The Final Frontiersman Read online

  I call Krin “Tigger,” though rarely to her face, because at thirteen she imagines herself too old for affectionate nicknames. Like Tigger, Krin bounces wherever she goes, and she’s utterly fearless about it. If she’s been splitting wood and wants to go into the cabin, she doesn’t walk around the pile; she’s tall for her age, so she backs up, gets a running start, and leaps over, stretching her athletic five-foot nine-inch frame as far as it will go. If she’s going to get something out of the high cache and encounters a fallen tree, she simply jumps it. If she goes to church in Fort Yukon during the summer, she arrives fifteen minutes late in order to make what she calls a “grand entrance,” and then bounds down the aisle to the front pew, sitting as far from Edna and Rhonda as she can get.

  Heimo peels the ends of our last pole. “I’ll be glad to have this over with,” he says. “Why don’t I just finish this one?” I don’t object. Instead I walk back to the cabin to get a box for the shavings. They’ll be good fire starters for my stove. At the cabin yard, Rhonda is sitting on a bench outside, taking a break from her studies. She points to a hawk owl, clinging to the top branch of a nearby white spruce. “He’s a curious fella,” she says. “He’s been watching me.” Then she gets up and walks over to a small spruce tree and scrapes off some pitch with her index finger. She sits back down next to me and shows me a small cut on the top of her hand, near her thumb. “I did it with the bow saw,” she says, rubbing the pitch into the cut. “I thought I heard a Bohemian waxwing and I got excited. It doesn’t hurt too bad though. Serves me right. I wasn’t paying attention because I was thinking about running to the cabin to get Mom. Bohemian waxwings are a sure sign of spring. If I saw a Bohemian waxwing we wouldn’t be out here much longer. We’d be getting off the river, for sure.”

  * * *

  Everyone is getting antsy. For days I’ve watched the girls walk in and out of the cabin ten times an hour, unable to concentrate on their studies. They’re supposed to do four to five hours of work a day, but the year is winding down. Rhonda is sick of algebra. Krin just wants the birds to come.

  Rhonda and Krin are part of the Alaska Gateway Correspondence School out of Tok, Alaska. Every year, just before they leave Fort Yukon for the bush, they are sent a year’s supply of study materials. They’re required by the state to take the basic subjects: writing, math, U.S. history and government, and science. They’re able to send out their work with the occasional pilot, who, in turn, sends it to Tok. The lessons are graded by their correspondence teacher and then mailed to Fort Yukon. Sometimes a pilot will pick up the Korths’ mail and bring it out for them. They get months of mail at a time. The girls then have a chance to look over their many graded lessons. It’s a difficult way to learn. They have no direct contact with their teacher. Although they are naturally bright, verbal, and inquisitive, I cannot help but think that their education occasionally suffers from this arrangement, particularly as they get older and the lessons get tougher, too hard for either Heimo or Edna to lend any appreciable help.

  Even Edna needs a break. All year long she’s tried to guide the girls’ studies as best she can, given her own limited education; she never finished high school. She’s struggled with many of the lessons herself. But this time of year, like the girls, she just wants it all to be over. The Korths have been in the bush since July, and Edna is eager to get to Fort Yukon, where she has a summer flower garden and a handful of close friends. “Occasionally a pilot will pay us a visit out here,” she says. “But they’re always men. They’re nice, but they talk to Heimo.”

  Dawn Jagow, whose family—husband, Paul, and two children—spends part of the year in the bush, understands Edna’s sentiments. “I know how hard it must be for her. On the river, we get visitors, but they’re almost always men, too. I make tea and back off most of the time. For a woman the hardest part is not having anyone to share your feelings with. It really becomes apparent to me when we come to town and I realize how much I’ve missed my friends. On the river, I read a lot and I have conversations in my head with my friends. But I’ve never found a substitute for the lack of friends. The bush is very much a man’s world. But it’s my home, and I consider myself lucky to live like this.”

  The girls are eager to get to town, too. They want to see their friends, talk about new CDs, watch videos, play computer games, read music magazines, drink Mountain Dews and Cokes, and maybe dye their hair and meet boys. They have big plans for summer, and when they talk about them, it’s difficult for me to remember that they grew up out here rather than in some suburb of Milwaukee or Chicago. Krin used to be a big fan of pop icon Britney Spears, but now she leans toward Pink, Lil Bow Wow, and Lil’ Kim. Rhonda likes to write rap lyrics, incorporating messages of racial tolerance, which, if nothing else, is testament to the power and pervasiveness of the modern media machine. But more than anything else they want friends. They want to grow up like normal kids—“Like Dad did,” Rhonda points out.

  Rhonda, Krin, and I are walking one of the river’s many braids looking for bare ground. We are out collecting Indian potato, a carrotlike tuber found along the river’s cutbanks. The girls each carry a pick, our digging tools, and I tote the shotgun. “Just hanging out with people our own age,” Rhonda continues, “it’s something we’ve hardly had a chance to do. It was always get into town and get back out as quickly as we could. A month and a half goes so fast. We’d just get to know people again and it’d be time to come back out to the cabin. Plus, Dad’s so protective of us when we’re in Fort Yukon. He likes us to stay around the cabin, so he can keep an eye on us.

  “Why do we live like this?” she continues. “It’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times. There really is no answer; we just do. Daddy and Mom chose to live this way. Daddy loves it, and Mom does too, I think. Besides, Dad’s done it for so long, I don’t know what else he’d want to do, or could do. It’s all he knows now.”

  The temperature is in the low 50s today—it hasn’t reached 50 since early September—and Rhonda is wearing an Adidas sweatsuit and a red bandana and would look more like a New York City rapper than a wilderness girl if it weren’t for her hip boots. Catch her in Fort Yukon in June, and it’d be easy to think she’d never spent a day in the bush. I know otherwise. In the last half hour, Rhonda has pointed out to me mink, porcupine, wolverine, and snowshoe hare tracks, and a small pile of fox scat. Both she and Krin have carried knives and matches since they were five. Familiarity with knives and fire-building skills are essential in the bush, and Heimo and Edna reasoned that it was better to teach the girls when they were young, which was a good thing because when she was eight Rhonda was called upon to use them in an emergency.

  It was mid-September 1994, and Heimo hadn’t shot a moose yet; in fact, he hadn’t even seen one. Hoping that his luck would change, he and Rhonda, who barely came up to his ribs, set off in the canoe down-river to explore a slough where Heimo had found moose in the past. The weather had turned cold, and ice was beginning to run in the river. They tied off the boat at the mouth of the slough and walked the bank. Heimo stopped occasionally to cow call, hoping to lure in a bull moose eager to mate. When he saw movement in the willows, he paused. An animal revealed itself, but it wasn’t a bull moose. It was a caribou, a bull leading five other bulls and a small herd of cows. The Korths needed meat, and the prospects of getting a moose were getting slimmer every day, so Heimo snapped off four shots and dropped three of the bulls. He and Rhonda cut them up and then they walked back to get the canoe. They loaded the meat and paddled to the river. When they reached the river and got out of the canoe, Heimo was grateful that they were only two miles from the cabin. Three caribou made for a heavy load, and Heimo knew that lining the canoe wasn’t going to be easy.

  Heimo and Rhonda were walking a gravel bar. Heimo struggled to keep the canoe’s bow out of the whirling eddies and tracking into the current. Suddenly the boat took off sideways and water spilled over the gunwales. Then the boat turned over, dumping everything—the caribou meat
, Heimo’s rifle, his binoculars, a backpack. Heimo waded into the river to rescue what he could. The water was shockingly cold. He grabbed his backpack, turned and yelled for Rhonda to build a big fire. Ten minutes later, when Heimo returned to the gravel bar, having saved his gun and binoculars, his backpack, and, miraculously, much of the meat, too, Rhonda had the fire roaring.

  “I love the isolation sometimes, but I miss talking with people my age,” Rhonda continues. “Ten and a half months is too long. I wish we could spend more time in town. I like being able to just walk down to the store. Everything here is hard. I’ll always live in Alaska, I think, but I don’t know if I’ll want to live out here,” she adds, and then interrupts herself to show me a bush of soapberries, which, she tells me, grizzlies are fond of. “I worry about this area though,” she says, picking up her train of thought. “I worry that one day they’ll discover oil or gold or something.” Krin chimes in and startles me. Sometimes getting Krin to talk is like prying information out of a hostile witness. “I like the peace and quiet,” she says, “but I miss my friends.” Krin confesses that she’d like to live somewhere else when she grows up—“Hawaii or Europe,” she says. Then, with coaxing from Rhonda, she tells me about the only real friend she’s ever had, a girl named Zane. It was the summer of 2000, and Heimo was commercial fishing. He was worried about Edna and the girls being in Fort Yukon alone, so instead they rented a cabin in Circle Hot Springs. Krin met Zane during her first week in Circle, and for nearly two months, the two of them were inseparable.

  The girls are suddenly silent, as if each feels that she has said too much. We are walking along a side slough, and they run ahead of me. “This is where we had our bunny snares in winter,” Rhonda shouts back to me. Krin isn’t paying attention. She scales the riverbank and walks out into the tundra, where the snow has melted enough to reveal the vegetation underneath. “Low-bush cranberries,” she yells. Rhonda and I join her, and I eat the berries like a foraging grizzly. They are thawing now and are filled with sweetness. Krin has been watching me. “What’s the matter?” she says. “Haven’t you ever had cranberries in spring before?”

  Rhonda and Krin walk ahead, leaving me with the berries. I graze for a few more minutes and then catch up to them, stopping briefly to inspect a willow bush and rub the soft rabbit fur of its young buds. Rhonda shouts to me, “On the way home, we’ll pick some of the leaves for a salad. They’re really tender.”

  The girls have found the perfect south-facing cutbank. The snow is completely gone. “Daddy likes to get down on his hands and knees and smell the ground in spring,” Rhonda says, grabbing her pick and digging into the bank. Neither Rhonda nor Krin swings her pick with any force. Rather they hold their picks near the head and scratch at the dirt, digging gently like a woodcarver using a gouge to shape the features of a human face. Krin sets her pick aside and brushes away the dirt and roots to get at the main tuber of an Indian potato. She snaps it off. “Here,” she says, handing it to me. “Wash it off in the puddle.” I do as I’m instructed and then bite into it. It tastes starchy, like raw corn. “What do you think?” Rhonda asks, but doesn’t wait for my reply. “In fall we collect them in gunnysacks and set them outside to freeze. Then in winter, we’ll fry them up.”

  Breakup is behind schedule, and even the geese have been slow to come. Heimo is puzzled. “I just can’t figure it out. We should be seeing flock after flock by now.”

  Heimo and I are sitting in a makeshift driftwood goose blind, covered up to our waists in a white sheet, swatting at the first mosquitoes of the year. They’re fat, slow “bombers,” and they’re easy to exterminate. We have six decoys—four feeders and two sentinels—dug into the ice near the edge of the river channel. Though the advance of spring seems to have stalled, a five-foot-wide lead has formed in the middle of the river, where the ice has melted from the nearly constant sun. For the past two days the wind has come out of the north, bringing cold air out of the polar regions, and the temperature hasn’t climbed above the low forties. Heimo says he can feel it switching to the south though—good news. That will bring warm air. With twenty-one hours of full-on sun, it won’t take long for the snow and ice to melt, for this country to sprout new spring streams everywhere. Water will trickle and ooze out of every mountain, hill, and hump. If the wind does not shift, however, we could be locked in winter’s vise for another month. Earlier in the day Heimo and Edna were talking about the winter of 1992-1993, when the snow that fell on September 9 didn’t melt until early June 1993. “God,” Heimo said, “I hope that doesn’t happen this year. I love to spring out here, but I don’t want to be here until mid-June.”

  The girls tell me that Heimo gets like this every year, a little irritable, they say, impatient to get to town. By mid-May, he is often just as eager as the girls are for a change of pace. This year he is more anxious than usual. He thinks it’s going to be a good year for muskrats, and he’s hoping to get out by the third week in May, so that he won’t miss the season. In late spring he and Fred Thomas go “ratting” together in the lakes around Fort Yukon; with .22s, they shoot muskrats for the meat, which Heimo likes fried, and for the skins, which bring an average of $2.50. Heimo is also thinking about the king salmon run. He and Fred set and tend fifty feet of gill net on the Yukon River once the run starts. But it isn’t just the ratting and the king salmon. Heimo likes to chum around with Fred, who, though he is nearly forty years older than Heimo, is still his best friend in town. Then there’s Heimo’s daily four-mile jog and his occasional indulgence—an ice-cold Coke from the Alaska Commercial Company store, which everyone calls the AC.

  At this rate, however, unless the weather takes a dramatic turn, Heimo will surely miss the ratting season. As spring advances, things get tricky for the bush pilots. There’s usually a two-week period when a plane can’t get in or out, when there’s too little snow to land on skis and too much snow to land on wheels on the gravel bars.

  Adding insult to injury, the annual spring migration of geese and ducks back to their Arctic nesting grounds is late, and this time of year the Korths depend on waterfowl for food.

  Meat is an essential part of the bush diet. Though the Korths bring in provisions—black beans, peas, pinto beans, lentils, canned corn, green beans, spinach, rice, soups, spaghetti noodles, oatmeal, powdered milk, coffee, spices, butter, honey, sugar, and flour—these items are expensive, and the Korths buy only enough to supplement a main meal of meat, though Heimo does admit that their menu has grown more exotic over the years.

  In spring when the temperature is consistently above thirty-two, the Korths cut up what’s left of their caribou for drymeat. Yesterday, Rhonda took the last hindquarter of caribou out of the small snow shelter that she had built to keep it fresh, and we made drymeat. It was a family project. Heimo cut the caribou into long, thin strips, following the grain of the meat, and then he put the strips into a bowl filled with salt water. Krin used her knife to sharpen the dry willow sticks, which served as skewers, handed them to me, and then I impaled the strips, fat end down. Rhonda dug a hole in the middle of the smoke rack and built a fire in the hole with dry cottonwood. Afterward, she joined me. The job took a full afternoon, but when we finished, the smoke rack held nearly seventy willow sticks, all dripping with five to six fresh caribou strips. Rhonda covered the rack with a plastic tarp, and Heimo reminded her that she’d need to tend the fire for the next two days. Rhonda shot him a look of disgust, as if to say, “Yeah, I know, Dad. I’ve only done this every spring since I was a little girl.”

  Yesterday morning, Krin and Heimo each shot a goose, Krin’s first. They were the only two geese they saw all day. I helped Heimo pluck them. One was a good-sized Canada and the other was a speckle-belly. Both were “rolling in fat,” as Heimo likes to say. We saved the livers, gizzards, and hearts, which Edna fried up later while the geese were boiling. Heimo kept the wings, too. He’ll use them for bait once the trapping season begins. He is still upset with himself though. He and Krin had shot females.
“I don’t like to shoot nesters,” he explained while we were plucking them. “Usually we’ll only take the males.”

  In 1918, the United States and Canada enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prevents the hunting of waterfowl between March 10 and September 1. In doing so, Congress failed to adequately consider the fact that Alaskans who live in the bush often depend on waterfowl for their spring and summer meat. For years the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is charged with implementing the statute, turned a benevolent blind eye to this practice, choosing instead to enforce other aspects of the act. But now an amendment to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act allows for the spring harvest of waterfowl by rural residents, legalizing a hundred-year-old tradition.

  Spring waterfowl hunting is a practice that doesn’t go unnoticed by urban waterfowl hunters who feel that they’re being shortchanged. Subsistence, in general, is a prickly issue in Alaska, pitting urban users against rural users, a controversy that often manifests itself as a Native/ non-Native divide. The Alaska Federation of Natives insists that a subsistence preference is needed to protect village lifestyles and economies, and it takes issue with Fairbanks hunters who regard taking a moose every fall as their inalienable right. Urban hunters retaliate, accusing Natives of shooting indiscriminately and not observing game laws. Plus, urban hunters are quick to point out that they have the Alaska state constitution on their side.