Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  At Tanana, Dad bargained for the best price for our furs. Finally he sold part of them to Ole Shade of the Northern Commercial Company and then shipped the remainder to the Seattle Fur Exchange auction. My season’s catch of four lynx, many foxes, many marten, and one wolverine, sold for more than $1,000.

  Though our stay was short, we saw Edwin Simon. I hadn’t seen him since the year I had lived with Dad at Alatna, and it gave both Dad and me great pleasure to see his beaming face again.

  We headed home on a fast, hard-packed trail. I walked and ran all the way on the level and uphill, and rode the sled going downhill. We reached Hughes, 120 miles, in four days, and we met Little Sammy on the trail. He had moved to the Melozitna River headwaters to hunt moose, as there were no moose in the Koyukuk River valley. He had come to Hughes to tell Chief John that a cow moose had left the Melozitna River and headed over the divide into the Koyukuk.

  Little Sammy noticed that I had worn my snowshoes ragged. “That growing kid, he needs new snowshoes,” he said. “Man, he walked all the way to Tanana and back on those old ragged ones. I just made these for myself, he can have them. We can’t hold him back with bum snowshoes.” With that, he handed me his newly made snowshoes and I proudly accepted his generous gift.

  We traveled easily in the trail broken by Little Sammy, but after about ten miles on my new snowshoes they started to hurt my feet because the harness wasn’t broken in, and I had to put on the old ones. We arrived back at our Batza River cabin the following day to find that Jimmy and Charlie had collected more fox and marten furs.

  We hadn’t taken the contraband marten to Tanana. The game warden for the region, Frank DuFresne (later a nationally known outdoor writer), patrolled from Tanana, and Dad didn’t dare chance being caught with all those marten furs.

  After we had been home a day, I was curious to see how Chief John was making out on his hunt for the cow moose. We had seen the tracks where he had turned off the river about forty miles below Hughes, so I presumed he would be at the lakes below there.

  Chief John was half-brother to Old Mama and my great-uncle. He was a small, tough man who had once killed a grizzly bear with a spear. He would not admit to this feat. If he had, it would have been considered bragging, which was not acceptable in the old Koyukon culture. While he wouldn’t admit to the exploit, others somehow knew about it, and he was held in high esteem.

  I walked upriver on my new snowshoes for about two and a half hours and came to his trail where it led down through the lakes, following the moose tracks. I went home, and the next morning the weather was clear and around 0 to 10 degrees, so I headed downriver, figuring maybe I would intercept him. In three hours I found him camped with his wife, Big Mary. They had tracked the moose for a couple of days until they caught up with it and shot it. The moose hide was stretched out on the snow, and they were scraping both sides of it with a curved piece of trap spring tied to a short stick for a handle.

  That’s the way it was then. Whenever a moose showed up in the Koyukuk, someone would find its trail and stay with it until he killed the animal. Once the moose was taken, camp was made, and every bit of the animal was used.

  Chief John and his wife had banked the base of their tent with moose hair for insulation, and they had made a moose-hair bed for each of their five dogs. Chief John had found rocks at a nearby bluff with which to break the bones so they could boil out all the nourishing fat and marrow. They had skimmed the fat off the top of the water and with it made a soup. It was surprising how much fat they got out of those bones. I ate with them, and with a little added rice, that soup was delicious.

  Some of the meat was cut into strips and dried into jerky. They cooked and ate all of the intestine parts and the large blood vessels. All the meat from the head (some of the sweetest meat on a moose) was removed, cooked, and eaten. No usable part was wasted.

  “Need help going back?” I asked.

  “No. We stay three more days to finish the skin and cook all the bones. We take our time. Maybe stop at spring muskrat camp on way back to Hughes—after breakup. No hurry,” old Chief John explained.

  They were living real Indian style, enjoying life. They planned to consume the all-too-rare treat of fresh meat in leisure while basking in the warming spring weather. There was no need to hurry.

  Caring for the valuable moosehide took them several days. First they removed the hair by dry-shaving it with a sharp knife. Then the hide was stretched out on a smooth place in the snow and pegged down so it would freeze evenly. As soon as the hide was frozen solid, they scraped the remaining meat and fat off the flesh side, which was a full day’s work.

  After the flesh was removed, the stakes were pulled and the hide was turned over, and the hair side was scraped to remove the black tissue until the hide was white. This was another full day’s work.

  The skin was then dried and rolled until it could be tanned, sometime during summer or fall. To tan it, the hide would be soaked in a mixture of water and rotten moose brains. Sometimes a bar of brown soap was added. The hide was wrung dry by fastening one end to a tree or stump, and twisting the other end with a five-foot pole. Then it would be hung up and scraped with a sharp flat rock. Again the hide would be soaked in the brains solution and scraped. The harder one works at scraping after wringing the water out, the softer the finished product. The hide was held with one hand while it was scraped with the other. This required hours of patient work.

  The hide was then sewed into a pouch or tube, and a canvas or skin tube was sewed around the bottom to provide a pipe or conveyer for smoke. Then it was smoked on one side, with the smoke wood never allowed to flame. The smoking gives a moosehide a beautiful golden brown color. The longer it is smoked, the darker the finished product. Preferred smoke wood is bone-dry rotten spruce. The Koyukon people pick such wood up in the woods whenever it is found, for it isn’t common. The resulting tough but soft, golden brown tanned moosehide is suitable for making pants, shirts, jackets, moccasins, and mittens.

  Chief John gave me a piece of moose meat and pointed out a shortcut portage that reduced my trip home by at least an hour. The next fall I named that portage Chief John Portage (and so it is called today).

  When I went back to their campsite a few days later, Chief John and Big Mary were gone. Nothing remained to show that they had killed a moose—no bones, no skull, no hair. Everything was cleaned up or buried.

  9

  DEEP COLD

  During the winter of 1927–28, I spent an unforgettable day running part of our Batza River trapline when the temperature was –78 degrees Fahrenheit. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, such extremely low temperatures were not uncommon, and we often ran our trapline in –50 to –55 degree temperatures. That winter, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day our mercury bottle remained frozen solid, meaning the temperature remained at –42 degrees or colder. Dad wouldn’t let Jimmy or me go out for any length of time when the temperature was below –60. “Too risky,” he warned.

  He didn’t need to remind us what could happen at such temperatures if we became wet in overflow, a common phenomenon of the North. When rivers freeze to the bottom and groundwater continues to flow, pressure builds and the force from groundwater sometimes is strong enough to lift the ice. The water may break through the ice and spread along the frozen surface—this is called overflow. Sometimes the water gushes through the ice like an artesian well, rising several feet above the surface of the ice. Overflow may be a fraction of an inch deep or a foot deep.

  We had frequently heard Dad tell how one December with a big dog team, he was hauling mail to Fort Gibbon. As he drove his dogs up the Yukon River on a day when the temperature was –78 degrees, two soldiers who wanted to go to Fort Gibbon for Christmas asked if they could travel with him. He couldn’t take both, for adding 90 pounds or so of duffel for each soldier would have been too much added weight on the sled, but he agreed to take one of the men.

  “You’ll have to walk,” Dad told the soldier.
Everyone understood that walking was part of traveling with a dog team pulling a heavy load. Dad was walking himself. The dogs moved at walking speed and on downhill slopes they went a little faster.

  “Stay away from water. Don’t mess around trying to tiptoe through overflow of any kind,” Dad warned the soldier.

  When they reached the Tozitna River, which had frozen to the bottom, overflow was running on top of the ice. The water was barely an eighth of an inch deep, and the soldier, ahead of Dad and the team, walked across the skim of water. Immediately the bottoms of his boots froze as solid as iron.

  Dad turned the team and traveled an extra hundred yards to go around the water, then returned to the trail to rejoin the soldier on the far side of the overflow.

  “My feet are getting cold, Jim,” said the soldier.

  “Did you walk across that water?” Dad asked.

  “Yes. But I seem to be warming up now. I think I’m in good shape,” the soldier answered.

  In a few miles they reached the cabin of Monkey John, Dad’s friend, where they stopped to warm up.

  “How are your feet?” Dad asked the soldier.

  “Fine. Don’t worry,” he answered.

  “Why you ask, Jim?” Monkey John wanted to know.

  “He stepped in that overflow on the Tozi, at 78 below,” Dad answered.

  “Too cold. Me atsukee (scared),” said Monkey John, feeling of the soldier’s feet.

  “Solid froze!” he said.

  Monkey John harnessed his dog team and raced to Fort Gibbon to get an Army detail with a doctor to retrieve the man.

  In the meantime, Dad and others brought snow inside the cabin to put the man’s feet in. Snow was a popular remedy then. It was often even rubbed on frostbitten parts before discovery that such crude treatment could do further damage. The Army men with a doctor and dog team hauled the soldier to the Fort Gibbon hospital. He eventually lost both legs. So Jimmy and I knew enough to stay away from overflow during the deep cold.

  An important part of our trapline equipment was a fine Taylor thermometer calibrated to –98 degrees Fahrenheit. We paid ten dollars for it, when a good quality thermometer that registered to –50 or –60 degrees sold for fifty cents. That January, the Koyukon “month of the days going from short to long,” I had been stuck in the cabin for days, impatiently waiting out a long cold spell. The reading on the Taylor thermometer edged up to –58 degrees and Dad said it was warm enough for me to go out. I dressed in my warmest clothes. Over my wool union suit I wore a pair of heavy wool pants and a heavy wool shirt. Over the shirt I put on a wool jacket, and on top of that I wore a cloth parka with a hood with a wolverine fur ruff. I pulled wolf fur socks over my wool socks, and packed a clean innersole of dry local sweetgrass in my moccasins before putting them on, then pulled on a pair of Alaska Indian-type moosehide moccasins, which folded and tied at the ankle.

  My mittens were the moosehide ones made by my Aunt Eliza, lined with Hudson’s Bay five-star blanket wool. Beaver fur was sewed to the inside of the gauntlets, which kept the heat in yet allowed enough circulation to prevent sweating. Beaver fur was also attached to the outside of the gauntlets, giving me a place to wipe my nose, for the inescapable nose drips one gets in the extreme cold.

  I carried an axe, and in my packsack I had a closed can holding kerosene-soaked burlap rags with which to start a fire if needed. (Even today in my snow machine winter survival kit I include a supply of starter burlap rags. I cut them into six-inch squares, pack them tightly into a can, pour kerosene or No. 1 diesel oil over them, and then close the can with a tight lid. One of these rags under dry sticks as a fire booster can be a lifesaver.)

  I left about 8:30, well before daylight. Around my neck and over my face I wrapped a five-foot-long wool scarf, a gift from Ella Vernetti. Moisture from my breath would freeze on the scarf, so I occasionally turned it to a dry spot. As I walked, my exhaled breath made a crackling noise as it hit the super-chilled air, a sound that starts occurring at about –50 degrees.

  Jimmy and I had experimented earlier that winter with boiling water. At –55 degrees, a cup of boiling water hurled into the air makes a great whoooosh and instantly turns into a cloud that drifts off slowly; no water falls to the ground. And when we opened the door of our warm cabin at such temperatures, the cold air rushed in and condensed the moisture of the room, and the condensation rushed along the floor like escaping steam.

  That cold day as I ventured out to check some traps, animals were not moving—there were no tracks. I knew that foxes were curled up in dens or buried in deep snow, their noses covered by white-tipped tails. Beaver and muskrats were snug and safe under the ice of rivers and ponds. Mice scurried about under the snow, where they too were insulated from the terrible cold.

  I found two marten in traps, removed them, and reset the traps. This success encouraged me to snowshoe on. I came to a frozen red fox in a trap. His fur was beautiful. I reset the trap, but left the fox to pick up on my return. I had kept my mittens on while removing the three animals and resetting the traps; bare hands begin to freeze in seconds in such cold.

  I sensed that the temperature was dropping, but I didn’t feel cold. Only my fingers were icy from carrying the axe in my hand, so I put it in my pack. The axe is a necessary tool on a trapline, for limbs and small trees need to be cut around a set trap, and sometimes brush must be cut in a trail. In an emergency when one must have a fire or build a temporary shelter, the axe is indispensable. A trapper on the trail without an axe would be like a carpenter without a hammer.

  As I approached the next trap, a blind trail set, I saw disturbed snow from some distance. Steam was rising from the breath of some animal, which growled ferociously, threatening me when I neared. A puff of steam erupted from his jaws at each growl and with each breath. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled, and I almost lit out for home.

  Firmly caught in a No. 3 Newhouse trap was a wolverine, one of the most fearsome of Northern mammals, and he had been in the trap only a short time. Usually solitary, and never very abundant, the wolverine is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family in North America. The Koyukon people consider the wolverine’s spirit to be the strongest of any animal, and they treat it with great respect. One of the Koyukon words for the wolverine is doyon, coming from the Russian toyon, which means chief or great man. The strength of this beady-eyed, low-slung, heavy-clawed animal is difficult to believe. Sometimes a wolverine steals animals from traps, and occasionally one breaks into a trapper’s cabin or cache in search of food. The destruction this powerful thirty-pounder can wreak in a cabin is renowned in the North.

  It was my first encounter with a live wolverine. I was certainly afraid of it, as it roared and threatened to eat me alive, but I was anxious to take it home, for the fur was valuable. We had quite a struggle, which took me some time, but I managed finally to put an end to it with a heavy club, without damaging the beautiful fur.

  Removing it from the trap, I put it in my pack. I noticed its glossy brown fur, with the two pale lateral strips that converged at the base of his bushy tail. But I didn’t linger because the encounter had tired me and I began to feel the cold. It was time to go home.

  Snowshoeing as rapidly as I dared, just short of causing me to break out in a sweat, I headed down my backtrail. I picked up the fox and carried it in my mittened hands for a time, but my fingers started to grow cold, so I buried it in deep snow at the edge of a lake and marked the place with a stick. I was tiring fast and growing steadily colder. For the first time that day, I felt the cold through my pants.

  At –50 degrees and colder in the Northern wilds, complete silence reigns. The only sign of life may be an occasional raven flying over-head—his wings make a loud noise in the dense air. There is the occasional startling rifle-shot crack of a tree freezing and splitting, or the eerie drum of ice giving off a loud spaaaaang, with the sound echoing and rumbling away underwater.

  I realized the cold was becoming more intense as I s
huffled homeward. I must have walked for two hours, and, despite my heavy clothing and physical exertions, I had become cold from head to toe. I knew that I had to keep moving because no amount of clothing would keep me warm if I stopped. Yet I moved slowly, knowing that if I overexerted and started to sweat, the perspiration would freeze on my clothing and allow the cold to penetrate.

  The wolverine was heavy, but I didn’t want to leave it behind; besides, it kept my back warm. When I came to the river I couldn’t see across it because a thick fog was hanging over it. Our cabin was across the river. As I went down the riverbank, I felt the difference in air temperature: with each step it felt as if I were wading in a cold river.

  Just before I reached the far bank, dimly through the fog I saw the shadowy forms of Dad, Charlie, and Jimmy, waiting for me. Weakness gripped my body, and I dropped my pack with the wolverine in it before climbing the bank. Even without the wolverine on my back I had difficulty reaching the top. Kicking off my snowshoes, I hurried directly into the cabin. The others followed. No one spoke.

  I sat on a wood block we used as a stool. Charlie cut my moccasin strings and yanked off my moccasins and socks. “No frostbite,” he announced. His welcome words were the first any of us had spoken. Other than minor frostbite on my cheeks and on the tip of one of my little fingers, I was fine.

  “Dammit, Sidney, I’ve told you never to go out when it’s colder than sixty below,” Dad scolded.

  “It was only fifty-eight below when I left,” I said, defensively. “You said it was all right.”

  Eagerly, I told him about the wolverine, the two marten, and the fox. I knew my take was valuable; the four furs would bring about eighty dollars. My report helped take some of the pressure off. My wolverine was the first we had trapped that winter, and its fur alone was worth ten dollars from a fur buyer—more if traded or sold to an Indian or Eskimo fur seamstress.