied the four corners. How we tied the knots, I don’t know, but they held.
We went back into the house to get our mosquito net and bedding, holding our breath as we hurried past our mom’s body. We hung the netting underneath the tarpaulin, which took Jimmy and me a long time, and after spreading the bedding inside the mosquito net, the three of us crawled in and went to sleep. The makeshift shelter became our home. We went into the house only when we really needed something.
Earlier in the day we had fed Marion thick, sweet Eagle Brand condensed milk. We probably didn’t add enough water to it, for not long after we crawled into our blankets, she vomited. We all started to feel sick because we hadn’t eaten well and were hungry. But as soon as I opened the door to the house, that awful smell met us. I closed the door right away, and we decided to not go into the house at all.
Shadows on the Koyukuk Page 3
