The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Heimo didn’t have more than a few hundred dollars to his name, much less $10 million, but he was interested. There were complications, however. There were children involved: Melinda and Merlin. For Heimo, who had been on his own since he came to Alaska, the thought of being with a woman he loved was exciting. But an instant family? He didn’t know if he was ready for that. And then there was Emerson. Though Emerson was his friend, Emerson had witnessed Edna’s difficult recovery after the death of her fiancé, only to see her treated poorly by a man who was incapable of fidelity. Heimo was his friend, but Emerson was determined not to let Edna be hurt again.

  Heimo’s first real chance to be alone with Edna didn’t happen until the summer of 1981. Heimo needed a break from Fort Yukon, so he accepted an invitation from a friend to stay in Nome for the summer and do carpentry work.

  These were still Heimo’s drinking days, and Nome had more taverns per capita than any town in Alaska. One night Heimo was drinking at a bar called the Board of Trade, or the BOT. Many of its patrons affectionately translated BOT as “Bottom of the Toilet.” The BOT was a rough, hard-drinking bar. Surely the last person Heimo expected to meet in there was the woman who would one day become his wife. But in June 1981 Edna strolled in, or rather hurried in. She saw Heimo sitting at the bar and ran to him. She told Heimo that a drunk had taken an interest in her at another bar and that she had slipped out, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

  Edna and Heimo talked that night at the bar. Heimo made her laugh and he was a good listener and Edna confided in him. She told him things that she had not talked with anyone else about. Walking her home that night, Heimo summoned the courage to finally—after all these years—ask her out, and Edna, with little deliberation, accepted.

  There is already a distinct chill in the air though it is only late July. Last night the temperature dropped below freezing, and this morning we woke to discover an inch of snow on the ground, clinging to the fireweed and the kinnikinnick. Winter is preeminent here. Combined, spring, summer, and fall—when bush families like the Korths cut wood, lay in their winter meat, make repairs to the cabin, dig an extra outhouse hole, enjoy the sun, and mentally prepare themselves for the snow and cold to come—amount to nothing more than a four-month prelude to the long season of winter.

  This day, I am walking to the high cache with Edna. She and Krin just flew in yesterday, a full week after Heimo, Rhonda, and I arrived. Edna takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with the scent of spruce and the air’s cold bite. “Smells like home,” she says. “It’s good to be home.” Edna tells me that she is always happy to leave the cabin in spring and go to Fort Yukon for the summer. But two months is enough for her. “By mid-July,” she says, “I can’t wait to get back out.”

  We are going to the high cache to get the generator because today is wash day, and Edna has piled five huge cloth bags filled with clothes around an ancient-looking Hoover washing machine, which sits in the middle of the cabin yard. The machine is a relatively new addition. For years Edna did all her wash with a washboard, and even though she must now haul two five-gallon buckets of water from the river for each load—she estimates that she has at least twelve loads—using the Hoover is easier than scrubbing clothes all day.

  On the way to the cache, we walk by my little two-man Moss tent, which is set back in the woods about forty feet from the cabin yard, outside the perimeter of the solar-powered bear fence, which was given to Heimo by a friend. The friend is an ardent environmentalist, and Heimo jokes that he was less concerned for their safety than he was for the bears, since an all-purpose law allows the Korths to shoot a bear in defense of “life or property.”

  “Bear bait,” Edna says, looking at the tent and my fly rod leaning against a tree. There has been a grizzly prowling around the cabin yard, and Edna jokes that she regards my tent as the first line of defense. Each afternoon, after the day’s work, I’ve set off for the river, calling myself, much to Heimo’s amusement, a “subsistence fisherman,” in order to supply fresh, tasty Arctic grayling for our supper. Edna knows that there’s nothing that attracts a grizzly like the smell of fish. Though I wash up in an ice-cold pool downriver every evening, it is a pro forma precaution. Soap or no, I’m bear bait when I crawl into my bag at night.

  “If a griz comes, I’ll be up a tree quick as Krin,” I say, “and then I’ll send him to the cabin.”

  “Yeah, right,” Edna says, looking at the trees, knowing full well that I’m not agile enough to get up one before a grizzly makes a meal of me.

  Walking back to the cache, Edna and I stop to fill a small plastic container with blueberries. It is kind of a halfhearted effort. Soon Edna, Krin, and Rhonda will head out to the tundra for a full day of berry picking for canning.

  Hunched over a blueberry bush, I ask Edna, somewhat tentatively, about her first date with Heimo. Edna is a steadfastly private person, still mistrustful of my motives, and she usually recedes in response to my questions. But she seems glad to talk about their first date in Nome.

  They went fishing for Dolly Varden, and when it became clear that the fish weren’t going to bite, they spent the rest of the day wandering the trails outside of Nome on a friend’s motorcycle. That evening they went out for pizza. “Milano’s Pizza,” she says, as if pleased that she still remembers the name. She also remembers the story she told Heimo that night about her father.

  When Edna was a young girl, she had been sick and feverish for a week. One day, a woman came to the house to tell Edna’s father, Emerson, of a dream she’d had the night before. In the woman’s dream, Edna was lying on the ground with her chest open and her beating heart exposed. Three shamans circled Edna. When the woman asked the shamans what they were doing, they replied, “Take her. We cannot get to her soul.” Shamans were still a very important part of Eskimo society, and when the woman finished telling Emerson of her dream, Emerson marched over to the shaman’s house and threw a large rock onto his roof, as a warning to him not to be casting any spells on his daughter. The next day, Edna’s fever dropped, and two days later she had fully recovered. Edna knew that Heimo would appreciate the story, because he knew her father as normally a kind, mild-mannered man. The image of Emerson tossing a rock onto the shaman’s roof in a fit of anger, risking the shaman’s retaliation, too, gave both Edna and Heimo a good laugh.

  “What did you think of Heimo?” I ask, emboldened by Edna’s lack of reserve. I ask the question casually, giving her the opportunity to ignore it if she chooses. Perhaps it is the calming effect of the soft morning sun and the snow dripping gently from the leaves of the cottonwoods, but she doesn’t hesitate. “I liked him,” she says, “but I always thought he was just a weird trapper who lived alone.”

  Edna stops then, checking herself, as if she is uncertain how much to reveal. I wait, and minutes go by, and neither of us says a word. “A weird trapper?” I say, breaking the silence at last. “But what did you think of him after your first date?”

  Edna doesn’t respond. She stands and walks in the direction of the cache. I follow her. She stops at the ladder to the cache and puts down her container of blueberries and ties her shoe. Without looking up, she says, “I thought he was the nicest guy I ever met.”

  CHAPTER 9

  A Family of His Own

  Heimo and I are sitting on a rock ledge overlooking the Coleen River valley after a half day of hiking. It is early afternoon and only now is the fog, which has hung over the valley since yesterday evening, beginning to rise. Heimo is glassing east, hoping to spot a bull moose wandering in the dense white and black spruce thickets along the river. He glasses continuously, carrying on a narrative in a whisper. Although a moose’s big ears make it look like a Maurice Sendak creation in Where the Wild Things Are, the oversized ears are what allows it to escape the stew pot. So we whisper.

  “Not for ten million dollars,” Heimo imitates Emerson, Edna’s father, and chuckles softly. “No amount of money could pay for what Edna means to me. But every time I think of that
—ten million dollars— it makes me laugh, because eventually all it took was twenty-five grayling, some moose meat, half a moose stomach, and a wolverine skin.” That’s what Heimo brought with him from the river and presented to Emerson when he and Edna returned to Savoonga in January 1982 for their wedding.

  Heimo explains that by the summer of 1981, when he and Edna were dating in Nome, word made it to Savoonga that he had asked Edna to marry him, and Emerson, fortunately, had already had a change of heart. While Heimo was working up the courage to ask Emerson for Edna’s hand, Emerson took the initiative and called him.

  Heimo puts down his binoculars for a moment and laughs out loud. “ ‘That’s good, Heimo,’ ” he says, impersonating Emerson on that day. “ ‘I like you. My boys like you. That’s good. My wife like you.’ ” It was Emerson’s way of saying that he knew Heimo would take good care of his daughter.

  After spending the summer of 1981 with Edna in Nome, Heimo returned to Fort Yukon. But this time he was not alone. He had Edna on his arm, and her daughter Millie, too. Merlin, Edna’s son, stayed with Edna’s parents in Savoonga. After a week of visiting with friends, Heimo, Edna, and Millie left Fort Yukon for the cabin. For much of the flight, they were over the expansive, flat, pond-pocked wilderness of the Yukon Flats. But as they neared the Stranglewoman Mountains, Edna saw the land change. To the north was mountain country, and for the first time she understood why the Natives of Fort Yukon said that Heimo lived “above the clouds.”

  An hour after taking off from Fort Yukon, the pilot landed on a gravel bar not far from the river. Heimo held Millie’s hand and stayed by their gear while Edna walked along the bank of the river. Admiring the Stranglewoman Mountains to the southeast and the rugged peaks of the Brooks Range to the north, Edna felt an exhilaration she had not experienced in many years. The Coleen River—it would be a new beginning for her, and for Millie, too. Millie pulled away from Heimo, but she didn’t run down the gravel bar to be with Edna; she ran twenty feet into the woods. Millie laughed and giggled and danced around the trunks of two large white spruce trees. When Millie left Nome that summer, she had never even seen a tree before. Now, along the river, she was surrounded by them. There were trees so high she had to lie on her back to see the tops.

  Heimo kept his eye on Millie, but he watched the river, too. Though it was already late August, it had been a wet summer in the Interior, and the river was high, uncrossable. Three years before, with his brother Tom, he had made the mistake of trying to cross the river at high water. It was not a risk he was willing to take again. In those three years, he had learned one cardinal rule—never take unnecessary chances. In the Arctic, good judgment is often the dividing line between life and death. So instead of trying to make it to the cabin, he, Edna, and Millie bided their time and camped along the river’s east bank, within shouting distance of the cabin. For five days they hunted, gathered berries, explored, and chopped wood.

  Despite having grown up around guns, Edna was new to hunting. She was the second oldest of five children, and as a youngster her father had taught her how to shoot—first a pellet gun and then a .22—and she had caught on quickly. By her midteens she was eager to hunt with her dad, but she knew that was impossible. She was as good a shot as any boy in Savoonga, but on St. Lawrence Island women were not allowed to hunt. It was considered bad luck and strictly forbidden.

  With Heimo, there were no such restrictions, however. Edna was free to hunt; in fact, Heimo encouraged her. There were three mouths to feed now, and if he could depend on her to shoot a caribou or a moose, that was all the better.

  By their second night on the river, Edna got her chance to show Heimo that she was a capable shot. Millie was already asleep in the tent, and Heimo and Edna had just finished washing up in the river. They were sitting around the fire, talking about what their lives would be like together, when Heimo heard a branch crack. Grizzly, he thought, and grabbed his gun. A minute later six caribou stepped out of the woods—four cows and two bulls. Heimo handed the .22 to Edna. “Take the back one,” he said. “The big bull.” It was still light out, so Edna took aim. She shot twice at eighty yards and the bull fell on the second shot. The caribou scattered. Three cows ran back into the woods, while the remaining bull and the fourth cow ran upriver. After thirty yards, they stopped, and that’s when Heimo pulled the trigger on his 300 Winchester rifle and dropped the bull where he stood.

  Edna ran upriver and stood over the animal she had shot. She had killed a caribou! Hardly a man on St. Lawrence Island, let alone a woman, had ever shot a caribou. It was nearly midnight when Heimo and Edna finshed gutting and cutting up the bulls. Edna was covered in blood up to her elbows. She had grown up cleaning fish and the birds her father hunted, and one thing Heimo never had to show her was how to use a knife.

  The following day, Heimo began Edna’s bush education. The first thing he was going to do was to teach her how to use an ax. Because there were no trees on St. Lawrence Island, it had never been something she needed to know, but on the Coleen the ability to use an ax was an absolutely essential skill.

  Heimo showed Edna the correct stance and how to grip the ax and slide her hand down the handle when she swung. Then he lay a thick log in the moss for her to practice on. At first, Edna swung the ax wildly. But she was determined. Heimo could see it—her aggressive posture, the ferocious expression, the horrible grunting. “Whoa, Edna, calm down. You don’t have to kill it,” he cautioned her, holding six-year-old Millie and standing back at a safe distance, trying to suppress his laughter for fear of making Edna self-conscious. “Take it easy, Edna. You’re going to wear yourself out, if you don’t kill yourself first.” Edna just rolled up her sleeves, wiped her forehead, glared at him, and swung the ax even more fiercely.

  It wasn’t long before Edna was using the ax with a precison that impressed Heimo, so they moved on to the next step—splitting wood. Edna had good hand—eye coordination, and learned quickly. After a morning of instruction, she was splitting wood like a regular woodswoman. She loved the feeling of the ax in her hand, but mostly she loved the smell of the wood. At first, each time she’d split a log, she’d pick it up and hold it to her nose. Only then would she let Millie, who proved to be an eager helper, add the log to their growing pile.

  Nearly a week after arriving on the Coleen, they walked a few hundred yards upriver and found a spot where the current had slowed and the river bottom was shallow and knitted with gravel bars, and they crossed. Heimo led, holding Millie on his shoulders, and Edna followed him. When they reached the opposite bank, Heimo pointed to a tall stand of white spruce trees a quarter of a mile off the river. “That’s home,” he said. Edna and Millie led now, following the trail into the woods. Millie spotted the cabin first, one hundred yards down the trail. There it was. She pulled Edna by the hand.

  Before either of them went inside the cabin, Edna, still holding Millie’s hand, walked around the cabin yard. The yard was dark, shadowed by high trees. Where is the sky? Edna thought, and mentally she marked the dead trees that she was going to take down. When Edna saw the woodpile though, she was disappointed. Heimo had already laid in most of the winter’s wood the previous spring. No matter. Edna announced that she and Millie would take down the trees, cut and stack the wood themselves, whether they needed it or not. “I want to be able to see the sky,” she said, homesick for the treeless spaciousness of St. Lawrence Island.

  It is early August, and it has been five days since Edna and Krin arrived back on the river, and Edna and I are sitting by the fire among the circle of chairs and benches they call their summer kitchen. There is a slight chill in the air, but the fire is not for our warmth—Edna keeps it going to drive away the opportunistic mosquitoes. Rhonda and Krin have gone to fetch water, and Heimo is a quarter mile downriver, using his spotting scope to see if the caribou are coming. For days, he has talked of little else. He watches Mummuck Mountain almost compulsively now, like a farmer studying the sky and waiting for rain, as if perhaps he ca
n will the caribou to come.

  Edna is dressed up. She wears a colorful flannel shirt and long feathery, Navaho-like earrings. Her hair is pulled tight against her head like a ballet dancer’s and plaited into a long, silky braid, which brushes against her lower back when she pokes at the coals of the fire. The Korths are expecting company, three friends from Connecticut, who are supposed to come in this evening by bush plane. Years ago Heimo and Edna had helped them and their friends out of a tough spot, when a bush pilot infamous for taking poor care of his clients dropped them off on a lake two miles from the river. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that the three friends and the rest of their group were hoping to paddle the river. They had several tons of gear, canoes, food, and other provisions, and had anticipated being dropped off much closer. Heimo had gone to investigate when he heard the plane and discovered them out on the tundra wondering what their next move would be. He showed them a shortcut to the river and helped them haul their gear. Edna prepared grayling for the group of twelve.

  Edna is particularly excited about their arrival because one of the three guests is a woman. It’s rare that a woman comes out. Edna plans to take her berry picking on the tundra. She puts another log on the fire, holding it far away from her body so she doesn’t get dirty. “You should have seen it,” she says, leaning back in her chair.

  “What?” I ask her.

  “His cabin,” she says, looking at me as if I haven’t been following the conversation. “When I first saw it, I thought, What in the world are Millie and me getting ourselves into? I won’t live like this. It wasn’t exactly a woman’s dream, you know.” Edna laughs about it now, an easy, cheerful laugh.

  The cabin was twelve by ten, with a tiny peephole window and a ceiling so low that Edna could hardly stand up straight without bumping her head. If the trees made her claustrophobic, the cabin was far worse. It made her feel like she was trapped under the ice, like all the air had been sucked from her lungs.