Shadows on the Koyukuk

by Sidney Huntington

  We camped for the night and set out early the next day to climb a big ridge while the snow was still hard from the night’s freeze. The dogs could hardly handle our heavily loaded sleds, and we had to push with all our strength.

  When we reached the top, I was so hungry I stopped to eat while Jimmy went ahead. I had a couple of bottles of seal oil, traded from a coastal Eskimo, and some old dried salmon. I ignored the moldy tinge of green on the salmon and ate greedily. Along with the moldy fish, I swallowed plenty of seal oil, which tasted good.

  Jimmy had found a live beaver house and was waiting at it when I caught up. We camped nearby, preparing to start our beaver hunt. As it turned out, I wasn’t able to participate in the hunt for a while. Afflicted by diarrhea from my meal, I spent about a day and a half sitting on a big willow branch as the seal oil dripped through me.

  In the meantime, Jimmy shot a couple of beaver, so we had something decent to eat. When I recovered I joined in the hunt. I carried a new .25–20, while Jimmy had a .30–30. We used hard-nosed bullets that did little damage to beaver skins. We searched for active beaver lodges where beaver had been leaving the water to feed. We would quietly wait until the animals left the water, and then shoot them in the eye or nose. We had to quickly retrieve the animals, for if we didn’t move fast a beaver sometimes kicked itself back under the ice in a death flurry. If we killed three or four or more in an area distant from camp, we skinned them so we didn’t have to carry the heavy carcasses.

  As we worked our way downstream, the weather warmed. When the snow froze during the night or early morning, we moved as fast as we could before it thawed and turned to slush again.

  One day we had to cross a deep creek. The ice covering it looked solid and, though breakup was near, we decided to take a chance. Jimmy had the guns and ammunition on his sled; my heavier sled held food, camping gear, and other items.

  Jimmy whooped at his dogs, and they sped across the ice. Stopping, he watched while I crossed. “C’mon guys,” I yelled at my dogs and they followed in Jimmy’s tracks. All went well for the first few feet. Suddenly, the ice broke and my sled sank in the swift water. I clung to the submerging sled as pieces of ice flew all about, but I had to turn loose when it rolled in the current. My load spilled and washed away; the only items left were those lashed to the sled with rawhide.

  Jimmy grabbed my towline and, with the help of my dogs, pulled me and the sled ashore. I was soaking wet from feet to shoulders. Jimmy started a fire and I changed into dry clothes from the pack on his sled.

  The current had swept most of our food out of reach under the ice. We managed to retrieve coffee, but we had no bacon, flour, salt, or sugar. As a result, for a month we ate mostly beaver meat. Without salt, I didn’t like the taste, and eventually I couldn’t eat any more beaver. When there was nothing else to eat, I burned the beaver meat thoroughly; burned beaver tastes better to me than unsalted beaver. Joe Beatus, a Koyukon elder of Cutoff, later told me that I’d have been better off not cooking the meat, that I should have eaten it raw. Maybe he was right.

  We boiled or burned many geese that we shot, and made goose soup. I practically lived on that soup.

  We brought sixty beaver skins home, and each of us made about $300—not an especially good take. I lost a lot of weight on that trip: my normal weight is about 160 pounds, and when I got home I weighed about 135.

  On that trip, Jimmy and I were walking to a lake to look for beaver when we saw a big black bear on a nearby hillside. The bear eyed us, but we ignored him. We had plenty of beaver meat, which we were eating and feeding to the dogs, so we had no need for the bear. Suddenly, without a sound, the bear charged, bounding directly at us.

  My rifle was over my shoulder, and I started to pull the case off. Jimmy fired, hitting the bear in the heart so that it died instantly, collapsing in mid-stride. It rolled between us while I was still trying to slide the case off of my rifle. Disgusted, I threw the gun case away, and I have never since carried a cased rifle while afield.

  Beaver, which become very fat, are an important food animal for the Koyukon people. In prewhite times—before traps, snares, rifles, and steel ice-chisels—no one trapped beaver beneath the ice, the primary method of taking them today.

  When a Koyukon hunter of the old ways wanted a beaver in winter, he first located all the “extra houses,” or “hideout houses,” that the beaver may use for feeding once ice locks them into pond and lodge. He then cut open all the hideout houses so they froze and became unusable for the beaver. Next, with an axe, he cut a hole through the top of the main lodge, which can be difficult, for frozen mud and sticks of a beaver house are hard as rock and may be a foot or more thick.

  If the hunter had previously found every hideout house and made them useless to the beaver, he would find all the beaver lying together in the water inside the main lodge. Sometimes their chins would be resting on the platform at waterline, the only place they could surface to breathe. Frequently, the beaver behaved almost as if they were waiting for the hunter to take them.

  The rest is hard to believe, and I was skeptical before I witnessed it. In 1935 my Uncle Weaselheart and his wife, Josie, told me that I should be ready if I wanted to see them “take” (kill all the beaver in) a beaver house at a lake about ten miles below Hog River.

  Earlier, I had seen where Weaselheart had searched out and cut open all the hideout houses and allowed them to freeze. On the day I figured they might be taking the house, I went to the lake. Sure enough, Weaselheart was near the beaver lodge and Josie was inside it. She had already taken out one big beaver, almost as big as herself. It was an honest super blanket size. (Beaver skins are stretched round and graded into sizes: small, 40- to 44-inch diameter; medium, 45 to 49 inches; large medium, 50 to 54 inches; large, 55 to 59 inches; extra large, 60 to 64 inches; blanket, 65 to 67 inches; and super blanket, 68 inches and up.)

  After they had chopped into the top of the lodge, Josie had climbed in. The beaver, on the resting platform, dived into the water of one of their exit tunnels. Then they lay there, facing Josie, their chins on the edge of their resting platform. Josie kneeled, and with bare hands she seized the largest beaver by both front legs. Once she had her hands on the beaver’s legs, she never let go. She lifted the heavy animal past her chest and face, over the edge of the hole, and passed it to Weaselheart, who killed it with a club.

  The old Koyukon stories say that beaver lifted in this manner will not bite or struggle, provided the person doing the lifting has no fear. All beaver living in a lodge are taken in such an operation. Tradition says that if the young ones are lifted out first, the other, larger, beaver may fight and bite.

  “You want to try?” Weaselheart asked me.

  Reluctantly, I said, “Yes.”

  Josie, in the beaver lodge, exploded in the Koyukon tongue. I could not understand her long harangue.

  “Are you sure?” Josie then asked me. “If you are even a little bit scared you may get bitten. I wouldn’t try it if I were you. If animals smell fear, they bite.”

  I decided she was doing all right, and maybe I had better just watch. Beavers have powerful jaws, and their teeth are big and sharp.

  As I watched, Aunt Josie went back to work. She lifted the next-largest beaver out of the water, eased it past her chest and face, clearly within biting distance, and put it where Weaselheart could club it.

  I watched her boldly catch and lift out five beaver, making a total of six that came from that house—parents, yearlings, and young of the year.

  “Uncle Peter, why did Josie give you hell when you invited me to go into the beaver house?” I later asked Weaselheart.

  “She say, ‘Don’t you know our old stories? They say you don’t change places in the house after you take some beaver out.’ The beaver will get scared of the new person trying to catch them, and the new person usually gets hurt. The beaver don’t trust anyone anymore. They are then lost, for they swim off and die,” he explained.

  How many hund
reds, perhaps thousands, of years were needed for Koyukon people to learn this technique? And only with instructions passed from generation to generation did anyone of my mother’s generation know how to take beaver in this manner.

  Spring beaver hunting with rifles, an annual activity for half a century, nearly wiped out Alaska’s beaver. Half the shot beaver sink and are lost. I remember shooting ten or fifteen beaver, and returning home with seven or eight. One night I returned with twenty-two; I don’t know how many sank.

  A careful and experienced hunter went prepared with a spear and a throwing weight with hooks attached to a light rope for retrieving the animals. This saved many beaver that would otherwise have been lost.

  Beaver and sea otter were among the most important animals in the early Russian fur trade, when Russia claimed Alaska. By 1910 Alaska’s beaver seemed bound for extinction, and between 1910 and 1923, killing of beaver was prohibited. The season reopened in 1923, and in 1926 a season limit of twenty per hunter was set, but beaver again became so scarce that in the late 1930s and ’40s the federal government closed the season. Beaver are prolific, and within a few short years they returned in good numbers. After that, shooting was prohibited, and each trapper was limited to a specific number each season.

  Today in the Koyukuk, the animals can legally be taken only with traps and snares. At first the limit was five, then it went to ten and twenty. Now, in many areas of Alaska there is no limit.

  Warden Sam White taught us how to trap beaver under the ice using a simple pole set. This required cutting a hole in the ice of a beaver pond and thrusting a pole through it with bait sticks of poplar nailed to it. A trap was fastened to the pole near the bait sticks. Once we learned this system, we improved on it.

  George Attla, Sr., became an expert at trapping beaver under the ice. He perfected a system that we call “the crooked stick set.” One spring Jimmy happened to hit George’s trail during beaver trapping season. Jimmy wasn’t catching many beaver, so he followed Attla’s trail and studied his sets.

  The following winter he tried Attla’s method. Like Attla, he used an L-shaped pole or heavy stick. The bottom half of the L lies beneath the ice and parallel to it. The top half of the L projects almost a foot out of the ice. A No. 21 jump trap, or a No. 4 jump trap with teeth, with the leaf spring nearest the pole, is tied to the horizontal arm of the L, exactly one shovel’s depth (metal part only) beneath the ice. Bait sticks, usually poplar twigs, are shoved straight down the hole in the ice so they are just above the trap. This set catches mostly big beaver.

  A good beaver trap costs $25 to $30 nowadays instead of the $5 or $6 I used to pay. Because of the high cost of traps, most who seek beaver now use snares, which are much cheaper. There are many variations in snare sets for catching beaver under the ice.

  One year I caught 178 beaver with help from my family. One night I brought home twenty, including fourteen super blanket size and half a dozen smaller ones. I skinned them in the tent where we lived during beaver season. I used to skin a super blanket beaver clean in twenty minutes or less, and I finished skinning all twenty of those beaver before I went to bed that night.

  I’ve always followed the traditional Koyukon custom of removing the innards of beaver in a special way. The procedure is to skin the beaver, leaving the feet and tail on the carcass. I remove the castorum (two large glands under the base of the tail) carefully, without cutting any tubes. Then I cut off the head low on the neck and carefully remove all of the viscera by cutting loose the kidneys, liver, stomach, intestines, heart, lungs—leaving all attached to each other and the head. The important food part of the animal, a neatly cleaned carcass, remains.

  Then I throw the head and attached viscera back into the river or pond from which the animal was caught while chanting the old Koyukon words that mean “make lots more beaver.” This is a way of showing respect for the beaver and appreciation for the privilege of trapping it.

  About this ceremony, an Indian friend once commented, “It doesn’t bother a person who doesn’t know about it, but I know the traditional beliefs, and it bothers me if I don’t observe them.”

  I’m in the same boat.

  20

  SPEARING GRIZZLY BEARS

  When war came in December 1941, at the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jenny and I had six children—Franklin, Marie, Electa, Arnold, John, and Leonard. Nevertheless, I went to Anchorage to enlist in the Army. I had never seen such turmoil. People crowded the streets; construction continued day and night, with trucks and tractors running continuously.

  At the Army recruiting office, I completed a questionnaire. The recruiter left and returned shortly with a civilian, who said, “I understand you can work with metal.”

  “Yes, I’ve done a little sheet metal work,” I replied. Charlie Swanson had taught me some of the basics at Batza River, and I had once worked for a short time helping on a sheet metal job at Galena.

  “We need sheet metal workers at Fort Richardson,” he said. “You don’t have to go into the Army. We’ll give you a draft classification that will keep you out of the service.”

  “But I want to do my share,” I said. During World War II every able-bodied Alaskan wanted to help his country.

  “You can help best by working for us as a sheet metal worker,” he answered.

  I went to work at Fort Richardson near Anchorage as a sheet metal roofer on January 1, 1942. One week later I was promoted to sheet metal roofing foreman. I worked all spring and all summer, night and day, for as many hours as I could stand. I bought a house in Anchorage, and Jenny and the kids joined me. I had never lived under such stress. People were everywhere, crowding and pushing. We stood in lines to buy clothing, food, and cigarettes. Everyone was in a hurry. Living was expensive, although I was making more money than I had ever dreamed of making.

  That fall, as I put roofs on military buildings, hundreds of flocks of geese flew over. With every flock heading south I’d raise my eyes and remember the sweet silence of the Koyukuk, the smell of spruce forests, the yelp of sled dogs, and thousands of square miles of beau-tiful, unpeopled land. Those great Vs of birds and their wild calls seemed to be telling me, “Sidney, you weren’t bred to live like this. You don’t belong in this crowded place.”

  Finally, I went to the colonel in charge of the base. “I’ve got to leave, Colonel,” I told him.

  “Why? You’re doing a good job.”

  “I’ve trained a man to do my job.”

  I was unable to express my strong feeling of homesickness, but somehow he understood. He called Galena, where a new Air Force base was under construction, and found me a job as foreman of an oiling truck and a crew of twenty men. With relief and gratitude, I agreed to take the job. Jenny and I sold our Anchorage house and moved to Galena.

  At Galena I was only a ten-minute walk from the Alaskan wilds where I had lived most of my life. I renewed my ties with the forests and streams by hunting, trapping, picking berries, and fishing in my off-hours.

  The Galena Air Force Base was originally a Civil Aeronautics Authority (today the Federal Aviation Administration) airfield. During World War II, it was the first stop for Russian pilots flying American lend-lease warplanes from Fairbanks to Russia. During the war, I saw as many as 132 Bell Airacobra (P-39) fighter planes parked there, awaiting improved weather so they could fly to Nome. Altogether, the Russians accepted 7,929 American warplanes at Fairbanks and flew them to Nome via Galena. From Nome, the planes flew across the Bering Straits to Siberia, then to the Eastern Front, where they flew in combat against the Germans.

  The Air Force decision to build at Galena created a boomtown on the north bank of the Yukon River, 575 river miles from the Bering Sea. About thirty-five people lived in Galena in 1941 at the start of construction. With the influx of people, the quiet village became a noisy tent city. During wartime, Galena’s population ballooned to at least 3,000.

  The Air Force first arrived at Galena via the Yukon River with six barges full of tr
actors, trucks, and cranes. Twenty soldiers were dumped on the beach with that heavy equipment. They had no blankets and no housing. The Koyukon people of Galena took those GIs into their homes as if they were their own kids, including the commanding officer, a Lieutenant O’Neil. The men slept and ate at the homes of Native families, while they ran the tractors, cranes, and trucks to build the airfield.

  The Galena Native homes were mostly small, simple log cabins, but they were warm and open to these hardworking young men. They became homes away from home for the soldiers, and many close relationships were forged.

  That winter, soldiers built a huge domed airplane hangar. To bolt the girders in place, they worked 150 feet in the air from buckets lifted by draglines, never losing a day of work, no matter how cold or how windy. I saw them working at –58 degrees. Those rugged men became highly respected for their accomplishments during the time they lived at Galena. Some of them fell in love with Alaska and our way of life. Upon discharge from the service, many settled in Alaska and married Native girls.

  Life changed for many local residents who found permanent jobs at the Galena Air Force Base. From seasonal trapping and commercial fishing, with a consequent seasonal income, they converted to a partial cash economy with year-round income. Most continued to largely depend upon game and fish for food.

  In 1939, the last boat that Jimmy and I whipsawed lumber for and built at Hog River was the thirty-two-foot Koyukuk. She was long and skinny, with a five-foot beam and a reverse-curve bow. With the twenty-horsepower Kermath marine engine we installed, the Koyukuk could make about twenty miles an hour, fast for the time.

  Jimmy’s personal Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was the death of his wife Celia that day, from tuberculosis. Jimmy and Celia had a daughter, Christine. Three years later Jimmy married Flora Charles. In time they had seven children, but Jimmy and Flora split up, and Jimmy kept all the kids and later married Marion, a girl from Koyukuk, who helped Jimmy raise all those kids plus an adopted daughter. When Jimmy and Marion split up, he never remarried.