In the Korths’ relatively spacious one-room cabin in Fort Yukon, there is a framed photograph on the wall above the kitchen table of Heimo at the helm of an Eskimo walrus hide skinboat, an angyaq. The sail is up, stretched tight by a stiff wind. Though the photograph doesn’t show that detail, it clearly captures Heimo gripping the tiller, with a full beard that gives him the look of Ahab and his long, dark hair flowing wildly behind him. Heimo is staring straight ahead, as if searching the distant ice for a navigable lead or a great whale. The sky is ominously gray, heavy with fog and mist.
The photo occupies a prominent space on the wall next to a photographic homage to the Korths’ first daughter, Coleen. It is one of Heimo’s favorite photos, if only because his time on St. Lawrence Island, to this day, strikes him as nothing short of serendipity. What was a kid from Wisconsin doing hunting with the Eskimos of the Bering Sea? Surely when Heimo was a boy, dreaming of Canada’s Northwest Territories and Alaska, he never imagined a place like St. Lawrence Island—an island encircled, as far as the eye could see, by, depending upon the season, either ocean or ice. His imagination, after all, had been conditioned by Wisconsin’s North Woods, by small, hidden lakes surrounded by remnant white pine, and by 300-year-old hemlock, paper birch, red and sugar maples disregarded by rapacious turn-of-the-century loggers.
St. Lawrence Island is a place devoid of trees—entirely. When Heimo arrived just after Thanksgiving in November 1975, having barely survived his first three months on Beaver Creek, there were elders still living in Savoonga who had never in their lives been off the island. Consequently, they had never seen a tree. Asian currents deposited prodigious heaps of driftwood on the island’s shores, but this was as close to a tree as many of the village’s older residents had ever come.
Herman Toolie, Heimo’s Eskimo teacher, taught Heimo to respect the wilderness of ice that stretched to the North Pole for its stark and simple beauty and its impersonal cruelty, and Heimo was an attentive student who adapted quickly to the demands of his temporary home. He loved the elemental challenge of hunting on the ice even though the failure to notice a faint change in the direction of wind could result in death. Above everything else, Herman told him, a hunter has to be acutely aware. He has to become a predator. Nothing should escape his notice—not a track, a sound, or flash of color in the distance. The final component to the hunt, Herman said, is the shot. When the animal is near, the most important rule, the only one, is bullet placement. Place the bullet where the head meets the neck.
Like Herman, Heimo had the heart of a hunter, but he was also drawn to the Siberian Yupik people. After months of isolation on the trapline, Heimo relished the easy intimacy of Savoonga’s 350 residents. Though the village was in the midst of cataclysmic changes—television and telephone would come to the island by the late 1970s—Heimo discovered a people continuing the traditions and living by the rhythms that had defined the lives of their people for thousands of years.
St. Lawrence Islanders form one clan of the nine-clan Siberian Yupik people that populate Siberia, called Ungazik, and the two modern-day villages of Savoonga and Gambell. Centuries ago, the Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, who called themselves the “Real People,” lived according to clan in semisubterranean homes called “nenglus,” along the shore, and subsisted on whales, walrus, seal, polar bear, fish, water birds, and eggs, and trapped arctic fox and polar bear for fur. The roofs of these nenglus were built of sod stabilized inside by the jawbones and rib bones of whales. The walls were made from what was available— driftwood and whale bones. Contrary to popular myth, Alaskan Eskimos never lived in snow houses. In the Canadian Arctic and Archipelago, however, people lived in snow houses on the shore ice for nine months a year and in animal skin shelters during the summer. Elsewhere— Labrador and west and northwest Greenland, for instance— the snow house was used only as a temporary shelter.
The first European to come upon St. Lawrence Island was the Dane Vitus Bering, who sailed in the service of the Russian crown. Bering christened the island St. Lawrence when he sighted it on August 21, 1728, the Feast of St. Lawrence. Bering was searching for the geographical link between America and Siberia and would have discovered a cultural, linguistic, and ancestral link, too, had the St. Lawrence Islanders come out to greet him and his crew. The Eskimos of “Sivuqaq” had traded with the Siberians of the Chukchi Peninsula for centuries before Bering arrived, sailing their skinboats, or angyaqs, which were capable of carrying thirty people back and forth over the forty miles that separated the island from the mountainous Russian mainland. Instead the Eskimos fled into the Kukulgit Mountains when they spotted his unfamiliar vessel. Bering writes: “We located this island, which we named St. Lawrence, in honor of the day, and found on it a few huts but no people, although I twice sent the midshipman to look for them.” Unimpressed by what he saw, Bering moved on.
The Russian Otto von Kotzebue was the next European, or laluramka (literally, “people from the bearded clan”), to explore the island— in 1816—but he was similarly unmoved. Judging its commercial potential to be almost nothing, he, too, sailed on, leaving the island to its isolation until American whalers discovered in the waters off the island one of the last great populations of bowhead whales, or aghvook.
Both fashion and necessity fueled the pursuit of the bowhead. Baleen from the bowhead’s jawbone was used to produce a fiberglasslike material that was used in upholstery, umbrellas, women’s skirt hoops and corset stays, and carriage wheels and springs, and whale blubber provided lighting oil for a booming population. A bowhead was worth its weight in gold, $10,000 per whale. In the second half of the nineteenth century, whalers rushed north—they would leave Hawaii in spring and follow the melting ice pack—and the western Arctic became the country’s most profitable whaling grounds and the scene of colossal butchery. In a forty-year period, more than 3,000 voyages were made.
The whalers soon discovered that the islanders were enthusiastic traders. The whalers traded rifles, shotguns, whaling guns, gunpowder and ammunition, tobacco, matches, molasses, and whiskey for walrus ivory, baleen, fur, and women. When the bottom dropped out of the whale oil market, whalers headhunted, taking only the bowhead jawbones, and leaving their headless corpses to rot in the sea. Whalers also killed hundreds of thousands of walrus for their skin, blubber, and ivory tusks. The two mammals revered by the Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, on which they had depended for thousands of years for food, shelter, and clothing, were quickly disappearing from their waters. By the mid-1870s, disease (flu, measles, syphilis), famine, drunkenness, and a rash of bad weather conspired against the islanders. Between 1878 and 1880, St. Lawrence Island lost two-thirds of its population, leaving all but two of its eight original villages—Gambell and Pugughileq (Southwest Cape)—completely decimated. On an island for which the sea had always provided, the period came to be known as the Great Starvation. Accessible game was scarce and once-heroic hunters sold their seal nets and hunting guns for alcohol. Historian Dorothy Jean Ray, in her book The Eskimos of Bering Strait, 1650-1898, claims that the Eskimos “drank excessively from the first sip of liquor.” She writes that they enjoyed it as a stimulant and also used it as a temporary escape from the strict behavioral codes that governed Eskimo life. Even the hunters who abstained from alcohol met with disaster. They were thwarted by fierce winds, which prevented them from reaching their hunting grounds by foot or by boat. Many died of exposure attempting to find food. Some took chances on thin ice and fell through and drowned. When a hunter did successfully kill an animal, he was often too weak with hunger and disease to carry it home. People were forced to boil and eat their walrus tents and eat their dogs and skin ropes. Only 300 islanders remained by 1890. By the early 1900s, when the price of baleen climbed so high that steel carriage springs were being used instead of baleen the whalers fled the Arctic in search of new waters, the bowhead numbers having been reduced to 3,000, one-tenth of its prewhaling population.
By the time Heimo reached St. Lawrence Island in early December 1975, the Bering Sea had rebounded, and Heimo was hunting regularly on the pack ice with Herman Toolie. Despite Herman’s expertise, venturing far out onto the ice was always a calculated gamble. In March 1977, that gamble nearly cost Heimo and Herman their lives.
Heimo and Herman were two miles out on the ice. They’d each shot young bearded seals and were dragging the one hundred-pound animals behind them when Herman signaled for Heimo to stop. “Wait!” Herman said, and Heimo knew immediately that something was wrong. Herman yelled, “Ohook! Hurry. Black smoke. Open water.” Then Herman began to sprint, his eight-foot hunting stick in one hand and the rope, which was tied through a hole cut into the seal’s jaw, in the other. Heimo followed, but he was unable to keep up. Herman was small and agile, and he was used to navigating the uneven ice. A quarter of a mile from shore, Heimo discovered Herman waiting for him. The south wind had broken up the shore-fast ice. Their only hope was to jump.
Heimo clutched his hunting stick and his rope and shadowed Herman. Herman jumped from ice floe to ice floe, and Heimo followed. But Herman quickly outdistanced him. Negotiating the ice floes was something Herman had done since he was a young boy. It was how the boys of the village challenged each other—like Heimo and his friends jumping trains. It was a game of courage and balance. Where the shore-fast ice split into small floes, the boys hopped from one floe to another to see which of them was the bravest, the most sure-footed.
As Heimo neared the shore, he shuddered when he saw the open water that separated the sheets of ice. Concentrate, he thought to himself. Left, right, left, then drive the knee and spring. It was as if he were diving back in high school again. Herman, who had already made it safely onto the shore-fast ice, saw the floes parting and shouted to Heimo, “Ohook! Ohook!” Heimo made one jump and then another. Before he knew it, he was in the water, the weight of the seal nearly dragging him under. He struggled onto the floe, clawing at the ice for a grip. Then he lay on his belly, trying to catch his breath. He didn’t have the strength for another jump. He couldn’t make it. “Heimo!” Herman yelled. “Hurry.” Heimo fought to get to his knees, and then he stood. Hand over hand, he tugged at the seal rope until he pulled the seal onto the ice floe. Herman was still shouting for him to hurry. Heimo could see it, too. If he waited any longer, the floe would be too far from the shore-fast ice for him to make it.
Heimo had only one more jump to make. He ran across the ice floe and hurled himself into the air. He hit the shore-fast ice, but the seal rope snapped taut and yanked him back into the water. Terrifed, Heimo struggled to reach Herman’s outstretched hand. “Leave the seal,” Herman screamed, but Heimo didn’t hear a word. When Herman finally pulled Heimo onto the ice, to safety, Heimo’s rifle was still slung across his shoulder and he still clung to the seal rope. In his panic he’d forgotten to let go.
Whaling was as dangerous as hunting on the pack ice, but still Heimo was eager for the experience. He was a cat with nine lives and had a growing sense that this was all part of his destiny.
The only problem was that on St. Lawrence Island men went whaling in family groups, and outsiders were not welcome. By March 1978, Heimo had given up all hope of ever seeing a bowhead hunt firsthand. He might have been welcome on Herman Toolie’s brother’s boat, but that boat was already full. The chance of making it onto another crew was almost nil.
One night, while almost every family in Savoonga was glued to its television set, Heimo was out walking. Television had come to the island only recently, and the entire village was obsessed with The Six Million Dollar Man, which the people called the Bionic Man. For Heimo, who didn’t enjoy TV, the arrival of television was a curse. “People stopped visiting,” he says. “It was hard to get them away from it. They watched for the sake of watching even though many of them didn’t understand a word.”
Nathan Noongwook was out walking that night, too. Nathan was the captain of a whaling boat. When he was a boy, his father told him how the whale hunt was once preceded by a period called Eghqwaaq, when villagers held ceremonies and sang songs of entreaty, asking Apa to ensure their hunting success. St. Lawrence Islanders no longer held the ceremonies though, so Nathan was out, while everyone else huddled around a televison set, engaged in his own private conversation with God.
Heimo and Nathan exchanged greetings. Nathan mentioned that he was short a man on his whaling crew, and with the season approaching, he was willing to break with tradition. He asked Heimo if he would like to join his crew. Nathan explained that he would be nothing more than a paddler and a float thrower—after striking the whale, hunters threw out plastic buoys to keep the whale from diving and to slow its flight. Both responsibilitites, however, were essential. In 1978, the International Whaling Commission, concerned about dwindling bowhead whale populations, took over management of the Eskimo bowhead whale hunt and decided to cancel it. When the Barrow, Alaska, Eskimos protested and staged a hunt, other Eskimo communities followed suit. The IWC eventually conceded, setting kill and strike limits for each village. The Eskimos bridled at the quota. They argued, but to no avail, that the impact of their hunting was insignificant. To miss only one strike now could be the difference between a season’s success and failure. Nathan explained this to Heimo. Heimo was hardly listening though. He could hardly believe his good fortune.
Pursuing an animal that can reach sixty feet long and sixty tons in weight in a boat made of walrus hide is perhaps the world’s most dangerous endeavor. The hunt begins unremarkably. Using binoculars, hunters glass the open water, waiting to catch sight of a blow. Sometimes they sit for days, napping or busying themselves drinking tea, telling stories, and playing cards. But after a whale is sighted breaking the surface of the water and the “Puhhh!” is heard, the unmistakable expulsion of air, the men fly into action. They board the angyaqs. If the wind is right, they immediately hoist the sail. If the wind is poor, they paddle vigorously, but silently, in order not to spook the whale.
Once in pursuit, the success of the hunt, at least until the boat is virtually on top of the whale, is entirely up to the captain. He has to negotiate the menacing ice floes and follow the leads, which are at times miles wide and at others are nothing more than narrow channels, while still trying to keep the whale in sight. It is a feat of maneuvering a constantly changing course that puts a captain’s skills to their ultimate test. What a captain also has to do is keep his bearings, even far out at sea, when the fog rolls in, so he can eventually make it back to land. Compasses are nearly useless, since a captain is changing course too often to take frequent readings. Out at sea, a captain reads the wind and the currents. Apart from these guides, he relies on years of experience and an intuitive understanding of where the island lies.
To encounter a bowhead whale is to learn what fear is. Using its huge head, reinforced with cartilage, as a battering ram, it is able to plow a path through thick pack ice. Yet in order for the striker to make his throw, the captain must be able to maneuver his angyaq within fifteen feet of the beast. At that distance, the whale looks as big as a battleship. You can feel it move through the water, see the whale’s shiny black skin, smell it, and practically choke on its stink. A mere flick of its tail can crush a boat, sending the entire crew plunging into icy waters and to a near-certain death.
At fifteen feet, the striker stands poised in front of the boat, holding tightly to the harpoon bomb lance gun that hasn’t changed since Captain Ebenezer Pierce invented it in the late 1800s. Prior to the harpoon bomb lance gun, or darting gun, which is equipped with a fifteen-inch, pencil-shaped brass bomb packed with dynamite, Eskimo whalers used ivory-or slate-tipped harpoons. Once the whale was harpooned, sealskin floats were used to keep it near the surface of the water so it could be harpooned again and again until, eventually, it bled to death. But with the darting gun Eskimo hunters could harpoon the whale while simultaneously shooting it with a dynamite bomb.
When the village of Savoonga was established as a reindeer camp, no one thought about its potential as a whaling site. For decades the men of Savoonga joined the people of Gambell in their pursuit of the bowhead. However, in the early 1970s, with the introduction of the snowmachine, the people of Savoonga, who had long been disappointed with their share of the catch, began their own tradition.
Sixty-five miles from Savoonga, located on the island’s southwest cape, was an old village called Pugughileq. Pugughileq was a midden of whale bones, bleached a chalk white by the sun, on which the villagers once hung and dried their seal nets. Here the men of Savoonga built rough plywood shacks, heated with oil stoves during the April bowhead hunt.
“Whaling is a lot of waiting,” Heimo recalls. “I sat next to Nathan—he was the captain—on a hill that looked south. Nathan glassed the open water and watched the wind. He was hoping for a north wind to clear out the ice, so we could chase the whales. He saw a few whales blow, but the wind was out of the southwest and we were locked in by ice. While we waited, Nathan told me that Eskimos were the world’s greatest travelers. He said that an Eskimo discovered the moon by building a ladder of driftwood to it. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was why he didn’t leave behind a sealskin flag to show the world that an Eskimo was there first.”
Heimo was astounded by Nathan’s ability to stay awake. With fifteen hours of light, the old man glassed tirelessly. Before he finally surrendered to sleep, he joked with Heimo that he slept, always, “with one eye open.”
The men waited three-quarters dressed, hoping for a favorable wind and Nathan’s cry. They waited for three days, and then finally it came. He had sighted a whale—“Aghvook!” Forty men were ready to go in a matter of minutes. Nathan climbed into the stern of the angyaq. “Oooohooo kkk!” he yelled. “One, two, three!” Heimo and six other men ran alongside the thirty-foot angyaq, pushing it like bobsledders across the ice on its ivory runners. Then, as if they’d been training for this moment for years, the hunters simultaneously leaped into the boat when Nathan barked out the k of “Ohook!” Their timing was perfect, literally flawless. It was as if the men were joined together by some invisible thread. But Heimo jumped late, preoccupied with the spectacle, determined not to miss a detail. The men had already grabbed their paddles and were lunging at the water like racers when Heimo cleared the gunwales. Heimo took his paddle, stroked twice, and then noticed Nathan motion to one of the men to raise the sail. It was less an order than a gesture, a slight nod of the head, like a buyer bidding on a steer at a cattle auction. The sail caught the wind, and the men fell silent.
Nathan negotiated a narrow lead, and then the ocean opened up. When the whale blew again—“Puhhh!”—half a mile out, it was electrifying. Heimo heard the man next to him, Nathan’s sixteen-year-old nephew, draw in a long breath, as if to suppress a desire to yell out loud. Heimo’s whole body trembled, his muscles tensed. The angyaq covered the half mile quickly, and then Heimo saw the whale, swimming languidly, unaware that it was being pursued. No one moved now except for the striker, who drew his arm back. The thirty-ton bowhead was only twenty feet from the boat.
“Shit,” Heimo says, “it was the scariest thing I ever felt. Aghvook—the word kept speeding through my head. Aghvook, Aghvook. I tasted blood or something in the back of my mouth. That metallic taste.”
Then the striker struck. Seconds later the bomb exploded, and Heimo felt the whale shudder. It was furious now, flailing in the water. Heimo was ready to throw the float until he saw that the harpoon had not stuck.
Only seconds after Heimo realized this, another angyaq was over the whale. He saw the striker throw the harpoon and felt the bomb go off and saw the whale shudder again. The whale tried to dive, racing for the ice, but it was too badly hurt. The harpoon had stuck this time, and the throwers tossed out their floats. The whale drifted toward the surface of the water and made a halfhearted attempt to escape, but its blow had turned to blood. When the Yankee whalers saw blood spitting out of the whale’s blowhole, they’d exclaim, “The chimney’s on fire!” knowing that the whale was as good as dead.
Nathan’s radio crackled at full volume now. The other boats, angyaqs and aluminum skiffs, which would haul the whale to shore, had been alerted, and they were speeding to the site. When the last boat arrived, the whale turned belly up, and everyone cheered. They’d gotten their whale and they still had one strike left.
Ropes were fastened to the whale and the boats worked together to tow it in. When they arrived back at camp, Heimo couldn’t believe his eyes. Half of Savoonga, it seemed, had been radioed and turned out to see the hunters and their catch. Anyone with a working snowmachine had made the sixty-five-mile trip. Heimo watched as two men from the boat that had delivered the final, deadly strike climbed on top of the whale and began to cut off huge slabs of mungtuk (whale skin with a layer of blubber) with long, twelve-foot, ulu-shaped knives. The juicy, black-and-white mungtuk was then divided among the people.
In mid-January of 1981, en route to his cabin on the Coleen River after spending the holidays in Fort Yukon, Heimo considered telling the bush pilot that he would not be going to St. Lawrence Island in the spring. At the last moment, just before the pilot returned to Fort Yukon, he reconsidered. What the heck, he thought, I’ll go for one last adventure.
At the end of May 1981, near the end of the walrus’s summer migration north, Heimo joined a group of hunters from Savoonga. Their destination was a prime walrus hunting spot among the spring’s last, large ice floes just northwest of the village of Gambell on the island’s far western shore. They traveled by what was locally known as a “speedboat,” a wooden V hull with an eighty-horse Evinrude engine. The fog was thick when they left Savoonga, so they took a compass bearing—60 miles west-northwest. Five hours later, confused by the absence of any ice floes, they emerged from a fogbank. Heimo knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the mountains. They were the mountains of Siberia along the Chukchi Peninsula, not far from the Siberian coastal town of Provideniia. The coast was close, which meant that they were in Russian waters. They hadn’t compensated enough for the strong southerly currents. Though Heimo had been living largely without news from the ouside world for over four years, he knew enough to realize that this was bad. It was the height of the Cold War, and he and his friends were in Russian waters.
The severity of the situation dawned on Heimo when a Russian patrol boat gave chase. There were men in the bow of the boat with guns and another man with a bullhorn. Heimo and his friends could either give themselves up or duck back into the fogbank and make a run for it. They chose to run.
Looking back, Heimo thinks that his friends fled to protect him. Eskimo hunters occasionally entered Russian waters. Russian patrol boats would sometimes investigate, but that was usually the end of it. However, when the patrol caught sight of Heimo, a white man, it was suddenly more interested.
“Spy,” Heimo says now. “They must have thought I was a spy, hoping to slip into the country through Siberia.” To this day, he is convinced that if he had been caught he would have had a tough time explaining to them that he was a simple walrus hunter.
Shortly after losing the patrol boat, Heimo’s boat collided with an ice floe, ripping a hole in the boat’s side just below the gunwales. His friends hadn’t seen the floe in the fog, which covered the water like a thick wool blanket. He and his friends bailed frantically until it was obvious to them that they could not bail fast enough. Quickly, one of the men tore out one of the boat’s seats, which was nothing more than a plywood board. Then he tore out another. He held one of the boards over the hole on the outside of the boat while another man held a plywood seat over the hole on the inside. From a toolbox, which they always carried with them, another man grabbed a hammer, gathered a small handful of nails, and nailed the two boards together. The boards didn’t completely stanch the flow of water, but by bailing, too, they were able to keep the boat afloat. Five hours later they arrived in Savoonga, cold, wet, and tired, but alive.
It is late July 2002, and we are sitting outside the Korths’ cabin on the upper Coleen River near their summer kitchen, which is nothing more than a small fire pit with an iron grate over it surrounded by lawn chairs and rough-hewn spruce benches. We have just finished our supper—boiled porcupine, or “quill pig.” This morning, not far from the cabin, Heimo killed it with an ax. He singed it over the fire to remove the quills, and then gutted and skinned it. Edna boiled it for two hours and then browned it on the grill. Knowing I’ve never eaten porcupine, everybody watches me take my first bite. “Delicious,” I inform them, which it is, though I think they were all hoping I’d retch with disgust.
“Up here you got to eat what you can get your hands on,” Heimo says.
“No,” I say, protesting. “I’m not kidding. I’ll never again look at a porcupine in the same way. When I see one I’ll think supper. It tastes like pot roast.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Heimo. “Soon everybody will be serving it for Sunday supper down there. Ah, excuse me, would you please pass the porcupine.”
Supper is over and Krin is doing the dishes. The night air has cooled, and after a week of utter rabidity, the mosquitoes have finally decided to give us a break. Heimo has just finished telling us the story of almost losing the boat, and their lives, to the ice floe. Edna holds his hand, fingers interlocked, a silent admission of how different her life would be had the walrus hunting trip turned out differently, had Heimo’s Eskimo friends not acted quickly to patch the hole in the boat.
Heimo pulls Edna close and kisses her on top of the head. “You know those Eskimos,” he says. “They’re resourceful. They can fix almost anything.” Heimo’s comment is an informed observation, not a blanket generalization. During my winter visit, one of the snowmachines was running poorly, and Heimo cursed his inability to figure out what was wrong with it. “An Eskimo could fix it,” he said. “I’ve seen them take apart entire engines, figure out the problem, fix it, and put the engine back together in an afternoon.”
“Mom can do that, too,” Rhonda yells from the hammock. “Mom’s the mechanic in the family.” Rhonda and Krin and Krin’s new husky puppy, Firth, which Krin named after one of the rivers in northeast Alaska, are all lying in the hammock together. The hammock was a gift from Fred Thomas to Krin for her thirteenth birthday. It sags under their weight. They swing back and forth only inches above the ground.
“It’s true,” Heimo says, hanging his head in mock shame. “Edna fixes everything around here.”
“Yeah, right,” Edna replies, as she often does to Heimo’s verbal taunts, jerking her hand from his.
“That’s right,” Krin yells. “Mom’s better at fixing things than Dad.”
“I’ll fix you,” Heimo shouts, and jumps up out of his chair. The girls see him coming and scatter. Firth scampers after Krin, yapping and biting at her heels; Krin runs for the woods. Rhonda makes a break for the cabin, but reconsiders and dashes for the tent, which Heimo and Edna have been sleeping in since returning to the river because it’s cooler than the cabin. Heimo chases Rhonda around the tent until she sprints for the cabin, ducking under the volleyball net, which is tied tightly between two black spruce trees. Heimo follows, but forgets to duck. He is on his back now, having lost the battle with the net. Nobody inquires to see if he is hurt—instead we all laugh hysterically.
After his brush with death while walrus hunting, Heimo might not have been allowed to return to his cabin on the Coleen had he and other rural Alaskan trappers not been accommodated by a large and controversial piece of legislation called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
“What is to be the fate of all this land?” John McPhee inquired in 1976 in his book Coming into the Country. McPhee was referring to the vast lands that had been held in public trust from the time the United States acquired Alaska in October 1867, and more recently, those supervised loosely by the Bureau of Land Management. With statehood in 1959, Alaska was guaranteed 105 million acres. With the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Alaska Natives received 44 million acres. Besides 2 million acres of private property, what remained was 224 million acres, a chunk of federal land larger than any other state in the union, though almost a quarter of that federal land had already been protected as national forests, parks, and refuges.
Nearly five years after Coming into the Country was published, and prior to his final trip to Savoonga, Heimo was asking the same question: What would happen to the land? More important, what would come of the land along the Coleen River? Would his way of life be tolerated or would it be expunged with the stroke of a pen? Dare he dream of one day raising a family in the place he loved? One thing was for certain: Because of a promise included in the Native claims legislation, conservationists would get their due.
When ANCSA was passed, an Alaska planning group was formed to examine a variety of management possibilities on “d-2” lands, which had been withdrawn from state selection. All of the agencies involved— Fish & Wildlife, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management—scrambled to make their selections and meet a congressional deadline of December 18, 1978.
It all looked as if the issue would be settled by the summer of 1978, but in October the Ninety-fifth Congress adjourned without enacting the appropriate legislation. When it became evident that the December 18, 1978, “d-2” lands deadline mandated by Congress would not be met, Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus exercised his authority under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and withdrew 110 million acres from state and mineral selection. Two weeks later, President Jimmy Carter used the authority granted to him by the obscure Antiquities Act of 1906 to give national monument status to fifty-six million of those acres, incensing countless Alaskans. Alaska, many claimed, was being “locked up.” Some citizens of Fairbanks burned Carter in effigy, and a secessionist movement was born.
Nowhere was this land withdrawal greeted with greater antagonism than in the bush. Every suspicion, every resentment harbored about government and the outside world was confirmed. Rumors had been swirling for years, passed on by word of mouth or crackling over the radio, fueling a general sense of paranoia, a feeling among trappers, miners, and residents of bush communities that, whatever happened, their interests were not going to be considered.
I asked Lynette Roberts, who homesteaded on the Yukon with her husband, Steve Ulvi, how the land debate was greeted along the river, and she replied without hesitation, “With great hostility. There was this general sinking feeling that life as we knew it was over, which had everything to do with the fact that almost everybody was squatting, trespassing.” Because of the proposed Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, the section of the Yukon River between Circle, Alaska, and the Canadian border, including Eagle, was ground zero for the protest movement. The joke was that the Park Service knew how to manage only scenery and not people. It would come in and, if need be, forcibly remove homesteaders from the land. (A few years later, it would pay them as seasonal employees to dress up as trappers, don the garb of homesteaders, build fish wheels, and hang fish for the tourists who would flock to the area to catch a glimpse of what life along the river was once like.) Trappers all over the state were alarmed. Some heard that their presence, which had always been tolerated, was said to conflict with the “necessary and appropriate” use of the land and that subsistence living was incompatible with wilderness preservation, albeit nominally. Others heard that they were being belittled as nothing more than neo-pioneers, engaged in a social experiment or playing a game of wilderness survival as a lifestyle choice. Then there were the horror stories, some based firmly in fact, of pompous, briefcase-toting Bureau of Land Management agents, the first symbols of the new order, jumping out of helicopters to assert the government’s sovereignty over the land, delivering threats and eviction notices.
Randy Brown, who spent fourteen of his sixteen years in the bush along the Kandik River, where he and his wife, Karen Kallen, eventually raised two boys, remembers the time well—the consternation and the confusion. “Reapportionment was inevitable,” he says. “But this was a land grab of dramatic proportions. There was surveying going on everywhere, I mean everywhere—federal officials drawing up park boundaries, mineral surveys, timber surveys. They came in by helicopter to the upper Kandik, not too far from our cabin, to do timber surveys. Everybody was making claims—Native Corporations, the state, the BLM, the Forest Service. It was a crazy time, and we were caught in the middle of it, unsure of what was going to happen to us and the way of life we’d chosen.”
Roger Kaye, then a biological technician and land use planner with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, was one of those federal officials with the unenviable task of traveling throughout the bush and arranging meetings to explain, as best he could, the coming regulations to bewildered trappers and villagers. He and his boss, Lou Swenson, barnstormed across the countryside, visiting seven villages in twenty days. “We did a conscientious job of trying to help them understand what was going to happen. There was a lot of misinformation out there.” Lou Swenson, who later served as manager for the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, adds, “The new regulations tried to maintain the status quo, and we tried to help people understand that. It was a completely new idea of refuge management. We didn’t act like big bad government guys. Everything was authorized unless prohibited rather than the other way around. Refuge managers in the Lower Forty-eight would have heart attacks. But Alaska was a very different situation. People in the bush were relieved to find out that little had changed—they could still use snowmachines and dog teams, hunt, fish, cut wood, you name it.”
Finally, years of rumor, innuendo, and provisional meetings came to an end, and the trappers, at long last, had a general idea of where they stood. In the waning days of the Ninety-sixth Congress, the “d-2” land reform was consummated with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), and on December 2, 1980, President Carter signed it into law.
ANILCA placed 104 million acres, 28 percent of Alaska, under some form of federal protection, replacing the monuments with wildlife refuges, forests, wild and scenic rivers, and wilderness preservation systems. With a stroke of the pen, the nationwide preservation movement that was launched on behalf of the Alaskan wilderness was validated and rewarded. ANILCA more than doubled the size of the country’s national parks and wildlife refuge lands and tripled its wilderness preserve acreage. Living Wilderness called it “the strongest, most daring conservation action … in American history.” The Sierra Club called it “the last great first chance.” Time magazine labeled it “a masterpiece of compromise.”
This is not to say that conservationists were entirely satisfied. Many lamented the lack of restrictions in the 23.5 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve, adjacent to the Prudhoe Bay complex, which occupies more than one-half of Alaska’s North Slope and was established in 1923 during the Harding administration, when the Navy switched from coal to oil. It was a strategy that seemed sound in 1923—set aside oil reserves to ensure national security—but conservationists argued that it was no longer practical in light of the country’s enormous energy needs, which only Persian Gulf sources could satisfy. The decision to set aside Section 1002 (referred to as ten-oh-two)—a 1.5 million-acre chunk of Arctic coastal plain and the last section of Alaska’s 1,000-plus miles of Arctic coast not reserved for development—for assessment of its oil and gas reserves was particularly galling to conservationists.
Conversely, many Alaskans—particularly politicians, businesspeople, and the Alaska congressional delegates—denounced ANILCA and the conveyance of de facto wilderness into the protective and restrictive hands of the federal government. It was a land grab, they contended, without precedent in U.S. history, a conspiracy hatched and orchestrated by Lower Forty-eight politicians, most of whom had never even been to the state.
From the moment he set foot in Alaska, Heimo had been living with an uncertainty about what would become of the land. Being a newcomer, and feeling powerless in the face of inevitable and cataclysmic changes set in motion by the discovery of oil and, subsequently, the building of the pipeline, he did the only thing available to him: He went about his life and hoped for the best.
What Heimo and other Alaska trappers eventually got was a 186 page document that articulated a less restrictive approach to wilderness management that was in keeping with Alaska’s unique circumstances and that enabled Heimo and some of the trappers to remain on the land. ANILCA explicitly allowed for the continuation of subsistence practices by Alaska’s rural residents in most of the national interest lands, including the expanded Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where Heimo lived, acknowledging that those living in the Alaskan bush “may be the last remnant of the subsistence culture alive today in North America.” It also granted rural residents the right to use snow machines, motorboats, and other methods of transportation that had “traditionally been employed … by local residents.” Significantly, in a section titled “Use of cabins and other sites of occupancy on conservation system units,” it articulated a limited tolerance for backwoods cabins. ANILCA clearly spelled out the National Park Service’s policy: Those who built cabins on federal land after 1978 were out of luck; ANILCA made no accommodations for them; they would lose their cabins. Trappers who built before 1978, but after 1973, could apply each year for one-year permits; those who came before 1973 were ordered to renew their permits every five years. National Wildlife Refuge regulations were slightly more liberal. They granted renewable five-year permits to anyone who built his cabin before 1978, which meant that Heimo, had he deliberated longer about coming to the Coleen River, would have missed qualifying for permission to live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ANILCA further stipulated that permits could be transferred only to the immediate family and were rendered null and void with the death of the “last immediate family member of the claimant residing in the cabin.” Finally, applicants were required to acknowledge that they had no interest in the property on which the cabin stood.
When Heimo decided to go to Savoonga in the spring of 1981 and wrote it off to adventure only, he was not being entirely truthful with himself. He also went to celebrate. While in Fort Yukon for the holidays, he had heard the news about ANILCA. The details were vague, but for the first time since he came to the Coleen in June 1978, he was certain that he could come back and lead a life that was no longer imperiled by prohibitive legislation. He could keep his cabin and continue trapping as long as he abided by the permitting process. He didn’t like the new regulations, but he was willing to do whatever was required of him for the chance to live out his dream. But more than anything else, he came to Savoonga because of the presence of a pretty girl by the name of Edna Rose.
Heimo met Edna Rose, or Miti Dowin (her Yupik name), for the first time in the winter of 1975. He saw her often after that. He was friends with her father, Emerson, and frequently stopped by the house to visit. He was also a friend of her uncle’s, Jackson Mokiyuk. Jackson trapped fox, and it was he who taught Heimo how to prepare furs, how to make the proper cuts so as not to damage the fur, how to care for the fur once the animal had been skinned.
Edna was a year older than Heimo. She was attractive, there was no doubt about that, and available, too. But Heimo had promised himself that he would not get involved in a village romance. Savoonga was just too small. In such a small village, gossip was a kind of pastime, and Heimo was determined not to fuel its fires. Although he hadn’t come to Savoonga in search of a wife, Heimo had to admit—on the trapline, he was often lonely. And he hadn’t had a girlfriend since high school. There’d been other women, but they were brief flirtations, not relationships. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to share the beauty of the river with someone he loved?
One of Heimo’s favorite stories concerns an evening in the spring of 1978 when he was sitting with Emerson in the living room of Emerson’s house. Heimo hadn’t seen Edna since the previous spring, and when he arrived she was there. He tried to conceal his excitement, chatting with her as casually as he could. But he couldn’t fool Emerson. When Edna left, Emerson went to the kitchen and returned. “Heimo,” he said, “would you like something? Coffee maybe?” Heimo answered “No.” “Tea?” Heimo answered “No” again. “Juice? Water?” Heimo shook his head. “A wife?” For a moment Heimo was taken aback. Then he chuckled. “Sure, how about Edna Rose?” “Edna Rose?” Emerson replied, “Not for ten million dollars.”
Heimo didn’t have more than a few hundred dollars to his name, much less $10 million, but he was interested. There were complications, however. There were children involved: Melinda and Merlin. For Heimo, who had been on his own since he came to Alaska, the thought of being with a woman he loved was exciting. But an instant family? He didn’t know if he was ready for that. And then there was Emerson. Though Emerson was his friend, Emerson had witnessed Edna’s difficult recovery after the death of her fiancé, only to see her treated poorly by a man who was incapable of fidelity. Heimo was his friend, but Emerson was determined not to let Edna be hurt again.
Heimo’s first real chance to be alone with Edna didn’t happen until the summer of 1981. Heimo needed a break from Fort Yukon, so he accepted an invitation from a friend to stay in Nome for the summer and do carpentry work.
These were still Heimo’s drinking days, and Nome had more taverns per capita than any town in Alaska. One night Heimo was drinking at a bar called the Board of Trade, or the BOT. Many of its patrons affectionately translated BOT as “Bottom of the Toilet.” The BOT was a rough, hard-drinking bar. Surely the last person Heimo expected to meet in there was the woman who would one day become his wife. But in June 1981 Edna strolled in, or rather hurried in. She saw Heimo sitting at the bar and ran to him. She told Heimo that a drunk had taken an interest in her at another bar and that she had slipped out, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
Edna and Heimo talked that night at the bar. Heimo made her laugh and he was a good listener and Edna confided in him. She told him things that she had not talked with anyone else about. Walking her home that night, Heimo summoned the courage to finally—after all these years—ask her out, and Edna, with little deliberation, accepted.
There is already a distinct chill in the air though it is only late July. Last night the temperature dropped below freezing, and this morning we woke to discover an inch of snow on the ground, clinging to the fireweed and the kinnikinnick. Winter is preeminent here. Combined, spring, summer, and fall—when bush families like the Korths cut wood, lay in their winter meat, make repairs to the cabin, dig an extra outhouse hole, enjoy the sun, and mentally prepare themselves for the snow and cold to come—amount to nothing more than a four-month prelude to the long season of winter.
This day, I am walking to the high cache with Edna. She and Krin just flew in yesterday, a full week after Heimo, Rhonda, and I arrived. Edna takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with the scent of spruce and the air’s cold bite. “Smells like home,” she says. “It’s good to be home.” Edna tells me that she is always happy to leave the cabin in spring and go to Fort Yukon for the summer. But two months is enough for her. “By mid-July,” she says, “I can’t wait to get back out.”
We are going to the high cache to get the generator because today is wash day, and Edna has piled five huge cloth bags filled with clothes around an ancient-looking Hoover washing machine, which sits in the middle of the cabin yard. The machine is a relatively new addition. For years Edna did all her wash with a washboard, and even though she must now haul two five-gallon buckets of water from the river for each load—she estimates that she has at least twelve loads—using the Hoover is easier than scrubbing clothes all day.
On the way to the cache, we walk by my little two-man Moss tent, which is set back in the woods about forty feet from the cabin yard, outside the perimeter of the solar-powered bear fence, which was given to Heimo by a friend. The friend is an ardent environmentalist, and Heimo jokes that he was less concerned for their safety than he was for the bears, since an all-purpose law allows the Korths to shoot a bear in defense of “life or property.”
“Bear bait,” Edna says, looking at the tent and my fly rod leaning against a tree. There has been a grizzly prowling around the cabin yard, and Edna jokes that she regards my tent as the first line of defense. Each afternoon, after the day’s work, I’ve set off for the river, calling myself, much to Heimo’s amusement, a “subsistence fisherman,” in order to supply fresh, tasty Arctic grayling for our supper. Edna knows that there’s nothing that attracts a grizzly like the smell of fish. Though I wash up in an ice-cold pool downriver every evening, it is a pro forma precaution. Soap or no, I’m bear bait when I crawl into my bag at night.
“If a griz comes, I’ll be up a tree quick as Krin,” I say, “and then I’ll send him to the cabin.”
“Yeah, right,” Edna says, looking at the trees, knowing full well that I’m not agile enough to get up one before a grizzly makes a meal of me.
Walking back to the cache, Edna and I stop to fill a small plastic container with blueberries. It is kind of a halfhearted effort. Soon Edna, Krin, and Rhonda will head out to the tundra for a full day of berry picking for canning.
Hunched over a blueberry bush, I ask Edna, somewhat tentatively, about her first date with Heimo. Edna is a steadfastly private person, still mistrustful of my motives, and she usually recedes in response to my questions. But she seems glad to talk about their first date in Nome.
They went fishing for Dolly Varden, and when it became clear that the fish weren’t going to bite, they spent the rest of the day wandering the trails outside of Nome on a friend’s motorcycle. That evening they went out for pizza. “Milano’s Pizza,” she says, as if pleased that she still remembers the name. She also remembers the story she told Heimo that night about her father.
When Edna was a young girl, she had been sick and feverish for a week. One day, a woman came to the house to tell Edna’s father, Emerson, of a dream she’d had the night before. In the woman’s dream, Edna was lying on the ground with her chest open and her beating heart exposed. Three shamans circled Edna. When the woman asked the shamans what they were doing, they replied, “Take her. We cannot get to her soul.” Shamans were still a very important part of Eskimo society, and when the woman finished telling Emerson of her dream, Emerson marched over to the shaman’s house and threw a large rock onto his roof, as a warning to him not to be casting any spells on his daughter. The next day, Edna’s fever dropped, and two days later she had fully recovered. Edna knew that Heimo would appreciate the story, because he knew her father as normally a kind, mild-mannered man. The image of Emerson tossing a rock onto the shaman’s roof in a fit of anger, risking the shaman’s retaliation, too, gave both Edna and Heimo a good laugh.
“What did you think of Heimo?” I ask, emboldened by Edna’s lack of reserve. I ask the question casually, giving her the opportunity to ignore it if she chooses. Perhaps it is the calming effect of the soft morning sun and the snow dripping gently from the leaves of the cottonwoods, but she doesn’t hesitate. “I liked him,” she says, “but I always thought he was just a weird trapper who lived alone.”
Edna stops then, checking herself, as if she is uncertain how much to reveal. I wait, and minutes go by, and neither of us says a word. “A weird trapper?” I say, breaking the silence at last. “But what did you think of him after your first date?”
Edna doesn’t respond. She stands and walks in the direction of the cache. I follow her. She stops at the ladder to the cache and puts down her container of blueberries and ties her shoe. Without looking up, she says, “I thought he was the nicest guy I ever met.”