Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  Joe was a good sport. “I never dreamed that a skinny kid like that would beat me,” he said with a grin. “You Huntington boys are good at everything.” For two youngsters who lived on their own, such praise was encouraging, especially coming from Joe, who excelled at everything he did. I get a warm glow when I recall those words.

  Dad was proud of us too. He carefully inspected the Ark and pronounced it first class. “I knew you boys would do all right trapping. I didn’t dream you would build a fine big boat like this though,” he said.

  Back upriver, we cut stacks of firewood for the coming winter at our trapline shelter cabins, which were roughly ten to fifteen miles apart. Because we had only five dogs that season, we walked most of the time. One of us would take two large dogs and a small sled and walk from trap to trap on one line; the other would take the three smaller dogs and a small sled and walk another trapline.

  There is always something interesting to see on a trapline. A frequent companion was the tame little-headed hawk owl that is commonly out during the day. This friendly fellow perches atop small spruces, waiting until a traveler arrives. He then flies ahead and lands, waiting for the traveler to catch up. He’ll go on in his silent way, to wait again, watching with his wise yellow eyes, swiveling his head about. Another friendly bird is the gray jay, or camprobber. Stop for lunch or to make camp, and suddenly, silently, a camprobber is there, perched nearby, watching, ready to steal food, seemingly curious to see what is going on.

  By Christmas we had caught more than 200 mink, mostly good-sized animals. For some reason mink were everywhere that winter, eating anything they could catch, including one another. I couldn’t figure out why there were so many, and thought then that perhaps they bred twice a year. I know now that mink breed only once a year. After that season, I never again saw them in such numbers. By spring we had 300 fine mink furs.

  We lived by hunting, and we killed many bears during our years on the trapline, for we ranged far and needed much meat. The finest black bear meat comes from an animal taken in its den during winter. These bears also carry loads of highly treasured fat, which can be cut from the carcass after skinning, like removing a blanket, leaving only lean meat. Some blankets of bear fat weigh up to 100 pounds, although the average is probably around forty or fifty, depending on the size of the bear and the abundance of fall blueberries.

  We rendered the bear fat—that is, we heated it on a stove until it melted and could be poured into containers where it would keep fresh for months, especially when frozen. Pieces of dried fish dipped into melted bear grease is a delicacy eaten like potato chips. We also ate melted bear grease with low-fat fish and with lean game meats.

  Jimmy became fascinated by the traditional Koyukon Indian way of hunting for black bears in their dens. Dad was especially fond of black bear meat, which no doubt contributed to Jimmy’s enthusiasm. He was proud of his bear-hunting prowess, much of which he learned from our uncle Hog River Johnny. I thought he took unnecessary chances, like the time he crawled into a den head first to kill a bear. One shot in the dark, one bear. End of story.

  The best bear den areas in the Koyukuk are in low, rolling hills, around big lakes, creek banks, wherever there is cover. Experts—and in time Jimmy became an expert—can quickly identify the sign that indicates a black bear is ready to den. Some can even tell how close a den is likely to be from such sign. Female black bears like to use blueberry bushes as bedding in their dens, hence a torn-up blueberry patch in early winter can indicate a female black bear den is near. Dark, shiny droppings of a certain consistency are typical of bears when they are ready to enter their den for winter.

  Our uncle Hog River Johnny told us where to look for black bear dens. When we found one, we would walk close and stand by the entrance until the bear stuck his head out. Then we’d shoot him. When leaving a den, black bears are usually trying to escape, so there was seldom a confrontation.

  The more aggressive grizzly bears were another matter. They may charge from their den and attack an intruder. We could tell what kind of bear we were dealing with by the color of the hair found near a den entrance, and sometimes by the tracks if they weren’t covered by snow.

  Jimmy found himself in real trouble at a black bear den one October. He found bear sign and followed the tracks to the den. He shoveled snow away with a snowshoe, but he still couldn’t tell where the opening was. He probed with his rifle until it broke through the loose snow and into the den. Still he felt no bear.

  He found a plug of dead grass and branches, which he pulled out. With more nerve than I would have had, he crawled into the narrow entrance, shoving his .30–30 ahead. Still no sign of bear. He stretched his arm and rifle as far as he could reach. That brought action.

  A bear growled and slammed the rifle down, knocking it from Jimmy’s grasp. Jimmy didn’t argue. Leaving the rifle, he wriggled out, backwards. He could imagine all too clearly what would have happened if the bear had grabbed his arm.

  Safely outside the den, Jimmy decided to use another age-old Koyukon technique to take the bear. With his axe he chopped an opening in the top of the den, expecting the bear to shove his head through the hole so he could kill it with the axe.

  When the hole appeared big enough for the bear’s head, Jimmy released the four dogs from his sled, thinking the dogs would keep the bear off of him if it broke out of the den. He climbed atop the den again and swung the axe into the hole he had made. The axe struck a bear, and the furious animal erupted from the den with a roar. Blood, dirt, and bedding flew. Before Jimmy could move, most of the angry, bleeding bear was out of the hole, within a few feet. Now in self-defense, he swung the axe, cutting deeply into the bear’s head.

  The dogs, yapping with frantic excitement, didn’t come to help him. Puzzled, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that a second bear had emerged from the den and was on its hind legs, facing the attacking dogs. Jimmy saw it strike one dog with a powerful front paw and toss it fifteen feet through the air. The other three dogs tried to maneuver behind the bear to attack, where they could escape the slashing claws. Everything happened in split seconds. Before Jimmy could turn to deal with the bear in front of him, a third bear rushed from the den snarling.

  Jimmy had his hands full.

  The first bear, injured by the blow to his head, dropped to all fours. Swiftly, Jimmy chopped through its backbone, paralyzing the animal. Figuring the dogs would keep their bear occupied, Jimmy turned his attention to the third bear. The animal stood on hind legs, claws outstretched, ready to attack. Jimmy leaped to it and with a swipe of the axe split its stomach open, spilling bloody, steaming viscera onto the snow. The bear’s claws ripped through Jimmy’s heavy parka sleeve and tore his arm. Ignoring the pain, he whacked again at the bear’s belly, completing the job of disemboweling it. Jimmy jumped aside as the animal fell forward in the snow.

  The three dogs, growling and screaming, were still fighting the second bear. Jimmy leaped at the animal with his axe, and sliced its nose to the bone. Quick as thought, the bear slapped the axe out of Jimmy’s hands, sending it end-over-end until it disappeared in the deep snow.

  Weaponless now, Jimmy remembered his rifle inside the den and dove into the entrance. The dogs were still worrying the bear, but now the bear was after Jimmy. The enraged animal clawed Jimmy’s boots as Jimmy crawled into the darkness, frantically feeling for his rifle and praying no more bears lurked inside the den.

  Flat on his stomach, he located the rifle and half turned to face the bear, which now blocked the den entrance. The bear was close when Jimmy fired. The rifle blast inside the cave temporarily deafened him, but the bullet killed the bear.

  It took some time and a lot of effort to shove the heavy carcass out of the way so he could crawl out of the den. The big, limp bear was like a cork in a bottle. The first bear, paralyzed with a severed spine, lay growling nearby, and Jimmy finished it with another shot. The dog that the bear had flung through the air was so badly injured that he had to shoot it t
o put it out of its misery. It was one of his favorites, and for months afterward he blamed himself for the dog’s death.

  Jimmy was covered with blood, and blood stained the snow for thirty feet around the den. Except for deep claw slashes on his arm, he was unhurt.

  During the years on the trapline, I learned to love the challenge of building useful items. I made many snowshoes, using techniques I learned from Eklutna John. I also built many dogsleds of split birch. Dogsleds cannot be screwed, bolted, or nailed together because such joints will not withstand the twisting and jolting of the trail. Instead, babiche lashing is used. After soaking, the wet rawhide shrinks as it dries, tightening the joint. Babiche allows a sled to bend and twist without splitting the stressed wood as it bounces over rough trails.

  Jimmy and I whipsawed many feet of lumber, planed it, and made sturdy tables, chairs, cabinets, and shelves for our cabin, as well as more boats.

  I decided that I wanted to play a musical instrument. We had no battery radios in the early years, but we did have a windup phonograph with some hoedown records, the kind of music played at village dances where the violin and guitar are popular.

  The Koyukon people began playing fiddles in the late 1800s, obtaining instruments from Canadian trappers. Later, Irish and Scottish gold rushers brought more violins and more fiddle songs. And Koyukon people composed many songs of their own. Most Indian fiddlers learn to play by ear; many never learn to read music.

  I found time between trapping chores to make a guitar. It had a good sound, but it was not as handsome as a store-bought instrument. Next, I made a violin, basing my design on a picture in a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. To make glue for it, I boiled a moose hoof. The handle was maple, the fingerboard ebony, the top was birch, and the back and sides were spruce. I colored the spruce by treating it with acid.

  I worked for days steaming, bending, carving, and sanding, closely following the design of the picture. In the spring, I ordered strings and a bow from Sears. For many years, Jimmy and I played that violin at dances all up and down the Yukon. My moose-hoof glue didn’t hold well, and in wet weather the violin started to come apart, so I bought some good commercial glue, reglued it, and we used it again for a while. But one summer I left it at our cabin at Hog River, and while I was gone the roof leaked and the violin got wet and came apart again, and I never reassembled it.

  On days too stormy or too cold for working our traplines, and between trapping seasons, I used to study mechanical magazines, where I read about the universal inventors’ goal of creating a perpetual motion machine. About 1931 I decided I could solve that age-old problem; my machine would run forever.

  I spent months designing various parts, soldering and whatnot to shape a wheel-like contraption with arms that flopped out on one side and folded as they came up on the other. The weight and movement of the arms caused it to turn continually. My “invention” did quite well; once it turned on its own for almost an hour. But it wasn’t really tuned up so it could continue running. I suppose I fared about as well as anyone else trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

  On the trapline, Jimmy and I shared many adventures. One winter afternoon we struck the fresh track of a marten—the trail couldn’t have been over fifteen minutes old. We had often run down marten, forcing them into a tree where we could shoot them. I once killed three in one day in this manner.

  That day the marten that Jimmy and I chased on snowshoes wouldn’t tree. We nearly had him two or three times, but then we’d catch a glimpse of him bounding through the snow ahead. When we put on a burst of speed, the marten veered behind trees, or squirted through a patch of brush where we couldn’t see him. We’d then have to go around the thicket.

  By the time we picked up his trail again, he would be well ahead. The deep and loose snow made tracking that bounding little marten easy. Finally, just before dark, he treed, and I shot him with the .22 rifle we carried for the purpose and we had earned another twenty dollars.

  “Which way to the trail?” I asked Jimmy. He shrugged and pointed. I figured the trapline trail was in a different direction. “OK, let’s go this way,” I suggested, compromising between Jimmy’s guess and my own.

  Jimmy was agreeable, so we headed across country, following what we thought was a shortcut back to our original trapline trail. The night was dark and cold. Because clouds blocked our view of the stars, we couldn’t use the North Star as our guide, but the white snow reflected enough light from the sky to permit us to travel.

  We had started out early that morning, and by nightfall, after chasing the marten for several hours, we had put in a strenuous twelve-hour day. We traveled single file, as is customary on snowshoes, taking turns breaking trail. After we had crossed two or three ridges and traveled for several hours, nothing looked familiar. The slope of the ground seemed wrong.

  “Where are we?” Jimmy finally asked.

  I didn’t know. We figured out the next day that we had gone far back into the Purcell Mountains. We didn’t have maps. (For many years we called this range of low mountains dividing the Koyukuk drainage from the coastal Kobuk drainage the Hog River Mountains.)

  “Let’s circle back, find our trail, and backtrack,” I finally suggested. It was a last resort. We were hungry and tired to the bone. Neither of us wanted to spend the night siwashing under a spruce tree. We circled and after a long time found our tracks and retraced them. If we had gone by instinct we’d have probably traveled all night, farther and farther from where we wanted to be. At four a.m. we two exhausted kids arrived back at our cabin, too tired to eat a meal. We crawled into our bunks and slept until afternoon.

  14

  NO MAN’S LAND

  We were still trapping at Hog River in 1933 when I was eighteen. That fall I explored the Hog River-Pah River divide, part of what was called No Man’s Land in the old days. The Pah drains into the Kobuk River in Eskimo country, and the divide between the Pah and Hog River is fairly low.

  I found fair fur sign and decided to trap there. In November I put traps out along the upper Hog. A few days later, with thirty more traps in a backpack, I set out on foot from my Clear Creek cabin, planning to set more. I reached the last of my previously set traps about daylight. My traps had caught a few marten, which I hung in trees where I could pick them up on my return.

  After I passed the portage trail, I started setting marten traps, following the right bank of the Hog. Hog River turns 180 degrees in a huge horseshoe; the Pah River portage takes off to the northwest from the approximate apex of the horseshoe.

  By about three o’clock I had set all my traps. Encouraged by many fresh marten tracks, I headed home, backtracking and marking my trail with blazes on trees, broken branches, and other sign.

  I didn’t mind being alone. There was much to see—rabbit tracks, an occasional scurrying rabbit, a scolding red squirrel, a lethargic porcupine perched in a tree. A hawk-owl paced me in the treetops. Several ptarmigan leaped into flight along the stream. My snowshoes whispered through the dry snow, and I strode along, eyes busy, searching for tracks, which always told a story. The physical action felt good, and the icy winter air in my lungs was like wine.

  I had nearly reached the Pah River portage trail when I saw strange snowshoe tracks. Someone had followed me a ways, then had taken off on a direct line for the portage lake where most travelers camped because of sheltering timber and plentiful firewood. His stride was too long for me to step in his tracks; he was either going fast or he was a big man with long legs. I yelled a few times but received no answer.

  I followed the tracks, thinking he must be camped at the usual site. Dark was near. I began to have a creepy feeling, remembering stories I had heard of missing Indians in this mountainous No Man’s Land. To my knowledge, it had been decades since any Koyukon had disappeared in No Man’s Land, but there were still stories. Before the turn of the century, no matter what happened to an Indian in No Man’s Land—a fatal fall, freezing to death, a lethal encounter with a bear�
��Koyukon Indians assumed that Eskimos were responsible for the disappearance, and another story was born. Likewise, Eskimos blamed the Koyukon people for every Eskimo who failed to return from No Man’s Land.

  Although I was a bit nervous, I kept going. Soon I saw smoke. Although dusk was near, no light shone where the smoke was rising. No sled dogs barked. At the campsite I found the smoke was from ashes dumped from a stove. A tent had been pitched nearby. Dog and sled tracks led toward the Kobuk side of the range. It was evident that as soon as the stranger had reached camp, he had knocked his tent down, loaded his sled, and left.

  I puzzled over this on the long hike home. That night my way was lit by a brilliant aurora that writhed in a huge curtain overhead, like a gigantic twisting rainbow. The reds, greens, and purples were brilliant, and great searchlightlike flashes punctuated the movements. I have heard that some people fear winters in the Far North because of the long, dark nights. In the Koyukuk, where clear skies in winter are the rule, nights are seldom really dark. It’s only difficult to see when occasional heavy clouds cover the sky or when thick snow falls.

  The aurora lights many winter nights, and so does the moon. The beauty of a full moon on a sparkling snowy landscape is difficult to describe: it can seem almost like full daylight, with tree shadows. Even the stars provide plenty of light for traveling on clear nights. Alaska’s crystal air seems to magnify the millions of diamond-bright stars in the northern skies, and there is no background of city lights to dim their brilliance.

  The following week, I went to see whether the mysterious visitor to the Pah-Hog portage had moved his camp down the Pah River a short way or had left the country. I walked eight miles to the Pah, where I poked around for awhile, following his snowshoe tracks. I concluded that the unknown person had taken up his traps and departed, despite the abundant fur sign.