The Final Frontiersman Read online

  We abandon the snowmachine when we near the top of the mountain and posthole through three feet of snow, racing to see who can get to the top first. It isn’t much as races go. With each step we sink in up to our hips. We should be wearing snowshoes, but Heimo didn’t want to spend the time putting them on. Though there isn’t a cloud in the sky, he is worried about the weather. The weather in the Interior can turn quickly; it is moody, like a man who hasn’t seen the sun in almost two months. After the sun’s long absence, Heimo is determined not to miss a moment of it.

  I am ten feet behind Heimo when suddenly he stops. Fresh caribou tracks. The caribou, it appears, came down from the ridge and wandered into the valley. Without a word, Heimo bounds back to the snowmachine, quicker this time, following our fresh trail. The sun will have to wait. With the winter meat supply running low, Heimo has been hoping to run across caribou.

  I follow the tracks and see where they’ve crossed the trail twenty feet in front of where we’ve left the snowmachine. Heimo joins me, clutching his snowshoes and the .22 rifle. Surely, I think, he isn’t going to try and shoot a caribou with the .22. Heimo notices me looking at it skeptically. “A neck shot,” he says. “We’ll creep up, and I’ll take one with a shot where the neck connects to the skull. I don’t want to shoot it in the heart and ruin the ribs and the brisket or the heart. That’s the best part. Caribou can’t see good, so we can get close if we can come at them from downwind.”

  The wind is out of the south, so we are in luck. We follow the tracks for thirty yards and then Heimo turns and holds out his arm, instructing me to stop. “Your snowsuit’s too loud,” he says. “You’ll scare them. Stay here.” I am glad for the reprieve. Without snowshoes, I am having a hard time keeping up.

  Heimo disappears into the thick forest of head-high black spruce. Then I hear them—two shots, not in rapid succession, the second one nearly a ten count after the first. I wait for a shout of joy or another shot, and then I see the caribou wander out of the trees, their tawny coats outlined against the glistening snow. They are coming right for me, but there is nothing for me to do but watch. Heimo took both guns, the .44 magnum, which he always wears in a holster, and the .22 rifle. He emerges from the woods, following them. The caribou are moving slowly, stopping to paw away the snow with their hooves and graze on moss and lichens, as if their lives are not in imminent danger. Heimo raises his gun and takes aim. But before I hear a shot ring out, one of the caribou drops not more than fifty yards from where I stand. It falls to its knees and then rolls over on its side.

  I struggle through the snow to where it lies dead. It shed its horns in December and would not get them back until April, but I can tell that it is a bull by its size. Heimo, panting and sweating from the exertion of the hunt, joins me. He rolls the caribou onto its other side, and shows me the two bullet holes, both of them neck shots, dead on target, separated by no more than an inch.

  Heimo pulls out his freshly sharpened jackknife and kneels next to the caribou, as if he might pray over it, and then draws his knife swiftly across its neck. Dark blood pours from the cut, transforming the snow into red-colored crystals. Next, he severs the head, and then he begins to skin the animal. He cuts the hide on one side of the caribou and peels it back like a winter blanket and then he cuts off the front and back legs on that side. Next, he skins the other side and cuts off the legs. Though he usually uses the skin, this time of year it is almost worthless. The hair falls out like strands of straw, and the larvae of warble flies, which in summer burrowed down through the hair to lay their eggs, have transformed the hide’s smoothness into a series of irregular ridges.

  Once he’s skinned it, he makes a long, vertical cut up the caribou’s midsection, stopping at its breastbone. He spreads open its belly, and steam rises from the cavity. “Hands cold?” he asks. “Put them right here and they’ll warm up fast.” I do, and am glad. The tips of my numbed fingers tingle with life again. Pulling out the guts halfway, Heimo cuts off the ribs where they attach to the backbone and the breastbone. Once he has one side of ribs completely off, he cuts the windpipe and the esophagus. Since the guts are no longer attached, he pulls them down and severs them from the pelvis. Then he digs out the heart, liver, and kidneys. “These are my favorites,” he says, wrapping the organs in the caribou hide. “We’ll bring them home with us, and Edna will fry them up tonight. You ain’t sqeamish about eating organs, are you?” Had he shot the animal in summer, near water, he would have taken one of the caribou’s four stomachs and eaten it raw. “That’s the real treat,” he tells me. “The ‘Bible.’ ”

  The “Bible” is shaped like a football, but only half the size. Inside it is layered and looks, as the name would suggest, like the pages of the Good Book. Heimo explains how he would cut the stomach, making a long incision. Then he would wash out the moss and the lichens, carve out tender chunks, and pop them into his mouth as if they were pieces of watermelon.

  When he finishes with the butchering, we stand over the steaming gut pile and watch a rare winter raven appear out of nowhere. Heimo scrubs his hands all the way up to the elbow with snow and then wipes them on a bandana. While he cleans off his knife with the same bandana he explains his plan for the meat. “I’ll find a place to cache it, and then if you want you can pick it up with the snowmachine tomorrow. Think you can find your way?” “Sure,” I answer, but he is already looking for a place to hide the meat and isn’t listening.

  Nearby, the raven hovers. Though ravens are said to have thirty distinct calls, this raven is cannily silent, cruising over the site, hoping not to be noticed. We know, though, when it is overhead by the whoosh of its wings. It is keeping a safe distance, but it is clearly interested in the kill. Heimo glances at the raven again and tells me how most ravens, though supremely adapted to the cold, choose to spend their winters in Fairbanks, Fort Yukon, and the villages, scavenging food from dumpsters.

  Heimo is scanning the terrain, looking for an inconspicuous spot to stash the meat, when the raven drops down for a closer look, making a faint gurgling sound. Heimo catches it out of the corner of his eye and whirls. “Yee-haahhh,” he yells, throwing his hands up as if trying to clear a dusty road of milling cattle or a campsite of a marauding raccoon. The raven spooks and croaks its displeasure. “Damn raven,” Heimo says, “he’s going to try to get at the meat.” Turning away from me, Heimo draws his knife across his pants and slips it into his pocket. Without saying a word, he walks back to the snowmachine, starts it, and carves a new trail to where the caribou lies. We load it onto the sled, and I clear out a spot where I can kneel between one of the hindquarters and the head. The sun has swung down below the mountains, and the land is now wrapped in a lambent light. I grip the side of the sled for balance and prepare for the jerk as Heimo pulls back on the throttle. But the jerk does not come. Heimo cuts the engine and swings around on his seat, facing me. “You know,” he says, looking at the sky, “never once, not even once, did the old man ever tell me that he loved me.”

  I look away, not sure what to make of this sudden confession. “The old man was mean, you know.” Heimo takes his knife from his pocket, opens the blade, wipes it on his pants again, puts it back into his pocket, and then pulls a small, thin piece of drymeat from his coat. Sticking it into his mouth, he clamps down with his back teeth and tears off a bite. “Mom tried to make excuses for him.” His voice is soft now, a near whisper, as if he is concerned that someone might be listening. “She said it was the war that made him that way—but she knew it, too, and she protected us from him. He was mean and had a terrible temper to go with it. Not a good combination, huh?”

  Like most Alaskans, Heimo Korth is from somewhere else. He came from the “Outside,” first as an emigrant to the United States and then to Alaska. Heimo was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on April 17, 1955, the oldest child of Erich and Irene Korth. Erich Korth wanted his son’s name to be Erich, Jr., but Irene insisted on Heimo (pronounced HI-mo, with a long i and a long o), a Finnish name she’d alw
ays been fond of. When Heimo was three, the family—by then including a brother, Erich, Jr., and sister Angie—emigrated to the United States, to Appleton, Wisconsin, where Irene’s oldest sister, Erika, had settled after marrying an American GI. Erich Korth resisted the move. He could hardly read or speak English. He and a partner were starting a plumbing business outside of Frankfurt, and he had high hopes for it, but Irene Korth prevailed upon him, and ultimately he agreed.

  Appleton, like many of the towns and cities of the Fox River Valley, was a quiet, hardworking place, a city of 45,000 dominated by one of the Midwest’s leading liberal arts colleges and a paper mill industry that tamed the picturesque Fox River with a series of locks and tainted its waters with PCBs. Appleton had a flourishing downtown with two movie theaters and attractive storefronts and had not yet felt the sting of neglect that would come as the city expanded and businesses located nearer U.S. Highway 41, draining the downtown of its customer base. In fact, in the fifties, the city’s downtown was busy, particularly on Friday nights, when stores stayed open until 9:00 P.M. and area farmers came to town to do their once-a-week shopping. Appleton had a “good side” of the tracks and a “bad side.” However, the dividing line was not the railroad but the Fox River, which coursed through the city, creating a wide chasm with striking bluffs on either side. The Southside, by larger cities’ standards, was hardly bad, but it never quite measured up to its counterpart across the river. The Korths moved to Weimer Street on the Southside, only blocks from the pretty woods and expansive fields at the town’s edge.

  Heimo grew up in a cream-colored old farmhouse with a large front porch that was trellised with grapevines. Five big horse chestnut trees shaded the yard, four in front and one in back. Two ancient apple trees, a crab and a Macintosh, which hung heavy with juicy apples in September, leaned over the sandbox in the backyard.

  Behind the backyard was “Old Rosie’s field,” a large meadow of native grasses and wildflowers, strawberries, rabbits, bees, and butterflies during the summer. Old Rosie was a loud, surly woman, and she and Erich Korth traded insults and fought about whether or not the children had a right to play in her field. The kids ignored her threats. Heimo and his friends used it for playing army, tag, hide-and-seek, flying their kites, and shooting their BB guns.

  Appleton was a good place for a young boy to grow up, particularly one like Heimo, who had a yearning to be outdoors, even if the hot summer winds sometimes brought in the sulfurous stench of the Fox Valley’s many paper mills. Tree-filled ravines fed the Fox River, and Heimo explored every one of them. He discovered which ravines had the most frogs and which creeks the painted turtles liked best, which wild trees had apples with the fewest wormholes, and where to gather hickory nuts in fall.

  When he turned twelve, Heimo bought a spear at a local sporting goods store and made solo trips to the Fox River, where he prowled the tangled brush of the river’s banks like a young Huck Finn and speared spawning carp wallowing in the river’s shallow backwaters. He loved that river. Sometimes his friends joined him, but Heimo usually kept to himself, and he preferred it that way. He laughs about it now. While his friends flirted with girls in the park, he explored the river, testing his balance on logs and wading in knee-deep muck.

  Despite his mother’s frequent warnings, he was playing on the train trestles that spanned the river, too. Every boy who played on the train trestles knew the dangers—one misstep meant a twenty-foot fall into the river’s powerful current—and he knew the stories. Once in a while one of the men who operated the locks would find the body of some unlucky kid who’d drowned bumping up against one of the lock walls like a bloated fish.

  At age twelve, Heimo mustered up the courage to jump his first train. Although Heimo remembers the Fox River being full of floating logs, increasingly trains instead of the river were being used to supply the paper companies with timber. The train was ten cars long and slowly rumbled past the Riverside Paper Company and then over Lawe Street—an easy one, Heimo’s friends said. Many of them were older, and some of the boys had been jumping trains for two or three years. It was a hot July day, and Heimo could feel the sweat building in his hands. What if he jumped and his hands slipped? With all of his friends looking on, Heimo had no choice but to try. He picked the last boxcar, so that if he fell there wouldn’t be another car to roll over him. When he was certain that the brakeman wasn’t looking, Heimo made his dash from behind the building. He ran alongside the train at a good pace, but he didn’t have to sprint to keep up. Then he saw the ladder attached to the back end of the car. Grabbing on to one of the iron rungs with his inside hand, he jumped. Next thing he knew, he was traveling with the car. He rode it for one hundred yards, jumping off before the car reached the river, but when he hit the gravel he lost his footing. He had the presence of mind to tuck into a roll to protect himself. When he got up and dusted himself off, his friends in the distance cheered. He had jumped his first train, and he had scraped and bleeding arms and elbows to show for it.

  After that, Heimo and his friends jumped so many trains that they started a competition, a test of bravery and skill—the one who jumped the most trains in a day was the winner. Heimo entertained kids at the local pool with his acrobatic dives, and soon it became apparent that he could use these skills—agility and balance combined with fearlessness—to win the train-jumping competitions. But train jumping was perilous, and it was only a matter of time until someone got hurt. Three years later, after jumping hundreds of trains, Heimo saw what happened to a friend. Chasing a boxcar, his friend mistimed his hop and fell. He was thrown under by the speed of the train, and Heimo was sure that his friend would die. Somehow, he scrambled out just in time. But the image stayed with Heimo. He swore he was finished. He never jumped again.

  Heimo remembers aspects of his childhood with fondness—even the dangerous game of jumping trains—but there are some memories he’d rather forget. Erich Korth was a drinker. He was not a hard boozer, but he liked his beer, as the saying goes, and when he was drunk he could be mean.

  Though Erich Korth had five children to feed on a plumber’s income, he refused to sacrifice his beer. Just about every half year, Erich Korth got into the family’s white 1965 Ford station wagon and drove to the Adler Brau Brewery in downtown Appleton. Putting the backseat down for more storage space, he loaded the car with cases of discounted beer. When he was down to his last two cases, he repeated the trip. Though he did most of his drinking at home, he made an exception for the annual plumber’s union picnic.

  All year Erich Korth looked forward to this big summer blowout under the canopy of magnificent elm trees at Telulah Park. All the plumbers were there with their families. The barbecues coughed smoke; the air smelled of hamburgers, hotdogs, and cigars; the pop and beer flowed generously; and kids played games while their mothers looked on and played bingo and their fathers drank and talked shop. By late afternoon, the men were drunk, and then, as if on cue, the fights started. Erich Korth got as drunk as the next guy, and even as a young boy Heimo learned to recognize the signs.

  Most summers, Heimo, too, looked forward to the plumber’s picnic. But in 1967, he was especially excited. In the past, he had to watch while the older boys played baseball, hoping for an invitation that never came. But in July 1967, he knew that things would be different. Twelve years old now, Heimo was the starting catcher for his Little League team, and when it came to choosing sides, he was determined not to be passed over. He had a good arm, a reliable bat, and the speed to beat out an infield grounder.

  Heimo was the last boy picked, but at least he’d made the cut. His team took the field first, and he was stuck out in right field, where there was very little action. Still Heimo prepared himself for every hitter. But not a ball came his way. In the bottom of the third inning, however, he finally got his chance at bat. The opposing team’s pitcher, a sixteen-year-old Babe Ruth Leaguer, thought himself a hotshot. Although this was only sandlot baseball, he was throwing curveballs, sliders, and knuckle
rs, and when the smaller boys took the plate, full-arm fastballs. Heimo hoped that he could just get his bat on one of the pitches, that he wouldn’t embarrass himself.

  When the first pitch came, Heimo swung hard and missed the ball badly. Then the catcalls started. “This guy can’t hit! He’s a whiffer!” Heimo got his bat on the second pitch, but fouled it off into the backstop. He took the plate for the third pitch and was imagining a pop fly that fell into the hole between second base and center field when he heard a scream. “Heimo, Heimo!” He whirled around and saw his mother running toward the field. All the boys were watching, and he felt like hiding. “Heimo,” she called again, stopping to catch her breath. Heimo dropped his bat and ran over to her as fast as he could. The heckling of the other players followed him. “Better run to Mommy,” some of them yelled out. Heimo reached his mother and by that time she was breathing so heavily, she was unable to talk and could only pull Heimo by the arm.

  They ran to the beer tent, and before Heimo got there, he saw what was happening. Erich Korth and another man were squared off, screaming at each other. A small crowd had gathered around them, but no one made an effort to intervene. In fact, some of the men were drunk and were encouraging the two to fight. Irene Korth shouted at Heimo to stop his father, but when Heimo saw how mad his father was, he refused. Erich Korth was threatening the other man. They were pushing each other, and Heimo thought his dad was going to throw a punch. Finally a group of men decided they’d seen enough and dragged the two men apart.