The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  The bush pilot makes two sweeps of the gravel bar, testing the wind and checking the bar for any obstructions before he decides to land. On another bar, large trees, torn from their roots and manhandled by the river during breakup, lay scattered among the stones and sand. Next spring, when the river is again transformed into a wild, rushing torrent, these trees will be gone, rolling and splashing their way to the Porcupine. Heimo creeps up the river in his canoe, hardly making any progress against the current with his three-horse engine.

  We land and wait for Heimo to meet us at the gravel bar. After a quick “Hi,” he loads our gear into the canoe. “It’ll take me a while,” he says. “I have to paddle. Motor’s screwed up. Keeps cuttin’ out on me.” Then he eases the canoe into the river. “Meet you on the other side of the island,” he yells back to us. “Watch out for bears. I’ve seen a lot of tracks farther upriver.”

  Rhonda and I slip on our hip boots and wade the river to reach the island. The river is down, only knee high and a limpid green. I can see the stones on its bottom as if there is no water separating us, as if the river itself doesn’t exist.

  When we reach the willows, they hum with the sound of so many mosquitoes I feel as if I’m at a NASCAR race. I walk quickly, swinging my arms to keep them at bay, aware that biologists have discovered rotting caribou, killed by marauding mosquitoes, that have been completely drained of blood. The sand is a calligraphy of tracks—moose, porcupine, the wide three-toed imprints of cranes, the webbing of goose prints, but no grizzly tracks. Heimo made better progress than he expected and is already waiting to take us across when we reach the far side of the island. “Water’s muddy,” he says. “Maybe caribou cross upriver or maybe bank collapse. I go upriver later and look.”

  I look at Rhonda and smile, and she understands my amusement.

  “After a couple of months in Fort Yukon, we always come back talking like that.”

  “What?” Heimo asks. “What?”

  “ ‘Maybe caribou cross upriver or maybe bank collapse,’ ” I imitate him. “ ‘I go upriver later and look.’ ”

  “How’s this?” Heimo asks, and affects a cultured English accent. “I daresay it was the caribou or perhaps a bank collapsed. Either way,” he says, drawing out a long “I” in “either,” “I intend to check after dinner.”

  “No,” I say, “it doesn’t suit you. Stick with ‘I go upriver.’ ”

  Heimo insists that Rhonda and I put on our life vests and then he paddles us across, aiming the bow of the canoe at a forty-five-degree angle to the current. A willow branch stranded in the middle of the river taps out a staccatto beat on the water’s surface. Once across, Heimo jumps from the canoe into a slow, shallow pool. With three quick half hitches he secures the canoe to a branch dug into the river bottom. Then he grabs our bags and trudges up to the cabin, muttering about the “goddamn motor.” I follow Rhonda. She stoops and grabs the leaf of a fireweed plant and eats it.

  “God, I’m going to miss it here,” she says, chewing the leaf.

  It’s a decision that Heimo and Edna and Rhonda, too, have been agonizing over for much of the last year—whether or not Rhonda should go “Outside” to attend high school. Over the summer, they made up their minds and arranged for Rhonda to live with Heimo’s younger brother, Tom, in Appleton and attend the same high school Heimo did—Appleton East. In late June, Heimo and Edna called me from Fort Yukon and asked if I’d be willing to escort her, to let her fly out with me. “Of course,” I said, realizing how difficult it would be for them to let go. They’d lose Rhonda for an entire school year and possibly for good. It would be hard on Heimo and Edna, and of course Rhonda, but I knew it would be equally hard on Krin.

  Sitting around the fire after supper, while mosquitoes hover around our chairs, waiting for our bug spray to wear off, Heimo and I talk about what leaving home will mean for Rhonda.

  Heimo is wearing only a T-shirt, and I can see that summer in Fort Yukon has taken its toll. Despite his running regimen—four miles a day—and spending every morning on the river with Fred Thomas tending gill nets, he looks as if he’s put on at least ten pounds.

  “Millie tried it,” Heimo tells me. “She lived with my brother Erich and his family, but that didn’t work out good at all. It’s going to be different with Tom, I think. And I have confidence in Rhonda. She’s got good head on her shoulders, too.” I stare at Heimo when he says this, and he averts his eyes. Then, finally, he lifts his head and breaks into a laugh. “Just kidding,” he says. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders, and I have faith in her. She was brought up with good values. I think she’s going to make the proper choices. Besides, she needs to get out and see things. It’s going to be hard on Edna and Krin, but it’s the right thing to do. Except for summers in Fort Yukon, she’s lived out here her whole life. There’s a big world out there, and she should have the opportunity to see it. When she’s finished with high school, if she wants to come back, she can. I hope she does, but that’s up to her. As far as ANILCA’s concerned, she can do that. It says that the permit can be renewed every five years ‘until the death of the last immediate family member of the original claimant.’ But after her and Krin, it’s over. They are the last people in America that will ever be able to live like this.”

  Rhonda has been doing the dishes and listening passively to our conversation, her head half turned in our direction. “How do you feel about it, Rhonda?” I ask her.

  She shrugs her shoulders and dunks the cup she’s just washed in the plastic rinsing tub. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Rhonda,” Heimo says.

  Rhonda speaks up now. I’ve witnessed it before—how much she needs her father’s respect, the lengths she’ll go to to make sure he’s proud of her. She doesn’t have it in her to disappoint him. She’s her father’s girl, his “little woodsman,” whom he can always rely on to do the right thing.

  “I’ll miss this place,” Rhonda replies. “I’m sure it’ll be hard, but personal style is in, and I think I have a lot of personal style, so I think I’ll be able to make friends quickly.”

  “I think you will, too,” I say, though I know that in a largely white city like Appleton Rhonda may meet with racism.

  “And you’ll wear fur in winter to show them that you’re proud of how you were raised,” Heimo insists.

  Later, when Rhonda and I are fetching water, I tell her, “It may be tough on you. Remember who you are and be proud of it. Some people might say nasty things. Don’t listen to them; they’re just idiots.”

  “You mean racists?” Rhonda asks, rescuing me from my ambiguity. “I can handle them.”

  Rhonda fills her bucket and I offer to carry it. “Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”

  Walking back upriver, she points to Mummuck Mountain, and for the first time I can see why they call it that. Mummuck is a Yupik word meaning “breast.” The nipple on the mountain is pronounced, the breast ample and rounded. Edna was the first one to notice it, in May 1984, shortly before Coleen died. “Mummuck,” Edna said, pointing it out to Heimo, and the name has stuck.

  “When the light is just right and caribou are on top of the ridge, you can see them from here without a spotting scope,” Rhonda says.

  “Have you ever been up there?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she responds, annoyed at my question. “What do you think? Three years ago I got my third caribou ever up there.”

  “So you got it when you were thirteen? When did you kill your first one?”

  “That was on the Sheenjek in 1998,” she says, “when we were living in the tent camp. I was twelve.”

  In the spring of 1998, before they left the Coleen, Heimo and Edna decided that they wouldn’t return to the river until the summer of 1999. They’d spend the following season on the Sheenjek River. Heimo felt the Coleen drainage needed to rebound from his trapping pressure. But there was more to it than that; they went for the wolves and for adventure, too. The Sheenjek has a high density of wolves, and Heimo was hoping
to catch half a dozen by spring. He and Edna were also excited about the prospect of exploring new country. Sixty miles west of their cabin on the upper Coleen, the terrain at the headwaters of the milky, glacier-fed Sheenjek River is rugged and mountainous.

  Today it is raining. It looks as if it might clear up, but Heimo has decided not to try putting on the new roof. Instead we fish our way down-river, hoping to catch enough grayling to feed the three of us for supper.

  “Only six. We’ll catch that in no time,” Heimo assures me.

  “Too bad,” I say. “I was hoping to spend more time on the river.”

  “Go ahead,” Heimo replies. “Spend the day, and catch all the fish you want.”

  When Heimo first came up, he enjoyed fishing, but he no longer has any patience for it. And he has no tolerance for my fly rod. “Never play a fish, just horse it in,” he says. There’s no room for the finer points; he fishes to eat. So we do what I call “guerrilla fishing.” Heimo is amused by the name, which only serves to make him fish faster. We walk down the riverbank at a good clip, and when Heimo spots a hole, he drops his spinner in and jigs it. He’ll jig the spinner for a minute or so—no more—and if a fish doesn’t bite, he moves on.

  “It’s not like fishing for trout down there,” he says, “where you have to work the stream. If there are grayling, they’ll bite. Grayling ‘pod up.’ Where there’s one, there’s more. Where there’s none, there’s none,” he says definitively.

  Guerrilla fishing. We catch our six fish in a remarkably short time, horsing them in like bait-and-bobber fishermen, and now we are about a mile downriver, lying on a sandbar in a meadow of goose grass. I have no idea what time it is, late morning, afternoon. It hardly matters. In summer, the sun circles above the horizon almost continuously. Morning, afternoon, evening, night—they are Lower Forty-eight constructs that are no longer applicable.

  “Just think how many millions of years it takes for rock to be ground down into sand. And people take it for granted,” Heimo says, sitting and grabbing a handful of sand, which he lets run between his fingers. “You know,” he says, pausing for a long time, “this is where Coleen died. This is where the canoe turned over. About a year after it happened, I found Coleen’s pink boot not too far downriver. Edna has it back at the cabin. But don’t tell her we were here. She doesn’t like to come here. She doesn’t even like to hear about it. She’s still afraid of the river.”

  Heimo says this and confirms my hunch. In spring I had watched Edna on the ice. She was cautious, walking on it only when it was necessary, and then she walked stiffly, as if each step was a matter of willpower. When she could avoid the river, she did. When the ice began to run and leads opened in the ice, her tentativeness struck me as something more elemental. It was fear, a fear born of painful experience and a memory that won’t leave her.

  “After Coleen’s death,” Heimo adds, letting the rest of the sand fall from his hand, “Millie was with us some, but she spent most of her time with Edna’s parents. Maybe she felt guilty. Edna tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t talk about it, so me and Edna never knew. I don’t know what it was, but Millie and me never hit it off. She resented me, and maybe I resented her a bit, too. As she got older, she didn’t like to be out here. No fun, bad memories, I don’t know. Anyway, when she turned fifteen, she went to Mount Edgecomb—Millie was really smart with books—a state-funded boarding school in Sitka, Alaska. I think she just wanted outta here. There was no holding her back. She said, ‘Sayonara,’ and left for good.”

  After Coleen’s funeral in early June 1984, Heimo, Edna, and Millie were led outside to a gathering, a traditonal Gwich’in potlatch, with moose, salmon, fry bread, chicken, and potato salad. There they were presented with $500 in cash, which the town had collected for them. People as far away as Arctic Village donated money. It was a godsend. The Korths were down to their last $4. But money couldn’t patch the hole in their hearts.

  A week later, the three of them left Fort Yukon to return to the river. While Edna and Millie waited on the gravel bar where the plane had dropped them off, Heimo made the trip to the cabin site. He alone would ford the river and test the current. It was better that way.

  Wearing hip boots, Heimo leaned against the current. Still churning with spring runoff, it slapped coldly at his thighs. Where the river slowed, he could see grayling holding in the deep holes. He crossed the river’s main channel, searching for the shallow water where the sun illuminated the gravel underneath, and then a smaller channel. As he approached the far bank, near the cabin site, what he saw on the gravel bar that had once been Coleen’s playground was almost more than he could take. He remembered how she had loved it here, playing tag, building sandcastles, throwing stones into the water. There among the knee-high willows were Coleen’s footprints, indentations from the pink boots she loved. Heimo kneeled down and touched one of the prints, then he proceeded to do the only thing he could. He walked up and down the gravel bar and stamped them out. Edna, he knew, would never be able to bear it. Then he splashed water on his face and wiped his eyes with his shirt and lined the canoe upriver to where Edna and Millie were waiting.

  When Edna saw the canoe she balked. She wouldn’t go downriver in it. “I’m gonna walk,” she said. Heimo explained that the river was too high, the current too fast for her to keep her feet, for him to try to carry Millie. “You got no choice, Edna,” he said. Edna eventually agreed, but she refused to paddle. Instead she sat in the middle of the canoe, gripping Millie with one hand, clasping the canoe’s rail with the other.

  For the next three weeks, Edna, Millie, and Heimo worked for eighteen hours a day, taking advantage of the sun, to build their new cabin. It was hard to summon the motivation, the energy to go on without Coleen, but by midday they were lost in their work and they could forget, if only temporarily. It was the work, Heimo says, that saved them.

  We are lying in the sand, under the summer sun, which even at this latitude feels hot, and Heimo is telling me the story. “I have issues with Fort Yukon, but the people there really helped us,” he says. “Even strangers. But that’s the way Fort Yukon is. For all its problems, the community rallies when a tragedy occurs. People forget their differences. A guy flips his boat, and his enemy will save him.”

  “So Brantley”—Edna’s brother—“helped you, too,” I say. “When you left Fort Yukon, didn’t he come out and help you build the cabin?”

  “No,” Heimo says, “we’d finished it long before that. Edna and Millie had to go to town in January because Edna was having bad problems with her teeth. That’s when Brantley came out. I told him that I could use his help while they were gone. But that wasn’t the real reason,” Heimo confesses. “I could have managed on my own. There was just the trapline, cooking meals, and hauling water. The truth is, I couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. I couldn’t stomach the idea of being out here by myself after Coleen.”

  Heimo grabs a stone and throws it into the woods, struggling to find words. “You never get over it,” Heimo says. “You just try to get used to it.”

  “Thinking back,” Heimo concedes, “it was probably a stupid thing for all of us to go down to the lower cabin, bad judgment, I don’t know. I had a dream the night before it happened. I dreamed that Coleen was going to die. Same with my mom, too. When I found out about my mom, I remembered the dream I had. They say my oma, my grandmother on my dad’s side, had those kind of dreams, too. I didn’t pay any attention to the dream. I thought it was nonsense.”

  When Edna returned from Fairbanks, she and Heimo had little to say to each other. They hardly spoke and almost never hugged. Heimo had fits of temper. He yelled and screamed when the snow covered his trapping trails, when the snowmachine stalled. There were days when he could not get out of bed, when he could not have cared less about trapping.

  Edna could only sob. One morning, after Heimo and Millie left to check one of Heimo’s short lines, Edna crawled into bed, pulled up the covers, and buried her head in a pillo
w. When Heimo and Millie returned in the early afternoon, Edna was still in bed. The small pile of wood that he had brought in that morning lay next to the stove. The fire had gone out and the cabin was cold.

  Heimo got the fire going again and made a dinner of fried caribou steaks, noodles, and canned spinach. He set Edna’s plate on a bucket next to the bed. After he and Millie had finished their meals, he went to her.

  “Please eat, Edna,” he said.

  “No,” she replied.

  Then Heimo lay beside her, and wrapped his arm around her. Edna sat up and pushed him away. “I want Coleen back,” she cried.

  “We had some terrible fights,” Heimo remembers. “It was our way of getting out the grief. When we talked, we talked about divorce. Millie had to see all that. It was tough on her. Things were bad between Edna and me for a long time, and then Rhonda was born. They say a child can’t save a marriage, but Rhonda being born saved ours. If she wasn’t born I don’t think we could have stuck together.”

  I wake early today to the sound of sandhill cranes croaking happily from the tundra. Despite the late spring freeze, which was hard on the berries, the cranes have been here for days now. They must have found a hardy patch of blueberries. When Heimo and Edna and Krin shoot some of the cranes this fall, their gizzards will be dark blue.

  Last night Heimo announced that today would be “roof day.” He has chosen well. The sky is a sea of pristine blue. Clouds lurk far to the north, but they will not pose a problem for us. According to KJNP, rain is not in the forecast.

  Heimo begins what will probably be a full-day project by draping large sections of cloth over the inside of the cabin. When he’s done with that, he and Rhonda and I climb onto the cabin roof and remove the moss, some of which crumbles and falls into the cabin below.

  “It’s gonna be a mess,” Heimo says, “but this roof’s gotta go. I put on this roof two years before you were born,” he tells Rhonda. Rhonda smiles wanly. She knows what Heimo means—he built the roof the month after Coleen died.