The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Sister Angie was hardly surprised by Heimo’s abrupt departure. “Heimo was always an individual,” she says. “Ever since he was a boy, his room was always filled with Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and animal and bird books. He used to take me into the woods and teach me to identify birds and animal tracks. I knew the factory job was only temporary.”

  While Erich Korth had always bullied and degraded Heimo, Irene Korth had instilled in him a deep belief in the possibilities of life and the conviction that he could do something unique and different with his. Angie Korth says of her mother, “Mom was born too early. She would have made a great hippie. She was worried about Heimo, but she admired free spirits, and that’s what Heimo was; she knew that.”

  Despite Irene Korth’s support of her oldest son, Lisa Korth remembers how hard it was on her mother when Heimo left. “She was very excited for him,” she says. “But she worried, too. I remember Mom crying a lot.”

  In May 1974, Heimo packed up his Ford F150 pickup truck, which he’d outfitted with a topper, stuck $700 in his wallet, and took off for the Northwest Territories. Riding an adrenaline high, he reached International Falls, Minnesota, in less than eight hours—the 500 miles between Appleton and International Falls had been a blur. At the bridge to Canada, a customs agent pulled him over. Where was he going, the agent asked. When Heimo answered, “the Northwest Territories,” the agent asked him to leave his truck and escorted Heimo to an office where he interrogated Heimo. Where are you from? Why are you going to the Northwest Territories? What are you going to do for money? Then it dawned on Heimo. “Jesus Christ,” he thought, “I never should have answered honestly.” Canada had had problems with draft dodgers, and now that U.S. involvement in Vietnam had ended, Canada was being flooded with disillusioned veterans. Heimo had anticipated having a problem, so before leaving he’d made sure to shave and cut his shoulder length hair. Finally the customs agent asked Heimo to open his wallet. Heimo dumped its contents onto the table, and the agent counted the money slowly—$400, $500, $660. Heimo had paid for gas and food, but his $700 was largely intact. Confident that he had no intentions of relying on the charity of the Canadian government, the agent told Heimo to be on his way.

  After the incident at the border, Heimo gassed up and ate, then he drove through the deep Ontario night. He stopped to sleep along a potholed country road outside of Kenora, Ontario. He was too tired to pitch his tent, so he just lay his sleeping bag under a tree. The following day he covered all of Manitoba, crossing at night into Saskatchewan, where he camped at Crooked Lake Provincial Park. Before dawn, he was on the road again. He pushed himself, arriving in Calgary, Alberta, just after sunset. Looking west in the direction of Banff National Park and the Livingstone Range—the first mountains he’d ever seen—he felt his heart leap. He pulled off to the side of the road and stared at the mountains, outlined by the gray-red sky, and knew he’d never again be happy back home in Wisconsin’s flatlands.

  The next morning, he headed north, past Edmonton to Peace River. After nearly 500 miles of driving, he turned onto a gravel road, lay down on the front seat of his truck with a sweatshirt as a pillow, and woke at sunrise. Just west of Peace River, he went for a swim in Lac Cardinal in Queen Elizabeth Provincial Park. Then he headed north up the Mackenzie Highway, paralleling the Hay River just north outside the town of Meander River. By late afternoon, he was in the Northwest Territories. He camped that night near Hay River on Great Slave Lake. The next morning, he arrived at the Mackenzie River, but so much ice was rushing down from Great Slave Lake that the ferry couldn’t make the crossing. He slept in his truck that night, crossed the Mackenzie on day seven, and arrived in Yellowknife the following afternoon, 2,500 miles from Appleton.

  Yellowknife itself was a disappointment to Heimo, nothing more than a jumble of buildings, jerry-rigged in the 1930s after prospectors discovered veins of gold in the local quartz. Intent on getting out of Yellowknife as soon as possible, Heimo started asking questions about trapping in the interior, in that great, wild stretch of boreal forest west of Yellowknife. The answers he received discouraged him. He was told that only Canadian citizens were allowed to trap. In a bar, Heimo met an old miner, who confided in him that there were men out there trespassing and laying low when necessary. Heimo hung around Yellowknife, debating whether or not to say the hell with the law, but a month later he returned to Wisconsin. Heimo knew that his father would gloat, and he was determined not to give him the pleasure until he had a few drinks under his belt, so instead of heading home to the inevitable “I told you so,” he stopped in at Sarge’s. Heimo started drinking in the afternoon, one Budweiser after another. By the time the mill crew arrived, Heimo was already drunk. He was sitting on a barstool when his friend Roland Pruno walked by. Heimo pulled Pruno toward him and wrapped a heavy arm over Pruno’s shoulders. “I’m going again,” Heimo said, nearly whispering. Later that night, Pruno remembers, Heimo told him and anyone else willing to listen, in a loud voice, that he wouldn’t be in Wisconsin for long, that he had the guts to leave once and he’d have the guts to try again.

  I am two weeks into my January visit. It is 6:30 in the morning when I hear Heimo walk by, the snow cracking under his feet. By now I know his routine. He rises at 6:15 to stoke the fire and warm the cabin and then he takes the honeybucket to the banks of the creek bed, where he dumps it. Afterward he checks the weather, reading the two thermometers that NOAA has provided him.

  Despite the fact that Heimo is no longer punching a factory clock, he leads a ritualized life. Structure, he says, is essential in the bush, where at times it is so cold that getting out of bed, much less going outside and subjecting oneself to winter’s cruelties, requires an act of will. It is easy to be listless in winter, particularly in January, when a person is craving the return of the sun.

  Heimo is standing outside my tent now. “Ya, der, you awake or ya still snoozin’?” he asks, improvising a heavy Wisconsin accent. I try to be enthusiastic, to sound as if I’ve had a good night of sleep on my army cot, as if I am looking forward to bundling up against the cold. The last thing I want Heimo to think is that I am a soft city boy. “Ready and rarin’,” I say, trying out my own Wisconsin accent. “Let’s give ’er.”

  “Ooooh, Christ,” Heimo continues, drawing out the long O. “I spent too much time at da tavern last night wit da boys. She was a late one, and I got a hangover. Aw Jeezus, da wife, she’s pissed.”

  “Ya, der, I’m feelin’ er, too. My frickin’ head is poundin’,” I answer. “Oooh, ders gonna be hell to pay wit da missus dis mornin’.”

  Heimo laughs. It has been a long time since he’s been in a Wisconsin tavern, or any tavern (he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the fall of 1981), but he loves this routine. For two weeks now we have subjected Edna and the girls to our Wisconsin schtick. For them the humor has worn off, but Heimo loves it.

  We eat a breakfast of oatmeal—“oatmeal or no meal” is Heimo’s refrain— and then I return to the tent to dress, layering against the inevitable cold. By 8:30 Heimo is outside with the snowmachine and the sled. “Taxi’s waiting and the meter’s running,” he shouts.

  I get myself situated in back of the sled, using my day pack as a backrest. Today we’re carrying only Heimo’s pack, a few leghold traps, the ax, the .22, and two marten carcasses, so I’m able to stretch out and extend my legs. When I’m settled Heimo kisses Edna and the girls goodbye. Each morning they come out to see us off regardless of the temperature. Edna is a worrier; from experience she knows how fast things can go wrong out here. “Don’t forget the plan,” she says. “If you’re not back by suppertime, I’ll come looking for you.” “Oh, Mom,” Heimo replies, trying to soothe her, “we’ll be okay.”

  Today we plan to check Heimo’s longest line, a trip that will take us eight hours or more. Fortunately it is only 26 below. The temperature will be bearable, at least five degrees or so warmer once we get into the hills where Heimo has his marten sets.

  Heimo has notic
ed significant weather changes in Alaska since he arrived in 1975. Though he expresses skepticism about the urgent warnings of a worldwide warming, his observations would probably coincide with global-climate-change models. “The winters are not nearly as cold as they once were,” he tells me, wiping the snow from the #1 longspring leghold trap on his first poleset. “Years ago, forty, fifty below was common, but it’s rare today. No question about it, though, the winters are longer now. They come earlier and stay later. But I can handle that. It’s the snow that ticks me off. There’s a lot more of it than before, and it makes my life hard. These traps get too much snow and they won’t fire properly. And it’s hell on my trails.”

  The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms and expands upon Heimo’s observations: more cloud cover, more frequent snowstorms, more moisture in the air in general, and stronger winds, which pick up moisture from the thawing ice fields of the Arctic Ocean and transport it south. A 2001 report from the panel indicates that global warming is far worse than earlier estimates, with Alaska, Greenland, and Arctic Canada witnessing warm-ups significantly higher than the rest of the world. Over the past thirty years, winter temperatures in regions of the north have risen by ten degrees compared to a worldwide average of one degree, and Arctic ice is 40 percent thinner than it was in 1960. Despite the naysayers who adhere blindly to Le Chatelier’s principle—that the earth is capable of recovering on its own from devastating changes—many climatologists anticipate increases by the year 2100 “without precedent during the last 10,000 years.” In other words, the earth will encounter the kinds of dramatic global climate changes that it has not seen since the last Ice Age.

  By the time Heimo and I reach the fifth poleset, he is shaking his head, more puzzled than discouraged. The polesets have been empty, and he’s seen very little marten sign. “There should be marten all over this hill,” he says. For most trappers in Alaska’s Interior, the marten is their bread and butter. It’s what allows them to pay for the bush flights and their food and fuel bills. The other animals—the wolf, wolverine, lynx (or “lynk,”), fox, beaver—they’re “gravy,” as one old Fort Yukon trapper told me.

  Heimo shuts off the snowmachine. “I’ll probably catch seventy or so marten this year,” he says. “At $40 or so a pelt, that’s only $2800. Not much of a year unless I do well on wolves this spring. Did I ever tell you about Fred’s best year?” Fred Thomas is Heimo’s good friend and one of Alaska’s legendary trappers, the subject of Edward Hoagland’s memorable essay “Up the Black to the Chalkyitsik.” Fred Thomas calls Fort Yukon home. At eighty-three, he still takes his boat up the Black River, 300-plus river miles from Fort Yukon, where he picks berries and hunts moose at his camp. He still successfully traps seventy-five miles of line around Fort Yukon, using a snowmachine, and still cuts all his own wood. “The winter of 1979-1980,” Heimo continues, “Fred and his brother and son trapped 315 lynk,” Heimo says the number as if it is inconceivable, the same way he might react to news of Bill Gates’s net worth. “Do you wanna know what they got for each pelt? $350,” he says. “$350!” Trappers in Alaska talk about the price of fur like Midwestern farmers discuss milk, corn, and soybean prices, and I knew it was the kind of payday Heimo had never seen and, considering the dismal state of the fur market, maybe never would. “With that kind of money, I’d put a chunk in the girls’ college fund and then I’d buy a new snowmachine and some Alaska #9 wolf traps,” he muses.

  Heimo doesn’t linger long over the thought. He tells me to sit down in the sled, pulls the starter on the snowmachine, lets it warm up for half a minute, and then gives the machine some gas. Every trapper has to have a bit of the gambler in him, a sense of anticipation that keeps him going in the cold, that impels him to check the next trap even when the prospects look gloomy. It isn’t the same kind of mindless hopefulness of someone playing the slots, but rather the sense of expectation that a diligent blackjack player might feel. He studies the cards and knows that it’s only a matter of time before he wins.

  Heimo has the heart of a blackjack player. All of his marten traps are polesets. Before the season begins, he spends weeks surveying hundreds of miles of country, searching for marten tracks and the kind of terrain marten love. He’s a good student, careful and observant, and even in low marten years he does well. Once he’s finished scouting, Heimo lays out his lines, constructing his polesets before the season begins. The polesets are spaced fairly close together because trapping is about probabilities—the more traps you’re willing to set and check, the more success you’ll have. To build a poleset, Heimo locates a dead spruce tree and cuts it down at the point where the trunk begins to taper off, usually three feet above the ground. Then he notches the trunk and rests the other part of the tree, the pole, in the notch, making certain to wipe off the pitch, which can spoil a fur. Using his ax, he cuts a small, flat indentation in the pole, which will eventually contain the trap. Just before the season begins, Heimo will boil the traps in spruce boughs to take away their scent and then he’ll haul them out with the snowmachine and the sled. He uses one trap per poleset, fastening the trap’s chain to the pole, so that once the marten is caught it can’t run off with the trap. At the end of the pole, he attaches a piece of string to which he ties bait, usually moose skin, the skin of a spruce grouse or a ptarmigan, or the fur of a snowshoe hare with the entrails wrapped inside. The bait dangles high enough from the ground that the marten can’t reach it. In an effort to get at the bait, the marten will use the pole as a ramp.

  We have left the polesets behind and now we’re bound for a side trail to check some of Heimo’s leghold traps. A quarter of a mile down the trail, Heimo stops the snowmachine and points to fresh tracks in the snow. “Wolf,” he says. “Looks like a loner, traveling east. An adolescent male, I’d say,” he explains, showing me the seven-inch paw prints. “He’s probably after the caribou that were bedded down on the lake.” Heimo steps from the snowmachine carefully. I get out of the sled. “Try to stay on the snowmachine trail,” he warns me. “I don’t want any fresh tracks in the snow.” We walk along the trail on top of the packed snow for about one hundred yards. The wolf’s tracks parallel the trail, but never once does he get closer than two feet. “Wolves are so damn smart,” Heimo says. “See how he won’t even step on the trail. He wants nothing to do with it.”

  Though wolves have ranges over 600 square miles and rarely use the same trail, Heimo thinks that this one might be coming back and decides to set two Bridger #5 longspring wolf traps in a clearing. Wolves, he tells me, are more likely to let down their guard in a clearing. First, he breaks off a rotten spruce tree at its base and pushes it into the snow so less than two feet is sticking up and sprays it with coyote urine that he orders from Fur Country Lures out of Jordan, Montana. This is the scent stick, or the “peepost,” as Heimo calls it. Before setting the traps, Heimo puts on his special cloth wolf gloves, which he only uses for setting wolf traps so they won’t carry any other scent, animal or human. As he prepares the wolf traps, he explains how they work. The traps have offset, rounded jaws, rather than square ones, that act like handcuffs. Rather than breaking bones or tearing into flesh, they leave a small gap, which is less painful for the wolf. Heimo sets the traps and arranges the guide sticks, then collects a film of snow on the head of his ax and gently sprinkles it over the trap lids.

  “If there was wind here,” he says, “I couldn’t do this. I’d use a block of hard snow to hold the trap down. But you got to taper it with your ax, so there’s not much snow over the pan. Otherwise the trap won’t fire right.”

  Before leaving, he wipes snow over the chains to conceal them and then uses a small spruce bough to dust the snow clean of our footprints.

  He’s happy with the set and is eager to check another one a mile down the trail, where we saw fox tracks a week ago. I am hardly in the sled when he takes off. He is driving faster than usual, and I’m holding on with one hand and fending off spruce boughs with the other. When we arrive at th
e trap, Heimo throws his arms up as if signaling touchdown. “Got ’im,” he celebrates. “A red fox.” It’s the same one, he says, that was prowling the hillside only eight days ago. We walk up to the fox, and unlike the wolverine, it doesn’t hiss or lunge at us; it slinks low to the ground and trembles, and I feel a pang of guilt. Heimo lifts his leg and steps on it heavily, collapsing its lungs. The fox looks at me, and I turn my head and look away. “Are you okay?” Heimo asks. “Sure,” I say. As he puts his weight into it and pushes the air from the fox’s lungs, it emits a long, high-pitched sound like an asthmatic’s wheeze.

  Heimo pulls apart the jaws of the #4 double longspring trap and gives me the fox to take back to the sled. Sitting down, I hold it in my lap. I take off my mitten and glove and rub my hand along the soft, cherry-red fur along the fox’s back. Though I am a hunter and have shot deer, rabbits, and countless grouse, pheasants, and waterfowl, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the fox’s death, as Aldo Leopold did when he shot a wolf and reached it in time to see a “fierce green fire” dying in its eyes. I stroke the fox and watch Heimo reset the trap. He returns to the snowmachine, straddles the seat, then turns around, facing me.

  “I know,” he says simply. “Sometimes it’s hard.”

  Had Heimo been allowed to go out into the country west of Yellowknife, he would have become a fox trapper. The Northwest Territories had an abundant supply of red fox, cross fox, and Arctic fox, and their habitat was not going to be affected by oil development. While Heimo was in Yellowknife, he had learned, for the first time, of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a joint venture of the oil companies holding Prudhoe Bay leases. The pipeline’s fate had been sealed the previous year when Vice President Spiro Agnew broke a tie vote in the Senate authorizing its construction. Though the Canadian government petitioned hard for a route through Canada via the Mackenzie River valley and into the Great Lakes, the pipeline became an all-Alaska endeavor.