It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  Charlie sat, anchoring his elbows on his knees, and raised his ­sixteen-power binocs, while Jonathan manned the spotting scope I recognized from Charlie’s kitchen table. Wordlessly, they clamped down on the scenery, squeezing it with their eyes for caribou. I had tried the binoculars in camp and found that I couldn’t hold them steady enough to use. I couldn’t fathom how Jonathan could free-hand the sixty-power spotting scope. No one spoke for long minutes. I exchanged shrugs of shared uselessness with Roy, an old friend of Albert’s who had come for the funeral. Neither of us had optics. It wasn’t likely either of us would see something these guys didn’t.

  At last Charlie grunted softly and asked Jonathan what he made of the group on the second mountain range, up where the gray of the rock face met the uppermost yellow band of willow. I hadn’t given much thought to Jonathan until now. He was a taciturn man in a navy ball cape with scraggly facial hair and a voice like Oscar the Grouch. Turning the scope to the indicated spot, he finally deigned to use the scope’s tripod. “Yah, some nice bulls in that group,” he murmured. “Two real big ones on the right. Had them in silhouette for a moment. They’re moving pretty good.” Charlie and Jonathan both tried to show me through their respective optics, but I couldn’t see anything that might have been caribou. “It helps if you already know the country,” Charlie said. “That way, you know when you’re seeing something that wasn’t there before.” He said the trick was to look for little black dots, specks. If the specks moved they were caribou. Although this was the shortest glassing lesson I’d ever received, it was also comprehensive. I asked how many and how far off the bulls they’d seen were. Charlie thought and said, “There’s about nine in that group. And, oh, twenty-five miles or so.” Jonathan nodded in agreement. “Yah, about that.”

  “So they’ll be here in . . .” I asked, letting my voice trail off.

  “Two days,” Charlie answered. “If they keep coming this way.” He turned back to glassing. In the next few minutes Charlie identified four additional groups of bulls, none of them numerous. Each of the bulls that were traveling together amicably now in the various bachelor groups would go its own way when the rut kicked into high gear. “Then some of them will kill each other with their horns,” he said.

  He and Jonathan spotted another clutch of bulls they estimated at forty miles away. He had sighted one group that he thought was coming our way. If animals in this group kept coming, they’d probably pass a rock dome twelve miles away. We’d be able to see them better and ambush them from there. With no more discussion, the decision to try for these bulls had been made. We got back into the Argo for the four-hour ride. Several times, crossing the streams that invariably ran in the seam between hills, we had to get out while Charlie used the Argo’s winch to cross. The Argo never went fast, but it always went. It took us the full four hours to reach the dome.

  When we arrived, we climbed the rounded outcropping to glass again. Charlie handed me his rifle and had me follow two steps behind him as we walked quietly up the hill. “Be ready,” he said. “Caribou like high places like this. The wind keeps the flies away.” I had told Charlie I was a lousy offhand shot, but I was happy to be holding the rifle and honored to be thought of as more than a passenger. I had decided not to take any shot over 100 yards unless I could get into a sitting position. I stayed close, ready to hand the rifle back to Charlie quickly if an animal beyond my self-imposed limit presented itself. It wasn’t easy. Charlie never looked like he was working at it, but the guy could cover ground.

  We didn’t jump any caribou, but we glassed until ten o’clock, when the light finally started to go. Charlie hadn’t seen the group he was after. This was good, however. He explained that the terrain was such that they’d drop below our line of sight if they were headed our way. That we couldn’t see them wasn’t proof, of course, that they were still headed our way. But Charlie seemed encouraged and that was enough for me. I thought of what Jonathan had told me earlier, “My grandma said we used to live just like animals, because animals were all what was in their brain.” Charlie’s brain worked like that. He didn’t talk a great deal about caribou, which surprised me at first. The hunters I knew speculated endlessly about the habits of deer or ducks. I wondered whether, paradoxically, it was the very primacy of caribou that meant there was no great need to discuss them, or whether there was an ongoing but nonverbal conversation about them that was beyond my ken. I noted that when Charlie did speak of caribou, his observations were always framed in terms of what the animals required at a certain moment and why.

  We set up camp below the dome, collecting drinking water from pools in the moss here and there. I helped start a fire with the wood we’d brought while Roy Henry put up the small tent. Dinner was simple and quick: coffee, instant macaroni, and fried caribou. Salt was the only condiment. We hadn’t walked much, but riding in the Argo was like riding a slow-motion mechanical bull. I didn’t know about the others, but I was exhausted. The tent was absurdly small, designed for two men with minimal gear. We laid our sleeping bags out and essentially fell into them fully clothed. There wasn’t room to roll over or change position. How you landed was how you slept. Each man laid his rifle between him and the next man in what I’d come to think of as “Alaska ready” condition—the bolt closed, the chamber empty, but the magazine full. All that was needed to be ready to shoot was to work the bolt once and pull the trigger. There was a rock under my back when I landed. For the only time in my life, I was so tired that it made no difference.

  I awoke the next morning to find Charlie gone and Jonathan and Roy still asleep. I crawled out of the tent and walked quietly up to the top of the dome, trying to keep downwind of where Charlie might be in case he had animals in sight. After nearly an hour, I saw him walking my way with his rifle. He had killed a cow for camp meat and needed the Argo to haul it. After that, he’d seen the group of bulls. So far, his hunch had held. They looked as if they would pass by here in a couple of hours. Jonathan and Charlie quickly dressed and quartered the cow, a task as familiar to them as opening the mail was to me. At one point, Jonathan had removed the lacy membrane of fat covering the stomach in one piece, almost like a doily, and hung it on a bush to dry. “Icha’ats’a chu, we call it,”’ he said. “Old-timers used to use the stomach as a cooking pot,” he continued, rolling the carcass so the guts spilled downhill. “They’d clean it out and put pieces of meat in it. Then they’d dig a hole and put hot rocks in, some dirt, and then that folded-over stomach. In an hour or so, it’d be ready. That was before we had pots.” This was a veritable torrent of language for Jonathan, as many or more words as I’d heard him say in my days here. We loaded the cow and went back to camp, and Jonathan began frying up some of the fresh meat. Charlie stood atop the Argo to keep tabs on the bulls.

  They must have changed course or moved faster than he thought, because the next time I looked over Charlie was gone, already jogging across the tundra with the .270 in one hand. That he had said nothing—merely grabbed the gun and gone—told me how urgent the situation was. I took off after him. By this time he had slowed to a brisk walk, which was good, because I couldn’t run in this terrain. At every step I sank four inches into the ground. It was like running in cement. I saw the spot he was headed for, a rock mound atop a slight rise about a mile off. Within 200 yards, I’d removed my parka, vest, hat, and fleece jacket. Meanwhile Charlie scissored away on his long legs.

  A few hundred yards from the mound, he dropped to a crawl. I’d closed the distance a bit, but he was still about 300 yards ahead of me. A moment later, he looked back and made an emphatic “down” motion with his arm. I hit the spongy ground as if struck by lightning. The last thing I wanted was to be responsible for a busted stalk. After a minute, he looked back again, seemed relieved that I’d obeyed, and, with a sweep of his arm, indicated that I should stay low and approach from farther downwind. I doglegged to the right, in a low Groucho Marx walk. When I finally got to the rocks
he was calmly smoking a cigarette. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said quietly. “You’ll get tired.” In a whisper, I asked how far the bulls were. “About a hundred yards,” he said. Then he stubbed out the cigarette and stood. From a mid-crouch I could just see three bulls placidly walking along. They stopped when they saw Charlie, as if unsure what this two-legged creature was. All three were large and fat, with dried scraggly strips of velvet still clinging to their antlers. A few hundred yards behind them were some cows with calves.

  Charlie dropped the first bull with a neck shot, then shot again when it tried to rise. He put two shots into the next caribou, which staggered, stood still for a long moment, and toppled over. It looked dead before it hit the ground. The third bull, farther off, took a bullet and stood, seemingly unperturbed by the lead insect bite, as if it was trying to remember something. I heard the click-clack of Charlie pushing shells into the rifle’s empty magazine, and the snick as he shoved the magazine back into the rifle, then another shot. The bull rocked slightly as it absorbed another bullet. Then it turned and began slowly walking directly away from us. I remember being struck by the deliberate way it did things. There was no lethal shot at this angle and neither of us spoke as we prayed for it to turn. After another forty yards, it finally did, offering a 175-yard quartering-away shot. Charlie’s shot was high, splintering a piece of antler above the animal’s head. The next shot appeared as a red blossom just behind its ear. The bull fell into a heap.

  Charlie showed no elation. If anything, he seemed strangely subdued, almost down. I imagined it was regret at not having killed as cleanly as he expected of himself. Maybe it was that, as for many hunters, the final act of the hunt—the killing—was, while necessary, the part he liked least. Maybe it was both. In any case, he was suddenly all business. He handed me the rifle and a handful of shells. “I’m going back to get the Argo,” he said. His voice was firm and flat. “I don’t want any crows or bears on that meat.” With that, he was gone, walking in that same ground-covering stride. I loaded four bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber, closed the bolt, and engaged the safety. Only then did I look around. The cows and calves had altered course and were heading away from me. In the distance I saw another group of caribou behind the cows, though they were too far to distinguish bulls and cows. I must have sat for half an hour or more. There was no sound, only the occasional pulse of a breeze. No birds or bears came. I marked and memorized where each downed caribou lay. It was easy to lose them against the tundra. The way to find them was to look for the only things that didn’t sway at all in the wind.

  We spent about two hours gutting and cutting the caribou. Charlie said that we had too much weight on our hands to wrap the meat in its own hide, that we needed to skin it all out. Roy and I worked together silently, skinning the caribou, then using the skin to stack the meat on, then tossing the pieces into the tarp lining the back of the Argo. By the time we loaded everything, Jonathan and I, riding in the back atop meat, gear, and guns, were sitting noticeably higher than Charlie and Roy in front. We rode for four or five hours, stopping only for water at the seams between hills. It was eight o’clock by the time we reached the ridge camp, still bright as afternoon. I suddenly realized how tired and bloody I was. My hands were covered with the dark caribou ink. My shirt, pants, and boots were stained with it. It was strange to be covered in blood but not to feel dirty. I realized that it almost felt the opposite.

  I was also ravenous. I attacked a plate of fried meat and rice without washing. When I hit a tough piece of meat, I grabbed the nearest thing, which happened to be my hunting knife, the same one I’d been using to butcher. After dinner, awaiting the cup of coffee that I hoped would keep me awake long enough to dig my sleeping bag out and find a place to unroll it, I washed and rinsed my plate and utensils in the tubs of soapy and clean water by the kitchen. Back at the fire, Jonathan looked at me and shook his head. “Shouldn’t wash your knife like that,” he said. “Soap and hot water, they’re bad for a hunting knife.”

  Charlie nodded in agreement. “Rolls the edge.” In practical terms, this made no sense whatsoever. The important thing was that they thought enough of me to instruct me in the basics of knife care. I felt grateful, even honored, for this. I thanked the both of them for telling me about soap and hot water.

  We drank our coffee in silence for a few minutes. “When it’s all over, your trip,” said Jonathan, “you gotta make a conclusion about it, right?” I told him he was correct. I asked what he thought it should be. “Well, . . .” he mused, the tip of his cigarette glowing as he took a puff. “This world, this country, it’s rough, you know? You see it. So you got to be tough. Not just in your body but also in your mind. That’s what I’d say.”

  I bade everyone good night, found an empty tent, and was almost instantly asleep. When I woke the next morning, Charlie had already gone. He had taken some other guys out up top. There were still a lot of people in the village who needed meat.

  BOILED GROUND SQUIRREL

  Take one freshly trapped and deceased ground squirrel.

  Gut it using your knife and fingers.

  Throw the carcass into a medium-to-large fire with a good bed of coals and active flames. It’s best if the fire is made outdoors. When all the animal’s hair has been singed black—you’ll be able to tell by looking and by a smell that makes you think you will never again be hungry—remove the carcass. Roll from side to side with sticks until it stops smoking.

  When the animal has cooled to the point that it can be picked up in your hands, do so. Using the spine (back edge) of a knife, scrape the singed hair off the animal, throw it in a pot of boiling water, and add a small handful of salt. Cook at a slow boil for one hour.

  Remove squirrel. Drain. Eat.

  Epilogue:

  Don’t Ever Let that Man Near a Stove

  I had blood on my hands. And boots, one pants leg, and even my forehead, thanks to a reflexive swat at a late-season mosquito biting there. It was October and I was up to my wrists in the body of a doe I’d shot minutes earlier as she nosed for acorns twenty-five yards from my stand. She had run for forty yards, white flag of tail tracing those leaping arcs through the air only whitetails seem capable of. On the fourth or fifth, she’d landed unsteadily, taken a wobbly step, and collapsed. One moment she had been feeding calmly. Thirty seconds later she was dead, never having known of my existence or what had happened. She’d died as almost all deer do, eyes wide open. I remember hoping that my own death would be as swift and tidy. I thought of Charlie Swaney’s face after he’d dropped those three bull caribou. How there had been no elation or euphoria at bringing down so much meat. If anything, he’d looked subdued, almost unhappy. As if killing was his least favorite part of hunting.

  Returning home after visiting the Gwich’in had been like returning from another world, and I was still processing the experience. As I field-dressed the deer, I kept replaying an encounter I’d witnessed in Charlie’s house. Like Albert Joe, Charlie had been trying to wean the village boys from video games and get them up into the woods and tundra. I had been in the house, pretending to be absorbed in the blare of the TV, when Charlie had summoned his twelve-year-old nephew for a rare dressing-down. The week before he had taken the boy up to the camp along the ridge to trap ground squirrels and practice shooting. After a while, the boy, saying he needed to go back to camp for more bullets, had left. But he hadn’t gone to camp. He’d hitched a ride all the way back to the village to play on his computer.

  “We’re worried about you and your friends,” Charlie said. His voice wasn’t loud but his words sounded formal, rehearsed. “We’re worried that you’re not gonna be ready when hard times come. You’re not gonna know how to get around up on the tundra or feed yourself.” He told the boy that he wasn’t going to find the knowledge he needed to survive in his video games. It was waiting for him in the woods and “up on top,” meaning the tundra. “God ga
ve you that land up there,” Charlie said, his voice rising slightly. “He put it there for you to learn and to use. But if you don’t learn it and use it, you won’t love it. And if you don’t love it, you won’t fight for it. You won’t keep it. And then you’ll end up like those Indians living in apartments in Fairbanks.”

  I’d at first thought he meant the last line as a kind of joke. There were worse fates, after all. But then I saw. To Charlie, an apartment wasn’t about where you slept. It was about renouncing who you were. The way a man defined himself as Gwich’in was by engaging in the act of subsistence—by hunting and eating caribou and the other wild foods that gave a man strength. To turn your back on that, to go to a city and live in a box, was to become deracinated. To Charlie it was the supreme self-betrayal, the ultimate fall. For what was such a man? He was no longer Gwich’in. He was nobody. He was a walking ghost.

  I felt as if I were some strange reverse image of those alienated boys. They hungered for the pleasures of the big world outside Arctic Village while I, frequently feeling lost in the wider world, hungered to be more deeply connected to the natural world they’d been born into. I could never become an Indian, just as I would never be a Cajun like Jody Meche or even an urban sea forager like Kirk Lombard. I was a modern man still trying to find out where I belonged. Why I hungered for that when so few of my peers did was something I still didn’t understand. (“Why seems it so particular with thee?” as Gertrude asks her melancholy boy.) But, in hindsight, I could see that the desire to know that other world had always been there. Playing cowboys and Indians, I’d always wanted to be the Indian. It wasn’t until much later that I could put a name to what I craved. And this was why I was so drawn to hunting, fishing, and foraging.