Heimo and I are sitting on a rock ledge overlooking the Coleen River valley after a half day of hiking. It is early afternoon and only now is the fog, which has hung over the valley since yesterday evening, beginning to rise. Heimo is glassing east, hoping to spot a bull moose wandering in the dense white and black spruce thickets along the river. He glasses continuously, carrying on a narrative in a whisper. Although a moose’s big ears make it look like a Maurice Sendak creation in Where the Wild Things Are, the oversized ears are what allows it to escape the stew pot. So we whisper.
“Not for ten million dollars,” Heimo imitates Emerson, Edna’s father, and chuckles softly. “No amount of money could pay for what Edna means to me. But every time I think of that—ten million dollars— it makes me laugh, because eventually all it took was twenty-five grayling, some moose meat, half a moose stomach, and a wolverine skin.” That’s what Heimo brought with him from the river and presented to Emerson when he and Edna returned to Savoonga in January 1982 for their wedding.
Heimo explains that by the summer of 1981, when he and Edna were dating in Nome, word made it to Savoonga that he had asked Edna to marry him, and Emerson, fortunately, had already had a change of heart. While Heimo was working up the courage to ask Emerson for Edna’s hand, Emerson took the initiative and called him.
Heimo puts down his binoculars for a moment and laughs out loud. “ ‘That’s good, Heimo,’ ” he says, impersonating Emerson on that day. “ ‘I like you. My boys like you. That’s good. My wife like you.’ ” It was Emerson’s way of saying that he knew Heimo would take good care of his daughter.
After spending the summer of 1981 with Edna in Nome, Heimo returned to Fort Yukon. But this time he was not alone. He had Edna on his arm, and her daughter Millie, too. Merlin, Edna’s son, stayed with Edna’s parents in Savoonga. After a week of visiting with friends, Heimo, Edna, and Millie left Fort Yukon for the cabin. For much of the flight, they were over the expansive, flat, pond-pocked wilderness of the Yukon Flats. But as they neared the Stranglewoman Mountains, Edna saw the land change. To the north was mountain country, and for the first time she understood why the Natives of Fort Yukon said that Heimo lived “above the clouds.”
An hour after taking off from Fort Yukon, the pilot landed on a gravel bar not far from the river. Heimo held Millie’s hand and stayed by their gear while Edna walked along the bank of the river. Admiring the Stranglewoman Mountains to the southeast and the rugged peaks of the Brooks Range to the north, Edna felt an exhilaration she had not experienced in many years. The Coleen River—it would be a new beginning for her, and for Millie, too. Millie pulled away from Heimo, but she didn’t run down the gravel bar to be with Edna; she ran twenty feet into the woods. Millie laughed and giggled and danced around the trunks of two large white spruce trees. When Millie left Nome that summer, she had never even seen a tree before. Now, along the river, she was surrounded by them. There were trees so high she had to lie on her back to see the tops.
Heimo kept his eye on Millie, but he watched the river, too. Though it was already late August, it had been a wet summer in the Interior, and the river was high, uncrossable. Three years before, with his brother Tom, he had made the mistake of trying to cross the river at high water. It was not a risk he was willing to take again. In those three years, he had learned one cardinal rule—never take unnecessary chances. In the Arctic, good judgment is often the dividing line between life and death. So instead of trying to make it to the cabin, he, Edna, and Millie bided their time and camped along the river’s east bank, within shouting distance of the cabin. For five days they hunted, gathered berries, explored, and chopped wood.
Despite having grown up around guns, Edna was new to hunting. She was the second oldest of five children, and as a youngster her father had taught her how to shoot—first a pellet gun and then a .22—and she had caught on quickly. By her midteens she was eager to hunt with her dad, but she knew that was impossible. She was as good a shot as any boy in Savoonga, but on St. Lawrence Island women were not allowed to hunt. It was considered bad luck and strictly forbidden.
With Heimo, there were no such restrictions, however. Edna was free to hunt; in fact, Heimo encouraged her. There were three mouths to feed now, and if he could depend on her to shoot a caribou or a moose, that was all the better.
By their second night on the river, Edna got her chance to show Heimo that she was a capable shot. Millie was already asleep in the tent, and Heimo and Edna had just finished washing up in the river. They were sitting around the fire, talking about what their lives would be like together, when Heimo heard a branch crack. Grizzly, he thought, and grabbed his gun. A minute later six caribou stepped out of the woods—four cows and two bulls. Heimo handed the .22 to Edna. “Take the back one,” he said. “The big bull.” It was still light out, so Edna took aim. She shot twice at eighty yards and the bull fell on the second shot. The caribou scattered. Three cows ran back into the woods, while the remaining bull and the fourth cow ran upriver. After thirty yards, they stopped, and that’s when Heimo pulled the trigger on his 300 Winchester rifle and dropped the bull where he stood.
Edna ran upriver and stood over the animal she had shot. She had killed a caribou! Hardly a man on St. Lawrence Island, let alone a woman, had ever shot a caribou. It was nearly midnight when Heimo and Edna finshed gutting and cutting up the bulls. Edna was covered in blood up to her elbows. She had grown up cleaning fish and the birds her father hunted, and one thing Heimo never had to show her was how to use a knife.
The following day, Heimo began Edna’s bush education. The first thing he was going to do was to teach her how to use an ax. Because there were no trees on St. Lawrence Island, it had never been something she needed to know, but on the Coleen the ability to use an ax was an absolutely essential skill.
Heimo showed Edna the correct stance and how to grip the ax and slide her hand down the handle when she swung. Then he lay a thick log in the moss for her to practice on. At first, Edna swung the ax wildly. But she was determined. Heimo could see it—her aggressive posture, the ferocious expression, the horrible grunting. “Whoa, Edna, calm down. You don’t have to kill it,” he cautioned her, holding six-year-old Millie and standing back at a safe distance, trying to suppress his laughter for fear of making Edna self-conscious. “Take it easy, Edna. You’re going to wear yourself out, if you don’t kill yourself first.” Edna just rolled up her sleeves, wiped her forehead, glared at him, and swung the ax even more fiercely.
It wasn’t long before Edna was using the ax with a precison that impressed Heimo, so they moved on to the next step—splitting wood. Edna had good hand—eye coordination, and learned quickly. After a morning of instruction, she was splitting wood like a regular woodswoman. She loved the feeling of the ax in her hand, but mostly she loved the smell of the wood. At first, each time she’d split a log, she’d pick it up and hold it to her nose. Only then would she let Millie, who proved to be an eager helper, add the log to their growing pile.
Nearly a week after arriving on the Coleen, they walked a few hundred yards upriver and found a spot where the current had slowed and the river bottom was shallow and knitted with gravel bars, and they crossed. Heimo led, holding Millie on his shoulders, and Edna followed him. When they reached the opposite bank, Heimo pointed to a tall stand of white spruce trees a quarter of a mile off the river. “That’s home,” he said. Edna and Millie led now, following the trail into the woods. Millie spotted the cabin first, one hundred yards down the trail. There it was. She pulled Edna by the hand.
Before either of them went inside the cabin, Edna, still holding Millie’s hand, walked around the cabin yard. The yard was dark, shadowed by high trees. Where is the sky? Edna thought, and mentally she marked the dead trees that she was going to take down. When Edna saw the woodpile though, she was disappointed. Heimo had already laid in most of the winter’s wood the previous spring. No matter. Edna announced that she and Millie would take down the trees, cut and stack the wood themselves, whether they needed it or not. “I want to be able to see the sky,” she said, homesick for the treeless spaciousness of St. Lawrence Island.
It is early August, and it has been five days since Edna and Krin arrived back on the river, and Edna and I are sitting by the fire among the circle of chairs and benches they call their summer kitchen. There is a slight chill in the air, but the fire is not for our warmth—Edna keeps it going to drive away the opportunistic mosquitoes. Rhonda and Krin have gone to fetch water, and Heimo is a quarter mile downriver, using his spotting scope to see if the caribou are coming. For days, he has talked of little else. He watches Mummuck Mountain almost compulsively now, like a farmer studying the sky and waiting for rain, as if perhaps he can will the caribou to come.
Edna is dressed up. She wears a colorful flannel shirt and long feathery, Navaho-like earrings. Her hair is pulled tight against her head like a ballet dancer’s and plaited into a long, silky braid, which brushes against her lower back when she pokes at the coals of the fire. The Korths are expecting company, three friends from Connecticut, who are supposed to come in this evening by bush plane. Years ago Heimo and Edna had helped them and their friends out of a tough spot, when a bush pilot infamous for taking poor care of his clients dropped them off on a lake two miles from the river. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that the three friends and the rest of their group were hoping to paddle the river. They had several tons of gear, canoes, food, and other provisions, and had anticipated being dropped off much closer. Heimo had gone to investigate when he heard the plane and discovered them out on the tundra wondering what their next move would be. He showed them a shortcut to the river and helped them haul their gear. Edna prepared grayling for the group of twelve.
Edna is particularly excited about their arrival because one of the three guests is a woman. It’s rare that a woman comes out. Edna plans to take her berry picking on the tundra. She puts another log on the fire, holding it far away from her body so she doesn’t get dirty. “You should have seen it,” she says, leaning back in her chair.
“What?” I ask her.
“His cabin,” she says, looking at me as if I haven’t been following the conversation. “When I first saw it, I thought, What in the world are Millie and me getting ourselves into? I won’t live like this. It wasn’t exactly a woman’s dream, you know.” Edna laughs about it now, an easy, cheerful laugh.
The cabin was twelve by ten, with a tiny peephole window and a ceiling so low that Edna could hardly stand up straight without bumping her head. If the trees made her claustrophobic, the cabin was far worse. It made her feel like she was trapped under the ice, like all the air had been sucked from her lungs.
When Edna and Millie went inside the cabin, Heimo remained outside, pretending to sharpen his knife. This was the part he had been dreading. When Edna and Millie came out of the cabin, he saw their faces and knew immediately. “Raise the roof,” Edna said. Heimo was so embarrassed by the cabin, he didn’t argue. He would not only raise the roof, he’d put in a sleeping loft, too. He had to work fast though—they were sleeping in the tent temporarily, and it was already early September. It would get cold soon, and Edna and Millie had never experienced temperatures like those they would see on the Coleen.
If ever there were a woman cut out for the bush, it was Edna. Edna had spent much of her childhood in harsh conditions; the weather on St. Lawrence Island is gray and wet for much of the year, enough to defeat even the hardiest of souls. And Edna was used to cramped, spartan conditions. Every November, her father would load up his sled and ready his fifteen-dog team, and the family would make the thirty-mile trip to their fox camp. They’d spend much of the winter and spring there, returning to Savoonga in May.
But life on the Coleen would test her. Normally, for an Eskimo, whose world revolves around the extended family, living in such isolation—the Korths’ nearest neighbor lived fifty-five miles down-river— would be out of the question. In Eskimo society, family bonds are valued above all else. Solitude is a sign of unhappiness, estrangement. After Edna made the leap of faith, though, and agreed to join Heimo on the river, she was determined to adjust and to learn to love the Coleen as much as she loved her “weird trapper.”
Beginning in late September, a week after the first snow of the season, Edna and Millie tended a snowshoe hare snare line, which Heimo had laid out in a small loop leading from and back to the cabin. With her father Edna had learned to trap white fox, using longspring traps with a pan held by a dog, which released the trap’s jaws, but on the Coleen wire snares were more effective, and Heimo showed Edna and Millie how to make and set them.
It was good for Edna and Millie to have time alone on the snare line. At six, Millie had already suffered enough. She had grown up without a father, and now she missed the only home she had ever known— Savoonga. On the snare line, Edna and Millie talked of Savoonga and how they missed eating seal meat and mungtuk. They also practiced identifying the tracks they found in the snow—the pointed pods of a cow moose, the four-toed pad of a wolf, the large, round tracks of a lynx, the elongated pad of a porcupine. They made a game of it, seeing which one of them could see and name a track the quickest. Sometimes Heimo would join them and quiz them, pointing out the distinguishing characteristics of each print. Only when Edna and Millie discovered the huge, pigeon-toed tracks of a roaming grizzly with its pronounced claws did Heimo’s warning always to be on guard against grizzlies seem real— too real.
By early October, nearly six weeks after her arrival, Edna had also made another discovery—she was pregnant. She had intuited it weeks before, but now she was certain. One day in early October, after walking her line, while Heimo and Millie stayed at the cabin boiling new snares in spruce boughs to rid them of their scent, she returned to the cabin and told them both. Heimo whooped with joy. They were going to have a baby! He picked Edna up and swung her around, then realized what he was doing, and set her back down as carefully as he could. Millie didn’t react. Later that night Edna promised Millie that she’d be happier when she had a sister or brother to play with.
In addition to adapting to their new surroundings, Edna and Millie also had to adjust to the Interior’s cold, and to autumn’s advancing darkness. One day in early November, Heimo noticed a pronounced ring around the sun, a luminously colored sun dog, and he knew then that even colder weather was coming soon. Sure enough, on the following day, a north wind off the Arctic sent temperatures to minus 35 degrees. Edna and Millie had never experienced 35 below before. Edna developed headaches, brought on by the intensely cold, dry air. Heimo checked his traps—he was used to 35 below—but other than tending to their snare line, Edna and Millie didn’t wander far from the cabin. At night, to alleviate her headaches, Edna set pots filled with ice on the woodstove and breathed in the steam.
That December, their first together as a family, Edna and Millie were ready for a break. But they had no plans to go to town. Heimo had been hoping for a good fur year, but after an outstanding 1980-1981 season, his fur take by Christmas amounted to only thirty-five marten, and much of that money was needed for supplies. What money he had left over from the previous season they’d already set aside to pay for plane tickets to Savoonga for their January wedding and for wedding expenses.
One night, while Millie was asleep and Heimo was washing up after skinning out a marten, Heimo suggested turning on KJNP. “We can sit in bed and listen to Trapline Chatter,” he said.
“Always KJNP,” Edna grumbled. They hadn’t gotten a message in over a month. Didn’t anyone care that they were out there?
Heimo and Edna listened to twenty-five messages. “No more,” Edna said, and reached to turn off the radio. She flicked the switch, and Heimo flipped it right back on. Edna turned over, her back to Heimo.
Then she heard it: “This message goes out to the Korths on the Coleen River. We’re sending out a plane to bring you into town for Christmas.” The announcer read the rest of the message, and when she finished, Edna was bouncing up and down at the edge of the bed. “We’re going to town! I can’t believe it! We’re going to town!”
When their friend and bush pilot John Peterson showed up three days later, he handed Edna an envelope. Edna studied it.
“C’mon, open it up,” Peterson said.
Edna tore the envelope and pulled out the letter. It was a petition signed by their friends in Fort Yukon, demanding they come into town for Christmas.
Heimo looked at the letter. “We got no money.”
No big deal Peterson told him. The flight had been paid for, and their friends had already bought presents for Millie, too.
It is late July and Heimo and I are cleaning Arctic grayling on a gravel bar just downriver from the cabin. Only seconds, it seems, after I slit open the belly of the first fish, the gulls appear. “I guess they know me by now,” I say to Heimo, half convinced the gulls have learned to recognize me. For the past week, I have fished daily, trying my luck in nearly every pool within two miles of the cabin. The river hasn’t disappointed me. For each fish I keep I throw one or two back. For an entire afternoon, I won’t see a single gull. Yet as soon I leave the water and grab my willow stick through which I’ve threaded the graylings’ gills, they suddenly appear, like a dog that crawls out from under the back porch when it hears the rattle of its food dish. When I crouch down and cut into the first fish, they cruise overhead—mew gulls and herring gulls—115 miles from the Arctic Ocean, screeching and squacking impatiently for their next meal.
I finish cleaning the fish and grab the largest of the bunch. “Look at this one,” I say, holding up a twenty-two-inch lunker, feeling inordinately proud of myself. I hold it by the belly and pull the dorsal fin, which fans out like that of a minitaure sailfish. Up close, the fish is goggle-eyed but pretty, its gunmetal gray splashed with variations of green and blue. Heimo doesn’t even look up. He knows that catching ravenous grayling, even with a fly, is hardly an angler’s feat. Besides, after a summer of gill-netting twenty-pound king salmon, he is unimpressed with my haul.
“It’s gonna taste good tonight,” I say.
“Yuck,” Heimo replies. After almost three decades of eating grayling, he no longer is fond of them and will eat them only in a pinch. His favorite fish is the salmon, whose pink meat he thinks is far superior to the white meat of grayling.
Rain falls as Heimo puts the finishing touches on the final grayling. Until yesterday it has been a dry month marked by sun and brilliantly blue skies, though August is usually the rainy season up here. “This is what Savoonga’s like every day,” Heimo says. “Cloudy and rainy. But the Arctic’s a desert. You know that, don’t you? We get fifteen inches of precipitation a year up here, less than Arizona. But in Savoonga, this is what you get day in, day out. The Interior is to Savoonga what San Diego is to Seattle.” Heimo stops for a moment, considering the analogy he’s just made, and then he makes a small correction. “That’s true,” he laughs. “Unless you’re talking about December and January, when the sun never clears the horizon around here.”
Except for its weather, Heimo has fond memories of Savoonga. It is, after all, where he met Edna. It is also where he was married—January 25, 1982. It was Edna’s birthday, her twenty-seventh. The wedding was at the Presbyterian Church. Since Edna is related to almost everyone in Savoonga, much of the village was there for the ceremony. The Reverend Alice Green performed the wedding. Green had come to the island in the late 1930s. The saying in Savoonga was that she “baptized, married, and buried.” After over forty years of service to the church and the village, she planned to retire. Edna and Heimo’s wedding would be her last.
Edna wore her hair loose down to her waist, and she wore a light blue wedding gown that she and Heimo had chosen together at J.C. Penney in Fairbanks. Heimo sported a fresh haircut and a light blue suit to match Edna’s gown; he hadn’t worn a suit since he was sixteen. The pants and the dress shirt made him itch, though, and his face itched, too. Edna wouldn’t allow him to get married in a beard, so he’d shaved that morning. All that remained of his foot-deep field of a beard was bushy sideburns that—wedding or not—he refused to part with.
After six years alone in the bush, all the attention on his wedding day made Heimo feel like escaping to the ice pack and hiding behind a pressure ridge. He was in love with Edna—there was no doubt about that—but if it had been up to him, they would have simply exchanged their vows privately and quickly, and that would have been the end of it. After the ceremony, he would have thrown his suit in a pile on the floor and gone out walrus hunting with Herman on the ice floes. Instead he was standing in front of a crowd of people, dreaming, to calm his nerves, of setting fox traps. He was so anxious he needed to be prompted by Reverend Green to say, “I will,” and then when it came time for the kiss, still flustered, he forgot to lift Edna’s veil. The guests erupted into gales of laughter, and Heimo blushed like a bashful young boy. After the kiss Edna held her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, too.
Just over four months after their wedding, Coleen Ann Korth, whom Edna and Heimo named after the Coleen River, was born in Fairbanks—May 29, 1982. By mid-July, they were back on the river, and Heimo immediately began to work on a new cabin. The four of them— Heimo, Edna, Millie, and now Coleen, too—would need more space than what the little cabin could provide. First, Heimo laid out the cabin’s dimensions—sixteen feet by sixteen feet. Then he cut the trees. It was hard building alone. Edna helped when she could. While Edna was working with Heimo, Millie held Coleen in her arms when the baby slept and rocked her when she cried.
During the first few weeks, Edna often took the girls to the river to a nearby gravel bar to avoid the mosquitoes. It had been a dry summer, and the river was low, so they were able to wade comfortably to an expansive bar twenty feet from the riverbank. On the gravel bar, Edna lay down a blanket, and together she and the girls enjoyed the breeze and the gurgling of the river. Sometimes while Coleen and Millie slept, Edna daydreamed. The last six years of her life had been difficult—first the death of her fiancé and later the discovery that her boyfriend and the father of her son, Merlin, was an incorrigible womanizer. Edna had hit a dead end. But on the Coleen, she dared to dream again. She was in love with a generous, responsible man. They would raise a family together. They would live simply. It would be a hard life, but the girls would grow up happy. Millie and Coleen would learn to be comfortable in the woods, to fish and hunt, to identify birds and gather berries, to paddle a canoe, snowshoe, ski, and perhaps trap, too. Though Edna had only stayed in school until the tenth grade, she and Heimo were determined to give Millie and Coleen a good education. The girls would get even more attention than children in Fairbanks did. Edna would oversee their studies. She knew she was smart; she picked up things quickly, and what she lacked in formal education, she would make up for through sheer effort. If need be, she would learn herself, and she would teach the girls, as best she could. A good life.
One day, while sitting with the girls on the gravel bar, Edna felt a searing stab of pain. She had just finished demonstrating for Millie the coarse whistle of a gray jay when it hit her. The pain dug at her abdomen and left her gasping. She tried to ignore it, but when it returned, thirty minutes later, she couldn’t. This time it lasted for nearly a minute. She had to lay Coleen down on the blanket because she didn’t have the strength to hold her. When it subsided, she took the girls back to the tent and described the symptoms to Heimo. They both hoped it was a freak pain and that it would soon disappear, but instead the pain grew progressively worse over the next few days. The sharp stabs were accompanied now by a dull but nearly constant ache.
Two weeks later, John Peterson, the Korths’ friend, who was now running a big game guiding and hunting operation along one of the rivers to the north in the Brooks Range, stopped in for a brief visit en route to his hunting camp. Heimo heard his plane and hiked out to meet him at the nearest gravel bar, where he’d landed, three miles downriver. “Thank God you stopped,” Heimo said. “Edna’s sick, and I’m worried about her.” Peterson had to deliver supplies to his hunting camp, but he promised to stop in again in two days on his way back to Fort Yukon. In those two days, Edna’s condition deteriorated. Her skin turned yellow with jaundice. Even the whites of her eyes were yellow. Worst of all, she couldn’t eat and could hardly get out of bed.
Two days later, Peterson landed downriver. Edna told Heimo that she couldn’t make it; there was no way she could walk that far. Heimo was frightened now and his response was more strident than he intended. “You got no choice,” he told her.
It took Edna three hours to cover the three miles. Heimo carried Coleen and provided a shoulder for Edna to lean on, and Millie walked on her own. A mile from the gravel bar, Edna had to stop to feed Coleen, who was wailing with hunger. When they finally made it to the plane, Edna nearly collapsed. Heimo had to lift her into the seat. Then there was Coleen. What were they going to do about Coleen? There was no other way; Edna would have to take Coleen with her, and Millie would stay at the cabin with Heimo.
Peterson flew Edna and Coleen to Fort Yukon and then rushed her to the clinic, where they diagnosed her condition as cirrhosis of the liver. The nurses there had seen so many alcohol-related illnesses that they never considered it might be anything else. Edna insisted that she was not a drinker, and only then did the nurses call the Fairbanks hospital to consult with a physician. When the nurse described the symptoms, the doctor knew immediately—a gallbladder attack. Get her to Fairbanks on the next plane, he demanded, or she might die. Arrangements were made to leave Coleen with a friend in Fort Yukon. When Edna arrived at Fort Yukon’s tiny airport, the daily commuter plane to Fairbanks was taxiing down the runway. They radioed the pilot and made him turn around. Edna arrived in Fairbanks at 7:00 P.M. that evening and was rushed to the operating room. Two hours later, she was recuperating from surgery. The doctors had performed an emergency gallbladder operation, an operation that saved her life.
By the time Edna and Coleen returned to the river two weeks later, Heimo had the new cabin finished. It was big but crudely and hurriedly built. With fall coming on, there was a real possibility of snow, and Heimo did not have time to lay in a floor. Edna lay spruce boughs over the dirt floor, for warmth and to contain the dust. But there was nothing she could do about the lack of light in the cabin. Inside it was dark and gloomy because Heimo had not had time to peel the logs.
For Coleen’s first birthday, Heimo and Edna threw a big party. It was late May and they’d just left the river. They’d spent a few days in Fort Yukon, but were now in Fairbanks, renting a cabin without indoor plumbing. Heimo was peeling logs for the summer for a builder, hoping to earn enough money to buy supplies for the upcoming trapping season. Many of their friends showed up for the birthday celebration, and Erich and Irene Korth came, too.
Heimo picked up his parents at the airport in an old broken-down car he’d bought for the summer. When Heimo saw his mother pushed off the plane in a wheelchair, he was struck by her appearance—how dramatically her health had declined. It had been just one year since Heimo and Edna were in Wisconsin. As a wedding present Irene Korth had bought them the plane tickets. Though she had already been diagnosed with cancer, she was full of life and energy, on her feet for much of the day, cooking big meals, doing household chores, and dispensing an abundance of affection. “She loved Edna and me up,” Hemo remembers. Now, though, she was gaunt and frail. She and Erich had been to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, but the cancer, which began in the pancreas, had metastasized to the liver. Irene’s skin now had the shiny yellow hue of jaundice, as Edna’s had when she’d had the gallbladder attack. Quietly, while they waited for their bags, Erich Korth told Heimo how sick Irene had been. Publicly she expressed hope that she’d recover, but privately Irene confessed to her husband that she knew it was only a matter of time. The pain was almost constant now, Erich said, and as a last resort Irene had been to see a faith healer.
Irene’s final wish, before she died, was to see her granddaughter, Coleen. It was a happy visit, marred only by what happened two days before Erich and Irene were scheduled to return home.
Heimo, Edna, and Erich Korth were out hauling water; Irene wanted to spend as much time as she could with her granddaughters and insisted on staying behind to watch Coleen and Millie. It was a dry summer all over the Interior, and lightning had sparked a number of fires nearby. Fairbanks skies hung heavy with smoke. The Bureau of Land Management was using World War II bombers to spread retardant. When Irene saw the bombers fly overhead, she panicked. With Coleen in her arms, and holding Millie by the hand, she fled the cabin and ran down to the main road. She was wandering along the road, as cars sped by her, babbling incoherently, when Heimo, Edna, and Erich found her. They were being bombed, she howled, just like during the war, and they needed to find a place to hide.
The planes were all too reminiscent of the war. Irene was born in 1929 in Hausen, Germany, fifteen miles south of Frankfurt. While her brother was sent to the Russian front, where he later died, and her father was forced into military service, she and her mother and three sisters spent much of World War II in a bomb shelter, hiding from the savage one-two punch of the British and American air campaign. It was an experience she never forgot.
Edna took Coleen in her arms and pulled Millie against her leg, and Heimo comforted his mother, embracing her until her trembling stopped. “It’s nothing, Mom,” he repeated again and again. “We’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”
A day later, when Heimo took them to the airport, Irene Korth admitted that she was embarrassed by the incident. She didn’t know what had come over her. When Heimo hugged her good-bye, he knew that he would never see her again. She had always supported his decisions, even if they had puzzled her. He would miss his ally, but his greatest regret was that Coleen would grow up without having known her.
Before leaving Fairbanks for the trapline, Heimo traded his car to a friend in exchange for a seventeen-foot canoe. The canoe represented an important step in the Korths’ lives. Just transporting their gear and supplies to the cabin had always been a two- or even a three-day chore. Now, if they landed upriver, they could load the canoe with supplies and float down. If they landed below the cabin, they could line up. It would also make transporting meat less of an ordeal. When Heimo shot a caribou or, worse, a moose, he had to carry all the meat back to the cabin before he could hang it. It was grueling, backbreaking work.
After a brief stopover in Fort Yukon, Heimo arrived at the cabin in late July in poor spirits. He had called his mother one last time before he left Fort Yukon, and she’d resisted, hanging up. “Bye, Mom,” he said, “I gotta go. I really gotta go. I love you.” Both of them knew they would never talk to each other again.
Five days later, Heimo waited for the Arctic Circle airplane that would bring in Edna and Coleen. Millie had already flown back to Savoonga with a family friend to be with Edna’s parents. When Edna and Coleen didn’t arrive, Heimo worried. Was it weather, mechanical problems? What he didn’t know was that Edna and Coleen and the pilot had to make an emergency landing on a gravel bar one hundred miles downriver on the Porcupine.
An hour into the flight, the pilot broke the bad news to Edna. The plane’s throttle was stuck, he said. We’ll have to land. “What?” Edna asked, adjusting her headset. “What?” she raised her voice. “We have to land—now!” the pilot answered. “Hold on and don’t let go.” Edna held Coleen as tightly as she could, hugging her to her chest and locking her fingers. Then she looked out the window. The pilot was descending quickly. “Please, God, don’t let us crash.” She kissed Coleen. When she looked out the window again she spotted the gravel bar. She pulled Coleen close, and leaned back and braced her feet against the bottom of the pilot’s seat. When the plane hit with a loud “thunk,” the pilot instantly cut the engine. Edna looked out the window. Would the bar be long enough? Then she closed her eyes. “Huhhhhh,” she heard over her headset, a long expulsion of air. Only then did she dare to look out the window. The pilot had brought the plane to a stop just before the river. Edna’s leg muscles quivered.
The pilot didn’t waste any time radioing for help. Ten minutes later, it started to rain. A bit colder, Edna knew, and the rain would swiftly turn to snow. She was determined not to wait in the plane and freeze, so she put Coleen in her backpack and pulled its drawstring so that only Coleen’s head was showing and left the plane. Then she gathered wood and kindling for a fire. For three hours, she and Coleen and the pilot huddled around the fire to stay warm before they were rescued. That evening, back in Fort Yukon, Edna sent Heimo a Trapline Chatter, alerting him that she and Coleen were okay.
The following day, after an uneventful flight, Edna and Coleen made it to the cabin. They were there for only two days when Heimo decided to line the canoe upriver to check out a second cabin site, which he had already cleared with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Fairbanks. Over the summer, after examining the records of his fur take since arriving on the river, Heimo came to the conclusion that he was trapping out the local fur-bearing population. He was especially concerned about the marten and the beaver, which, unlike the wolf, wolverine, lynx, and fox, had small ranges, and were more susceptible to trapping pressure. His marten take revealed an undeniable trend: 66 marten for the winter of 1978-1979; 105 marten in 1979-1980; 121 marten in 1980-1981; 59 marten in 1981-1982; and 35 marten in 1982-1983. New country was the only solution, so he’d gone to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife office and proposed the idea and was given the go-ahead.
Heimo loaded the canoe with food, a lantern, sleeping bags, a tent, a shotgun with slugs for bears, and his 22.250 in case they came across caribou. Heimo lined the boat upriver, while Edna walked along the bank with Coleen on her shoulders. Coleen loved to be umucked, the Siberian Yupik word for toting someone on your shoulders. She loved the vantage point and waved to Heimo from the riverbank. Heimo waved back and occasionally shouted, “I love you, Guroy,” their affectionate nickname for Coleen. After the way she’d devoured her cake at her birthday party, they started calling her “Guroy,” a Yupik word that translated to something like “Little Piggy.”
Four miles upriver, near the mouth of Marten Creek, Heimo shot a caribou, so they set up camp and hung and dried the meat. He shot two geese that evening and roasted them over an open fire. After three days, they continued their journey. When they reached the spot that he and the Fish & Wildlife official had plotted on the map, he was thrilled. The location was ideal—lots of good timber in which to hide his cabin, dead trees for firewood, high ground, and what looked to be a year-round spring. They overnighted at the future cabin site, and the following day they floated down to the lower cabin, where Heimo began working on the floor. He’d brought in some plywood, vowing that he would not allow his family to spend another year with a dirt floor. Covered by spruce branches, the dirt floor was cold in winter and muddy in spring. There were needles and dust everywhere. Heimo had signed on with Keith Koontz again that August to guide hunters, so he had to work fast. He did not like the idea of leaving Edna and Coleen alone, but he had no choice; 1982-1983 had been a poor fur year and guiding was good money.
Three weeks later, Heimo returned from hunting camp. Coleen was fifteen and a half months old now, and she had inherited her father’s love of walking. Edna told Heimo how she and Coleen had hiked up and down the river, and Heimo could see how proud Edna was. When Coleen came to hug him, Heimo noticed that Edna had tied bells to her coat. “What’s that for?” he asked her, and Edna explained that Coleen was a born explorer like her father. “She loves to get away from me and go off on her own,” she told him. “Once I thought I lost her. I found her by the banks of the river. It really scared me. She could have fell in so easily. After that I tied bells to her coat so I always knew where she was.”
That evening the moon was nearly full and Edna, Heimo, and Coleen went for a walk along the river. Heimo umucked Coleen, and from his shoulders, she cried out and pointed to the moon, “Moo, moo.”
The winter of 1983-1984 began mildly with very little snow and temperatures that rarely dropped lower than 10 below. By January, however, the warm spell abruptly ended. On January 7, Heimo loaded wood into the woodstove and then went outside to check the weather. His breath crackled in the dry air; the tops of the trees hardly moved at all. No wind, Heimo thought—a sure sign that it was bitterly cold. The thermometer, attached to the black spruce tree just outside the cabin door, read 55 below. Heimo returned to the cabin, deciding that it was too cold to check his lines; 55 below—it wouldn’t last. But he was wrong. The weather didn’t break until January 23, when warm southerly winds whispered in, ending the cold’s frigid grip over the southern foothills of the Brooks Range. Then, in early February, the weather changed again. Temperatures locked in at minus 35 and didn’t budge for more than three weeks.
To make matters worse, a bush pilot had stopped in to deliver word that Heimo’s mother had died in December. Though he had known that previous summer that her death was imminent, Heimo was hit hard by the news.
That winter Heimo had his worst trapping season since the early days on the middle fork of the Chandalar River. By spring, he had only managed to catch fifteen marten. Because the snowshoe hare population was down, lynx were scarce, too. Even wolves, which were normally plentiful along the Coleen, were hard to find; Heimo caught only two. Only wolverines, of which Heimo got six, saved his year from being a disaster. Nevertheless, after two poor seasons in a row, Heimo knew that he and Edna would have to make a change. He did the math and figured out that they would have barely enough for supplies for the following season, particularly after the plane tickets. In April, before breakup, Edna and Coleen were flying out to bring Millie back from Savoonga. Heimo asked Edna to leave Coleen with him, but Edna knew that Coleen would just be in Heimo’s way. Besides, Edna said, Coleen needed to get out. None of them had seen another human being since the previous July.
Before she and Coleen left the river, Heimo and Edna finalized their plans to spend the next season upriver.
On April 8, just before Edna and Coleen flew out, Heimo wrote his friend Jim Kryzmarcik from Wisconsin.
Jimmer,
It is now April 8th and we are at the trapline cabin. We will be moving upriver about 20 miles to build a new cabin, more fur up there. I brought the boat up there dragging it behind the snowmachine a couple weeks ago. I set up the tent and stove at the same time. Edna and the kids will be up there in about a week… . Well this winter has been the poorest trapping season I had on the river.
Heimo included a ptarmigan feather with the letter.
While Edna and Coleen were gone, Heimo hauled up the canoe and supplies by snowmachine and began cutting trees for a new cabin. On April 21, a day later than Heimo expected them, Edna, Millie, and Coleen made it in. Spring was late and the snow was still a foot deep, so the pilot had an easy time finding a gravel bar to land on. Heimo picked up Edna and the girls with the snowmachine and ferried them back to the tent camp.
Far from being a hardship, living in their temporary tent camp was idyllic. At night they spread a sleeping bag over a bed of spruce boughs and slept under caribou skins. Coleen lay between Heimo and Edna, and Millie snuggled against Edna’s back for comfort and warmth. Edna was glad to be back home.
Edna and I have gone to the river to haul the last two buckets of water. After a full day of washing clothes, Edna has only one more load to do. The sky is a faded, almost fragile blue, and we stop to watch two birds soar among the wisps of clouds. One has a tremendous wingspan. The other is smaller, with narrow, bent, streamlined wings. “Golden eagle,” Edna says, “and an osprey.”
I have been accompanying Edna for a portion of the afternoon. She has been unusually talkative—lighthearted, even—perhaps because the burden of doing laundry has finally been lifted from her shoulders. The cabin yard is a web of impromptu clotheslines, rigged for the occasion, but that doesn’t matter; Edna is nearly done. The relief is evident in the way she moves. She jumps a small channel of water between the gravel bars. For a moment she reminds me of Krin.
Edna plunges her bucket into the river and sets it down on the gravel bar. Earlier she’d been telling me about Savoonga, about her father’s fox camp, and she picks up now as if the narrative thread had never been interrupted. “When I was young,” Edna remembers, “there were stories, always stories. My little friends and me used to go to an old woman’s house to hear them. She’d tell us stories and she’d fall asleep—she was very old—and we’d nudge her awake. Now they have TV, and things have changed.
“Gotta rest my legs,” she explains, sitting down next to me. She picks up a rock and tries to skip it from a sitting position. It skips twice and sinks. “They’re lost,” she says. “The people in Savoonga. They’re trying to hold on to their language and their dance—that’s good—but the hunting is disappearing. They don’t need to hunt. They can collect their welfare checks. I hunt and trap. Why can’t they? We own the island.” Edna is referring to the fact that the residents of the island refused to participate in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, choosing instead to retain the fee simple title to 1.136 million acres of land on the island. “We thought that owning our own land would make things different, but it didn’t change.” Her people, she thinks, are wandering in a world in which they have no firm footing, caught between the traditions of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Only whaling still has the power to bring the people of St. Lawrence Island together. On the other hand, the island’s two Native Corporations are trying to initiate business ventures. One new effort allows islanders to sell ivory, artifacts, and whalebones discovered during spring “subsistence digging” forays among the ancient and abandoned villages of the island and then sell them to auction houses across the world.
Suddenly Edna falls silent. It is a habit I am now familiar with, so I say nothing. “Do you understand?” she asks, after scratching at the gravel with a stick. I assure her that I understand her feelings about her former home. “Do you understand?” she asks again, looking at me for the first time since she started talking about Savoonga. “I love Savoonga, but it is hard for me to see what’s goin’ on there.”
When Edna and Coleen returned from Savoonga with Millie, Heimo was glad to have his girls back. Though the adjustment of having people around after six years of living alone was difficult for Heimo, he had come to love, and depend on, Edna and Coleen’s presence so much that he no longer enjoyed being alone. Even Millie, it seemed, was happy to be on the river again, reunited with her mother and Coleen and, Heimo hoped, perhaps him, too.
For a month they peeled logs in the morning and hunted in the afternoon for ptarmigan and spruce grouse. The pace was relaxed, casual. They would build a cabin in a new place, and their fortunes would turn—or else. They’d talked about it—this ominous “or else”— obliquely at first, the prospect of having to leave the trapline. And they always arrived at the same spot: Another bad trapping year, and they’d have to consider leaving; they’d have no other choice.
But for a month, at least, they were able to forget. While Heimo and Edna peeled logs in the snow along the river, Millie and Coleen played tag and hide-and-seek on the bank above, and most of the time, Heimo and Edna knew where Coleen was by the sound of the bells. When the sound faded, Heimo bounded up the bank and called for her. More often than not, she refused to answer, and Heimo followed her trail, sometimes deep into the woods. He’d find her hiding behind a tree with her hands covering her eyes, believing as all children do that if they can’t see you, well, then, surely you can’t see them.
Heimo scooped her up in his arms and ran through the woods. “I got you, I got you,” he yelled. And then the two of them searched for Millie. Sometimes, in the late morning, Coleen tired and then she fell asleep on the caribou skin, which Edna laid on top of the snow like a picnic blanket. Millie would sit next to her and read.
Breakup didn’t come that year until May 22. When it did, the Korths’ spring idyl ended. It was as if the reality of their situation suddenly struck them. They had no intentions of going to Fairbanks or Fort Yukon that summer, and the mosquitoes were already ravenous; they would only get worse. By the time mid-June arrived, Heimo knew that they would have to spend the majority of their days on the gravel bars, far away from the trees and the underbrush. It was the only way to escape the swarming mosquitoes. Though he wanted to go to town as much as Edna, it was just too expensive. They could not afford to buy even the most basic supplies. Better to stay at the cabin and live off the land, subsisting on geese and what they could gather—willow leaves, Indian potato, and wild onion. But soon enough the geese migrated through, and then they ate whatever they could get their hands on— porcupine, late-season ducks, ground squirrels, grayling. It was too soon after breakup for grayling to be in the river, but they were lucky enough to find some in the creek.
On June 2, Heimo remembered that they’d left a twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal in a fifty-five-gallon drum at the lower cabin. He told Edna that he was going to go and get it and bring it back the same day. But then he reconsidered. The water was still too high to line the canoe back up the river. He could float down alone and hike back, but that would mean leaving the canoe at the lower cabin for at least another week, and they’d probably need it before that. Heimo suggested that they all float down. Because there were more lakes, there would be more ducks and geese at the lower cabin. And surely, they wouldn’t have a problem finding Indian potato, willow leaves, and wild onion. Besides, they both knew it wasn’t a hard float; they’d discovered that the previous spring. Edna agreed; they’d float down together. That was the best plan.
On the morning of June 3, Heimo read the temperature—a crisp 30 degrees— but the sky was clear in every direction. At least they would not have to contend with rain. Heimo loaded the canoe, and then he positioned Millie in the middle and set Coleen in Millie’s lap. Edna took the bow, and Heimo sat in the stern to do the steering.
Two miles downriver, Heimo saw a sweeper, a large tree hanging low over the river, and he knew then that they were in trouble. It had not been there the previous spring, he was sure of that; it must have toppled during breakup. He paddled furiously to try to maneuver around it, but the current pulled at the canoe. They hit the sweeper full force and the canoe flipped. The next thing Heimo knew, they were in the water, a deep hole. God, was it cold. Heimo surfaced and saw Edna hanging on to the canoe. Instinctively, he grabbed for Millie. It was then that he realized that she no longer had hold of Coleen.
What happened then Heimo will never forget. He had hold of Millie and he saw Coleen float by. He saw his daughter float by, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t let go of Millie. So Heimo dragged Millie to shallow water. He swam out and pulled Edna and the canoe out of the deep water, too. Then he ran to the bank and raced down-river. “Coleen!” He was screaming it now. “Coleen!” He would see her and then he would dive in and rescue her, and everything would be okay.
Heimo ran a quarter of a mile downriver and then he ran back. Maybe Coleen was stranded on a gravel bar. If so, there was still time to save her. When he reached Edna and Millie, he realized he needed to help them. He was shivering from the cold, and he knew that if they didn’t get warm, they’d both be severely hypothermic. Now he went into autopilot. He helped them both up the bank and then he gathered kindling and an armful of deadwood. He arranged it and then he tried to strike a waterproof match. Only he couldn’t; his hands were shaking. “Goddamnit.” He tried again and again. When the match finally lit, the fire went up in a blaze, and Heimo ran back downriver, looking for a trace, Coleen’s pink boot, anything that might help him find her. Then he ran upriver again. As he neared the fire, he began to grasp the truth. Coleen was gone.
At the fire, Edna was hugging herself, rocking back and forth, and crying hysterically, “mama, mama. I want my mama.” Heimo knew they would have to make it to the other side of the river, that it was important to get Edna and Millie under caribou skins. The fire had not been enough; Edna and Millie were shaking uncontrollably. Heimo carried Edna to the canoe and set her in it and then he got Millie. He searched for a large log to use as a paddle and pole. Then he sat down in back of the canoe and pushed it off into the current, but the river immediately tugged at them. Heimo battled against it, and when they reached a spot where the water was shallow enough, he jumped out. He held on to the canoe and slowly shuffled his feet along the river’s rocky bottom until he was at the bow. Then he grabbed the bow rope, pulled the canoe onto a small sandbar, and carried Edna and then Millie up the bank. It was then that he lost it. In his rage, he punched trees and heaved huge rocks into the river. Minutes later, spent, he yelled Coleen’s name one last time.
Back at the tent camp, he covered Edna and Millie in caribou skins and then tripped the new emergency locator transmitter. Then he went to the gravel bar and scratched out SOS with his foot. That evening, the Civil Air Patrol out of Fort Yukon was looking for them. CAP had been notified by Alaska’s Rescue Coordination Center (RCC), where all ELT messages are sent. Heimo, Edna, and Millie were all out on the gravel bar now. Heimo had built a fire to keep them warm and to enable the pilot to find them easily. The only problem was the ELT signal was coming from the tent camp where Heimo had set it off. When the plane came, the pilot searched among the trees and never bothered to look in the direction of the gravel bar. Heimo ran down the gravel bar. He waved his arms wildly and shouted at the top of his lungs. “We’re down here, you stupid son of a bitch. We’re down here. God, please let him see us.” Then he saw the pilot pull up and circle around in the direction of Fort Yukon. Until the pilot gave up his search, Heimo believed that maybe—somehow—Coleen might still be alive. When the pilot turned for Fort Yukon, his last glimmer of hope faded. He had failed to save his daughter.
Later that evening, a friend of the Korths, a pilot for Arctic Circle Air, heard that the RCC was still getting hits from the Coleen River, hours after the pilot had given up his search. He took matters into his own hands and borrowed a company plane and flew out to the river. He found Heimo, Edna, and Millie still on the gravel bar and noticed that someone was missing, so he air-dropped a message—“If it’s an emergency and you need a helicopter, wave your arms.” When Heimo waved, he tipped his wings to acknowledge that he understood and airdropped another message—“I’m going to get help.” He knew there was a helicopter based out of Arctic Village, where the University of Alaska was doing archeological work, so he radioed them and had them send out the helicopter. Five hours after their friend discovered them on the gravel bar, Heimo, Edna, and Millie were in Arctic Village, where news of their tragedy quickly spread among the villagers. Late that night, with the sun just beginning to fade, they arrived in Fort Yukon, where they were met by a group of friends. The following day, Heimo went out in a helicopter with two Alaska State Troopers and flew up and down the river much of the afternoon, but never found a sign of Coleen.
Four days later, a service was held in Coleen’s honor at the Assembly of God Church. Much of Fort Yukon was there. Heimo and Edna were numb. But when the service ended and Heimo turned to thank everyone for coming, he stared into the crowd of people and for the first time he cried.