The Final Frontiersman Read online

  Heimo arrived at the cabin at 2:00 A.M. the following morning, chilled and vomiting from exhaustion. The last half-mile had seemed almost impossible. By the time he reached the cabin, Heimo was dangerously hypothermic, shivering and slurring his words. Edna helped him out of his clothes, wrapped a sleeping bag and a caribou skin blanket around him, and set him by the fire with a cup of hot tea and a bowl of moose broth. Then she led him to bed, where she held him until the following morning, when she could feel that his body temperature was finally beginning to rise. Heimo got up briefly, long enough to sip some of the soup. Then he fell asleep again. Waking in the early afternoon, he saw that Edna had crawled back in bed with him. She was nuzzled against him with Krin cradled in her arms. Rhonda slept on the other bed, snoring softly. The cabin was warm and smelled of fresh fry bread. Heimo walked to the stove and put more wood in. Slipping back into bed, he realized just how close he’d come to freezing in a snowbank like some dumb greenhorn. He kissed Edna on the forehead. Then he held Krin’s tiny hand and watched her until she and Edna woke.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Big Woods

  For Heimo, the Brooks Range represented the culmination of his boyhood desires. As soon as he landed in the mountains, he knew he was home. Some of his Wisconsin buddies might have thought that Alaska was a passing phase, but Heimo knew otherwise. John Peterson, the personable Minnesota-raised bush pilot who flew him into the Brooks Range to meet up with Keith Koontz and who remains Heimo’s good friend almost thirty years later, remembers the first time he ever met Heimo. “He was in Alaska, and he was beside himself. I have a picture of him stepping off the plane. He was grinning from ear to ear. He had his Wisconsin beer weight on and he was pudgy, but, God, was he eager. He told me that he’d spent two miserable years being a factory guy, and he’d hated it. He told me he’d been drinking a lot. Then he said—get this—he said, ‘I’m gonna be a mountain man.’ I thought, sure as shit this guy’s gotta be kidding. But then I could see that he was serious. Most guys that green don’t stand a chance. You know they’re going to die. But there was something about Heimo. He was going to do it.”

  Heimo recalls his first day in the Brooks Range. “I was singing the John Denver tune ‘Rocky Mountain High’ to myself,” he says. “You know, ‘I was born in the summer of my twenty-seventh year.’ I changed the lyrics to ‘I was born in the summer of my twentieth year,’ ‘coming home to the place I’d never been before.’ ”

  In mid-August Heimo wrote to his friend, Jim Kryzmarcik:

  Hey Budnick Buddy,

  Well I’m in Alaska and I am here to stay… . You wouldn’t believe the beauty up here. This is the only place a person can really say is God’s country. Dall sheep on the mountains, moose in the valleys, caribou on the tundra, ducks and geese all over, wolves and bear (grizzly)… . I am definitely going to live up here and for good.

  Heimo signed it “The Alaskan Kid” and included a P.S.: “Get a map of Alaska and look above the Arctic Circle for Fort Yukon and I’m 150 miles north of Fort Yukon by Arctic Village.”

  But even while surrounded by all the beauty, Heimo was having nightmares about going back to Wisconsin. He knew that by the end of August, he would again be searching for a job, and he was determined not to return. His indissoluble bond with the Alaskan landscape—the only wilderness large enough to patch the considerable hole in his heart and move his spirit—had already been established. It was a grand and ultimately costly obsession.

  “I was praying that I wouldn’t have to go back,” Heimo says. Thankfully, it never came to that. “Keith Koontz is really the one who got me started in Alaska. He knew I wanted to trap, so he contacted a friend of his, Kenny Miller, who agreed to set me up on Beaver Creek. I was about forty miles southwest of the village of Birch Creek and seventy miles south of Fort Yukon. I knew very little about trapping, but I knew that I wanted to live out in the woods.”

  John Peterson, who flew Heimo out to the cabin, shakes his head in disbelief and laughs now about Heimo’s determination. Peterson was doing some trapping then, too, and knew what it took. “I asked him if he wanted a radio, and he turned me down. He said, ‘No, I won’t have time for distractions. I’m gonna learn how to trap.’ ”

  By the end of September 1975, Heimo was set up in a cabin on Beaver Creek, and already his body had transformed to fit the country. In two short months he had dropped nearly fifty pounds from his Wisconsin high of 240 pounds. While working for Koontz he was cooking and cleaning up after hunters, escorting them up to 6,000 feet, and then, when they got a sheep or a caribou, a moose or a bear, packing it out toting loads of over one hundred pounds. And for the first month on Beaver Creek, he was living off what he could shoot—spruce and ruffed grouse and ducks.

  Beaver Creek was once the trapping territory of a Minnesota-born Swede named Iver Peterson, who trapped it until 1939. Folks in Fort Yukon called Peterson “the toughest man there ever was.” It was said that sled dogs couldn’t keep up with him. He was so strong and so intent on making money that during the winter months he trapped at night with a candle lantern regardless of the temperature. He was one of the country’s rugged, indestructible “hard-trappers.” One story goes that a trapper met up with him in the woods and noticed that he was nearly buckling under the weight of six fox skins and another half dozen frozen fox. He was on his way back to his cabin and had another seven miles to go. The trapper, who was running dogs, offered to take him home, and Iver shook his head. “This ain’t weight I’m carrying,” he replied, “this is money.” When he was thirty-nine Peterson snowshoed into the village of Beaver, picked up his new bride, a fourteen-year-old girl named Ruth, and carried her on his back, covering the sixty miles in two days. Well into his seventies, Peterson could still cut three cords of wood a day and he could draw a map of Beaver Creek from memory that was every bit as good as a USGS topographical map.

  Heimo had learned bits and pieces of Peterson’s history in Fort Yukon, and he was excited to be trapping the same country. For grubstaking Heimo, Kenny Miller had worked out an arrangement—Heimo would trap, and Miller would get half the fur. Heimo was happy to do it, since it meant that his dream would become a reality. When he called his mother from the pay phone at the airport in Fort Yukon and told her that he was headed for the woods to be an Alaskan trapper, she insisted on sending him the money to buy traps. She told him that other parents had to pay for college educations, but since Heimo wasn’t going to college, she and his father would gladly pay for his traps; Erich, though, still refused to talk with Heimo.

  Heimo went north because of a primal urge as strong as the drive that sends the caribou each year out of their coastal calving grounds and south over the passes of the Brooks Range. Contrary to what his father believed, Heimo was not running away from reality, but confronting it head-on. Beaver Creek was to be Heimo’s testing ground. Erich Korth regarded his son’s decision to make his life in Alaska as a deliberate repudiation of everything he’d urged his son to believe in, and Heimo was still bitter enough to let his father think what he wanted.

  From prehistory onward, the word wilderness has been used to define areas inimical to man. People’s imaginations populated these places with all sorts of malevolent creatures. In his book The Wooing of Earth, Rene Dubos reports that the word wilderness is used nearly 300 times in the Bible. “All its meanings are derogatory,” he argues.

  Interestingly, Dubos points out that in the Bible, wilderness became associated with a place where a chosen people were tested before deliverance to the Promised Land. After having undergone what Dubos calls his “spiritual catharsis,” Jesus emerged from the wilderness after forty days and forty nights of fasting, desolation, and grappling with the devil, and “withdrew into Galilee,” fulfilling the prophesies of Isaiah.

  In his influential book Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash examines another early reference in literature to wilderness. Of the eighth-century epic Beowulf, he writes, “ ‘wildeor’ appeared in refere
nce to savage and fantastic beasts inhabiting a dismal region of forests, crags, and cliffs… . The wilderness,” he continues, “was conceived as a region where a person was likely to get into a disordered, confused, or ‘wild’ condition.”

  The word panic, as Nash asserts, originated from the terror that travelers felt when they heard strange and eerie cries in the wilderness. Assuming the cries to signify the approach of Pan, the Greek and Roman god of flocks and herds, who was portrayed as having two horns, pointed ears, and goat’s legs, the travelers often became as frightened as children. Nash also writes of the semihuman Wild Man, whom people believed roamed the forests of Medieval Europe naked, covered with nothing but a thick coat of hair.

  The Gwich’in of the Fort Yukon area had a version of the Medieval Wild Man—Na’in—the Brush Man. Na’in wandered the woods, though occasionally he would approach human settlements to raid fish racks and steal food and, sometimes, to kidnap people, particularly women, for companionship. Na’in rarely left a trace. Sightings were uncommon, but those who claimed to have seen him insisted that he was real.

  Heimo had always been comfortable in the woods, beginning in Wisconsin’s North Woods, which are small by Alaska’s standards, but are big enough and wild enough even for an accomplished woodsman to lose his way. Though the woods at night still held a sense of dread for him, it didn’t take long for him to conquer his fear. Like an agoraphobic willing himself to leave the house, each night Heimo forced himself to roam the woods, but he did it incrementally. At first, he wandered just outside the cabin, then a few hundred feet away, always keeping it in sight. After his first month, he was ready to really challenge himself. Each night, he walked a mile or two from the cabin, teaching himself to become comfortable with the night, fighting off the fear that came from leaving the comfort of the fire and the security of the cabin. Slowly the fear disappeared, reinforced by the empirical fact that each night he returned home unharmed.

  Surprisingly, the Na’in legend never bothered him. Even as a boy he had never been afraid of ghosts and goblins and witches, and he dismissed the stories of Na’in with the same assurance. Nevertheless, he worried. Alaska was just so goddamn big.

  “Can you imagine being dropped off in the middle of nowhere?” he asks. “I was a real cheechako” he admits, using the Alaskan euphemism for an unskilled, wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn, a tenderfoot, what the trappers of the Rocky Mountain West would have called a mangeur de lard, a pork eater, a man inexperienced in the mountains. “I knew about being in the woods in Wisconsin, but this was Alaska. There wasn’t even a stove in the cabin. There was supposed to be someone coming downriver with a stove, but because of freeze-up, he never made it as far as the cabin, and here I was looking at winter with temperatures of 50 below. I was real scared.”

  Joe Dart, a University of Alaska Fairbanks professor in the Computer Sciences Department and former editor of Alaska Trapper magazine, says, in his still-thick Maine accent, “Lots of guys came up to do the Alaska thing. They’d seen Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and they wanted to live in the woods. Most of them ended up on the pipeline.” Dart, an avid woodsman and canoeist even before he arrived in Alaska, was one of those who worked the pipeline. “Alaska intimidated a lot of young men,” he says. “A guy on the pipeline that I knew years ago hit the nail on the head. He said, ‘Alaska is beyond human scale. The rivers are too big, the mountains are too big; it’s bigger than you can grasp.’ ”

  Heimo was so frightened that he wrote an ill-advised letter to his parents expressing his doubts about living in the bush. A few days later, when a pilot brought in what meager food supplies Heimo was able to buy while in Fort Yukon—mostly beans, macaroni, and white flour to augment the spruce and ruffed grouse and ducks he’d been eating—Heimo sent the letter out. “I wasn’t thinking,” Heimo says. “You can write a letter when you’re in that state of mind, but you should never send it. Later I learned that Mom called the state troopers. The troopers had no way of reaching me, so they contacted the pilot, who assured them that I was okay. Okay?” Heimo scoffs. “I wasn’t okay; I didn’t have a goddamn stove. I had to sleep outside and build bonfires to keep warm.”

  Heimo had no luck shooting a bear or a moose either, and he had grown discouraged. The ducks had migrated through, leaving only grouse and rabbits, which he knew would never sustain him through the long, cold winter. So Heimo resolved to walk. He would hunt for sixteen hours a day and keep warm at the same time.

  Soon enough, however, Heimo’s worst fears were realized. By late September, a foot of snow had already fallen, and it kept coming, meaning that he was almost always breaking trail. And the temperature was tumbling. First 5 below, then 10 below. On October 1, Heimo woke up early, shivering in his sleeping bag, covered in a thin layer of frost. The sky was slate blue, and wind was barreling out of the north. Reluctantly, Heimo crawled out of his bag and walked over to the cabin, where he had nailed a thermometer to a large white spruce. It read 15 below, and now Heimo knew, for certain, that he was in trouble.

  Resisting the temptation to panic required all the fortitude Heimo had. He slipped on his parka, canvas mukluks from Arctic Village, wool gloves, hat and pants, and a backpack, in which he’d packed macaroni and bread enough to last him three days, and set off upriver, determined not to return until he’d killed a black bear or a moose.

  He was behind the cabin, bound for a willow- and alder-choked gravel bar where he had seen moose tracks the previous week, when he discovered a collapsed cache that he had not noticed before. Lying on the ground were a few rusted traps, a torn plastic tarp, a fur stretcher, and a lynx skull. Among the mess of rotting wood, he found a sheet-metal woodstove and fifteen feet of stovepipe. Twenty-seven years later, still astounded by his discovery, Heimo says, “I thought I was dreaming. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.”

  Heimo carried the stove and the pipe back to the cabin and searched for wire to seal the stovepipe shut. Then he remembered that he had brought out #2 picture wire to set rabbit snares. He wrapped it around the pipe, cut the wire and twisted the ends tightly. Shoving the pipe up through the old stovepipe hole in the roof, he attached it to the sheet-metal stove. He tore the pages out of a novel, crumpled them up, and threw them into the belly of the stove, and then lit the match, touched it to the paper, and waited to see if it would draw. Running outside the cabin, he stood and watched and his heart leapt when he saw smoke coming from the pipe. He had heat.

  The Gwich’in say that the far north is where a man has room to dream. By early November, Heimo had almost exhausted the local supply of grouse and rabbits and was running dangerously low on macaroni and flour. What he was dreaming of was food. He had shot and wounded a small bullmoose in October. He tracked it late into the day but never found it, and only then did he realize that he was nearly ten miles from the cabin, too far to hike back in the dark. Instead of taking the chance of getting lost in unfamiliar country, he built a lean to and spent the night with only a fire and the clothes on his back to keep him warm.

  His efforts to bag a bear were also unsuccessful, and the local moose fled when a pack of wolves moved into the area. He thought his luck had changed when he discovered a large patch of rosehips just southeast of a big bend in the river, no more than a half-mile from the cabin. He knew that for the early Gwich’in, rosehips were a source of vitamin C, and a constant one since rosehips stay on the bush all winter long. He was craving vitamin C, and he stood right in the middle of the patch like a feeding grizzly. It was 36 below. Taking off his mittens, he picked and ate the frozen rosehips until his fingers were too cold to move. That night he awakened with the worst gastrointestinal problems of his life and spent much of the night in the outhouse in temperatures that had fallen to 45 below. Days later he was still sick and weak and unable to hunt.

  By the second week of November, he knew he had to do something drastic. He had heard stories of trappers dying of hunger in their cabins, and he had already experienced two of
the symptoms of serious hunger—mental fuzziness and lethargy. He was hunting and splitting wood constantly now, and he didn’t have enough food to replace the calories he was burning at 30 and 40 below. But to give up, he knew, was a death sentence. He might as well take his .44 magnum and put it to his head and end it quickly. Desperately low on food, he decided to walk fifteen miles upriver where he knew that Miller had a second cabin. He hoped that perhaps he’d find a stockpile of flour or spaghetti or beans, something to carry him through the winter.

  He was walking on the river, carrying a backpack and pulling a sled, loaded with his sleeping bag, his rifle and shotgun, and what remained of his food—a grouse, some flour, a few cups of macaroni, and a couple of pounds of rice—when he failed to recognize bad ice. He fell through, flung his arms out and caught himself, lucky not to have been sucked under the ice by the quick current. Soaked from the chest down, he crawled on top of the ice like a seal and only then did he realize that he’d lost his sled. Somehow his rifle and sleeping bag had fallen out of the sled before it went under, but everything else was gone, including his food. He was three miles from his cabin.

  Heimo ran as fast as he could, and when he reached the cabin, he was in luck: The fire was still burning in the stove. He hung his sleeping bag near the stove to dry, and then he shed all his clothes and wrapped himself in a blanket. He sat next to the stove until late afternoon, shivering, still too cold to move more than a few feet from the heat. Even though he resisted it, one persistent thought kept entering his head—“What are my chances?”—and he was forced to contemplate what twenty-year-olds should never have to consider—death. That night, while lying in his bunk, he resolved to try to signal a plane.