The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  The planes were all too reminiscent of the war. Irene was born in 1929 in Hausen, Germany, fifteen miles south of Frankfurt. While her brother was sent to the Russian front, where he later died, and her father was forced into military service, she and her mother and three sisters spent much of World War II in a bomb shelter, hiding from the savage one-two punch of the British and American air campaign. It was an experience she never forgot.

  Edna took Coleen in her arms and pulled Millie against her leg, and Heimo comforted his mother, embracing her until her trembling stopped. “It’s nothing, Mom,” he repeated again and again. “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”

  A day later, when Heimo took them to the airport, Irene Korth admitted that she was embarrassed by the incident. She didn’t know what had come over her. When Heimo hugged her good-bye, he knew that he would never see her again. She had always supported his decisions, even if they had puzzled her. He would miss his ally, but his greatest regret was that Coleen would grow up without having known her.

  Before leaving Fairbanks for the trapline, Heimo traded his car to a friend in exchange for a seventeen-foot canoe. The canoe represented an important step in the Korths’ lives. Just transporting their gear and supplies to the cabin had always been a two- or even a three-day chore. Now, if they landed upriver, they could load the canoe with supplies and float down. If they landed below the cabin, they could line up. It would also make transporting meat less of an ordeal. When Heimo shot a caribou or, worse, a moose, he had to carry all the meat back to the cabin before he could hang it. It was grueling, backbreaking work.

  After a brief stopover in Fort Yukon, Heimo arrived at the cabin in late July in poor spirits. He had called his mother one last time before he left Fort Yukon, and she’d resisted, hanging up. “Bye, Mom,” he said, “I gotta go. I really gotta go. I love you.” Both of them knew they would never talk to each other again.

  Five days later, Heimo waited for the Arctic Circle airplane that would bring in Edna and Coleen. Millie had already flown back to Savoonga with a family friend to be with Edna’s parents. When Edna and Coleen didn’t arrive, Heimo worried. Was it weather, mechanical problems? What he didn’t know was that Edna and Coleen and the pilot had to make an emergency landing on a gravel bar one hundred miles downriver on the Porcupine.

  An hour into the flight, the pilot broke the bad news to Edna. The plane’s throttle was stuck, he said. We’ll have to land. “What?” Edna asked, adjusting her headset. “What?” she raised her voice. “We have to land—now!” the pilot answered. “Hold on and don’t let go.” Edna held Coleen as tightly as she could, hugging her to her chest and locking her fingers. Then she looked out the window. The pilot was descending quickly. “Please, God, don’t let us crash.” She kissed Coleen. When she looked out the window again she spotted the gravel bar. She pulled Coleen close, and leaned back and braced her feet against the bottom of the pilot’s seat. When the plane hit with a loud “thunk,” the pilot instantly cut the engine. Edna looked out the window. Would the bar be long enough? Then she closed her eyes. “Huhhhhh,” she heard over her headset, a long expulsion of air. Only then did she dare to look out the window. The pilot had brought the plane to a stop just before the river. Edna’s leg muscles quivered.

  The pilot didn’t waste any time radioing for help. Ten minutes later, it started to rain. A bit colder, Edna knew, and the rain would swiftly turn to snow. She was determined not to wait in the plane and freeze, so she put Coleen in her backpack and pulled its drawstring so that only Coleen’s head was showing and left the plane. Then she gathered wood and kindling for a fire. For three hours, she and Coleen and the pilot huddled around the fire to stay warm before they were rescued. That evening, back in Fort Yukon, Edna sent Heimo a Trapline Chatter, alerting him that she and Coleen were okay.

  The following day, after an uneventful flight, Edna and Coleen made it to the cabin. They were there for only two days when Heimo decided to line the canoe upriver to check out a second cabin site, which he had already cleared with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Fairbanks. Over the summer, after examining the records of his fur take since arriving on the river, Heimo came to the conclusion that he was trapping out the local fur-bearing population. He was especially concerned about the marten and the beaver, which, unlike the wolf, wolverine, lynx, and fox, had small ranges, and were more susceptible to trapping pressure. His marten take revealed an undeniable trend: 66 marten for the winter of 1978-1979; 105 marten in 1979-1980; 121 marten in 1980-1981; 59 marten in 1981-1982; and 35 marten in 1982-1983. New country was the only solution, so he’d gone to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife office and proposed the idea and was given the go-ahead.

  Heimo loaded the canoe with food, a lantern, sleeping bags, a tent, a shotgun with slugs for bears, and his 22.250 in case they came across caribou. Heimo lined the boat upriver, while Edna walked along the bank with Coleen on her shoulders. Coleen loved to be umucked, the Siberian Yupik word for toting someone on your shoulders. She loved the vantage point and waved to Heimo from the riverbank. Heimo waved back and occasionally shouted, “I love you, Guroy,” their affectionate nickname for Coleen. After the way she’d devoured her cake at her birthday party, they started calling her “Guroy,” a Yupik word that translated to something like “Little Piggy.”

  Four miles upriver, near the mouth of Marten Creek, Heimo shot a caribou, so they set up camp and hung and dried the meat. He shot two geese that evening and roasted them over an open fire. After three days, they continued their journey. When they reached the spot that he and the Fish & Wildlife official had plotted on the map, he was thrilled. The location was ideal—lots of good timber in which to hide his cabin, dead trees for firewood, high ground, and what looked to be a year-round spring. They overnighted at the future cabin site, and the following day they floated down to the lower cabin, where Heimo began working on the floor. He’d brought in some plywood, vowing that he would not allow his family to spend another year with a dirt floor. Covered by spruce branches, the dirt floor was cold in winter and muddy in spring. There were needles and dust everywhere. Heimo had signed on with Keith Koontz again that August to guide hunters, so he had to work fast. He did not like the idea of leaving Edna and Coleen alone, but he had no choice; 1982-1983 had been a poor fur year and guiding was good money.

  Three weeks later, Heimo returned from hunting camp. Coleen was fifteen and a half months old now, and she had inherited her father’s love of walking. Edna told Heimo how she and Coleen had hiked up and down the river, and Heimo could see how proud Edna was. When Coleen came to hug him, Heimo noticed that Edna had tied bells to her coat. “What’s that for?” he asked her, and Edna explained that Coleen was a born explorer like her father. “She loves to get away from me and go off on her own,” she told him. “Once I thought I lost her. I found her by the banks of the river. It really scared me. She could have fell in so easily. After that I tied bells to her coat so I always knew where she was.”

  That evening the moon was nearly full and Edna, Heimo, and Coleen went for a walk along the river. Heimo umucked Coleen, and from his shoulders, she cried out and pointed to the moon, “Moo, moo.”

  The winter of 1983-1984 began mildly with very little snow and temperatures that rarely dropped lower than 10 below. By January, however, the warm spell abruptly ended. On January 7, Heimo loaded wood into the woodstove and then went outside to check the weather. His breath crackled in the dry air; the tops of the trees hardly moved at all. No wind, Heimo thought—a sure sign that it was bitterly cold. The thermometer, attached to the black spruce tree just outside the cabin door, read 55 below. Heimo returned to the cabin, deciding that it was too cold to check his lines; 55 below—it wouldn’t last. But he was wrong. The weather didn’t break until January 23, when warm southerly winds whispered in, ending the cold’s frigid grip over the southern foothills of the Brooks Range. Then, in early February, the weather changed again. Temperatures locked in at minus 35 and didn’t budge for more tha
n three weeks.

  To make matters worse, a bush pilot had stopped in to deliver word that Heimo’s mother had died in December. Though he had known that previous summer that her death was imminent, Heimo was hit hard by the news.

  That winter Heimo had his worst trapping season since the early days on the middle fork of the Chandalar River. By spring, he had only managed to catch fifteen marten. Because the snowshoe hare population was down, lynx were scarce, too. Even wolves, which were normally plentiful along the Coleen, were hard to find; Heimo caught only two. Only wolverines, of which Heimo got six, saved his year from being a disaster. Nevertheless, after two poor seasons in a row, Heimo knew that he and Edna would have to make a change. He did the math and figured out that they would have barely enough for supplies for the following season, particularly after the plane tickets. In April, before breakup, Edna and Coleen were flying out to bring Millie back from Savoonga. Heimo asked Edna to leave Coleen with him, but Edna knew that Coleen would just be in Heimo’s way. Besides, Edna said, Coleen needed to get out. None of them had seen another human being since the previous July.

  Before she and Coleen left the river, Heimo and Edna finalized their plans to spend the next season upriver.

  On April 8, just before Edna and Coleen flew out, Heimo wrote his friend Jim Kryzmarcik from Wisconsin.

  Jimmer,

  It is now April 8th and we are at the trapline cabin. We will be moving upriver about 20 miles to build a new cabin, more fur up there. I brought the boat up there dragging it behind the snowmachine a couple weeks ago. I set up the tent and stove at the same time. Edna and the kids will be up there in about a week… . Well this winter has been the poorest trapping season I had on the river.

  Heimo included a ptarmigan feather with the letter.

  While Edna and Coleen were gone, Heimo hauled up the canoe and supplies by snowmachine and began cutting trees for a new cabin. On April 21, a day later than Heimo expected them, Edna, Millie, and Coleen made it in. Spring was late and the snow was still a foot deep, so the pilot had an easy time finding a gravel bar to land on. Heimo picked up Edna and the girls with the snowmachine and ferried them back to the tent camp.

  Far from being a hardship, living in their temporary tent camp was idyllic. At night they spread a sleeping bag over a bed of spruce boughs and slept under caribou skins. Coleen lay between Heimo and Edna, and Millie snuggled against Edna’s back for comfort and warmth. Edna was glad to be back home.

  Edna and I have gone to the river to haul the last two buckets of water. After a full day of washing clothes, Edna has only one more load to do. The sky is a faded, almost fragile blue, and we stop to watch two birds soar among the wisps of clouds. One has a tremendous wingspan. The other is smaller, with narrow, bent, streamlined wings. “Golden eagle,” Edna says, “and an osprey.”

  I have been accompanying Edna for a portion of the afternoon. She has been unusually talkative—lighthearted, even—perhaps because the burden of doing laundry has finally been lifted from her shoulders. The cabin yard is a web of impromptu clotheslines, rigged for the occasion, but that doesn’t matter; Edna is nearly done. The relief is evident in the way she moves. She jumps a small channel of water between the gravel bars. For a moment she reminds me of Krin.

  Edna plunges her bucket into the river and sets it down on the gravel bar. Earlier she’d been telling me about Savoonga, about her father’s fox camp, and she picks up now as if the narrative thread had never been interrupted. “When I was young,” Edna remembers, “there were stories, always stories. My little friends and me used to go to an old woman’s house to hear them. She’d tell us stories and she’d fall asleep—she was very old—and we’d nudge her awake. Now they have TV, and things have changed.

  “Gotta rest my legs,” she explains, sitting down next to me. She picks up a rock and tries to skip it from a sitting position. It skips twice and sinks. “They’re lost,” she says. “The people in Savoonga. They’re trying to hold on to their language and their dance—that’s good—but the hunting is disappearing. They don’t need to hunt. They can collect their welfare checks. I hunt and trap. Why can’t they? We own the island.” Edna is referring to the fact that the residents of the island refused to participate in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, choosing instead to retain the fee simple title to 1.136 million acres of land on the island. “We thought that owning our own land would make things different, but it didn’t change.” Her people, she thinks, are wandering in a world in which they have no firm footing, caught between the traditions of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Only whaling still has the power to bring the people of St. Lawrence Island together. On the other hand, the island’s two Native Corporations are trying to initiate business ventures. One new effort allows islanders to sell ivory, artifacts, and whalebones discovered during spring “subsistence digging” forays among the ancient and abandoned villages of the island and then sell them to auction houses across the world.

  Suddenly Edna falls silent. It is a habit I am now familiar with, so I say nothing. “Do you understand?” she asks, after scratching at the gravel with a stick. I assure her that I understand her feelings about her former home. “Do you understand?” she asks again, looking at me for the first time since she started talking about Savoonga. “I love Savoonga, but it is hard for me to see what’s goin’ on there.”

  When Edna and Coleen returned from Savoonga with Millie, Heimo was glad to have his girls back. Though the adjustment of having people around after six years of living alone was difficult for Heimo, he had come to love, and depend on, Edna and Coleen’s presence so much that he no longer enjoyed being alone. Even Millie, it seemed, was happy to be on the river again, reunited with her mother and Coleen and, Heimo hoped, perhaps him, too.

  For a month they peeled logs in the morning and hunted in the afternoon for ptarmigan and spruce grouse. The pace was relaxed, casual. They would build a cabin in a new place, and their fortunes would turn—or else. They’d talked about it—this ominous “or else”— obliquely at first, the prospect of having to leave the trapline. And they always arrived at the same spot: Another bad trapping year, and they’d have to consider leaving; they’d have no other choice.

  But for a month, at least, they were able to forget. While Heimo and Edna peeled logs in the snow along the river, Millie and Coleen played tag and hide-and-seek on the bank above, and most of the time, Heimo and Edna knew where Coleen was by the sound of the bells. When the sound faded, Heimo bounded up the bank and called for her. More often than not, she refused to answer, and Heimo followed her trail, sometimes deep into the woods. He’d find her hiding behind a tree with her hands covering her eyes, believing as all children do that if they can’t see you, well, then, surely you can’t see them.

  Heimo scooped her up in his arms and ran through the woods. “I got you, I got you,” he yelled. And then the two of them searched for Millie. Sometimes, in the late morning, Coleen tired and then she fell asleep on the caribou skin, which Edna laid on top of the snow like a picnic blanket. Millie would sit next to her and read.

  Breakup didn’t come that year until May 22. When it did, the Korths’ spring idyl ended. It was as if the reality of their situation suddenly struck them. They had no intentions of going to Fairbanks or Fort Yukon that summer, and the mosquitoes were already ravenous; they would only get worse. By the time mid-June arrived, Heimo knew that they would have to spend the majority of their days on the gravel bars, far away from the trees and the underbrush. It was the only way to escape the swarming mosquitoes. Though he wanted to go to town as much as Edna, it was just too expensive. They could not afford to buy even the most basic supplies. Better to stay at the cabin and live off the land, subsisting on geese and what they could gather—willow leaves, Indian potato, and wild onion. But soon enough the geese migrated through, and then they ate whatever they could get their hands on— porcupine, late-season ducks, ground squirrels, grayling. It was too soon after breakup for gra
yling to be in the river, but they were lucky enough to find some in the creek.

  On June 2, Heimo remembered that they’d left a twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal in a fifty-five-gallon drum at the lower cabin. He told Edna that he was going to go and get it and bring it back the same day. But then he reconsidered. The water was still too high to line the canoe back up the river. He could float down alone and hike back, but that would mean leaving the canoe at the lower cabin for at least another week, and they’d probably need it before that. Heimo suggested that they all float down. Because there were more lakes, there would be more ducks and geese at the lower cabin. And surely, they wouldn’t have a problem finding Indian potato, willow leaves, and wild onion. Besides, they both knew it wasn’t a hard float; they’d discovered that the previous spring. Edna agreed; they’d float down together. That was the best plan.

  On the morning of June 3, Heimo read the temperature—a crisp 30 degrees— but the sky was clear in every direction. At least they would not have to contend with rain. Heimo loaded the canoe, and then he positioned Millie in the middle and set Coleen in Millie’s lap. Edna took the bow, and Heimo sat in the stern to do the steering.

  Two miles downriver, Heimo saw a sweeper, a large tree hanging low over the river, and he knew then that they were in trouble. It had not been there the previous spring, he was sure of that; it must have toppled during breakup. He paddled furiously to try to maneuver around it, but the current pulled at the canoe. They hit the sweeper full force and the canoe flipped. The next thing Heimo knew, they were in the water, a deep hole. God, was it cold. Heimo surfaced and saw Edna hanging on to the canoe. Instinctively, he grabbed for Millie. It was then that he realized that she no longer had hold of Coleen.