The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  The following day, he stood out on a snowy gravel bar, hoping that a plane would fly by. His odds were next to nothing. In late summer, planes in the remote Interior are common sights, carrying hunters to and from camp, but in November they are rare. Heimo sat on the gravel bar until the sun set and then returned to the cabin feeling gloomy. On day two, he repeated his vigil, but again failed to spot a plane. On day three, he was disappointed again and hungrier than he’d ever been in his life. By day four, he was sitting on the gravel bar, assessing his chances of walking out. Birch Creek was nearly forty miles, a trip that under normal circumstances he could make. But now he was weak with hunger, and he’d have to break trail the entire way. To his amazement, early in the afternoon he heard a distant engine, unmistakable in winter when sound is so clearly borne. Using his mirror, he desperately tried to get the pilot’s attention, by angling it into the waning sun; but eventually the sound trailed off into silence. He found two packets of noodles that night that he’d tucked away in the loft, but they did little to assuage his hunger. Despair had set in.

  The following morning, Heimo woke determined to try his luck one last time. If he failed, he would attempt to shoot a few rabbits, expending as little energy as possible, then eat and rest for a few days, hoping to get some of his strength back.

  He resorted to stomping out SOS in the snow, an effort he recognized was so futile that he couldn’t help laughing at himself. If he didn’t get out, he would be one of the anonymous numbers, another dreamy cheechako who lost his life in Alaska. He cut spruce boughs and laid them in the troughs that formed the letters, hoping that a pilot might recognize the blue-green outline of the letters against the white snow. He had just finished the S and the O, when once again he heard a plane.

  John Peterson, his bush pilot friend, who was trapping out of Fort Yukon, had asked a pilot who flew the Fort Yukon-to-Fairbanks run to check on Heimo. When his flight from Fort Yukon to Fairbanks was empty, the pilot made good on his promise. Using a map that Jon Peterson had given him, the pilot flew over the cabin. Heimo was carrying an armful of boughs when he spotted the plane. He dropped the boughs and “started to go crazy,” jumping up and down and trying to remember the land-to-air signals that were described on the back of his hunting license. When the pilot didn’t acknowledge, Heimo ran to the end of the gravel bar and frantically stomped out “Pic Me.” He was beginning the U of “UP” when the pilot tipped his wings, indicating that he understood. Since he was flying a big twin-engine Grand Commander commuter plane and couldn’t land, the pilot radioed John Peterson in Fort Yukon. Peterson, who’d flown Heimo in three months earlier and had developed a fondness for him, was glad to come and get Heimo. Fort Yukon was only seventy miles away, and by late afternoon, on that same day, Heimo was in town.

  In Fort Yukon, Heimo sold what fur he’d managed to trap. He’d been so busy feeding himself that he’d had little time or energy for trapping, so his catch amounted to nothing more than a weasel, a few muskrats, and a half dozen marten. The Fort Yukon fur buyer only gave him $90 for his winter catch, but Heimo was so happy just to be alive that he didn’t care. Reality set in a few days later. Heimo had only $100 to his name, and he had to come up with a plan. He had resolved never to return to Wisconsin, though he knew he could use the other portion of the round-trip ticket his mother had bought for him. Fort Yukon to Appleton, Wisconsin, he could do in two days, three days max. Instead, he decided to go to Fairbanks and stay with a cousin of Keith Koontz and get a job, any job, that might allow him to stay in Alaska.

  In a letter to his friend Jim Kryzmarcik, written on notecards, Heimo provided more details of his first months on the river and his brush with death:

  Newton,

  Sorry I didn’t write sooner but when you live out in the bush you don’t come in contact with humans too much. I haven’t seen or heard from a person. No one to talk to. The first week was hell living by myself out in the wilderness but after the first week I got used to it and now I would not want to live in town. I like living by myself in the Arctic… . I’m not in the bush no more because I lost everything I had. Food, axes, etc. And almost lost my life… . I decided to go to cabin no. 2. I got about 3 miles from the home cabin and had to cross the river… . I started to cross and broke through… . Fell in up to my chin and the current almost pulled me under the ice. I couldn’t feel bottom. I don’t know how I pulled my self out. So I got out and it was 44 below and I ran 3 miles back to the home cabin. Almost passed out the last half mile. I was cold and almost froze to death when I got back to the cabin. I ripped off my clothes. My skin was a real dark blue. One eyelid froze shut. My beard … was a solid brick of ice. I thought I’d get gangrene for sure… . Boy I tell you I was scared. I am very lucky I’m alive. A few days later I tried to get to the cabin again. When I got there I almost cryed. There was a great big hole in the roof. Dirt was piled up about 3 ft. on the floor, froze solid. The bed was broke. Snow was piled up in the cabin. So I had to spend the night with no roof or stove because it was too late to go back to my cabin. I spent the nite in the corner of the cabin with a fire going. The temperature 48 below. So I was awake the whole nite, dared not to sleep cause it would have been my last. Longest nite in my life. Prayed to God. I was scared I’d never get out alive. Next day I barely made it back to the home cabin. Didn’t sleep for 2 days, hiked over 20 miles. Was worn out. When I got back I ate and went to bed at 4:00 p.m. Got up next day at 11:00 a.m. So now I’m in Fort Yukon. Lost all I owned and don’t know what to do. But will not go back to Wis. I got this wilderness blood in me now and no way will I go back no matter how much trouble I have at first. But that’s a trapper’s life.

  Heimo signed this letter “Heimo the Alaskan bush trapper, guide, packer, and mountain man,” and included the tail feathers of one of the spruce grouse he’d shot.

  Fairbanks was ground zero for the pipeline, and the city was booming and giddy. From Fairbanks, construction crews built north to Prudhoe Bay and south to Valdez. “It was crazy,” Heimo remembers. “There was money wherever you looked.” 2-Street, as 2nd Avenue is called, was loaded with hookers who catered to the young men who flocked to town in hopes of working hard on the pipeline and making pocketfuls of money. One thousand dollars a week was an average weekly paycheck for a pipeline worker, and consequently the hookers did well, too. In a one-block area, Heimo guessed, there were more hookers than in all of New York City. “They’d have to stand out there in their short skirts and fishnet stockings and show their stuff at 40 below,” he laughs. “But business was good, and they could always duck into a building to warm up.” Pimps cruised the streets of downtown in big cars, and drug dealers made their daily rounds of the bars. Fairbanks was “sin city,” and ironically many people who were born and raised there welcomed the change. Greed oozed.

  In Fairbanks Heimo got a letter from Keith Koontz, the hunting guide who had taken a paternal interest in him. Koontz enclosed a $500 check. “Take the money and reoutfit yourself and go back to the trapline, go to Nome and get a job, or come to St. Lawrence Island and work for me,” the letter said. Though Heimo had no idea where St. Lawrence Island was, it looked to him like the beginning of another adventure.

  That day he cashed the $500 check, hid $475 in his sleeping bag, took the other $25, and walked to a tavern down the street. Delighted by the turn of events, he got shit-faced drunk. He remembers a dart team at the bar whose members were wearing T-shirts that read “The Pipeline Sucks.” A guy from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who’d recently come off the pipeline, was so taken with Heimo’s stories that he started buying Heimo drinks, stretching Heimo’s $25 to include a full night of boozing. The next morning, with a hangover to match the roaring Alaskan economy, Heimo boarded a plane for St. Lawrence Island.

  * * *

  St. Lawrence Island, or “Sivuqaq,” the traditional Siberian Yupik name, is roughly 100 miles long and 20 miles wide, about the size of Delaware. It is a treeless, fog-ridden place of rock and lava, pummeled year-r
ound by winds, stuck out in the middle of the abundant Bering Sea, only forty miles from Indian Point on Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula, and only twenty miles from the international date line. It is farther west than the Hawaiian Islands, 120 miles west of Nome, Alaska, and until the last half century, it has remained largely isolated from the Alaskan mainland.

  A map of the island shows a northern spine of 2,000-foot volcanic ridges called the Kukulgit Mountains, drained by rivers and creeks and separated by wet tundra valleys, while the south is a sea of blue lakes, inlets, and lagoons. Engulfed in cold ocean mists, which are created when cold Arctic waters collide with warm air blown up from the Pacific, St. Lawrence Island can be a chronically overcast place, except for a few short weeks every year when the island’s interior breaks out in a riot of color. Larkspur, saxifrage, daisies, anemones, and a host of other flowers bloom brilliantly in the ephemeral sunshine, which is soon replaced by dense Bering Sea fog.

  St. Lawrence Island was once a plateau in the Great Bering Land Bridge. Eskimo legend has it that the entire island, even the barren interior mountains, was once covered by a vast ocean. Slowly, as the island was “squeezed dry” by “Apa,” the Creator, land began to emerge from the sea’s black depths. “Sivuqaq” is roughly translated as “wrung out” or “squeezed dry.”

  “They took him in,” says Keith Koontz, referring to Heimo’s arrival in Savoonga, one of only two villages on the island, which was settled as a reindeer camp by herders from the island’s only other village, Gambell, in 1917. Keith Koontz is a likable, well-educated, practicing Baha’i, who sometimes lets his hair grow long and talks in kind of a Texas drawl. Koontz is married to an Eskimo woman from Savoonga. “I don’t know what it was about Heimo, but they loved him,” Koontz continues, letting out a booming, genial belly laugh. “Heimo’s a gregarious guy and he’s very funny. He was curious about their culture, too, and the people of Savoonga appreciated that.”

  In early December, Heimo wrote his friend Jim Kryzmarcik again.

  Newt,

  Well I’m in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island only 90 miles from Siberia… . I couldn’t go back out to the trapline… . So Keith loaned me $500.00 and said I could live out by him on the island. As you can figure this is an Eskimo village, still semi-primitive. 90% of the people live off the sea… . You wouldn’t believe the size of the animals (walrus). Huge. Average weight 4,500 lbs. With pure ivory tusks 3 ft. long… . I really wish I had a camera. Could get some beautiful pictures.

  This time Heimo signed it “Alaskan wilderness bush trapper, wilderness guide, mountain man,” and “Arctic ice pack man,” too.

  Three and one half months later, he wrote again.

  Hi Budnick Buddy,

  I got a million things to tell you but there ain’t enough paper in Alaska to write it all down. Eating a lot of walrus, seal, whale, fish (raw), polar bear, seaweed, birds, reindeer, and white fox even… . This island has no trees, all tundra… . Only two villages … and all live off the land… . Whaling starts in a few days. You wouldn’t believe the hustle and bustle of the village. They use big boats made out of walrus hides and the frame is made of whale bones… . Stores, school, and everything is shut down for a few weeks when the first whale is spotted on the south side of the island… . The old women have tatoos on their faces and hands… . They [the old women] are the most wonderful people … if you can understand them.

  Heimo helped Koontz build a house and he put in extra time at Koontz’s store in return for room and board. Television hadn’t come to the island yet, comic books were the craze, and Koontz’s was the only place in the village that sold them. So, while tending the cash register, Heimo met nearly everyone in Savoonga, a village no larger than two city blocks, with elevated boardwalks and plywood houses whose paint had been blasted off by wind and ice storms. Most of the village’s 350 people spoke English, although they preferred their native Siberian Yupik. Heimo quickly learned enough Yupik to get by, and as time passed he became friendly with the villagers. One of those to befriend Heimo was a thirty-five-year-old hunter named Herman Toolie. Herman’s mother was one of the women in Savoonga to wear the traditional tattoos. Heimo remembers that she had one on her face that resembled a whale’s tail.

  Herman was considered Savoonga’s best hunter, which made him a living connection to one of the most accomplished hunting cultures the modern world has ever known. Though Heimo was an outsider, Herman mentored him, teaching Heimo hunting skills that few white men would ever learn—how to hunt walrus, seal, and polar bear, how to read ice and the sky. Herman explained to Heimo that the sky reflected what lay below it. A hunter’s ability to read a “sky map” was an essential skill, and Heimo learned the basics: Above ice the sky turned a pale white. Above open water it was dark, what the Eskimos of Savoonga called “black smoke.”

  Bound by ice for six months of every year, St. Lawrence Island in December resembled an ancient glacier. Heimo had never seen such an alien landscape and he was drawn to it. When he wasn’t working for Koontz, he and Herman fished on the ice pack for sculpin, using handmade Eskimo treble snag hooks of copper tubing. The sculpin, or “bullhead,” as the people of Savoonga called the fish, were yellowish green and black, about ten inches long, with bloated, oversized heads. After digging a hole, Herman and Heimo would jig by hand, bouncing the hooks off the sea’s bottom, nearly a hundred feet down. They would catch thirty or forty at a time. As Heimo became better acquainted with the ice and its dangers, Herman took him out seal hunting, too.

  Heimo’s first seal hunt was a memorable one. Herman and Heimo walked out onto the ice against a fierce northerly wind. The wet wind cut through Heimo’s parka, and he remarked about how cold it was. Herman agreed, but explained that a north wind was a blessing. Always beware of a south wind, he told Heimo. A south wind was capable of forming a lead, or channel of open water, between the shore-fast ice and the pack ice, setting the once immovable ice in motion and leaving unsuspecting hunters to float to oblivion. Swimming, Heimo knew, wasn’t an option once the ice had separated. Even an expert swimmer would quickly be overcome with hypothermia. Every other year, the village of Savoonga lost expert hunters to the ice, which was shaped by currents, tides, and winds, and which opened and closed capriciously under their influence. The village accepted these deaths with equanimity. Even a grieving widow knew that the Eskimo hunter was never more alive than when he was on the ice.

  Walking was difficult, and when Herman located a lead, a channel of water in the ice, two miles out, Heimo was glad for the rest. The ice, he discovered, had topography, an erratic relief formed by emerging pressure ridges, high walls of ice that buckled upward. Often he and Herman had to scale the pressure ridges, which could be fifty feet high. It was dangerous, unpredictable climbing.

  Herman and Heimo concealed themselves behind a small pressure ridge about fifty feet from the lead. The lead—the meghaat—was one hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide, the only lead in sight, and Herman knew that this was where a seal would surface for its next breath of air. Seals, he explained, had to come up every twenty minutes to fill their lungs.

  Before whalers introduced the rifle to St. Lawrence Island, villagers used nets or ivory-tipped harpoons for hunting seals. If there were large stretches of open water, allowing the seal to surface just about anywhere, hunters stood little chance of success. However, if the currents had not broken up the ice fields, and hunters successfully located a breathing hole or a small lead, they needed only patience.

  By late afternoon, Heimo and Herman abandoned their vigil. Not a single seal had surfaced. Back at the village, they returned to a commotion. One of the elders had shot a polar bear, which he’d dragged into the main room of his house on a large plastic tarp. People were coming and going, not just to see the bear, but to get their allotment of meat, which was always divided among the extended family.

  When Heimo and Herman arrived, the hunter was eager to tell them the story of his kill. It was then that Heimo learne
d that while he and Herman were waiting for a seal to surface in the lead, the polar bear had caught their scent downwind. It had been stalking them, the hunter said, moving slowly from pressure ridge to pressure ridge to avoid being seen. The hunter was scouting for leads when he saw the bear. He shot it only a hundred yards from where Heimo and Herman had been hunting. It was wounded and the hunter chased it and shot it again, knowing that a wounded bear could never be allowed to escape. It had to be killed and its soul released or the hunter would come to harm. Battered by the wind, neither Herman nor Heimo ever heard the shots.

  Three weeks later, Heimo shot his first seal, two miles out from the village, in a fifty-foot lead. He shot it right behind the head as Herman had instructed him. “Bullet placement,” Herman said. “That’s the key.” Herman showed him how to swing and throw the seal hook, and after many attempts, Heimo finally succeeded in hooking and retrieving the seal, a 140-pound young hair seal—nuksuk. Heimo learned from Herman that traditionally a hunter who’d killed a seal would melt ice in his mouth and put his mouth to the seal’s to give it a drink of water. After the meat was stripped from its bones, the bones were then returned to the sea to ensure the success of future seal hunts.

  Heimo left Savoonga in mid-April, vowing to return every spring.

  By late April, Heimo’s first spring in Alaska, he was back on Beaver Creek, thirty miles upriver from where he’d been the previous fall, tending the trapping cabin of a friend who was going to Anchorage for the summer. He had twenty-five pounds of kidney beans, a case of macaroni, and a case of canned spinach.