Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  Dad and Charlie had cached similar items at their trapping cabin and some supplies had been left over from the previous winter. If we forgot something, we had to do without.

  The Yukon River ran high, and we had to dodge many drift logs as we traveled the first four-hour leg of our journey to Koyukuk Station. At the time, Koyukuk Station was a dangerous place for a boat when a south wind blew, although since then the river has formed a sheltering island in front of the village. Over the years I saw many boats sunk there by sudden winds and accompanying large waves. We had planned to bypass that village, but the weather was calm when we arrived, so we went on in.

  Dominic and Ella Vernetti talked Dad into staying until morning, and that evening we ate a wonderful spaghetti dinner cooked by Dominic, a master at preparing Italian dishes. Someone suggested we have a dance, and soon everyone in the village had gathered and the dance roared on through the night. But about three in the morning, a breeze started from the south, and we rushed to the boat and headed out.

  “If the wind blows too hard, pull into the slough about a mile above the bluff,” called Andrew Pitka, a friend of Dad’s.

  Soon we saw a 500-foot-high bluff looming ahead where the Koyukuk joins the Yukon. After we rounded it, the wind picked up, and waves started to roll over the gunwales of our barge. To escape them we fought our way into the sheltered and calm slough Andrew had mentioned. We had escaped the wind, but at considerable cost: millions of whining mosquitoes greeted us in the slough.

  We spent the entire day in our bunks sleeping and resting inside our bed nets to escape the mosquitoes. When the wind calmed that evening, we headed on up the Koyukuk. In a few hours we stopped where huge flocks of ducks and geese had gathered. With a shotgun, Charlie killed a couple of geese and made a tasty soup. The birds provided the first red meat Jimmy and I had had since we had left the steamer Alice, and it was wonderful.

  For bush residents in those years, beans commonly took the place of fresh meat, providing protein in summer when there was no way to freeze meat. After a month or more of beans we were tired of them, so Charlie’s soup was especially satisfying. The farther we traveled upriver, the more wildlife we saw and the fewer beans we had to eat. We saw ducks and geese by the hundreds of thousands, as well as foxes, lynx, and otters.

  At the old village of Cutoff, we found my uncle Hog River Johnny. “Are you planning to return to Hog River?” Dad asked him. He shook his head sadly and said, “I wouldn’t stay there now, not since Anna died.”

  Our Aunt Eliza Attla was at Cutoff too. She hugged me and Jimmy and fussed over us, giving us tasty tidbits to eat. While it embarrassed us, both of us missed mothering, so we loved the attention. During our boyhood years many of the warmhearted, motherly women of the Koyukuk eased our loneliness with such attention.

  “Do the boys have mittens and moccasins?” she asked Dad.

  He told her that we had some that had come by mail order from Outside. But that wasn’t good enough for her.

  “Stay over a day and let me fix these kids up,” she requested.

  The next day, she came aboard the Vixen with moosehide moccasins and rabbit-skin socks for Jimmy and me, as well as two beautiful pairs of moosehide mittens lined with wool from a Hudson’s Bay blanket. She had sewn a band of beaver fur on the outside of the mitten cuffs for brushing our cold noses on. She also brought a pair of fine, warm, fur slippers for Dad.

  “How much do I owe you, Eliza?” Dad asked.

  “I do that for Anna, my sister. Maybe sometime those boys might help me,” she answered. That was the generous, loving way of life on the Koyukuk in those days. She must have worked all night.

  Shortly after we left Cutoff, Dad spotted a shiny, fat black bear poking along the beach ahead. Hastily, he beached the Vixen and went ashore with his rifle. We waited, excited. Soon we heard the crack of a shot, then another. Dad appeared and signaled to Charlie to bring the boat and barge on up the river. When we rounded a bend, Dad was kneeling on the sandy beach, skinning the bear. That black bear provided some of the sweetest meat I ever tasted. We feasted on it for many days until it began to spoil in the July heat.

  At Hog River, we stopped at Mom’s grave. After we cut away the grass and small willows crowding the tiny site, we prayed. Our thoughts were melancholy, and there wasn’t much that could be said. Seven years had passed since she had left us, but our memories of her were still vivid and our hearts were heavy.

  The Hog River country is beautiful, with clear streams flowing through spruce and birch forests. Hudson Stuck described it well. After he drove a dog team from the Koyukuk drainage into the Kobuk in early February 1906, crossing two headwater forks of the Hog, he wrote, “As we came down a steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it remains in my mind as one of many places…where I would like to have a lodge in the vast wilderness.”

  Batza River, our destination, pours into the Koyukuk thirty river miles upstream from Hog River. We arrived there late one evening, and immediately Charlie and I took the fishnet skiff downriver and set two short gillnets at an eddy. I had helped my mother with gillnets, and now Charlie taught me more about them. They were both empty the next morning, which told us that we had arrived before the salmon.

  Dad and Charlie lived in a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot log cabin they had built the previous winter. It was too small for four people, so we cut logs to build a twelve-by-sixteen-foot addition. With a whipsaw, Charlie and I cut enough lumber for floors, doors, and other features. I had helped Bill Dalquist whipsaw a shaft log for his boat at Nulato while waiting for Dad and Charlie to arrive, and now Charlie taught me more about using this tool that was almost indispensable in the Alaska wildlands.

  A whipsaw is about one-eighth-inch thick and perhaps ten inches wide at the upper end, tapering to four inches wide at the lower end. Total length may be five to seven and a half feet. A permanent long handle is attached to the top end. The lower, adjustable, handle is generally a block of maple. A frame is built so a log to be sawed is above the head of the man at the bottom of the saw, who pulls down when cutting and guides the blade of the saw to keep it on the lower line. The man below is liberally sprinkled with sawdust and anything else that comes off the log with every stroke. The man on top pulls the saw up on his cut, guiding it along the line marked on top of the log.

  The addition to our enlarged log cabin became our bedroom. The front room was a combined kitchen, workshop, and living room where we skinned fur animals, made sleds and snowshoes, and repaired and made new dog harness with webbing and rivets. Charlie, a good sheet metal worker, made several stoves there.

  There was plenty of work. All of us did whatever was at hand, with no separation between kid’s work and adult’s work. Dad wanted us to learn how to take care of ourselves, so the best way was for Jimmy and me to pitch in and help with every task.

  We built two small, windowless log outcabins that summer—one downstream, about halfway to Hog River, the other about ten miles upriver. We used them for overnight stops or for short daytime rests while running our traplines. Each was a ten-by-twelve-foot windowless shelter with a small stove. The doors were only three feet high, barely big enough to duck through. To enter, we had to step over the lower three logs of the cabin; this type of threshold reduces the amount of cold air that pours through an open door in winter. At each of these outcabins, we kept matches, candles, a small supply of food, and a week’s supply of dry firewood ready for use.

  The salmon run was poor that summer, so we caught and dried only 500—hardly enough to feed our six dogs through the winter. We split and dried the fish in the usual way. It appeared likely that we would end up having to feed our dogs rabbits, if there were any.

  One of our last jobs before freezeup was to pull the Vixen out of the water. About a mile and a half downstream we found a back slough that looked safe. River ice hadn’t pushed inland to bend the larger six-inch-diameter will
ows along that slough for many years, and some of those trees must have been ten to twenty years old. Pulling the boat out of the water at the slough saved five or six days work, because we didn’t have to make a Spanish windlass to pull it up a steep bank. Dad and Charlie agreed that our boat would be safe in the slough from the destructive power of ice during breakup.

  So the dog team and sled could travel easily, Jimmy and I spent hours widening trails and shoveling them smooth where they climbed the banks of the river.

  When the lakes froze over and snow came, we began to notice mink, fox, and some lynx tracks. Marten were scarce, and marten season, closed several years earlier, remained closed.

  That fall, Jimmy and I trapped our first mink, and when we went to retrieve it, it sprayed us with its skunklike scent. We had mixed feelings when we arrived at the cabin carrying that mink. On one hand we were proud of our catch, but on the other we knew that we didn’t smell very good.

  And sure enough, when we stepped into the cabin carrying our mink, Dad whooped, “Get out of here, quick. You kids stink!”

  Sheepishly, we left the cabin, still carrying our catch. Dad made us strip to our birthday suits and scrub down. Charlie skinned the mink and found the skin to be a blueback (bluish color inside the skin), which indicated that the fur was not prime. From that we learned it was too early to trap other furbearers, so we waited for another month before setting more traps. By then the fur on all the animals had reached its longest, sleekest, and densest condition—in other words, it was prime and the bluish color inside the skin had disappeared.

  Cold came on fast in October, freezing the Koyukuk River over in just a couple of days. Dad, Jimmy, and I crossed on the ice to scout the country on the far side. We camped in the open, without a tent. Searching for tracks, we found mink, marten, and fox sign on the big grassy lakes. Dad and Charlie hadn’t trapped there the previous year.

  We broke a dog team trail across the river and cut a swath through the brush to the hills. Here we set some traps for marten. According to Dad, the bootleg price for marten was $20—big money in 1927. (My views on illegal trapping have changed, but I’m not judgmental about what happened more than half a century ago when only a few Indians or others living like Indians resided in the Koyukuk and Yukon valleys and they did what they had to do to survive. There were few people, few trapping regulations, and little enforcement of hunting and trapping laws.)

  When trapping season was open and we were ready to catch furbearers, we followed the trails we had brushed out during summer with dog team and sled, through areas attractive to foxes, lynx, mink, and marten. We set our traps along these trails, some of which ran ten or fifteen miles. With some sets we used bait to attract animals, and with others we made blind sets—that is, we set the traps where an animal was likely to step blindly into them. Some traps were placed in cubbies—little brush or bark shelters that are attractive to furbearers, especially marten. Sometimes we hung a ptarmigan or duck wing over a trap so it would entice a marten to investigate.

  We ran these traplines regularly to remove the trapped animals. In the normal below-zero winter temperatures that occur in the Koyukuk valley during trapping season, the animals died within hours, but if their frozen bodies remained in the traps for more than a couple of days, ravens, jays, shrews, or other animals were likely to eat them, damaging the furs.

  Money didn’t mean much to me then. Accomplishments did. I spent every spare hour outdoors working. I made my first dogsled out of split birch, lashing it together with babiche (rawhide). I cut my own bedroll out of the skin of the black bear Dad had shot. And I ran my own trapline. It was the most fun I had ever had.

  By Christmas, we had twenty lynx, ninety foxes, thirty mink, and twenty contraband marten. Marten, a sleek brown tree-climbing relative of the mink, appear to have very long cycles of abundance and scarcity. One winter, about 1895, my grandfather, the trader, caught more than 500 marten with deadfalls—primitive traps set so that logs fall on the animals that trigger them. He received twenty-five cents for each skin. At that time, and in earlier years, marten were not only a fur producer to the Indians of the Koyukuk, they were also a food animal. After the 1920 federal ban on the trapping of marten, Koyukuk marten didn’t return to real abundance until the late 1970s and early 1980s, although trapping was reopened about 1930.

  By March, Dad decided that he and I had to take our furs to Tanana to sell them before prices dropped. He worried that a depression was near, and of course he was right: the bottom dropped out of the economy the next year.

  One cold, clear morning in March we waved good-bye to Charlie and Jimmy, and headed down the glistening white trail on the start of our 300-mile round trip. My snowshoes hardly sank on the hard-packed route as I walked ahead of the dogs. Temperatures had moderated, and daylight hours were increasing noticeably. I was living with my dad, doing man’s work at the age of twelve. Daily I learned more about surviving and succeeding as a North Country trapper—which appears to be a simple existence, but in reality is a complex and challenging profession. My life was beginning to come together.

  We mushed twenty miles, reaching Little Sammy’s camp the first day. Little Sammy, married to my aunt Big Sophy Sam, one of Old Mama’s daughters, welcomed us for the night. He was a good-natured Koyukon Indian who played violin at village dances; he played by ear, and he was really good at it. The life of every party, he was a sincere Indian who followed the old customs.

  We reached Hughes the next day, where we stayed with Old Mama. As usual, she cried, fussed over me, cooked a special meal, and gave me new mittens she had made. I truly loved that wonderful lady. After my mother died, Old Mama was the nearest substitute for a mother that Jimmy and I had.

  About six inches of snow fell that night. In the morning we headed over the mountains to Indian Creek. At first we progressed well, but then we had to break trail in deep snow over a stretch that no one had traveled for many weeks. Dad knew the trail, and the government had marked it, so we didn’t go astray. Nevertheless, the eleven miles from Berry’s mine to Utopia were awful. Because of the deep snow, the trail had no bottom and the dogs had no footing. When dogs can’t get traction to pull, they wallow around, tire quickly, and need help in moving the sled. At such times the musher is the hardest working dog in the team.

  I had to double-break the trail—I tramped ahead half a mile on snowshoes and then returned to repeat the process, with three snowshoe tracks compacting the snow enough to give the dogs footing and allow the sled to move more easily. By the end of the day, when we arrived at the Utopia mail cabin, I was exhausted. To travel the eleven miles, I had walked thirty-three miles back and forth.

  Ernie Wingfield, a former prospector, was trapping at Utopia Creek. He had heard from other travelers that we were coming, and the previous day he had walked halfway to 70-mile Cabin and back, breaking trail over the route we were to follow. And he was planning to use the trail we had just broken on the following day, so our trail-breaking efforts balanced. Travel was easy to 70-mile Cabin on the trail that Ernie had broken; I had to double-break trail only the last six miles.

  Every night on that trip we had to cook dog food. To do this, we had to cut firewood, start a fire, melt snow, and cook rice or cornmeal, and then cool the mush before we could feed our hungry animals.

  We hit a fresh trail at the 70-mile Cabin. Tony Kokrines, a Tanana-born Indian who hauled mail from Tanana to Wiseman on a government contract, had gone through with his big dog team, headed for the Koyukuk. As we traveled, I learned the history of the mail route from the people we encountered along the trail and from evening talk. The Koyukuk mail run by winter trail began in 1906. Bob Buchanan was the first to fulfill the monthly mail contract from Tanana to Wiseman. Ed Allard hauled mail for the next eight years, then John Adams for the following four years. Next, trader Andy Vachon of Tanana won the contract and sublet it to old man Kokrines. He and his sons Anthony, Andrew, and Bergman Kokrines hauled the last of the mail by dog team ov
er that trail. After that, about 1930 or 1931, the airplane took over. I knew all these drivers except for the earliest, Bob Buchanan.

  The monthly mail run was the sole contact with the outside world for miners and prospectors who lived in the Koyukuk in the early 1900s. There was no radio. There were no airplanes. Dog teams carried everything in winter, riverboats carried everything in summer. Before regular mail routes, prospectors or miners carried mail to the mining district it was bound for and left it at a trading post. Letters from loved ones, magazines, and newspapers were treasures beyond value for these isolated men. In remote villages and mining camps, I’ve seen magazines with loose pages, the print worn from handling, treated as if they were valuable documents, as they were handed from man to man. Small wonder that mail drivers were considered special.

  We moved swiftly down the trail that Tony Kokrines had broken, arriving at 32-mile Cabin that night, having covered thirty-eight miles in one day. Dad rode the sled downhill, and I had fun running on my snowshoes. We stayed the night at the cabin of John Larson, a longtime prospector. Tanana was only thirty-two miles from his cabin.

  With an early start the next day, we reached Tanana before dark. Many residents were recovering from flu after an epidemic in which seventeen people had died. The town had been quarantined, and if we had arrived two days earlier, we would have had to return to the Koyukuk.

  Tanana was a community of about 600, about seventy percent Athapaskan. It had two roadhouses, a pool hall, three general stores, a sheet metal shop that made stoves, and other small businesses. Soldiers from adjacent Fort Gibbon helped to build and maintain the telegraph line from Fairbanks to Nome. (The telegraph line was to be maintained until 1943 when wireless [radio] replaced it.)