The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  After Trapline Chatter, Heimo tells stories about his early days on the trapline, talking well past his usual 9:30 P.M. bedtime. When he gets up to get a cup of water, Rhonda jumps in. “I should tell you about the first time I snared a wolverine. Wanna hear?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I answer.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” she says, not bothering with the details. “When I saw it in my snare, I kept yelling, ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.’ Of course, there wasn’t a soul around to hear me.” She giggles at this, as if realizing how comical she must have looked, jumping up and down, celebrating in the middle of nowhere. “But that didn’t stop me. When I finally calmed down, it hit me, ‘Shoot, now I have to carry this thing all the way home.’ It was frozen, so I couldn’t skin it, so I stuck as much of it as I could in my backpack and started walking. When I got near the cabin, Daddy saw me coming and ran out onto the tundra to meet me. I thought he’d take the backpack, but he was so excited, he ran all the way back to drag Mom and Krin out to see me.”

  “Yeah,” Heimo says when Rhonda finishes her story, “she’s my little woodsman.” Encouraged by her father’s compliment, Rhonda reaches under her sleeping platform. She grabs a stack of photographs and shuffles them onto her sleeping bag as if she’s dealing cards. Then she finds the one she’s been looking for—a photo that Heimo took of her on her trapline. Surrounded by black spruce trees, she is carrying a 30.30 rifle and a backpack. It is cold, nearly 30 below. Though she is wearing a hat and a hood, her bangs are covered in frost. I tell her that she looks like a real trapper, and she is clearly pleased. Then she turns and grabs her portable CD player and shows me her new Lauryn Hill CD. Adjusting her headphones, she slips the disc into the machine, flicks on the music, and whispers the rhyming words.

  I say good night and walk from the warm cabin. Earlier, Heimo, who checks the temperature once a day for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and sends his reports out every three months by bush plane, announced that the temperature had dropped to minus 22. Despite the slap of the cold, I linger outside my tent, amazed by the spectral colors of the aurora borealis (literally “dawn of the north”), charged by cosmic particles unable to escape the earth’s magnetic field. Radiant pinks, pulsating whites, and luminous greens light up the Alaskan night like the swirling phosphorescence of a Cape Cod bay after the sun has set. The northern lights dance, whirl, and shimmer, then they fade. The Inland Eskimos of Anaktuvuk Pass call the aurora “spirit light,” and I feel a sense of grace on this, my first night in the Interior.

  At 9:00 A.M. the blue shadows of twilight are disappearing, yielding to the dim light of day. Dawn is an occurrence that is happening somewhere else, farther south, that we will not see for nearly another week, when the sun breaks from its winter hibernation. At 68 degrees latitude north, the sun slips unceremoniously below the horizon near the end of November and isn’t seen again until the middle of January, and even then its appearance is brief, nothing more than a flash of light in a day dominated by gray.

  Off to the east, in the direction of what Rhonda and Krin have christened Thunder Mountain, a broad, treeless, snow-covered peak that rises coldly out of the tundra, the sun flirts with the horizon and the sky has a distinct painted-desert glow. Heimo stops to wrestle his snowmachine out of a snow drift. Annoyed, he pulls the machine’s skis back onto the trail and blows a string of snot from his nose. “Sometimes I hate it,” he growls. “Just when I think I have my trails cleared, it snows, and then I spend the rest of the week pulling my machine out of the drifts, understand?” Heimo punctuates many of his sentences with “Understand what I’m saying?” or the shorter version, “Understand?” as if he’s unsure whether someone from the Outside—which Alaskans amorphously call anything beyond the state’s borders—can even begin to comprehend his life. He tells me about the time in the late 1980s when the snow didn’t melt until June and came again in great, wet gobs in early September and stayed again until late the following May. “I heard about the seven feet of snow in Buffalo. Hell, you couldn’t pay me enough money to live in Buffalo,” he says, and smirks, fully aware of the irony of his statement. “I don’t mind the cold, but snow makes life miserable. You never heard of a guy dying of a heart attack from shoveling too much cold, have you?”

  Eager to change the subject, Heimo says, “We should see it on January thirteenth, if we’re lucky, if a low doesn’t settle in.” I know he is talking about the sun now. Each day, for the past five days, the sea of light has crawled resolutely across the land, coming closer and closer to the tundra valley, tinting the sky with color, and this has been the topic of our dinner conversations since my arrival. For a man who hasn’t laid his eyes on the sun for six weeks, however, Heimo seems to be taking its absence in stride. “Some years it gets to you more than others,” he admits.

  Alaska’s Interior is definitely no place for fair-weather fans. There are two seasons up here, people joke, “Fourth of July and winter.” Summer, it has been said, is “nothing more than a sweet dream,” an evanescent eight weeks between breakup and freeze-up, when mosquitoes rise like thick smoke out of the muskeg’s cotton-grass sedges, and flowers bloom at a frantic pace and go to seed by early August. Despite the unnerving hordes of mosquitoes in summer, winter is the season when even the strongest psyches are challenged. In August, when the willows and balsam poplars are already turning yellow, bearberry blazes a bright crimson, alders turn a muddy brown, and the first killing frost comes, everyone knows that summer has, once again, ended too quickly. As the earth’s northern axis turns away from the sun, a reckoning occurs. Winter is the all-consuming fact of life in Alaska’s Interior, a vital, physical, force. Those who suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is believed to be caused by too little exposure to sunlight, would find their own private hell here.

  Though the temperature is mild today by the Interior’s standards, only 28 below, I can feel the cold’s uncaring stab even with my layers of expensive, high-tech inner gear, a full-body polar suit, a badger fur bomber hat with earflaps, big, clunky Trans Alaska boots, a balaclava, expedition-rated mittens. But there is no room for bellyachers out here. Once the cabin is out of sight, there is nowhere to warm up. If the wind is shrieking across the tundra, as it often does, Heimo may occasionally seek refuge among the trees, but he won’t linger long. There are traps to check and very little light in which to do so.

  I’m aware that I should be thankful for this brief January warm spell. I’ve heard the stories. In the savage winter of 1989-1990 it was 56 below or colder for a month and a half. In February it “warmed up” to 46 below, and Heimo seized the opportunity to check his traps. Though there was a wind—the new windchill chart postulates that a mild 15 mile-per-hour wind transforms a temperature of minus 45 to an almost unbearable 77 below, where exposed skin suffers frostbite in less than two minutes—Heimo hadn’t checked his traps in nearly three weeks, and he’d been feeling stir-crazy. When a spring broke on the snowmachine, Heimo was forced to stop and fix it with his bare hands. He froze his heel, his nose, the tips of his fingers, and his cheeks that day.

  In the Arctic, the weather can assert its primacy at any time, as if to make it completely clear that this is not a land that man was intended to inhabit. Exploring the realm of subzero cold, for those who have never experienced it, is like learning a new language or like being plopped down in another country in which you lack even a vague understanding of the local tongue.

  Though I was raised in Wisconsin, where the cold is something we’re proud of—“Keeps out the whiners” an old friend says—I discovered that Interior Alaska required a complete readjustment of my cold quotient. In Wisconsin it can reach 10 below, but at that temperature we all huddle under blankets in our warm, gas-heated houses, leaving the couch only long enough to go to the window and watch for signs of life outside. But for residents of Alaska’s Interior, 10 below is considered refreshing; they split wood in flannel shirts or sweatshirts at 1
0 below. Between minus 10 and 20, there’s very little difference. Perhaps a person would throw on a jacket for another layer and smile about how easily the wood splits. But as the temperature nears 30 below, blood retreats from appendages. Take off your gloves for more than five minutes or so and your fingers will probably be frostbitten. This is the temperature at which a person achieves a vivid understanding of just how ill-prepared the human body is to handle the cold. Even trees suffer at 30 below. Moisture beneath tree bark can freeze and swell, causing bark to snap like the sound of a flat hand slapping the water’s surface. At minus 40 the air has the quality of fire. Snow is as dry as flour. But there is almost nothing harsher than a high pressure, when the winds barrel out of the high Canadian Arctic, bringing with it the northern latitudes’ bitter chill, or a “Siberian Express,” charging full-steam out of Russia’s icy hinterlands. Worse perhaps is when the winds south of the Brooks Range simply stop circulating. Temperatures in the Interior can then plunge to 50 and 60 below, a desolate cold for which we have no vocabulary, one that saps the spirit. The still air has a bite that can literally burn the lungs. Breath crackles with each exhalation and muscles react slowly, sluggishly, to orders from the brain. Worst of all, 50 below makes no allowances for mistakes.

  Even in my tent at night, I became well acquainted with the Interior’s cold—my woodstove was small enough that the fire required my attention about every two hours. At first, invariably, I slept through the embers, waking only after a deep chill invaded my bones. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and worked bare-handed, tearing thin strips of paper and then arranging the paper and kindling inside the belly of the stove. Lighting the match and touching it to the paper became an act of fervent hope. Even before the kindling caught, I scrambled back to my bag and watched the fire, blowing at it from a distance, trying to coax it to life. On more than one occasion, when the kindling failed to light, I scrambled out of my bag, shivering and cursing, reluctant to start the process again. When the kindling caught, I put on mittens, a hat, a neck gaiter, an extra pair of socks, and sometimes a coat, and buried myself in my bag and fed small logs into the fire. The whole procedure, if performed unerringly, took a few minutes. However, an hour later, after the tent was hot, I would wake up to shed my extra clothes, aware that the whole process would have to be repeated again in another hour.

  After those first few days, though, my internal clock adjusted to the demands of the fire. I woke every two hours or so, as if on cue, to catch the embers while they were still glowing. When I caught them in time, I threw in two or three small logs, opened the stove vents long enough for the fire to blaze, then closed down the vents to the point where only a whisper of air could sneak into the stove. If I did it right, the tent stayed relatively warm—though I could still see my breath—and I’d be snuggled deep in my bag with sleep overtaking me in a minute or so, hardly time enough to catch a chill.

  Today, ten days after my arrival on the Old Crow, Heimo pulls me in a sled behind his snow machine. I’m wedged among longspring leghold traps; wire snares for wolf, fox, wolverine, and lynx; skinned marten carcasses, which Heimo will put near the base of a tree as bait—a week ago, he noticed wolverine tracks near the tree—a small-caliber .22 rifle; an ax; an extra drive belt; a spare backpack with emergency rations, matches, and extra clothes; and our snowshoes. We use the sled instead of the second snowmachine because we are headed east across the tundra to the Old Crow Flats along the Canadian border and because Heimo’s winter gasoline supply is getting dangerously low. He uses about ten gallons a week, and he’s figured out that he’s got just enough to get him to March. Years ago, when Heimo ran shorter lines, fifty to seventy miles long, he checked all his traps by snowshoe, but now with 200 to 250 traps and 120 to 170 miles of line, he makes the rounds by snow machine, stopping often to check the short side lines on foot. For that reason, Heimo is emphatic about calling his snowmobile a snowmachine, though I persist in calling it by its Lower Forty-eight name. “It’s strictly a work vehicle,” he says. “I’d never own one if I didn’t need it. How many guys down in the Lower Forty-eight use theirs for work? There, it’s a recreational vehicle, neon to neon, you know,” he laughs, “tavern to tavern. And there ain’t a tavern up here for over 300 miles.”

  As we near the Old Crow Flats, the Richardson Mountains take shape far to the east. They are large and ominously white, rising out of the Flats’ snow-covered marshland. We stop for a moment, and Heimo sets a blindset, a coilspring trap that he lays just under the snow, hoping to surprise an unsuspecting lynx or wolverine that has taken to our trail because of the ease of travel. Though I should be paying close attention, I am in love with the rarefied light and the silence, and I am remembering what John Muir said. In Alaska, Muir marveled, “it is the morning of creation.”

  Heimo tugs at my snowsuit, breaking my reverie, and points to a small clearing where some caribou had bedded down the night before. We walk over and he shows me the white tufts of their bleached winter hair, which lie matted in the snow. Minutes later, we’re off again. We cross a lake, and Heimo takes the opportunity to open up the throttle, a bit of a joy ride. Snow flies straight back, and I pull the ruff of my fur hat over my eyes and adjust my face mask. Before the mask froze, it strained the biting cold, but now it is nothing more than a shield of ice. My eyelashes are freezing shut, and pinpricks, like the burn of stinging nettles, warn me that my cheeks are near freezing. Once over the lake, I look up just in time to swat away the supple alders and willows that line the trail and slap at me. By the end of my stay, I will develop an intense dislike of alders, the black sheep of the birch family, which resist human intrusion with whiplike lashes. When Zeus killed Phaëthon with a thunderbolt, he later punished Phaëthon’s sisters for mourning their brother’s death by turning them into alders. Offspring of the sisters flank nearly every trail and seem to be doing their best to punish me, displacing their anger, exacting some sort of belated revenge.

  I’m relieved when a few minutes later Heimo slows and shuts off the snowmachine. Heimo has stopped here because he’s eager to show me the international boundary line, an improbable thirty-foot swath cut through the trees. We forgo the snowshoes and slip up the riverbank to a clearing. Heimo makes it up first, and when I arrive I see his vapor trail and him posed next to a three-foot cylindrical cement marker, marker #32, designating the boundary between the United States and Canada, the 141st parallel. “Go ahead,” he says, pointing to a clearing that extends to the south as far as I can see. “It’ll be the only time you can cross over into Canada and get back to American soil without having to clear customs. I do it whenever I’m here. In fact, I always piss on the Canadian side. Not because I don’t like Canada, but because I can’t stand parks, and this is the Vuntut National Park. They set up parks, and they take out the people,” Heimo says, echoing a sentiment I have heard regularly in Alaska.

  The Arctic is a wilderness, but it has been inhabited for perhaps as long as 10,000 years by descendents of those who crossed the Bering Land Bridge. Modern definitions of wilderness won’t allow for the presence of people, however; in fact, they demand their absence. By that standard only Antarctica is a true, undefiled wilderness, though with research stations appearing on the Antarctic ice pack and a steady supply of tourists, this, too, is up for debate.

  It has been two days since our trip to the Canadian border, and Heimo is all business. He sets a wolverine snare, adjusting the guide sticks carefully, so that if the wolverine chooses the trail, there’s only one direction for it to go. “I’ll get ’em with this,” he says, and pushes one last stick into place.

  Though many of Alaska’s trappers use leghold traps for wolverine, Heimo usually prefers the snare. It is effective and easy to use. Heimo explains how the stiff end of the wire snare is fastened to a tree, while the malleable loop dangles from a stick placed near the middle of the trail eight inches from the ground. When a wolverine enters the loop and continues walking, the loop slips closed around its neck, whic
h activates a small locking device and prevents the snare from reopening. When the snare works as it’s supposed to, the loop pulls tighter as the wolverine struggles, and the animal dies swiftly of suffocation.

  Having set the last guide stick, Heimo walks back to the snowmachine. Before he can start the machine, I venture a question that I’ve been meaning to ask, and now seems as good a time as any.

  “What about groups like PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals],” I say, “which claim that you’re putting the animal through a lot of unnecessary pain?”

  “PETA”—Heimo winces at the word. “If the PETA people had their way, I’d be working in Fairbanks at Jiffy Lube instead of trapping,” he laughs. “Sure, an animal in a trap experiences pain, but I try to keep it to a minimum. Anyway, pain ain’t new to animals; they live with it. I trap half a dozen wolves a year. My impact is nothing. Many others die of starvation or are eaten by other wolves. And don’t forget, I subject myself to cold, hardship, pain, and the threat of death, too. I’m not above the natural process. The wolf kills the caribou, and I kill the wolf. But a bear could maul me, or I could drown. Some might say that I’m a killer, but most people just leave that to others. How many people butcher their own chickens? Do they ever think about all the animals killed in a combine?”