Other species statewide show the effects of overhunting and habitat loss. Hunters who’ve lived in Alaska for more than a decade or two will tell you how much they’ve seen things change. “When I got up here in 1976, the deer limit was five deer, and, if you couldn’t shoot five deer in an afternoon, you were in rough shape,” a marine pilot in Juneau told me. “There’s just a lot more people vying for the resource.”
Despite the state’s best efforts to manage populations and access, management means compromise. Neither can be infinite. What’s at risk? Superficially, a lot of money. In one year, the state will sell as much as $17.6 million worth of fishing, hunting, and trapping licenses. That doesn’t include the additional and expensive king salmon stamps and big-game tags. A stone hitting the water, the revenue spreads outward in increasing circles. If you visit Alaska from out of state to hunt brown bear, you pay $85 for a license and $500 for a tag, but the state also mandates a guide, which can cost more than $15,000. Guides pay property tax on their lodges and put gas in their boats. Their hunters eat at local restaurants and buy their children gifts from local merchants. Airlines transport them to and from the state. When the store’s open, a lot of people have jobs.
Whatever your stand on hunting, it’s worth noting that, collectively, hunters are the largest contributors to wildlife conservation in the country—more so, even, than those who oppose them. But there’s more at risk than just revenue. The world changes irreparably once an animal driven to endangerment goes extinct. Alaska still has a vast amount of wildlife, but it’s no longer possible to kill it off indiscriminately like Joe and his peers did. Not for any reason.
Around 1920, the Banks Island tundra wolf went extinct. A white wolf with black-tipped hair along the ridge of its back, it had a limited range on Banks and Victoria Islands in the Canadian Arctic. Its more common name was Bernard’s wolf, Canis lupus bernardi, named for Peter and Joe Bernard, who collected five of them. What does it cost the natural world when a species ceases to exist? What will we pay to prevent it?
9
New Beginnings
A heavy wind had come up and I sensed something was wrong, then I felt the anchor dragging. I jumped out of the bunk and in my bedclothes, I went through the galley like a crazy man. Anderson and Seaman thought I had gone out of my head. When I got up on deck I saw that we had drifted out over 200 yards from shore. We had no dory and only the foresail and jib; also, most all of our grub was ashore in the cache. . . . A few yards more and the anchor would not have had any bottom so we would have drifted for miles.
The sun set even before we left the harbor after work, and I hate anchoring in the dark, but between the rain and short winter days it’s always dark, which is why we’re a few hours north of town having a hell of a time hooking the anchor on the bottom of the bay. I stand on the bow pulpit holding the line. Twenty feet beneath me the flukes drag across sand or clay, refusing to hold.
Mike’s at the wheel, backing us down. We’re practically going in circles. He yells that maybe we should try another spot, but the line goes taut in my arms, rigid as steel, and the Monkeyfist jerks to a stop.
“What do you think?” I ask.
He shrugs. It all seems a little half-assed, but it’s dead calm, the sky clear. We call it good enough and shut the engine down.
It’s New Year’s Eve. The still air is thick-sweater cool, though I can see my breath. The stars glow bigger and brighter without the downtown lights for competition, and the bay mirrors them, constellations dotting the ceiling and the carpet. You find a way to celebrate the holidays you spend away from home. Five Christmases in the Arctic on his first trip alone, Joe did what he could to honor the day and its many traditions. In 1911 he hosted a clutch of Inuit with a feast of ducks, bear meat, potatoes, bread, and cake and played Christmas music on his gramophone.
“It was wonderful to watch them eat,” he wrote. “I could not help but remember the good dinners my mother used to have, and resetting the table so many times to take care of the many relatives and friends who came to eat and express their happiness.”
The following year, food was less plentiful, but he made do and hosted another small crowd, cooking what he could spare. “And many times today I thought of poor Gus,” he wrote.
Last year I flew back east for Christmas. Bad weather and canceled flights had me wandering airports in Juneau, Anchorage, Seattle, San Diego, and Minneapolis, chasing new connections, waiting in lines, sleeping on terminal floors, and drinking at airport bars with equally merry strangers. I made it to Boston eventually, but my luggage, containing Christmas gifts, did not. In its place I got the flu, which tainted what little time I actually had with family and friends. I learned my lesson. This year Christmas came and went, but I did not.
Mike and I have taken to the water to celebrate New Year’s Eve, to end one year and welcome another. We’ll celebrate a little tonight and then take the Zodiac ashore in the morning, hike a few hills and prowl around above the tree line and see what happens. Much winter lies ahead. Fish, crab, and prawns fill our freezers, but there’s little in the way of meat, and it would be nice to do something about that. The deer hunting season closes today, but subsistence exceptions give us the month of January. It’s been a slow season for both of us, but tomorrow, the first day of a new year, brings hope.
Morning lies a long way from here, though, and we still need to see off the current year.
Mike sits at the table while I cook on the Dickinson and listen to stories about Vietnam and growing up in Sitka. He’s lived here since he was just a couple years old, more than half a century now. I tell him about the wooded half-acre backyards we thought were forests when we were kids, bobber-fishing for perch the size of playing cards, Red Sox games, rush-hour commutes. We shake our heads at each other’s stories, our worlds colliding.
He and his wife have taken me under their wings, and we spend a lot of time hunting and fishing together. He’s patient with my ignorance. I don’t know much about this sort of life, but he’s taught me most of what I do. I ask how he learned so much about the outdoors.
“Some of it in the army,” he says, “but mostly the Boy Scouts.” He was involved with Scouting for years, even as an adult, leading canoe trips to the Yukon and passing on to others the love for all things wild the organization helped nurture in him.
“I was a Scout,” I say.
“Really?”
He seems surprised. I tell him my Scout troop focused less on the wilderness than on whittling bars of soap into busts of Native American chiefs, racing Pinewood Derby cars, and making papier mâché Halloween masks.
“That’s the suburbs,” I say.
“Man,” he says.
After dinner, he loads the rifles with tracer rounds and we climb up on the flybridge. I’ve never seen tracers before, except in war movies. Mike’s a gun guy—a great shot, a student of firearms, encyclopedic about makes, models, calibers, and their evolution throughout history—and a collector. He brings a different rifle or shotgun nearly every time we go hunting, and each is beautiful in its own way—a hand-checkered wooden stock, the flawless bluing of a barrel—their beauty a novelty to me, raised in a place where guns are weapons rather than tools. I’m learning they can be both, and objects of craftsmanship. Mike signed me up for his pistol-shooting league. Each week we head to the range with a bag full of sidearms to poke holes in paper targets. Weekends we go to the outdoor range and throw clays for each other. In Mike’s arms, the guns become an extension of his body; in mine, they’re cumbersome and dangerous.
He shoulders his semiautomatic and fires the first burst of tracer rounds into the sky overhead, one after the other, a line of em-dashes disappearing into darkness. Nothing absorbs the sound or the light. It’s just open space going on forever, the phosphorous burning brightly, red-tailed comets defying gravity and falling up into the sky.
; “Better than fireworks,” he says.
Later, the Northern Lights make an appearance. This far south they’re muted compared to the shows they gave Joe over the Arctic, but they’re better than fireworks too. Even after his many years in Alaska, Mike rushes out to the stern deck to watch.
We play hand after hand of cribbage and drink too much whiskey and beer until I can no longer do the simple math to count my cards: fifteen-two, fifteen-four, potato. Mike pegs his way down the board, hand after hand, beating me repeatedly and enjoying the hell out of doing so. We drink some more.
The sun set at 3:30 this afternoon, and it’s been dark for seven hours. We ring in the new year asleep at opposite ends of the cabin.
Hours later I awake in my V-berth to the shrill panic of an alarm. My head is thick, the cabin spinning like a roulette wheel, and it takes a long minute to realize it’s not in my head. The boat is swinging on anchor, heeling to one side as the wind leans into her. A storm has jumped us while we slept, as if our tracer rounds had torn open the sky. Rain pounds the cabin like a freak shower of hammers. My depth finder bleats an alarm that I didn’t even know it had; in the wind we’ve dragged anchor into shallow water and are running onto the rocks.
Mike’s slow to wake. I yell for him as I start the boat and scramble out onto the foredeck to grab the anchor line, not bothering to dress except for my boots. In boxers and a T-shirt, the air slaps me like an open hand. The rain stings my skin. From the bow pulpit, heaving at the anchor line, I can see the beach and rocks rising out of the storm just a few feet away on either side. We’re drifting inexorably toward them, tossing with the waves, my stomach keeping pace.
Then the sound of the engine changes. I feel it churn beneath me and look over my shoulder to see Mike at the helm, engine in gear, backing us away from the beach. I pull frantically at the anchor line, hoping the prop doesn’t tangle it or rout a hole in the rocky bottom. Through it all, the alarm squawks like a pissed-off bird. I hold my breath and don’t let go until it stops.
We both sleep late the next morning and wake to a mess of playing cards and empty bottles, firearms, wet clothes draped over ugly upholstery. It looks like the Michigan Militia crashed a frat party in 1976. The short day’s half over already by the time we’ve had coffee. Over breakfast we agree without debate to skip the hunt and head back to town.
My head hurts. I’m exhausted. The cabin smells like bacon and beer, stove diesel and bilge water, and I can’t shake the queasiness roiling my stomach. The storm came and went during the night, leaving no sign of itself except what Mike and I carry in our lingering moods. We motor silently back toward Sitka, snow on the mountains, snow on the volcano, the forest glistening wet and green and cold. Sitka’s more beautiful than anywhere else at its best, even when it’s ugly.
In a narrow passage just north of town, we jump a raft of sea ducks. Unlike puddle ducks, which take flight like they’ve been launched from a catapult, sea ducks first build up speed, paddle-running across the surface of the water. We spook so many that it looks like the New York Marathon, but it’s not starting guns we fire. Our shotguns bring down two apiece, Barrow’s goldeneye and harlequins. Their bodies hit the water like feathered stones.
Mike, who hasn’t said a word in an hour, smiles for the first time all day. “All right,” he says.
Maybe it’s the sun, but we’re both feeling better. It’s the first day of a new year. Even now I’m susceptible to promises of hope.
When I bring the ducks aboard I realize that one of them is still alive, near-death, weak, but still breathing, its heart a fading beat against my palm.
Anthropologist Richard Nelson, who lives in Sitka, has written extensively about hunting these islands. In Heart and Blood, his study of deer in America, he writes: “I have a fetish, an absolute and unwavering conviction, that every death I bring in hunting must be as quick as a blink, as instant as blackness when a light clicks off. My first obligation is to cause no preventable suffering, even for a split second.”
Joe was less sentimental about hunting in his writing, but he respected wildlife both for its ability to survive under adverse conditions and for the means of survival it afforded him under those same conditions. Time and again he writes about killing animals, the process detached from emotion.
I saw a fox lying down on its side with its back to me. I thought it was dead so I stopped my dogs, picked up my rifle and walked up to it quietly. I kept my gun ready as I have been fooled before about a ‘dead’ fox. I walked up to within 6 feet. I saw the head move a little so I jumped and grabbed the fox by the throat. Then it really became alive and fought as though there were nothing wrong. I soon strangled it; it had blood in its mouth. The fox was only skin and bones and the pelt is not very good.
Last fall I shot a doe on a beach. After she fell, her fawn, hidden in basket grass by the tree line, ambled over to stand clamoring over its mother’s body. Each time I remember the image of the two deer—one bleating, one bleeding out—the orphaned fawn’s cry becomes more human.
I take the duck in my hands and twist the head and body in opposite directions until something pops, either in the bird or in me. When it’s over, the lump of feathers in my hands is wet and warm and unsatisfying. This is goddamned serious, and you better always remember that.
I look at Mike, but he’s looking up at the sky, where a sucker hole closing in on itself is erasing the sun. It’s going to rain again soon, I realize, and even as we run back toward town, clouds turn the beauty of the mountains once more to menace. In Alaska, it’s astonishing sometimes what little difference separates the two.
PART II: LIQUID SUNSHINE
10
Better Than This
There we had everything and fine, warm weather. Here, a land of ice and snow with the same things happening from day to day; one day simply following another; cold and stormy. Yet it is here that I feel the most at peace.
The pilot’s disembodied voice warns the flight crew to prepare for our descent, the plane angles through the cloud cover, and Alaska appears out the window. My wife’s eyes double in size. She practically climbs onto the lap of the guy in the window seat trying to see past him, then grabs my arm tightly enough to create an archipelago of fingertip bruises. The Coast Mountains extend to the horizon as far as we can see, the entire planet seemingly snow-covered, ice-capped, volcanically formed, sheer slopes of igneous rock rendering everything inhospitable and beautiful. It’s a breathtaking first glimpse of Alaska, even if most of it is actually Canada.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Kim says.
“Just you wait,” I tell her.
It’s her first trip to Alaska, and my first time back since moving away seven years ago. I’m curious to see how Alaska has changed while I was gone.
I’ve changed too. Since I left, I’ve crisscrossed the country a number of times, lived in four different states, gotten married, turned forty. Countless small changes have taken place too—an advancing glacier wears away the land one pebble at a time. Like Alaska, I’m constantly reforming, spires crumbling, surfaces eroding, balances shifting. Everything is mutable, given enough time. I’m a different person than the one who lived here before, and I want to see what I think of Alaska now. Truth is, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I moved away, and Kim knows that. She wants to see what kind of place could have had such a formative role in my life in such a short time.
Our approach takes us over Lynn Canal, blue-green water that seems manufactured for travel brochures. The Coast Range yields to the gentler, lushly forested slopes around Juneau. Douglas Island off the port side of the plane, invisible from our seats, Juneau reveals itself piecemeal out our starboard window. First Thane Road, the seam where the forest and water meet; then the wharves and beaches of the waterfront at the southern edge of the downtown, cruise ships huddled at the channel’s hem. Then downtow
n itself, a tight cluster of buildings on the edge of Gastineau Channel, a glint of glass, steel, and asphalt beneath the forever shrugging shoulders of Mt. Roberts and Mt. Juneau.
Then we’re past it and over forest again, the airport 9 miles out of town. As we circle for landing, the Juneau Icefield shines in the July sun, 2,400 square miles of densely packed ice in its fourth century of retreat. The poor guy next to the window squeezes back against his seat so we can see too.
“First time in Juneau?” he asks.
Kim nods. “Are you from here?”
“I am,” he says. From the smile on his face, teeth bright as the ice cap, it’s clear that growing up here hasn’t jaded him, not on a day like today when the sky lacks clouds and the colors of the forest, glaciers, and sea appear artificially enhanced. That’s the sense you get in Alaska, that it must be fake, a Hollywood trick, Photoshop fraud. Nothing else you’ve ever seen is this beautiful.
“In the seventies and sunny all week,” he says. “In Juneau! Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Only hard-earned cynicism can breed surprise at a sunny day in the middle of July, when right-minded people expect it. But these aren’t right-minded people. People here are wired differently. That’s when it hits home that I’m back in Southeast Alaska.
Juneau’s airport looks small compared to those in most parts of the country, but it’s the third-largest in Alaska, where an inversely proportional relationship exists between geographic space and infrastructure. Our rental car is parked against a chain-link fence, on the other side of which are runways and small planes, acres of fireweed, stunning views of snow-dappled mountains. An eagle flies overhead. Kim’s excitement becomes so tangible, it’s like an extra suitcase to load into the trunk.
“Wow,” she says, taking it all in. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 9
