The Final Frontiersman Read online

  “Shhh,” Heimo says. “I want to hear this.” He turns up the sound on the tape player, and he and Rhonda and Krin anticipate Dr. Watson’s next line: “In those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted …”

  Edna announces that the food will be a little late—lentils with caribou hocks and beaver tail—so I take a seat on a bucket near the door and listen along to The Hound of the Baskervilles. The beaver tail is lying on the woodstove.

  While we wait for the lentils and the beaver tail, I look around the cabin. Heimo had told me its dimensions, fourteen feet by fourteen feet. It is four feet wider than the Old Crow cabin and only two feet shorter, but for some reason it looks considerably smaller, perhaps because it is even more cluttered, though the clutter is tasteful. In many ways, the Korths consider this, their upper Coleen cabin, to be their home cabin, and Edna has decorated with that in mind. Edna, not Heimo, has built three attractive tables and a corner shelf unit, using slender spruce logs with the bark still attached. The corner shelf contains books, photographs, tapes, and knickknacks, and on one of the tables, she has built a rack to store spices. In the kitchen area, she’s hung colorful wallpaper, depicting fruits and flowers. Above the wallpaper, using plastic milk crates, she’s erected shelves for the plates, dishes, bowls, cups, and utensils. She’s decorated the log walls with shelves, too, and family photographs, and the girls’ drawings. Edna notices me admiring the drawings from my side of the cabin and takes them down. “Here,” she says, handing them to me. “What do you think?”

  The girls, I know, love to draw, but on my first visit they were reluctant to let me see any of their work. Edna tried to show me some of it, but when they caught her, they invariably grabbed it away from her and hid it. Maybe now they are more comfortable with me, or perhaps they’re too preoccupied to notice. In any case, neither of them object. On one sheet of paper, Krin has drawn a horned puffin and managed to capture the large, odd-shaped bill. On another, she’s drawn a raven, large and black, and she’s endowed it with something of the raven’s roguishness. Rhonda has drawn a picture of an angelic-looking child, black hair, round face, full lips. She catches me looking at it, but rather than demanding it back, she hands me a photograph. “That’s Krin when she was little,” she says. “I tried to copy it.”

  “They’re good artists, aren’t they?” Edna asks. “Like their mother,” I reply. On my first trip, Edna made a pair of Eskimo slippers for my four-year-old daughter, using moose and caribou hide the color of walnut, spiky, short-haired strips of sealskin, and small pieces of lynx and wolf fur, both a mottled gray. On the top of the shoes, she added a white background of beadwork accented by intricately beaded red, yellow, and blue flowers. The slippers were works of art.

  The thick reptilelike skin of the twelve-inch beaver tail is bubbling on the woodstove. Heimo rises from a camping chair and peels the skin off the tail with a fork, revealing a semi solid slab of fat. “You’re gonna try it when it’s done, aren’t you?” Heimo asks, challenging me. He holds the tail suspended over a plate. Large drops of fat fall from it like juice from an orange that’s been cut in half. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say, and grimace. “It’s rich,” Heimo warns. “I wouldn’t eat too much of it or you’ll be awful sick.” Then he adds, “The PETA people would love the image of you eating beaver tail. I’m a member of PETA, you know. People for the Eating of Tasty Animals, that is.”

  Then he wraps the tail in tinfoil and sets it back on the stove. Twenty minutes later, Edna peels the foil back, peeks at the tail, and pokes at it gingerly with a fork. “Done,” she says. “Turn off that tape. Dinner’s ready.”

  Heimo hands me a large bowl of green lentils, which includes a sizeable bone, and a piece of beaver tail about the size of a hamburger patty. I try the beaver tail first, and they all watch and wait for my reaction. It is richer than anything I have ever eaten. It tastes like the drippings of southern fried chicken. Imagine removing the chicken from a cast-iron skillet and using a fork to scrape off what remains—skin, fat, and Crisco. Dip the fork in a bowl of melted butter, and you have beaver tail. “So, what do you think?” Heimo asks enthusiastically. “Just wait until we have pickled beaver’s feet.” At that, he grabs the two feet from a bowl and holds them for me to see. They look as big as diving fins. “We boil them and then we pickle them in onion and vinegar. They’re delicious.”

  I finish my lentils and ask for a second helping. Though I’ve enjoyed the beaver tail, I’ve had enough. It is now sitting in my stomach like a giant sponge. “There’s lots,” Heimo says, ladling lentils into my bowl. “Eat more.” “Stop,” I say, slowly pulling my bowl away so he doesn’t dump a ladleful onto the floor. I knew better than to listen to Heimo. I’ve never witnessed anyone with such an insatiable appetite. He burns a lot of calories, that is true, but there is no accounting for his ability to eat. Heimo eats like a wolf, bingeing when he can, as if preparing himself for a time of scarcity. Next to him, I look like a child playing with his food.

  I finish my meal first and then I watch as Heimo and Krin clean their caribou bones, using their jackknives to trim away the gristle and cartilage. Though I am loath to waste food, I look prodigal next to them. It’s a basic rule up here: You can use God’s name in vain when the snow has destroyed your trail or a lynx has stolen a marten from your poleset or the mosquitoes are murderous or it’s so goddamn cold that you don’t want to leave the cabin. But it’s sinful to waste anything, especially food.

  When Heimo and Krin finish with their jackknives, they gnaw on the bones as if they might never again see another meal, as if the ducks and geese on which they depend for spring food have ceased their spring migration to the Arctic nesting grounds. Finally, they dig their knife blades into the bones to winnow out the marrow. “I love the marrow,” Heimo says. Then he looks at me. “You eat like a white man. We eat like Natives. You leave the best parts. Natives would never do that. They utilize the whole animal.”

  “Give me back my bone,” I say, knowing that Rhonda has already cleared my plate.

  When Heimo finally finishes his bone, he plops it onto his plate, and it looks as if it has been bleached by the sun and then polished. There isn’t a scrap of cartilage remaining. Rhonda, who is cleaning up the dishes, takes the bone and ducks out the cabin door. Then she winds up and tosses it into the bushes thirty feet from the cabin.

  She pokes her head in through the door, smiling at me.

  “Your bone’s out there, too, if you still want it.”

  Next day, we have a lunch of Edna’s sourdough bread and honey—early white trappers and miners regarded sourdough as one of their most prized possessions, hence the epithet “sourdough” to describe someone who makes his living in the bush. Then Heimo helps me collect water at the spring behind the cabin. This morning I woke up with stomach pains and promptly reconsidered my decision to drink the water right out of the Coleen, as the Korths do, because the river has beaver. Heimo has taken four beaver this spring, but he left a family and a few others— “seed,” he calls them—as breeding stock for next year. I am determined now to use the spring to guard against giardia, sometimes called “beaver fever.” Giardias are parasitic protozoans that live in beaver feces—though all mammals can be infected—and are transmitted through unfiltered water. Though the Korths sometimes use the spring, they prefer the water in the river and seem to have built up a resistance to the parasite based on a long-term, low-level exposure. In fact, according to a Fairbanks parasitologist, they could probably drink heavily contaminated water now without becoming infected. I, on the other hand, have no such resistance, and I’ve heard enough giardia horror stories—intestinal pain, cramping, diarrhea—to feel sufficiently chastened. The last thing I want to do is spend my spring trip running to and from the outhouse.

  What passes for an outhouse at the upper Coleen cabin is nothing more than a three-foot hole in the ground over which Heimo has erected a kind of toilet. The toilet has four legs like a table. Where the to
p should be, Heimo has built a sort of seat, nothing more than a V formed by two pieces of wood with the open end of the V facing forward. It is primitive, but it works, though each and every time I visit I wonder just how the contraption will withstand my 225-pound frame. Last winter, Heimo told me the story of a fledgling Fort Yukon trapper who once fell into an outhouse hole and forever after was known by the name of “Shitslinger,” and I am not eager to see just how creative Heimo, Edna, and the girls can be in the event that I take a similar spill. One good thing about the outhouse is that it has a degree of privacy. In preparation for my visit—more to ensure the privacy of Edna and the girls—Heimo tied up a large green plastic tarp in front of the hole. The outhouse is open on three sides, though the side facing the cabin is shielded. In comparison to the Old Crow setup this is practically luxurious. Along the Old Crow, the permafrost—a layer of permanently frozen ground, which farther north in the High Arctic extends nearly 2,000 feet down—is so near the surface that it’s impossible to dig an outhouse hole. The outhouse there was the frozen creek bed. Everyone selected a spot in the snow, squatted, and then covered it up like a cat. Heimo’s reasoning was that when the spring floods came, they would wash away the shit, diluting the presence of human feces in the water, as Heimo said, to something like “parts per billion.” Toilet paper wasn’t discarded. In keeping with the no-waste ethic, Heimo encouraged me to bring it back and use it as firestarter.

  On the way to the spring, it occurs to me that I should probably ask Heimo about grizzlies. I should have inquired yesterday, when I arrived, but I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was overly anxious, though it would have been an entirely reasonable question. The Interior abounds with tales of Ursus arctos horribilis, one of the largest carnivores left on the planet. Although grizzlies aren’t really a worry in winter, the most chilling tale I’ve heard concerns the “winter” or “ice” bear, an animal that would sooner eat than sleep. While most bears den up for four to five months to wait out the worst of the weather in a state akin to sleep, where their heart rate drops to as few as eight beats per minute, the ice bear is forced by hunger to leave the comfort of its den and go out in search of food. After emerging from its den, it finds water as quickly as it can and submerges itself in it, forming a thick coat of insulating ice on top of its fur and fat. The ice bear is not only unafraid of the human scent, some people say it is attracted to it. Worst of all, its ice coat makes the bear impervious to bullets. But for all the ferocity of the stories, the ice bear is largely the stuff of legend. Yet once heard, it is as hard to wrest the ice bear from the imagination as it is for a boy or girl to escape night terrors after listening, for the first time, to the ghost story “The Man with the Golden Arm” around a campfire.

  Krin and Rhonda are creeping through the trees behind us, like spies. They overhear my question and immediately launch into an impersonation of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “ ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ ” they shout. “ ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ ” They dash behind a makeshift rack containing perhaps a hundred leghold traps and dozens of snares, which Heimo has pulled for the year, and cower as if being charged by an attacking grizzly. Heimo is more serious. “Some of the males are out of their dens by now,” he says, “so you should be careful when walking around, especially upriver. I wouldn’t worry too much about coming back here to the spring, but maybe you should carry a gun just in case.” He pauses. “I’d hate to be the one to deliver the bad news to your wife and mother.” He hoots, not at all reluctant to laugh at his own joke.

  I decide right then that I will take a shotgun with me whenever I visit the spring, “just in case.” I had a scare the previous summer while backpacking with a friend, north of here, near the Canadian border, and I am not about to take any chances.

  It was morning, and my buddy Burns and I had just finished breakfast. I was repacking my pack while Burns went off into some willows to relieve himself. Minutes later, I saw him coming back. Ten feet from the campsite he suddenly stopped. “What’s going on?” I asked. He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did he nearly whispered—“Turn around.” I turned around slowly, sensing the tension in his voice, and there was a 600-pound, honey-humped boar grizzly fifty yards away, walking right at us. Though my first instinct was to run, I held my ground. There was nowhere to run. There wasn’t a climbable tree within fifty miles.

  Six hundred pounds is big, yet the barren-lands grizzly of northern Alaska is only half as large as its coastal bear cousin, which dines on fish aplenty instead of roots, berries, and ground squirrels. Burns and I tried to keep calm and do as we’d been told. We locked arms to look larger and more imposing and started talking to the bear. We didn’t shout, but we spoke loud enough for him to hear, in confident, casual tones. “Howdy, bear,” we said. “We’re right here, big fella. Sorry to be camped out on your creek. Just passin’ through.” But the bear waddled toward us, as if he hadn’t heard a word. “Run if it’s a moose, stand if it’s a bear.” The closer he got, the more the mantra fast-tracked through my head.

  The distance was shrinking, forty yards, then thirty. We’d been hoping to see a grizzily—from a safe distance—but this didn’t qualify. There’s something about staring a bear in the face that makes a person immediately aware of his place in the food chain. My heart was pounding as I watched him amble down our side of the creek, seemingly unaware of, or indifferent to, our presence. It was dead calm and there was always the possibility that he hadn’t winded us yet. So I kept talking at him, while Burns grabbed a pot and banged on it with a soupspoon, but still the bear didn’t stop. Finally, as a last resort, I grabbed my pistol, a Ruger .44 Magnum double-action revolver. “Should I shoot one into the air?” I asked Burns. “It might scare him off.” Burns stopped banging on the pot. “Just hold on a moment,” he said.

  When the bear was thirty feet away, he crossed to the other side of the four-foot wide creek and stood on his hind legs, sniffing at the air, nostrils quivering, the first sign that he had noticed us, and a good sign, too. If he’d wanted to attack, he would have been slobbering. His ears would have been cocked back, and his head hung low, swinging back and forth. He would have been “woofing,” too. Nevertheless, I could hear him breathe and that was enough to make every nerve ending in my body tingle with a fear-inspired electricity. After a minute or so, he settled back down on all fours. Remembering the words of a hiking guide who made his living taking city folk into the Alaskan wilds, I kept the gun zeroed in on his shoulder anyway. “Break him down,” the guide had told me. “I carry a sawed-off shotgun with slugs when I’m taking clients out. If you’re going to shoot a grizzly with a .44 Magnum, you have to break him down. Go for the shoulders first.” I held the gun as steady as possible, wondering how even a .44 Magnum could damage that magnificently muscular shoulder. All the while, Burns and I kept talking to him. “Just be on your way now, big boy, and we’ll be on ours.”

  The grizzly sniffed at the air again, and then he crossed back to our side of the small creek and lazily wandered around us, giving us a wide berth. He was almost gracious about it. Nevertheless, we’d heard enough about the treachery of grizzlies not to be lulled into complacency by his apparent generosity. I kept the gun on him and Burns kept talking. Only when there were one hundred yards between us, and the bear was happily digging for roots in the tundra, did we allow ourselves to think that perhaps we wouldn’t be mauled.

  The truth of the matter is that a .44 Magnum offers a false sense of security. A grizzly can move quicker than Warren Sapp on a Sunday afternoon, covering fifteen yards in just over a second. It takes a steady hand and a rapid succession of shots from someone very comfortable with a .44 Magnum to bring down a charging bear. Heimo carries a .44 for protection against bears, but he knows how to handle the gun. He would stand a chance against a rushing, ill-intentioned grizzly; I wouldn’t.

  An old trapper was the first to break the news to me about the fecklessness of a .44 Magnum in the hands
of someone who isn’t accustomed to shooting one. We’d been talking about bears, and he’d asked me if I’d ever run into a grizzly. Why, sure I had, I told him, just the summer before. He was close, I said. “Were you carrying a gun?” he drawled. “Heck, yeah,” I told him with some bluster. “I was carrying a .44 Magnum.” “Psst,” he said, winking and bending close to me, as if he were ready to share a secret. I was all ears. “Next time you’re carrying that .44 of yours, be sure to file off the sight.” “File off the sight?” I asked him, thoroughly perplexed. “Hell, yeah,” he said, repeating the advice. “File off the sight.” I looked at him, waiting for his words of wisdom. He let the anticipation build. “That way,” he said, drawing in a deep breath, “when a grizzly shoves that gun up your ass, it won’t hurt so goddamn much.”

  Still, the most persistent fallacy of Alaska is that there’s a hungry bear hiding in every thicket just waiting to devour you. The truth is that grizzlies in the Interior have a range of one hundred square miles. Unless you know where to find them and what to look for, you’re lucky to spot a pigeon-toed track much less a real bear. Yet the primal fear one feels when hiking in grizzly country persists. A fresh pile of spoor or the sight of an excavated hill where a grizzly has torn up everything to get at roots or a squirrel is sure to raise the hair on the back of the human neck.

  Heimo has already been out to wake me—at 6:30 sharp, as he has for the last week. But I’d just put a fresh log in the stove, and I was seduced into sleeping for another hour by the womblike warmth of the tent.

  This time it is Krin who appears. Heimo or Edna has sent her out to get me, and she isn’t happy about it. “Breakfast,” she says with a growl. “Wake up.” Then I hear her run off through the snow. The sharp “thump” of the spring-loaded cabin door closing tells me that she is now inside and that it is safe for me to come out and take my morning pee. In winter I kept a plastic jug next to my cot, which I used as a pee bottle to avoid having to go outside. But spring is a whole other story. In spring I look forward to my morning pee and to boring a deep hole into the snowbank behind my tent.