When Edna and Millie went inside the cabin, Heimo remained outside, pretending to sharpen his knife. This was the part he had been dreading. When Edna and Millie came out of the cabin, he saw their faces and knew immediately. “Raise the roof,” Edna said. Heimo was so embarrassed by the cabin, he didn’t argue. He would not only raise the roof, he’d put in a sleeping loft, too. He had to work fast though—they were sleeping in the tent temporarily, and it was already early September. It would get cold soon, and Edna and Millie had never experienced temperatures like those they would see on the Coleen.
If ever there were a woman cut out for the bush, it was Edna. Edna had spent much of her childhood in harsh conditions; the weather on St. Lawrence Island is gray and wet for much of the year, enough to defeat even the hardiest of souls. And Edna was used to cramped, spartan conditions. Every November, her father would load up his sled and ready his fifteen-dog team, and the family would make the thirty-mile trip to their fox camp. They’d spend much of the winter and spring there, returning to Savoonga in May.
But life on the Coleen would test her. Normally, for an Eskimo, whose world revolves around the extended family, living in such isolation—the Korths’ nearest neighbor lived fifty-five miles down-river— would be out of the question. In Eskimo society, family bonds are valued above all else. Solitude is a sign of unhappiness, estrangement. After Edna made the leap of faith, though, and agreed to join Heimo on the river, she was determined to adjust and to learn to love the Coleen as much as she loved her “weird trapper.”
Beginning in late September, a week after the first snow of the season, Edna and Millie tended a snowshoe hare snare line, which Heimo had laid out in a small loop leading from and back to the cabin. With her father Edna had learned to trap white fox, using longspring traps with a pan held by a dog, which released the trap’s jaws, but on the Coleen wire snares were more effective, and Heimo showed Edna and Millie how to make and set them.
It was good for Edna and Millie to have time alone on the snare line. At six, Millie had already suffered enough. She had grown up without a father, and now she missed the only home she had ever known— Savoonga. On the snare line, Edna and Millie talked of Savoonga and how they missed eating seal meat and mungtuk. They also practiced identifying the tracks they found in the snow—the pointed pods of a cow moose, the four-toed pad of a wolf, the large, round tracks of a lynx, the elongated pad of a porcupine. They made a game of it, seeing which one of them could see and name a track the quickest. Sometimes Heimo would join them and quiz them, pointing out the distinguishing characteristics of each print. Only when Edna and Millie discovered the huge, pigeon-toed tracks of a roaming grizzly with its pronounced claws did Heimo’s warning always to be on guard against grizzlies seem real— too real.
By early October, nearly six weeks after her arrival, Edna had also made another discovery—she was pregnant. She had intuited it weeks before, but now she was certain. One day in early October, after walking her line, while Heimo and Millie stayed at the cabin boiling new snares in spruce boughs to rid them of their scent, she returned to the cabin and told them both. Heimo whooped with joy. They were going to have a baby! He picked Edna up and swung her around, then realized what he was doing, and set her back down as carefully as he could. Millie didn’t react. Later that night Edna promised Millie that she’d be happier when she had a sister or brother to play with.
In addition to adapting to their new surroundings, Edna and Millie also had to adjust to the Interior’s cold, and to autumn’s advancing darkness. One day in early November, Heimo noticed a pronounced ring around the sun, a luminously colored sun dog, and he knew then that even colder weather was coming soon. Sure enough, on the following day, a north wind off the Arctic sent temperatures to minus 35 degrees. Edna and Millie had never experienced 35 below before. Edna developed headaches, brought on by the intensely cold, dry air. Heimo checked his traps—he was used to 35 below—but other than tending to their snare line, Edna and Millie didn’t wander far from the cabin. At night, to alleviate her headaches, Edna set pots filled with ice on the woodstove and breathed in the steam.
That December, their first together as a family, Edna and Millie were ready for a break. But they had no plans to go to town. Heimo had been hoping for a good fur year, but after an outstanding 1980-1981 season, his fur take by Christmas amounted to only thirty-five marten, and much of that money was needed for supplies. What money he had left over from the previous season they’d already set aside to pay for plane tickets to Savoonga for their January wedding and for wedding expenses.
One night, while Millie was asleep and Heimo was washing up after skinning out a marten, Heimo suggested turning on KJNP. “We can sit in bed and listen to Trapline Chatter,” he said.
“Always KJNP,” Edna grumbled. They hadn’t gotten a message in over a month. Didn’t anyone care that they were out there?
Heimo and Edna listened to twenty-five messages. “No more,” Edna said, and reached to turn off the radio. She flicked the switch, and Heimo flipped it right back on. Edna turned over, her back to Heimo.
Then she heard it: “This message goes out to the Korths on the Coleen River. We’re sending out a plane to bring you into town for Christmas.” The announcer read the rest of the message, and when she finished, Edna was bouncing up and down at the edge of the bed. “We’re going to town! I can’t believe it! We’re going to town!”
When their friend and bush pilot John Peterson showed up three days later, he handed Edna an envelope. Edna studied it.
“C’mon, open it up,” Peterson said.
Edna tore the envelope and pulled out the letter. It was a petition signed by their friends in Fort Yukon, demanding they come into town for Christmas.
Heimo looked at the letter. “We got no money.”
No big deal Peterson told him. The flight had been paid for, and their friends had already bought presents for Millie, too.
It is late July and Heimo and I are cleaning Arctic grayling on a gravel bar just downriver from the cabin. Only seconds, it seems, after I slit open the belly of the first fish, the gulls appear. “I guess they know me by now,” I say to Heimo, half convinced the gulls have learned to recognize me. For the past week, I have fished daily, trying my luck in nearly every pool within two miles of the cabin. The river hasn’t disappointed me. For each fish I keep I throw one or two back. For an entire afternoon, I won’t see a single gull. Yet as soon I leave the water and grab my willow stick through which I’ve threaded the graylings’ gills, they suddenly appear, like a dog that crawls out from under the back porch when it hears the rattle of its food dish. When I crouch down and cut into the first fish, they cruise overhead—mew gulls and herring gulls—115 miles from the Arctic Ocean, screeching and squacking impatiently for their next meal.
I finish cleaning the fish and grab the largest of the bunch. “Look at this one,” I say, holding up a twenty-two-inch lunker, feeling inordinately proud of myself. I hold it by the belly and pull the dorsal fin, which fans out like that of a minitaure sailfish. Up close, the fish is goggle-eyed but pretty, its gunmetal gray splashed with variations of green and blue. Heimo doesn’t even look up. He knows that catching ravenous grayling, even with a fly, is hardly an angler’s feat. Besides, after a summer of gill-netting twenty-pound king salmon, he is unimpressed with my haul.
“It’s gonna taste good tonight,” I say.
“Yuck,” Heimo replies. After almost three decades of eating grayling, he no longer is fond of them and will eat them only in a pinch. His favorite fish is the salmon, whose pink meat he thinks is far superior to the white meat of grayling.
Rain falls as Heimo puts the finishing touches on the final grayling. Until yesterday it has been a dry month marked by sun and brilliantly blue skies, though August is usually the rainy season up here. “This is what Savoonga’s like every day,” Heimo says. “Cloudy and rainy. But the Arctic’s a desert. You know that, don’t you? We get fifteen inches of precipitati
on a year up here, less than Arizona. But in Savoonga, this is what you get day in, day out. The Interior is to Savoonga what San Diego is to Seattle.” Heimo stops for a moment, considering the analogy he’s just made, and then he makes a small correction. “That’s true,” he laughs. “Unless you’re talking about December and January, when the sun never clears the horizon around here.”
Except for its weather, Heimo has fond memories of Savoonga. It is, after all, where he met Edna. It is also where he was married—January 25, 1982. It was Edna’s birthday, her twenty-seventh. The wedding was at the Presbyterian Church. Since Edna is related to almost everyone in Savoonga, much of the village was there for the ceremony. The Reverend Alice Green performed the wedding. Green had come to the island in the late 1930s. The saying in Savoonga was that she “baptized, married, and buried.” After over forty years of service to the church and the village, she planned to retire. Edna and Heimo’s wedding would be her last.
Edna wore her hair loose down to her waist, and she wore a light blue wedding gown that she and Heimo had chosen together at J.C. Penney in Fairbanks. Heimo sported a fresh haircut and a light blue suit to match Edna’s gown; he hadn’t worn a suit since he was sixteen. The pants and the dress shirt made him itch, though, and his face itched, too. Edna wouldn’t allow him to get married in a beard, so he’d shaved that morning. All that remained of his foot-deep field of a beard was bushy sideburns that—wedding or not—he refused to part with.
After six years alone in the bush, all the attention on his wedding day made Heimo feel like escaping to the ice pack and hiding behind a pressure ridge. He was in love with Edna—there was no doubt about that—but if it had been up to him, they would have simply exchanged their vows privately and quickly, and that would have been the end of it. After the ceremony, he would have thrown his suit in a pile on the floor and gone out walrus hunting with Herman on the ice floes. Instead he was standing in front of a crowd of people, dreaming, to calm his nerves, of setting fox traps. He was so anxious he needed to be prompted by Reverend Green to say, “I will,” and then when it came time for the kiss, still flustered, he forgot to lift Edna’s veil. The guests erupted into gales of laughter, and Heimo blushed like a bashful young boy. After the kiss Edna held her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, too.
Just over four months after their wedding, Coleen Ann Korth, whom Edna and Heimo named after the Coleen River, was born in Fairbanks—May 29, 1982. By mid-July, they were back on the river, and Heimo immediately began to work on a new cabin. The four of them— Heimo, Edna, Millie, and now Coleen, too—would need more space than what the little cabin could provide. First, Heimo laid out the cabin’s dimensions—sixteen feet by sixteen feet. Then he cut the trees. It was hard building alone. Edna helped when she could. While Edna was working with Heimo, Millie held Coleen in her arms when the baby slept and rocked her when she cried.
During the first few weeks, Edna often took the girls to the river to a nearby gravel bar to avoid the mosquitoes. It had been a dry summer, and the river was low, so they were able to wade comfortably to an expansive bar twenty feet from the riverbank. On the gravel bar, Edna lay down a blanket, and together she and the girls enjoyed the breeze and the gurgling of the river. Sometimes while Coleen and Millie slept, Edna daydreamed. The last six years of her life had been difficult—first the death of her fiancé and later the discovery that her boyfriend and the father of her son, Merlin, was an incorrigible womanizer. Edna had hit a dead end. But on the Coleen, she dared to dream again. She was in love with a generous, responsible man. They would raise a family together. They would live simply. It would be a hard life, but the girls would grow up happy. Millie and Coleen would learn to be comfortable in the woods, to fish and hunt, to identify birds and gather berries, to paddle a canoe, snowshoe, ski, and perhaps trap, too. Though Edna had only stayed in school until the tenth grade, she and Heimo were determined to give Millie and Coleen a good education. The girls would get even more attention than children in Fairbanks did. Edna would oversee their studies. She knew she was smart; she picked up things quickly, and what she lacked in formal education, she would make up for through sheer effort. If need be, she would learn herself, and she would teach the girls, as best she could. A good life.
One day, while sitting with the girls on the gravel bar, Edna felt a searing stab of pain. She had just finished demonstrating for Millie the coarse whistle of a gray jay when it hit her. The pain dug at her abdomen and left her gasping. She tried to ignore it, but when it returned, thirty minutes later, she couldn’t. This time it lasted for nearly a minute. She had to lay Coleen down on the blanket because she didn’t have the strength to hold her. When it subsided, she took the girls back to the tent and described the symptoms to Heimo. They both hoped it was a freak pain and that it would soon disappear, but instead the pain grew progressively worse over the next few days. The sharp stabs were accompanied now by a dull but nearly constant ache.
Two weeks later, John Peterson, the Korths’ friend, who was now running a big game guiding and hunting operation along one of the rivers to the north in the Brooks Range, stopped in for a brief visit en route to his hunting camp. Heimo heard his plane and hiked out to meet him at the nearest gravel bar, where he’d landed, three miles downriver. “Thank God you stopped,” Heimo said. “Edna’s sick, and I’m worried about her.” Peterson had to deliver supplies to his hunting camp, but he promised to stop in again in two days on his way back to Fort Yukon. In those two days, Edna’s condition deteriorated. Her skin turned yellow with jaundice. Even the whites of her eyes were yellow. Worst of all, she couldn’t eat and could hardly get out of bed.
Two days later, Peterson landed downriver. Edna told Heimo that she couldn’t make it; there was no way she could walk that far. Heimo was frightened now and his response was more strident than he intended. “You got no choice,” he told her.
It took Edna three hours to cover the three miles. Heimo carried Coleen and provided a shoulder for Edna to lean on, and Millie walked on her own. A mile from the gravel bar, Edna had to stop to feed Coleen, who was wailing with hunger. When they finally made it to the plane, Edna nearly collapsed. Heimo had to lift her into the seat. Then there was Coleen. What were they going to do about Coleen? There was no other way; Edna would have to take Coleen with her, and Millie would stay at the cabin with Heimo.
Peterson flew Edna and Coleen to Fort Yukon and then rushed her to the clinic, where they diagnosed her condition as cirrhosis of the liver. The nurses there had seen so many alcohol-related illnesses that they never considered it might be anything else. Edna insisted that she was not a drinker, and only then did the nurses call the Fairbanks hospital to consult with a physician. When the nurse described the symptoms, the doctor knew immediately—a gallbladder attack. Get her to Fairbanks on the next plane, he demanded, or she might die. Arrangements were made to leave Coleen with a friend in Fort Yukon. When Edna arrived at Fort Yukon’s tiny airport, the daily commuter plane to Fairbanks was taxiing down the runway. They radioed the pilot and made him turn around. Edna arrived in Fairbanks at 7:00 P.M. that evening and was rushed to the operating room. Two hours later, she was recuperating from surgery. The doctors had performed an emergency gallbladder operation, an operation that saved her life.
By the time Edna and Coleen returned to the river two weeks later, Heimo had the new cabin finished. It was big but crudely and hurriedly built. With fall coming on, there was a real possibility of snow, and Heimo did not have time to lay in a floor. Edna lay spruce boughs over the dirt floor, for warmth and to contain the dust. But there was nothing she could do about the lack of light in the cabin. Inside it was dark and gloomy because Heimo had not had time to peel the logs.
For Coleen’s first birthday, Heimo and Edna threw a big party. It was late May and they’d just left the river. They’d spent a few days in Fort Yukon, but were now in Fairbanks, renting a cabin without indoor plumbing. Heimo was peeling logs for the summer for a builder, hoping t
o earn enough money to buy supplies for the upcoming trapping season. Many of their friends showed up for the birthday celebration, and Erich and Irene Korth came, too.
Heimo picked up his parents at the airport in an old broken-down car he’d bought for the summer. When Heimo saw his mother pushed off the plane in a wheelchair, he was struck by her appearance—how dramatically her health had declined. It had been just one year since Heimo and Edna were in Wisconsin. As a wedding present Irene Korth had bought them the plane tickets. Though she had already been diagnosed with cancer, she was full of life and energy, on her feet for much of the day, cooking big meals, doing household chores, and dispensing an abundance of affection. “She loved Edna and me up,” Hemo remembers. Now, though, she was gaunt and frail. She and Erich had been to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but the cancer, which began in the pancreas, had metastasized to the liver. Irene’s skin now had the shiny yellow hue of jaundice, as Edna’s had when she’d had the gallbladder attack. Quietly, while they waited for their bags, Erich Korth told Heimo how sick Irene had been. Publicly she expressed hope that she’d recover, but privately Irene confessed to her husband that she knew it was only a matter of time. The pain was almost constant now, Erich said, and as a last resort Irene had been to see a faith healer.
Irene’s final wish, before she died, was to see her granddaughter, Coleen. It was a happy visit, marred only by what happened two days before Erich and Irene were scheduled to return home.
Heimo, Edna, and Erich Korth were out hauling water; Irene wanted to spend as much time as she could with her granddaughters and insisted on staying behind to watch Coleen and Millie. It was a dry summer all over the Interior, and lightning had sparked a number of fires nearby. Fairbanks skies hung heavy with smoke. The Bureau of Land Management was using World War II bombers to spread retardant. When Irene saw the bombers fly overhead, she panicked. With Coleen in her arms, and holding Millie by the hand, she fled the cabin and ran down to the main road. She was wandering along the road, as cars sped by her, babbling incoherently, when Heimo, Edna, and Erich found her. They were being bombed, she howled, just like during the war, and they needed to find a place to hide.
The Final Frontiersman Page 24
