The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Heimo whips around in his seat—end of discussion. “Just one more set,” he says, “and then we’ll head for home.” The news lifts my spirits. I am cold and eager to return to the Arctic oven, and fire up the woodstove and crawl into my sleeping bag. Heimo starts the snowmachine, gives it some gas, and nearly jerks me out of the sled.

  Although Heimo and I usually spend a portion of our time on the trapline telling stories, joking, and exchanging insults, today he has been a predator, checking and setting traps, and examining every track he sees with the taut alertness of a wild animal. Just by looking at a track, he can determine so much: the animal’s size, its age, direction of travel, how fast it’s moving, if it’s breeding. And his ability to remember where all his traps are situated is nothing short of extraordinary. He wrestles his machine through a featureless forest and suddenly he stops, and I’m left wondering why. Then I see him clear the trail of a snare. Even when we’re checking a side line on snowshoes, I fail to notice these snares. I walk right into them, realizing my mistake only when I hear the guide sticks snap or get tripped up in the wire. Heimo finds my ineptitude amusing. To me the forest has a bewildering uniformity, and one spruce tree looks no different from the next. For him, it is an intimate world that reveals itself in nuance.

  Because he feels that maps impose an artificial order on the world, Heimo is not in the habit of using them. When he first came to Alaska he did so, but that was in the 1970s and early 1980s, when he was still developing an eye, and a feel, for the country. His map now is a mental one, as reliable as a topographic map, covering 500 square miles from the Yukon Flats, north over the elevations of the Brooks Range, to the foothills and the coastal plain, from the Chandalar River east to the Old Crow drainage and the Canadian border, an area larger than all of Grand Teton National Park.

  One hundred feet before we reach his last set, Heimo whoops. He stops the snowmachine. “Wolverine!” he shouts, and celebrates with a short victory dance. He points in the direction of his trap and even I can tell he’s caught a wolverine. The area has been denuded as if a Biblical cloud of locusts swooped in and devoured everything. In its struggle, the wolverine has cleared the six-foot-high tree of every one of its branches and torn up all the brush within a twenty-foot circumference. As we approach the site, called a “catch circle” by trappers, I feel my pulse quicken. Twenty feet away I can smell the pungent musk from the wolverine’s anal glands, which it has sprayed all around the trap site. I dare to walk closer, and I see the wolverine’s eyes staring at me, watching my every move. I imagine that its eyes burn with something like hatred. As I approach, it snarls and lunges at me. I step back and study it. It has short legs, a long snout for rooting, a small, flat head, a bushy tail, paws the size of salad plates, and it is built powerfully, low to the ground. It seems entirely unafraid, hunkered down in the dirt and snow as if it is preparing to spring on me. I have the unnerving suspicion that if the chain that attaches the leghold trap to the tree were longer, it would shred me with its rapier claws and its one-and-a-half-inch canines, and then crush my bones in its massive jaw.

  Heimo tells me to step back, positions himself, and dispatches the animal with a .22 shot to the heart. The wolverine collapses and heaves twice before it dies. Heimo kneels beside it and shows me the small bullet hole, which hasn’t damaged the fur. He separates the jaws of the trap, removes the animal’s foot, and then skins the beast where it lies, making quick work of it, deftly cutting the thick, pungent, yogurt-colored fat and then peeling back the fur and fat from the purple-blue flesh and sinew. Wolverine fur, Heimo tells me, is the finest there is. It doesn’t mat or freeze to the skin, so Alaskans use it to make hood ruffs or for anything else that may touch the face.

  The wolverine fur is a lush, beautiful brown with a band of gold running from its front shoulders to the base of its tail. I run my hands along the gold strip. “That’s called the ‘diamond,’ ” Heimo says. “Fur buyers love that.”

  Wolverine fur brings remarkably good money. A fur buyer will pay $350 for a large male, according to Heimo. When I express surprise at the sum, he explains that in addition to the time he puts in on the line, it will take him at least eight hours to prepare the fur. “My philosophy is that you take the animal’s life, so you should treat the fur with respect,” he says. “And that takes time.”

  Heimo is fond of the wolverine, there’s no doubt about that. The wolverine is a solitary, seldom-seen animal—a bit like Heimo in his early years—with a range as large as the wolf’s. Early French trappers called it the “devil bear,” and some Eskimos call it gulu gulu, the glutton. The Indians of north-central Alaska’s Koyukuk River call it doyon, which derives from the Russian word toyon, meaning chief, and they regard the wolverine with reverence. Wolves and even grizzlies are common sights in Alaska compared to the loner wolverine. The naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton only saw two wolverines in his entire time in the field in the Canadian Arctic in the late 1800s. Wolverines are stinky and surly and decidedly not cute, but Heimo admires them for their versatility. Though they are not even half the size of an adult wolf, they are pound for pound the strongest mammals in the Arctic, and they have been known to scare off bears and bring down caribou and Dall sheep. One day they are top predators; the next, lowly and insatiable scavengers.

  To think that Heimo would pass up trapping a wolverine because he admires it, though, is to be ignorant of what motivates him. He is not shy about expressing his love for the land apart from its ability to yield fur, but he also cherishes his way of life. He can simultaneously extol the intelligence of an animal and talk of ending its life.

  Heimo puts the wolverine carcass into a large flour bag and sets it in the sled. He says he’ll sell the head to a skull buyer for $35 or to a university, where it will be used in a biology lab. He’ll use the carcass as bait for attracting other furbearers, but the wolverine is nothing that will ever grace his dinner table. Though the Korths eat lynx, beaver, muskrat, porcupine, and sometimes grizzly bear, they observe the old Athabaskan Indian taboo against eating wolves or wolverines or any other member of the weasel family because they sometimes carry trichinosis.

  “You can watch me work on the wolverine tonight after supper,” Heimo says, straddling the snowmachine. “You might like that. Now let’s get the hell outta here. I’m hungry.”

  It is January 20 and we are above treeline, beyond Rundown Mountain, another peak that Rhonda and Krin named as little girls. January 13 came and went, and the sun didn’t arrive, but today, for the first time since late November when the sun disappeared below the horizon, the clouds have lifted and the sun fills the land with light. Heimo shuts off the snowmachine and bounds out into the snow. He’s been waiting for this day since November 27 and is as excited as a child by the sight of his shadow. He chases it briefly and then stops as if he’s suddenly aware that I’ve been watching. High above, a transarctic jet etches a white line across the electric-blue sky. At 35 below, its roar, even at 30,000 feet, is almost deafening. Heimo waits for it to pass. “I listened to Enya last night,” he says, closing his eyes and raising his face to the sun. Since his musical tastes usually gravitate toward Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, I express my surprise. “Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “Enya. It suits the landscape.” To the north the peaks of the Brooks Range look like gleaming white gods, and in the valley frosted spruce trees are glistening in the sun’s brittle light.

  We are finished checking the traps for the day and must now only reset the trail snares on the way back to the cabin. This is our third day in a row without so much as a marten, the Alaskan trapper’s bread and butter, but Heimo looks far from unhappy. He has driven the snowmachine and sled into the sun and hasn’t said a word for the last five minutes, which is unusual for him. Heimo is garrulous and good-natured—a real talker—hardly what I expected from a reclusive hunter-trapper. But to live deep in the Alaskan bush requires, if anything, a healthy sense of absurdity and a lissome capacity for happiness. Sweat the littl
e things and you won’t enjoy a moment of peace. Fail to appreciate the warmth of the returning sun, the brief moments of joy, and you disavow your reason for being here.

  I am on the trapline with Edna, who once a week leaves the cooking, all of which she does on a woodstove, to the girls. Given the option of cooking a meal on a woodstove and checking a trapline by snowshoe, I’d choose the less taxing of the two—the trapline. One of the myths about Alaska is that it’s a man’s world, but Edna is as capable and tough as most men.

  This wasn’t always the case. When Edna first arrived in the bush in 1981, she was a woman on the mend. She had a girl and a boy from previous relationships. Melinda, or Millie, who was six, was the daughter of Edna and a Swedish biologist, to whom Edna was engaged shortly before he was killed in a plane crash. Merlin, her son, was born in late November 1977. He was the child of Edna and a ne’er-do-well Eskimo from Nome. Millie accompanied Edna when she first joined Heimo in the bush. Later she lived with them for only part of the year and spent the rest of the year with Edna’s parents in Savoonga, where she felt most at home. Merlin, on the other hand, stayed with Edna’s parents full-time. In Savoonga it was not uncommon to pass on children to one’s parents or relatives. Still, it went against Edna’s instincts to leave either child behind, even if it was for only a few months at a time, and it saddened her, but reason eventually won out. She’d be making a new life in an unfamiliar and dangerous place, and she had no idea what to expect. The children, her parents told her—and she knew it, too—would be better off in Savoonga with them. So Edna let go.

  After checking most of her traps, Edna and I return to the mountain that overlooks the cabin. The afternoon sun shines on us at an oblique angle, filling the forest with orange shadows and a beneficent glow. For the past week, the days have been nothing more than rose-tinted promises, but now the sun has returned, and the snow reflects hundreds of smaller suns. Ahead of me, Edna moves agilely, economically, like a dancer, her long ponytail swishing against the synthetic material of her parka as she walks. “It’s nice to see the sun,” Edna says so quietly that I can barely hear her over the scraping of my snowshoes. Like many Eskimos, Edna’s English is slow and soft with a musical, singsong quality. The words originate deep in her throat, a melodic gargling sound, and her lips and jaw hardly move at all. A raven cries somewhere in the distance and suddenly Edna stops. “The raven?” I ask. “Sshhh,” Edna whispers, and points in the direction of a clump of small black spruce trees. “Siberian tit, I think,” she says, speaking of a bird that many birders spend decades trying to add to their life lists. Like Heimo and the girls, Edna is fond of birds, and she is clearly excited by the prospect of seeing the rare Siberian tit. Then she makes a gentle whistling sound, like wind leaking in through a little crack in a car window, a long expulsion of air like the shriek of a hawk, but soft. Standing perfectly still, we watch the trees for nearly a minute. Then Edna takes her snow stick, which she uses to rid overhanging spruce boughs of sabotaging snow buildup, and hits the trunk of a tree with it, hoping to scare the bird from its hiding place. Still no bird. She does it again and then shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe a Siberian tit. Maybe not.” Just before Edna’s last snare we run into fresh lynx tracks, and when I suggest that perhaps she’s caught it, Edna smiles broadly. “Lynk,” she says, using the Alaskan trapper’s name for the cat. “That would be good.” When we reach the last snare, there is nothing. We check three more polesets and discover marten fur in the final one. A marten has sprung the trap and stolen the bait. “Marten never get too trap smart,” she explains. “Maybe I’ll get him next week.”

  Before we get back to the cabin, I hear the sound of sawing. When we get close enough, I discover its source. Krin has the large hind leg of a caribou propped up on the sawhorses and is using a bow saw to cut steaks for supper. At 35 below, Krin is dressed only in jeans, a sweater, and mukluks, which the Korths call kamiks, pronounced “gummocks,” preferring the Yupik name for the sealskin-lined boots. Krin has already cut three steaks and is on her fourth one when I ask her if I can try.

  “Sure,” she says, handing me the saw. “And don’t forget to bring in the steaks.” Then she grabs Edna’s hand and the two of them skip away like little girls.

  Very quickly I realize that Krin stuck me with a tough job. Sawing frozen, rock-solid steaks is harder than it looks, and I am sweating by the time I finish the fourth steak, though I know I shouldn’t be surprised. There is nothing easy about this life; everything in the bush is labor intensive.

  I saw through the fifth steak, trying not to bend the blade, and by the time I return to the Arctic oven, the sun has moved briskly beyond the hills. Though it is only 3:30 the light resembles the last embers of a dying fire. Thirty minutes later the orange light of dusk has been replaced by the blue shadows of night.

  For supper I eat a large, delicious caribou steak, fry bread, and a plate of white rice to replenish the calories I lost on the trail. And after a day on Edna’s trapline, I am dehydrated, so I drink nearly a half-gallon of ice water, which earlier in the day I helped the girls to haul.

  Hauling ice is no easy task either. At a special gathering spot on the creek, the girls use a six-foot pick to break away the ice in large chunks. Along a line that divides the cloudy overflow from the new ice, whose interior is pure and blue, the girls chip with the precision of diamond cutters. The ice must be chipped and then lugged to the sled barehanded, regardless of the temperature—a sensation that feels like holding your hands to a candle flame—so that their gloves, which the girls use for everything from fetching wood to setting traps, will not taint it. Back at the cabin the ice is added to a plastic tub and boiling water is added to melt it. Hauling ice is hard work, and it’s a job that the girls do every day.

  After supper I walk back to my tent to stoke the fire, and then I return to the cabin. Approaching the front door, I hear a drumbeat, strong and resonant, and the sound of laughter. I shuffle my feet loudly, then knock just in case, and everything inside comes to a stop. “Come in,” I hear Heimo say, and when I do, they all burst out laughing. Edna is quick to tell me that they are not laughing at me. The radio is tuned to a station out of Barrow, a coastal town on Alaska’s North Slope, which is playing Eskimo music. Rhonda says that Edna and Heimo have been dancing. When I encourage them to continue, they look at each other sheepishly. Then the girls weigh in, “Please, pretty please!” Heimo and Edna agree, and Krin turns up the music. “Ready, Mom?” Heimo says. Edna moves her arms in slow, beautiful arcs, as if she were a longtime follower of the Grateful Dead. Rhonda tells me that in Eskimo dances women imitate the movement of waves. Heimo’s motions, on the other hand, are abrupt and powerful. Men, Rhonda explains again, enact the story of the hunt, the violent spearing and harpooning of walrus and seal. When the music stops, Heimo, who spent every spring from 1976 to 1981 with the Eskimo hunters of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island, adds that fifty years ago, when a young man from Savoonga killed his first seal, the elders removed his left nipple to commemorate the occasion; when he killed his first walrus, they removed his right one. When drums introduce the next song, everyone encourages me to dance. Edna, again, moves like the ocean, and Heimo teaches me my steps. I follow as closely as I can, but manage only the savage lunges, the simulated harpooning. The girls laugh at my efforts, hooting and nearly falling off their sleeping platforms.

  We listen to a few more songs, and then Heimo puts on a long, plastic butcher’s apron and rubber surgical gloves. He has been working on the wolverine fur for the last three nights and tonight he is determined to finish it. His sinewy forearms strain and bulge with each sweeping knife stroke, as he “fleshes” the fur. The fat and flesh curl like wood shavings. When he’s done with the body, he fleshes the wolverine’s foot pads. Then with his knife, he splits the lips. Only the ears remain. He makes a fine cut on each ear and turns them inside out. Then he tacks the fur, skin side up, using pushpins, onto a five-foot stretching board shaped like the blade of
a canoe paddle. Lifting the stretching board toward the ceiling, he hooks it onto a nail.

  Heimo sweeps up the shavings of fat and flesh into a dustpan, throws the mess outside, and returns to the cabin. “Done,” he announces, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his wrist. “Finally.”

  Nobody pays attention though. Edna is sewing, Rhonda reads a teen magazine, and Krin is sounding out words from the dictionary. Trying to grasp the nuances of a new word, Krin announces, lisping slightly, “You all are so con-spir-a-tor-ial.” Rhonda looks up from her book, getting the gist of the word, smiling mischievously, and suggests that since this is one of my last nights with them until April we should all go sledding. Heimo is scrubbing his hands in the plastic washbasin. “Not at 44 below,” he says. Krin agrees to go, setting the dictionary aside, then Edna, then I. “We’re feeling conspiratorial,” I say to Heimo. “Are you in or out?” Krin challenges him. “Out,” Heimo shouts, “definitely out,” at which Krin and Rhonda jump up and tug at his shirt and pat his bald head. “Okay, okay,” he says, relenting. “I give up. Sledding it is.”

  Ten minutes later, bundled against the bitter cold, we gather on the slope of what the girls call House Hill. The full moon, which won’t set until morning, hangs just above the spruce trees, casting the Brooks Range in a hauntingly blue light. Heimo looks on while Edna and Rhonda get settled on a large piece of plastic, hoping to be the first ones down. But Krin is too quick. “Look out for the Suicide Sled,” she shouts, grabbing another piece of plastic. Then she lets out a triumphant scream and hurls herself headfirst down the hill.

  CHAPTER 2

  Growing Up Wild

  It is late January 2002, two days after our sledding adventure, and Heimo and I are traveling by snowmachine along one of his trails, which winds its way north along Krin Creek to a bald mountaintop. Heimo named the creek after his daughter, at her birth. Krin Creek is prime marten and wolverine country. However, when we go to check Heimo’s last snare, it, as the others, is empty. So we drive to the mountain, not in the hopes of finding fur, but to feel the sun on our backs and see its dim, salmon-pink reflection off the Brooks Range to the north. The valley below is still cloaked in a somber gray and will be for another month until the sun climbs high enough to shower it in light.