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 reference 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.
The following day, he stood out on a snowy gravel bar, hoping that a plane would fly by. His odds were next to nothing. In late summer, planes in the remote Interior are common sights, carrying hunters to and from camp, but in November they are rare. Heimo sat on the gravel bar until the sun set and then returned to the cabin feeling gloomy. On day two, he repeated his vigil, but again failed to spot a plane. On day three, he was disappointed again and hungrier than he’d ever been in his life. By day four, he was sitting on the gravel bar, assessing his chances of walking out. Birch Creek was nearly forty miles, a trip that under normal circumstances he could make. But now he was weak with hunger, and he’d have to break trail the entire way. To his amazement, early in the afternoon he heard a distant engine, unmistakable in winter when sound is so clearly borne. Using his mirror, he desperately tried to get the pilot’s attention, by angling it into the waning sun; but eventually the sound trailed off into silence. He found two packets of noodles that night that he’d tucked away in the loft, but they did little to assuage his hunger. Despair had set in.
The following morning, Heimo woke determined to try his luck one last time. If he failed, he would attempt to shoot a few rabbits, expending as little energy as possible, then eat and rest for a few days, hoping to get some of his strength back.
He resorted to stomping out SOS in the snow, an effort he recognized was so futile that he couldn’t help laughing at himself. If he didn’t get out, he would be one of the anonymous numbers, another dreamy cheechako who lost his life in Alaska. He cut spruce boughs and laid them in the troughs that formed the letters, hoping that a pilot might recognize the blue-green outline of the letters against the white snow. He had just finished the S and the O, when once again he heard a plane.
John Peterson, his bush pilot friend, who was trapping out of Fort Yukon, had asked a pilot who flew the Fort Yukon-to-Fairbanks run to check on Heimo. When his flight from Fort Yukon to Fairbanks was empty, the pilot made good on his promise. Using a map that Jon Peterson had given him, the pilot flew over the cabin. Heimo was carrying an armful of boughs when he spotted the plane. He dropped the boughs and “started to go crazy,” jumping up and down and trying to remember the land-to-air signals that were described on the back of his hunting license. When the pilot didn’t acknowledge, Heimo ran to the end of the gravel bar and frantically stomped out “Pic Me.” He was beginning the U of “UP” when the pilot tipped his wings, indicating that he understood. Since he was flying a big twin-engine Grand Commander commuter plane and couldn’t land, the pilot radioed John Peterson in Fort Yukon. Peterson, who’d flown Heimo in three months earlier and had developed a fondness for him, was glad to come and get Heimo. Fort Yukon was only seventy miles away, and by late afternoon, on that same day, Heimo was in town.
In Fort Yukon, Heimo sold what fur he’d managed to trap. He’d been so busy feeding himself that he’d had little time or energy for trapping, so his catch amounted to nothing more than a weasel, a few muskrats, and a half dozen marten. The Fort Yukon fur buyer only gave him $90 for his winter catch, but Heimo was so happy just to be alive that he didn’t care. Reality set in a few days later. Heimo had only $100 to his name, and he had to come up with a plan. He had resolved never to return to Wisconsin, though he knew he could use the other portion of the round-trip ticket his mother had bought for him. Fort Yukon to Appleton, Wisconsin, he could do in two days, three days max. Instead, he decided to go to Fairbanks and stay with a cousin of Keith Koontz and get a job, any job, that might allow him to stay in Alaska.
In a letter to his friend Jim Kryzmarcik, written on notecards, Heimo provided more details of his first months on the river and his brush with death:
Newton,
Sorry I didn’t write sooner but when you live out in the bush you don’t come in contact with humans too much. I haven’t seen or heard from a person. No one to talk to. The first week was hell living by myself out in the wilderness but after the first week I got used to it and now I would not want to live in town. I like living by myself in the Arctic… . I’m not in the bush no more because I lost everything I had. Food, axes, etc. And almost lost my life… . I decided to go to cabin no. 2. I got about 3 miles from the home cabin and had to cross the river… . I started to cross and broke through… . Fell in up to my chin and the current almost pulled me under the ice. I couldn’t feel bottom. I don’t know how I pulled my self out. So I got out and it was 44 below and I ran 3 miles back to the home cabin. Almost passed out the last half mile. I was cold and almost froze to death when I got back to the cabin. I ripped off my clothes. My skin was a real dark blue. One eyelid froze shut. My beard … was a solid brick of ice. I thought I’d get gangrene for sure… . Boy I tell you I was scared. I am very lucky I’m alive. A few days later I tried to get to the cabin again. When I got there I almost cryed. There was a great big hole in the roof. Dirt was piled up about 3 ft. on the floor, froze solid. The bed was broke. Snow was piled up in the cabin. So I had to spend the night with no roof or stove because it was too late to go back to my cabin. I spent the nite in the corner of the cabin with a fire going. The temperature 48 below. So I was awake the whole nite, dared not to sleep cause it would have been my last. Longest nite in my life. Prayed to God. I was scared I’d never get out alive. Next day I barely made it back to the home cabin. Didn’t sleep for 2 days, hiked over 20 miles. Was worn out. When I got back I ate and went to bed at 4:00 p.m. Got up next day at 11:00 a.m. So now I’m in Fort Yukon. Lost all I owned and don’t know what to do. But will not go back to Wis. I got this wilderness blood in me now and no way will I go back no matter how much trouble I have at first. But that’s a trapper’s life.
Heimo signed this letter “Heimo the Alaskan bush trapper, guide, packer, and mountain man,” and included the tail feathers of one of the spruce grouse he’d shot.
Fairbanks was ground zero for the pipeline, and the city was booming and giddy. From Fairbanks, construction crews built north to Prudhoe Bay and south to Valdez. “It was crazy,” Heimo remembers. “There was money wherever you looked.” 2-Street, as 2nd Avenue is called, was loaded with hookers who catered to the young men who flocked to town in hopes of working hard on the pipeline and making pocketfuls of money. One thousand dollars a week was an average weekly paycheck for a pipeline worker, and consequently the hookers did well, too. In a one-block area, Heimo guessed, there were more hookers than in all of New York City. “They’d have to stand out there in their short skirts and fishnet stockings and show their stuff at 40 below,” he laughs. “But business was good, and they could always duck into a building to warm up.” Pimps cruised the streets of downtown in big cars, and drug dealers made their daily rounds of the bars. Fairbanks was “sin city,” and ironically many people who were born and raised there welcomed the change. Greed oozed.
In Fairbanks Heimo got a letter from Keith Koontz, the hunting guide who had taken a paternal interest in him. Koontz enclosed a $500 check. “Take the money and reoutfit yourself and go back to the trapline, go to Nome and get a job, or come to St. Lawrence Island and work for me,” the letter said. Though Heimo had no idea where St. Lawrence Island was, it looked to him like the beginning of another adventure.
That day he cashed the $500 check, hid $475 in his sleeping bag, took the other $25, and walked to a tavern down the street. Delighted by the turn of events, he got shit-faced drunk. He remembers a dart team at the bar whose members were wearing T-shirts that read “The Pipeline Sucks.” A guy from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who’d recently come off the pipeline, was so taken with Heimo’s stories that he started buying Heimo drinks, stretching Heimo’s $25 to include a full night of boozing. The next morning, with a hangover to match the roaring Alaskan economy, Heimo boarded a plane for St. Lawrence Island.
* * *
St. Lawrence Island, or “Sivuqaq,” the traditional Siberian Yupik name, is roughly 100 miles long and 20 miles wide, about the size of Delaware. It is a treeless, fog-ridden place of rock and lava, pummeled year-round by winds, stuck out in the middle of the abundant Bering Sea, only forty miles from Indian Point on Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula, and only twenty miles from the international date line. It is farther west than the Hawaiian Islands, 120 miles west of Nome, Alaska, and until the last half century, it has remained largely isolated from the Alaskan mainland.
A map of the island shows a northern spine of 2,000-foot volcanic ridges called the Kukulgit Mountains, drained by rivers and creeks and separated by wet tundra valleys, while the south is a sea of blue lakes, inlets, and lagoons. Engulfed in cold ocean mists, which are created when cold Arctic waters collide with warm air blown up from the Pacific, St. Lawrence Island can be a chronically overcast place, except for a few short weeks every year when the island’s interior breaks out in a riot of color. Larkspur, saxifrage, daisies, anemones, and a host of other flowers bloom brilliantly in the ephemeral sunshine, which is soon replaced by dense Bering Sea fog.
St. Lawrence Island was once a plateau in the Great Bering Land Bridge. Eskimo legend has it that the entire island, even the barren interior mountains, was once covered by a vast ocean. Slowly, as the island was “squeezed dry” by “Apa,” the Creator, land began to emerge from the sea’s black depths. “Sivuqaq” is roughly translated as “wrung out” or “squeezed dry.”
“They took him in,” says Keith Koontz, referring to Heimo’s arrival in Savoonga, one of only two villages on the island, which was settled as a reindeer camp by herders from the island’s only other village, Gambell, in 1917. Keith Koontz is a likable, well-educated, practicing Baha’i, who sometimes lets his hair grow long and talks in kind of a Texas drawl. Koontz is married to an Eskimo woman from Savoonga. “I don’t know what it was about Heimo, but they loved him,” Koontz continues, letting out a booming, genial belly laugh. “Heimo’s a gregarious guy and he’s very funny. He was curious about their culture, too, and the people of Savoonga appreciated that.”
In early December, Heimo wrote his friend Jim Kryzmarcik again.
Newt,
Well I’m in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island only 90 miles from Siberia… . I couldn’t go back out to the trapline… . So Keith loaned me $500.00 and said I could live out by him on the island. As you can figure this is an Eskimo village, still semi-primitive. 90% of the people live off the sea… . You wouldn’t believe the size of the animals (walrus). Huge. Average weight 4,500 lbs. With pure ivory tusks 3 ft. long… . I really wish I had a camera. Could get some beautiful pictures.
This time Heimo signed it “Alaskan wilderness bush trapper, wilderness guide, mountain man,” and “Arctic ice pack man,” too.
Three and one half months later, he wrote again.
Hi Budnick Buddy,
I got a million things to tell you but there ain’t enough paper in Alaska to write it all down. Eating a lot of walrus, seal, whale, fish (raw), polar bear, seaweed, birds, reindeer, and white fox even… . This island has no trees, all tundra… . Only two villages … and all live off the land… . Whaling starts in a few days. You wouldn’t believe the hustle and bustle of the village. They use big boats made out of walrus hides and the frame is made of whale bones… . Stores, school, and everything is shut down for a few weeks when the first whale is spotted on the south side of the island… . The old women have tatoos on their faces and hands… . They [the old women] are the most wonderful people … if you can understand them.
Heimo helped Koontz build a house and he put in extra time at Koontz’s store in return for room and board. Television hadn’t come to the island yet, comic books were the craze, and Koontz’s was the only place in the village that sold them. So, while tending the cash register, Heimo met nearly everyone in Savoonga, a village no larger than two city blocks, with elevated boardwalks and plywood houses whose paint had been blasted off by wind and ice storms. Most of the village’s 350 people spoke English, although they preferred their native Siberian Yupik. Heimo quickly learned enough Yupik to get by, and as time passed he became friendly with the villagers. One of those to befriend Heimo was a thirty-five-year-old hunter named Herman Toolie. Herman’s mother was one of the women in Savoonga to wear the traditional tattoos. Heimo remembers that she had one on her face that resembled a whale’s tail.
Herman was considered Savoonga’s best hunter, which made him a living connection to one of the most accomplished hunting cultures the modern world has ever known. Though Heimo was an outsider, Herman mentored him, teaching Heimo hunting skills that few white men would ever learn—how to hunt walrus, seal, and polar bear, how to read ice and the sky. Herman explained to Heimo that the sky reflected what lay below it. A hunter’s ability to read a “sky map” was an essential skill, and Heimo learned the basics: Above ice the sky turned a pale white. Above open water it was dark, what the Eskimos of Savoonga called “black smoke.”
Bound by ice for six months of every year, St. Lawrence Island in December resembled an ancient glacier. Heimo had never seen such an alien landscape and he was drawn to it. When he wasn’t working for Koontz, he and Herman fished on the ice pack for sculpin, using handmade Eskimo treble snag hooks of copper tubing. The sculpin, or “bullhead,” as the people of Savoonga called the fish, were yellowish green and black, about ten inches long, with bloated, oversized heads. After digging a hole, Herman and Heimo would jig by hand, bouncing the hooks off the sea’s bottom, nearly a hundred feet down. They would catch thirty or forty at a time. As Heimo became better acquainted with the ice and its dangers, Herman took him out seal hunting, too.
Heimo’s first seal hunt was a memorable one. Herman and Heimo walked out onto the ice against a fierce northerly wind. The wet wind cut through Heimo’s parka, and he remarked about how cold it was. Herman agreed, but explained that a north wind was a blessing. Always beware of a south wind, he told Heimo. A south wind was capable of forming a lead, or channel of open water, between the shore-fast ice and the pack ice, setting the once immovable ice in motion and leaving unsuspecting hunters to float to oblivion. Swimming, Heimo knew, wasn’t an option once the ice had separated. Even an expert swimmer would quickly be overcome with hypothermia. Every other year, the village of Savoonga lost expert hunters to the ice, which was shaped by currents, tides, and winds, and which opened and closed capriciously under their influence. The village accepted these deaths with equanimity. Even a grieving widow knew that the Eskimo hunter was never more alive than when he was on the ice.
Walking was difficult, and when Herman located a lead, a channel of water in the ice, two miles out, Heimo was glad for the rest. The ice, he discovered, had topography, an erratic relief formed by emerging pressure ridges, high walls of ice that buckled upward. Often he and Herman had to scale the pressure ridges, which could be fifty feet high. It was dangerous, unpredictable climbing.
Herman and Heimo concealed themselves behind a small pressure ridge about fifty feet from the lead. The lead—the meghaat—was one hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide, the only lead in sight, and Herman knew that this was where a seal would surface for its next breath of air. Seals, he explained, had to come up every twenty minutes to fill their lungs.
Before whalers introduced the rifle to St. Lawrence Island, villagers used nets or ivory-tipped harpoons for hunting seals. If there were large stretches of open water, allowing the seal to surface just about anywhere, hunters stood little chance of success. However, if the currents had not broken up the ice fields, and hunters successfully located a breathing hole or a small lead, they needed only patience.
By late afternoon, Heimo and Herman abandoned their vigil. Not a single seal had surfaced. Back at the village, they returned to a commotion. One of the elders had shot a polar bear, which he’d dragged into the main room of his house on a large plastic tarp. People were coming and going, not just to see the bear, but to get their allotment of meat, which was always divided among the extended family.
When Heimo and Herman arrived, the hunter was eager to tell them the story of his kill. It was then that Heimo learned that while he and Herman were waiting for a seal to surface in the lead, the polar bear had caught their scent downwind. It had been stalking them, the hunter said, moving slowly from pressure ridge to pressure ridge to avoid being seen. The hunter was scouting for leads when he saw the bear. He shot it only a hundred yards from where Heimo and Herman had been hunting. It was wounded and the hunter chased it and shot it again, knowing that a wounded bear could never be allowed to escape. It had to be killed and its soul released or the hunter would come to harm. Battered by the wind, neither Herman nor Heimo ever heard the shots.
Three weeks later, Heimo shot his first seal, two miles out from the village, in a fifty-foot lead. He shot it right behind the head as Herman had instructed him. “Bullet placement,” Herman said. “That’s the key.” Herman showed him how to swing and throw the seal hook, and after many attempts, Heimo finally succeeded in hooking and retrieving the seal, a 140-pound young hair seal—nuksuk. Heimo learned from Herman that traditionally a hunter who’d killed a seal would melt ice in his mouth and put his mouth to the seal’s to give it a drink of water. After the meat was stripped from its bones, the bones were then returned to the sea to ensure the success of future seal hunts.
Heimo left Savoonga in mid-April, vowing to return every spring.
By late April, Heimo’s first spring in Alaska, he was back on Beaver Creek, thirty miles upriver from where he’d been the previous fall, tending the trapping cabin of a friend who was going to Anchorage for the summer. He had twenty-five pounds of kidney beans, a case of macaroni, and a case of canned spinach.
The cabin was tucked in the woods at the foothills of the White Mountains, not far off the banks of Beaver Creek. It was a pretty place, bathed now, in late spring, in twenty-two hours of light. Again Heimo was eating ducks—Alaskans who live in the bush are allowed to hunt waterfowl in spring—and beaver, which he learned how to gut and skin from a book he found in the cabin. At first he hunted on snowshoes, but he quickly noticed that wet snow would pile up on the decking of the snowshoes, making walking nearly impossible. He discarded the snowshoes and wore instead an old pair of waterproof but heavy military-issue bunny boots, which lasted him until the snow melted. Though he’d never liked sunglasses, they were essential now in the long light of spring. Early trappers and Athabaskan hunters rubbed soot on their eyelids and around their eyes to protect themselves from the reflection of the sun off the snow. While in Savoonga, Heimo had learned from Herman that before the introduction of sunglasses, the hunters of St. Lawrence Island had used ivory to carve round cups into which they cut small slits and tied the cups around their heads using strips of sealskin.
Heimo was still a greenhorn, and since he hadn’t wintered in the Interior, he couldn’t call himself a trapper yet, but he returned to Beaver Creek with a newfound sense of purpose. After his experiences on St. Lawrence Island, he was convinced that he could survive Alaska’s Interior, too. Though friendly and outgoing, he didn’t mind being alone. In fact, he relished it—the solitude of the woods, the self-reliance. It was like swimming or diving; a man had only himself to count on, and Heimo looked forward to the challenges. This time he would “make it.”
By early May 1976, snow was melting in the mountains and overflow was rushing out of Victoria Creek into Beaver Creek, which was misnamed, because if anything it resembled a large Alaskan river. In some spots the overflow was nearly a foot deep. Underneath, the winter ice was beginning to melt away. With twenty-two hours of sun, it was only a matter of time before four-foot-thick fields of ice would come careening downstream like an avalanche.
That day came May 8. Beaver Creek had begun to break up overnight. Half a mile from the cabin, a house-sized slab of ice jammed, and the river rose, slowly at first. Never having witnessed a breakup, Heimo didn’t know enough to worry. Surely, he thought, the ice jam would be washed away. Besides, he had ducks to shoot. The previous evening he had noticed a large flock of black ducks circling a tundra pond, and he needed more meat. His plan was to jump-shoot them. He would walk to the pond and then crawl across the snow on his belly, surprising them while they swam in the shallows near the pond’s edge. The birds would be dripping in spring fat, and if he was lucky, he’d have enough meat for the rest of the week.
That was the plan, but when Heimo reached the pond and tried to stalk the ducks, they spooked, flying far out of range. Heimo lay on his back along the pond’s steep bank among dense bushes of Labrador tea, waiting for the ducks to return. They never did. It was late afternoon when another flock of pintails discovered the pond. Heimo could see them through his binoculars, swimming contentedly on the pond’s far side, five drakes and two hens. He crept out of the bushes and circled the lake. They were swimming separately, too far apart for Heimo to kill more than one with a shot, so he held off. He listened to them chatter and waited for his opportunity. Gradually, they swam closer together, and when they were in range, Heimo lifted his gun and shot three times. Four ducks lay dead in the lake. Heimo fired twice more, trying to drop one of the escaping ducks with a wing shot, but missed. He waited twenty minutes for the wind to blow the ducks closer to shore, and then he waded out and collected them. Putting them in his backpack, he began the three-mile walk back to the cabin, feeling good about the hunt.
A half-mile from the cabin, he heard a sound like a locomotive—the ice rending, struggling to free itself. The sound frightened him, and now he ran, nearly sprinting through the melting, foot-deep snow. One hundred feet from the river, he could see water pouring over the bank: flood. By the time he reached the cabin, the water was already up to the front door. What to do first? Don’t panic, he reminded himself. Don’t panic now.
His friend’s dogs were tied to their trees, and they were terrified, howling and pulling at their chains. Heimo unleashed them and shooed them off into the woods where they’d be safe. Then he remembered the puppies. Heimo ran around the cabin, yelling and whistling for them. He stopped long enough to listen and heard them whining from where they’d hidden under the cabin. Heimo called, but they were too frightened to move. He thought about sliding under the cabin to rescue them, but it was too late now. The water was too high. Heimo ran into the cabin, grabbed his sleeping bag, and stuffed his coat pockets with packets of macaroni. He came back out, searching frantically for the canoe. “Where’s the goddamn canoe?” Abandoning the idea, he pulled himself up onto the cabin’s roof. Seconds later, the river rushed through the cabin’s front door.
Horrified, Heimo sat on the roof and watched as the river groaned and labored and launched huge, truck-sized chunks of ice into the air. Suddenly the cabin shuddered as if it might collapse. Heimo held on to the main roof beam like a baby clutching his mother. With every blow, the cabin shook and Heimo held on tighter, knowing that if he let go and was thrown from the roof, he would probably be crushed to death.
When the ice jam broke, the river let out a resounding yawn and the water retreated as quickly as it had come, as if it were being sucked into an enormous drain. Heimo watched, unwilling to let go of his grip, as if he expected the water to return. An hour later, he warily climbed down from the cabin’s roof to inspect the damage. The cabin yard looked like the scene of a battle. Huge trees had been uprooted and lay scattered around the cabin yard like corpses. Other trees had snapped like twigs. Great brown monuments of ice, looking like tanks left behind by a retreating army, lay melting in the hot sun. Miraculously, the cabin was still standing, but inside Heimo found a dune of silt four inches deep. Too tired to shovel it out, he slept that night in his bunk in the stench of the river’s backwash.
After the flood, Heimo foraged for duck and goose eggs and caught pike, which had come up into the sloughs to spawn. When the pike dropped their eggs, they left the sloughs, and soon Heimo again was wondering how he’d survive the summer. He was learning that the Arctic is a sparse country, its abundance short-lived. Animals appear in great numbers for brief periods of time, and then they move on.
By late afternoon the sun was shining. Robins yodeled and tiny ruby-crowned kinglets sang vigorously. Heimo was cleaning two young ducks he’d shot on Victoria Creek. He had already plucked them both; next he’d have to gut them. He grabbed one of the ducks, made a small cut at the bottom of its breast cage, and pulled out the viscera. Leaning back, he launched them twenty feet into the river. Then he heard it— “Slurp”—the unmistakable sound of a fish rising to suck up the entrails, followed by spreading concentric circles on the river’s surface. Heimo gutted the next duck. Pitching the entrails into the river again, he listened. There it was again. Arctic grayling! Beaver Creek was still turbid with spring runoff, but there was no doubt now, grayling were in the river. He hadn’t expected them until midsummer.
Heimo ran to the cabin to get his rod, tied on a spinner, and threw the lure into a deep pool. Instantly, he felt the strike. He set the hook, reeled in the fish, grabbed it and banged the back of its head on a rock. When it went limp, he tossed the fish onto the ground behind him. He cast again. Boom, another grayling hit. After a long, icebound winter, the fish were ravenous.
Despite the grayling, by late June Heimo was craving fat again and losing weight. He knew now that he needed more than fish and the occasional duck. He’d have to shoot a bear. Beaver Creek was supposed to be black bear country, but Heimo had never seen anything but tracks and scat. Deciding that he’d have to look farther away from the cabin, one morning he headed up Beaver Creek to one of the side creeks with gear and food enough to last him for three days. He couldn’t paddle against the river’s current. And he’d need the boat to bring back the meat. Attaching a rope to its bow and stern, he walked with the loop along the bank of the river, straining to hold the rope in just the right place so that the canoe would stay out of the shallows and track into the current in the river’s deeper water, a technique called “lining,” which Heimo was not accomplished at. He was making steady progress until he reached a cutbank where the rush of water had carved out a deep cavern. Heimo didn’t know enough to beware of cutbanks, and sure enough the bank collapsed under his weight with a sudden whoosh of sand and dirt.
Heimo heard it happening, grabbed for a nearby tree, and held on. Six feet of cutbank hit the canoe, which tipped and then, amazingly, righted itself. Heimo scrambled down the bank and waded into the water to recover his canoe. His camping gear was wet, but worst of all, his bear rifle, his .444 Marlin, had fallen out. Fortunately, he’d had enough sense to tie everything else down. Searching the bottom of the muddy river with his hands, he realized that the rifle was gone for good. He cursed himself for his stupidity and paddled back down the river to the cabin.
A few days after this mishap, still determined to get a bear, he packed the canoe again with gear and loaded his shotgun with lead slugs. Downriver he shot not one, but two black bears. He gutted and skinned them and then lined the canoe up Beaver Creek, moving cautiously from gravel bar to gravel bar. Heimo had learned that the way to line a boat on a river with cutbanks was to avoid them entirely. Instead, he walked from gravel bar to gravel bar and paddled the short distance between them. With a canoe full of meat, this was a balancing act. He used only one rope, with one end tied to the bow and one end tied to the stern, and he held the rope so it formed something of a V. When he pulled the rope too tightly, the canoe would tack toward the shallow water and ground out. When he grasped it too loosely, the bow would pull out into the fast current. Gradually, he got to where he could line almost entirely by feel. He reached the cabin by evening and butchered the bears under the nearly constant sun. He made most of the meat into jerky (called “drymeat” in Alaska) so it wouldn’t spoil in the summer heat, and was able to feed himself and the dogs for five days on the fresh meat.
That summer was his first in Alaska, and as Heimo readily admits, he made every mistake there was to make. Nothing came easy. Yet his good spirits were not diminished. Near the end of July, he wrote his friend again.
Jammie,
Wish you could be here. Mountains all around. Nobody for 100 or so miles. You wouldn’t believe the mosquitoes up here in the Arctic. 17.65 million of them just flying around my head. Bug spray is useless. You just have to suffer. The summer is no time for sleep. The sun never sets.
This time Heimo followed his name with “seal hunter,” “wilderness scout,” and now “subsistence hunter,” too.