FROM THE DIARY:
“July 5: Yesterday morning after camp chores were done and fresh beef stew for evening cooked, Olaus and I headed south from camp toward the high, broad green ‘pass’ at the south end of Camp Mountain. En route, Olaus took me through the lowland woods to a place he had found a few days before and which he called ‘little Fairyland.’ It is, too. A stream comes down under the rock slide of the mountain and emerges and runs through a thick stand of beautiful spruces, unusually large ones for this far north, some of them measuring twelve to sixteen inches in diameter. The distinctive and enchanting feature is that the forest and the stream dwell in a world of moss—dark-green moss, light-green moss, emerald-green moss, and golden moss. It is all over the stones and the bed of the stream, and under the trees is a deep springy carpet many feet thick, laced over with cranberry vines.
“Under the spruces are piles of flaked cones, but we saw no squirrels. Overhead, the voices of many birds, including the thrilling chick-a-dee which we had not heard since leaving home in Jackson Hole in early May. With all the bird voices and the song of the stream, there is still a spirit of silence and withdrawnness about this place. Here is another example of the variety of environment to be found in the Sheenjek Valley, which at casual glance looks very uniform and rather stark. Neither this stream, at the southern end of the mountain, nor the big brawling bouldery one of the northern end—two very different habitats—can be found and experienced by flying over in an airplane, but only by going afoot, as the animals do. Here, on the day he had discovered this little fairyland, Olaus had met a lynx. The big cat did not run, but merely looked at him and then melted away into the thick growth of dwarf birch.
“From the fairy forest we emerged onto a broad slope of dry moss and grass and widely scattered small trees looking as though landscaped for a park. We ate lunch by a tiny stream there and then began climbing on up into the pass. We had had two short showers before this, but the sun shone warmly between them. We were almost at the top of the pass, so we thought, when we looked back and saw a great black cloud marching up from the south. We watched the storm clouds moving in, sliding over all the peaks, sending the advance streamers of mist up the middle of the valley. We felt the wind, and then the rain. And as we struggled on up the steep slope in the face of the storm, we both felt a real ‘participation.’ The environment is not tailored to man; it is itself, for itself. All its creatures fit in. They know how, from ages past. Man fits in or fights it. Fitting in, living in it, carries challenge, exhilaration, and peace.
“Now we made a dash for the last little clump of spruces and fairly crawled in under their branches, and sat and watched the storm and listened to the wind which came with it. The rain came, but a white-crowned sparrow in one of the spruces kept right on singing. In twenty minutes the rain stopped, but it was suddenly very cold. ‘Let’s go on. I’d rather move in the rain than freeze here.’
“Up we went, and the way was steep now, no more trees, only grass and lichen and sheets of mountain avens and heather with dozens of other flowers among them—a true alpine meadow all the way to the top. It was impossible not to see and appreciate all this prodigal wealth of plant life, even when the storm came on again fiercer than before, with strong wind driving rain which stung our cheeks. Thick swirls of mist moved across the tops of the slopes on all sides; the lower slopes and the pass itself were startlingly green below the gray mist. I had a sudden strong feeling that this could be the mountains of Wales. We went on through the pass until it began dropping toward little ponds in the valley which led around to the northern end of Camp Mountain. ‘Someday soon we’ll come up from the northern side,’ Olaus said, ‘and go all the way around and back to camp. But now we’d better go back the way we came. You look soaked.’
“I was, for I had left my rain parka in camp and worn only a light nylon jacket, but the rain was over now and we went back so fast, fairly running down the slope, that we were nearly dry and quite warm by the time we got back to camp and found the two blessed boys heating up the stew and making bannock over the outside fire. Brina had just come in from bird collecting, also a bit wet, but happy over having observed six gray-crowned rosy finches far up on the talus slope of Camp Mountain, at an elevation of about three thousand feet, and she had caught one. We ate our main course outside and then retreated to the tent for tea and Amazo pudding when another shower came along. Everyone crawled into his bed early.
“Here was another deep pleasure of summer in the Arctic: we usually went to bed rather early, all of us, and lay in our sleeping bags reading until we were good and sleepy. Small clothing bags and packsacks, plus the shirts and jackets we took off, made good high pillows for reading, and even when it was rainy it was light enough to read inside the light-green or white tents—and wonderfully cozy. Here at this latitude, 68° 36', the sun never sets from May 23 until July 20, and what the meteorologists call Civil Twilight is continuous from May 3 until August 9, all of which, in plain words, means it was never dark to any degree; the only approach to a sort of dusk was in late July, when the sun went behind a mountain for a few moments at a time, around midnight. Now and then we would hear the boys, in the next tent, commenting on something one of them was reading, and all the while, the songs of tree sparrows or white-crowned sparrows or the crying of the gulls and the loons. On this night after the Fourth of July we kept waking, listening to gentle but steady rain, thankful for warmth and a dry tent. At eight-thirty this morning I heard George and Brina talking in the cook tent, so I just stayed where I was for a while. By the time I crawled out, everyone was enjoying very good pancakes made by Brina and cooked on the Coleman in the tent.
“And then the sun came out, just as two beautiful big bull moose wandered slowly through the muskeg behind camp, unconcerned, while Bob got some good movie footage.”
Three days later Bob and Olaus and I set out early to make the trip all around Camp Mountain. It was a beautiful day—mildly warm, not hot, blue sky with a few white clouds making shadows on the mountains, a nice breeze to disperse the mosquitoes, so that we were not even conscious of them. We went around the northern end of the mountain, up and up, over the shoulder, on around through a pass high up, a lovely timberless alpine sort of valley. We traveled just below the limestone talus slopes and just above a series of little lakes. In one we found a pair of wandering tattlers, which was exciting. Olaus was sure they had young. And here we found a whole new series of flowers: buttercups in the water, delphinium, monkshood, polemonium. The high valley or pass was getting narrower and narrower, and we finally emerged into the beginning of the East Fork of the Sheenjek and realized that our broad pass of the Fourth of July dropped off into this, so we were soon up in it and tramping down toward home, coming by way of little Fairyland, where Bob and Olaus planned to take some movies the next sunny day.
We found Brina and George in camp, both looking through glasses over toward the west. “I guess the Indians have arrived,” George said.
Keith had told us that three Indians from Arctic Village were on their way, hunting wolves for bounty, with eight dogs packed with their supplies, and he had left with us a bag of tea, flour, and sugar for them.
Next morning George set off for the Indian camp “to say hello” and let them know the plane had left things for them. “Heck, might as well be neighborly,” George said.
In this case, being neighborly meant traveling two or three miles to a split channel upstream after he got across to the river, wading the river in waist-high water and traveling the same distance downriver again and over to the camp, which was on a slope that appeared to be quite a long way back from the river.
As we were starting lunch, George and one Indian appeared on the far side of the lake, and Bob quickly went across in the boat to pick them up. They were both wet to their waists. “We’ll have to carry the boat across and use it,” George said. “That river is rising; it’s deep and dangerous.”
First we gave them both hot tea; then I stretched the stew a bit and made a batch of potato pancakes from our dehydrated mix; and Brina had made a chocolate pudding. The Indian, whose name was Peter, was young and nice-looking, and smiled and laughed at everything that was said. Olaus was soon asking him about Indian names for birds and animals and he seemed pleased and eager to give him all the information he could. When Brina urged a third plate of food upon him, he said: “Oh no, thanks—I had two plates.”
But he accepted the third one when Brina insisted. Just then I heard George calling to me from inside the cook tent, and when I went in he said to me in a low voice: “Mardy, you know I’m sure they don’t have any food left over there; it took them ten days to come through from Arctic Village. They gave me some Labrador tea to drink; they had a little flour they mixed with water and fried in porcupine grease, and I saw a pot with a porcupine paw sticking out of it; and the dogs looked as though they are starving. Ambrose, their leader, told me they would have to shoot a moose, though they hated to, because there didn’t seem to be any caribou in this whole country. Gosh, d’you think we can give them a little?”
“Of course, naturally—but some of these dehydrated foods I’m afraid they wouldn’t know how to cook properly. You help me find what you think best.”
So after lunch Peter loaded his pack with the tea, flour, and sugar Keith had left, then we filled up his pack, as much as he could carry, with beans, rice, dried applesauce, and some other things. He kept saying: “Thank you very much, thank you very much.”
The boys took him across the lake in the boat, then carried the boat across the muskeg to the river, put him across it, and left it tied up on this side for future use. The Indians planned to go on upriver on the western side, to the head of the river, cross over to the head of the East Fork of the Chandalar, then travel south along it, back to Arctic Village (which is certainly a misnomer, being as far south as it is, compared to all the expanse of really arctic country. No one seems to know how it was named). This route they mean to travel is almost the same as George plans to follow on his backpack trip, which he and Olaus have been discussing and planning. If George makes this trip, it will mean that our party will have, in various ways, pretty well explored this middle area of the region, as Olaus had planned, so that with the reports from other trips and other scientists they will have a fair idea of the topography, vegetation, and animal life of this whole area, from the Canadian boundary to the Canning River, and from the Arctic Ocean to the latitude of Lobo Lake. This area, roughly two hundred fifteen miles east to west and one hundred miles north to south, we all hope will become an Arctic Wildlife Range, of about nine million acres, so that one great representative unspoiled piece of arctic wilderness can be kept as it is, for basic scientific research and for recreation and inspiration for everyone who cares enough about untouched country to come and visit and leave it without the marks of man upon it.
George would be photographing and taking notes on the topography and vegetation of the country at the head of the Sheenjek, and over west into the Chandalar drainage, but he would be especially looking for signs of mountain sheep, and for caribou and wolves, and observing the bird life. Olaus has a strong belief that valuable scientific data are accumulated on the ground, afoot, with eyes and ears alert, notebook and camera ready; and in George he had an earnest disciple.
The next morning Bob said he had heard four shots in the night, and after breakfast we saw a big smoke over at the Indians’ camp, so we hoped they had got some game for food and were smoking it. We hoped the shots did not mean they had killed wolves, although we would, of course, rather have the bounty go to the Natives than to some white hunter flipping around in an airplane for the “sport” of it. We had seen only three wolves on the whole trip so far, and it appeared that there were certainly no more than enough in the country to keep the caribou herds in balance. Olaus, tramping the country every day, collecting scats and other evidence, was making an ecological study of this whole question. He was, through scat analysis and field observations, constructing a fairly clear picture of the interrelationships among the animals. One chain of events goes like this: A wolf kills a caribou—in nearly every instance, naturally, a lame or sick one. The wolf cannot eat all of the meat. A grizzly quickly finds the wolf kill and has a meal. The foxes may be next on the scene, or a lynx or a wolverine. This story is unfolded by analyzing scats of all these species.
It is clear that the bear is largely a vegetarian but enjoys a meal of meat whenever provided from a caribou carcass or by digging out a ground squirrel from its burrow. And the ground squirrel, found all through the Sheenjek country, also largely vegetarian, likewise enjoys a bit of protein when he can find it—a bird’s egg or even the dead body of another squirrel.
Supporting this whole chain of life is the plant cover, which furnishes the main diet of the bears and squirrels, the nesting sites and cover for the birds and the small rodents, and, very importantly, the food of the caribou. So we are back at the beginning again!
Olaus and Brina had had many discussions of the value of one really sizable area being left alone, as a basis for comparison for all other wildlife studies. Under the provisions for the proposed wildlife range suggested by the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association that spring, hunting and trapping would not be prohibited, but we knew that the number of Indians and Eskimos who went into this area was so small that they would have no unnatural impact on the country; over the centuries a very few, from the Arctic and from the south, had only intermittently come into this area. There was always plenty of game nearer home; as a result, this whole region had been left almost completely untouched, and to us this was a warm, exhilarating thought!
“July 10: Martin’s birthday! What memories it brings, of thirty years ago at the Timber Creek cabin on the Old Crow, where I made a cake with raisins in it, and baked it in the fire hole Jess had made in the sandbank and lined with old scraps of tin he found around the cabin; and Olaus had made one candle by dripping wax into a tiny roll of paper; and the baby had got the idea—he blew the candle out himself!
“Thinking thus makes us realize too how different this part of the Arctic is from the Old Crow Valley—so much richer in all life, so much more varied and spectacular, being in the mountains; and how much poorer in insect life, to our great joy. And yet, how glad we are that we had that Old Crow adventure—one more whole region that we can see in our mind’s eye, one more region about which there is some scientific knowledge. Olaus is writing a birthday letter to Martin now, and we hope he and Alison and the two little girls had a good vacation at Moose.
“In the middle of the morning we noticed a flag waving over at the Indian camp. George went off immediately and soon returned with Peter and his beautiful Malamute dog. Peter had been hunting all night and got two wolves, and was going to return to Arctic Village on the plane if Keith came over on his Arctic Village run and would take him. The other two Indians are going on upriver; they have not got any wolves yet.
“Keith did come in, and had with him, just for the ride, Margaret Sam, a very attractive Indian girl from the village, who was feeling a little woozy on arrival and glad to have the cup of tea we made for her. She had her stylish curly hair bobbed too, like Jessie James, a flowered cotton skirt, a black cardigan sweater, and moccasins topped with white fur inside of rubber galoshes. This seems to be the accepted footgear; Peter had the same. She sat and smoked a cigarette and said a few words to Peter in Indian, but he didn’t seem to make much response.
“When Keith got out of the plane, he handed me, with a grin, a small package. It contained the two pairs of white baby moccasins from the Fourth of July raffle at the village; the lucky number was thirteen! He said that Don had won a pair of men’s moccasins and he would bring them over next time. He also said that they had stayed in Arctic Village over an hour last week, while Dr. MacLeod attended to some of the Indians. Those nurses weren’t going to let him get away easily. They came on down to Fort Yukon, and I think they kept him busy all afternoon there helping them give polio shots!
“Olaus and I had a lovely day yesterday, up in the big deep woods at the northern end of our flat, along the big creek. At the creek we had lunch and sat on the rocks and wrote for a while; there were fewer mosquitoes there. Olaus searched for fallen trees, large ones, and sawed sections with the little Swedish saw and counted the rings. He and the boys have all been doing this, and we already realize how slowly the white spruce grows in the arctic environment. Most of the trees seem to require over thirty years to reach a height of five feet, and about one hundred years to attain twenty feet. The oldest tree they have found so far is ten and a half inches in diameter, eight inches above the ground, and from the increment borings that Bob made, we found it to be two hundred ninety-eight years old! In this stretch of forest along the big creek, where there is comparatively good shelter, the trees are taller and quite dense, a real forest floored with deep moss.
“While Olaus was busy with the saw, I wandered through this forest looking for birds. You stand and listen. When you hear an interesting call or song, you go toward it until you find the bird. This is a happy kind of detective work, and this time it did bring forth a new species for Brina’s list, a gorgeous male pine grosbeak who sat on a dead limb right in front of me for several moments, a glowing spot of rose color in all that green world. There were juncos, myrtle warblers, and gray jays. Finally I came to a group of squirrel trees, and when Olaus came along we went over to examine them. There were the cone middens and the little holes in the moss, and up in a nearby tree a winter nest. ‘Aren’t we ever going to see a squirrel? How can they keep so hidden?’
“‘I don’t know. It’s a queer place up here—everything is so secretive.’
“Just then my eye caught a movement and I raised the glasses, and there he sat—a beautiful little animal, gazing down at us, perfectly quiet. We walked over slowly, and stood under his tree. He went up onto a higher branch, still silent, just gazing at us—a self-sufficient little aristocrat of the woods. Down home at Moose, our pine squirrels would have been telling us what to do in six different languages.
“We plodded home straight across the flat—through water, over tussocks, hopping along on little mossy ridges. We flushed out a mother ptarmigan and four downy young, and a young longspur.
“A beautiful evening. We were in bed reading. About ten-thirty we noticed a golden light in the tent; we looked out through the nylon-netting front onto a misty golden sunset, if we can call it that (the sun doesn’t set; it just goes behind the mountains upriver). Olaus immediately crawled out to take a picture, and so did George. Everyone had a hard time sleeping, what with the sky, whose colors kept changing and intensifying for a long time, and our gull and loon neighbors, who were all in a great frenzy over something and producing the most amazing variety of screams and calls. Here is a special kind of experience, lying snug in a tent, so close to the water, hearing all these sounds, lifting one’s head to see such beauty reflected in the still, black sheen of water.
“July 12: The three young folks were up and off very early yesterday morning, to begin a long day’s work on Brina’s study plot before George leaves on his trip. They would first have to locate the spot carefully, from the aerial photographs and the maps, then measure it off and drive stakes and run the heavy twine all around it and erect the blue and red flags at a corner, and then set the small mammal traps at regular intervals and make a listing of the vegetative cover by species. With three of them working, they hoped to do this in one day. Then Brina would go back up to stay overnight for more trapping. Bob came back at seven o’clock, striding into camp at his tireless pace. ‘I’ve found the way to go upriver, I’m sure; all the way from that plot of Brina’s, must be five or six miles; you can travel on that overflow ice. Sure beats muskeg hopping! We got the plot surveyed and traps set for small mammals. They were doing the vegetation survey, and three people couldn’t work at that, so I came on in.’”
After he had eaten, Bob started fishing, but soon had to drop his rod and run for his movie camera as the sun slid behind the triangle mountain across to the west, casting its rays through the big valley which opens from the west, making a romantic painting of the whole scene—mountains rising one behind the other in a golden mist, the nearer velvety sidehills a livid, burning bronze green. I remembered Otto’s words as I stood and watched. “You will see beautiful skies up there.”
Brina and George came home about nine-thirty, but it was not until breakfast the next morning that Olaus and I heard the story of the day’s adventure. They had asked Bob not to mention it when he got home, for fear I would worry about their getting back.
As the three of them were going north and had just crossed the big creek, they stepped up into the deep woods (where I had been wandering around identifying birds the other day). Bob remarked: “What a contrast! This is just like stepping into a tropical jungle all of a sudden.”
George replied: “Yes, I bet unseen eyes are watching us.”
And at that instant a huge grizzly reared up out of the moss and brush in front of them! Bob was in the lead; he hurled his movie tripod at the bear and shouted. The bear wheeled, fell to all fours, and galloped off toward the creek. The three young folks just stood there for a few seconds, looking at one another. Brina said she could just feel how white her face was, but when George said: “Brina, your face is white,” she answered: “Never mind! So is yours!”
In spite of the presence of a bear in the area, Brina was off the next morning, by herself, to stay up at the plot for two nights to do some more trapping. But she and George had come back by the open river route too, and that was the route we would all use from then on! Bob’s comment on the bear episode was: “You know, this running into grizzlies is getting darn monotonous for me!”
After Brina had departed for her lone trapping vigil, George and I began to get his supplies ready for his big trip north, west, south, and back east to camp. He was to leave on a Friday, and he and Olaus had figured about nine days for the trip, so that if he had not returned by a week from Tuesday, when Keith would come in again, it would be time to make some search flights—horrible thought, but best to plan as wisely as we could.
George got out the laboratory scales from Brina’s tent; we packed all his supplies in Pliofilm bags, weighed each one, and listed everything, George translating grams to pounds to satisfy my curiosity. I wasn’t a scientist, and grams made no clear picture in my mind. Altogether, he was to carry twenty pounds of food, his whole pack weighing sixty pounds. The food included: concentrated meat bars of 1,200 calories each, cheese, brown sugar, brown rice, oatmeal, MPF (multiple-purpose food), dehydrated campers’ stew and soups, dried peach and apricot granules, raisins, instant chocolate drink, tea bags, instant whole-wheat cereal, dehydrated potatoes, chili beans and corned beef, Jersey Cream biscuits, candy bars, and Logan bread. We hoped the amount was enough to see him through for twelve days if necessary. I made a whole batch of Logan bread, the standby of Alaskan mountain climbers, named for Mount Logan; it is full of nutriment, having in it, besides the famous flour mixture, brown sugar, honey, molasses, powdered milk, margarine, and raisins. Bob baked it in the Yukon stove; then we cooled it, cut it in squares, split these, buttered them generously, and packed them in Pliofilm bags, which George laid carefully in the top of his pack.
When we awoke on the morning of the thirteenth, George was gone. We knew he had planned to start about five; we had laid out food for him the night before, and I hoped he had eaten well before starting off.
Olaus and Bob and I spent most of the day taking movies in little Fairyland and out on the big overflow-ice field beyond the mouth of its stream, and, back in camp, helping Bob get more movies of the lone young offspring of our pair of gulls, which he had finally discovered in the grass and reeds near camp. The parents were complaining, but by now they had become somewhat reconciled to our living there with them. They had even found some benefits in it, for they had discovered that one of us was a fisherman and that he cleaned the fish at the edge of the lake beyond camp. Before long Olaus noticed that whenever Bob went to the edge of the water, for any reason, the two gulls arrived on the scene immediately. Any of the rest of us could go down to wash, or dip water, or rinse clothes, and they paid no attention. They knew Bob! And they shared our opinion that arctic grayling is a delicious fish.
The next day we three wended our way northward with empty packs to meet Brina and help her carry back the equipment from the plot. A memorable cool, breezy day, just right for hiking, and no mosquitoes out on the ice and the gravel bars. We met Brina coming through the willows at the agreed meeting place. She had had success in trapping voles and brown lemmings, and through this trapping had a satisfactory estimate of their distribution in the area of the plot. She said she “wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything,” but was willing to have Bob and Olaus deprive her of some of her load. Just before she met us, she had seen a reddish-colored wolf loping away in the willows.
The diary for that date:
“Another beautiful evening in camp. It has just happened that for several nights lately, I have wakened at 12:30 A.M., and there is the sun, shining gold between two lower peaks upriver. The whole environment has a steady, serene beauty that sings, that will stay forever, that soaks into one’s being.”