Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (36 page)
“They're a public nuisance.”
“English common law used the term âpublic nuisance' to refer to, for example, a slaughterhouse upwind. The people had the right to abate such a public nuisance. These people on the river are not a public nuisance. Hell, no. If I were twenty-one, I'd build there, and if the United States marshal came after me I would kill him. People should not have to live in ghettolike shacks they can control you in. The prime urge of all life is for an exclusive domain. Each human being needs that. These kids are trying to get away to a place of their own.”
“I've got a .357 Magnum. If someone tried to kick me out of my cabin, there'd be a murder in defense of my home. Instead of landing in that helicopter and driving Brad Snow off his place, the government should have given him patent to five
acres of land and said, âYou've done a good job. You're not a god-damned parasite living on others.'”
acres of land and said, âYou've done a good job. You're not a god-damned parasite living on others.'”
“That helicopter. If I was Snow, I'd have set her afire.”
“These river people couldn't make it if it weren't for the present accident of the high price of fur. Some hapless lynx comes along and stumbles into their trap. The three hundred dollars you can get from a lynx is what is keeping them alive.”
“I can't stand themâthey're so sociable.”
“I don't believeâand I don't think any other Indian believesâthat these young people down the river are harming anyone. But I don't believe they have a right to be there. They don't own the land. Really, they got no home. They got nothing. They live pretty tough. They learn fast, but I don't think they are as well prepared as older pioneers. One man up in the Seventymile last winter lost his toes. He got caught in overflow.”
“They come and they go. It takes a peculiar type person to live in this country. The winter usually weeds them out.”
“Several who came in last spring went out again in the fall, satisfied in their own minds that this is no country for them, and we are of the same opinion,” wrote Gordon Bettles the better part of a century ago. “When we old prospectors jump off, there won't be any tough fellows to go in there and go through the hardships we went through. There's a future in Alaska for the young man with the right kind of stuff.”
“A blue column of smoke, faintly rising from the spruces of some lonely gulch, guides one to the lonely camp of some pioneer who has been in Alaska since the first discovery of gold,” said a United States government bulletin describing this country in 1905. “Over a cup of coffee, prepared in an old baking powder can, one is made to understand the important part these men have played in the development of this portion of our possessions and their reasons for having learned to call it home ⦠men who have labored hard in a quiet way to satisfy the craving for individual independence and have gained
through hardship something that is worthwhile even if their hopes are not yet realized.”
through hardship something that is worthwhile even if their hopes are not yet realized.”
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Dick Cook, in his generosity, lifts from his plate a small gob of muskrat fat and gives it to me. The fat is savory, a delicacy. The lean of the “rat” could be taken for dark, strong chicken.He is saying, “There's a pride to doing something other people can't do. My life style is what so many people dream about. What they don't dream is that it took six or eight years of hard work to get it. A lot of these people who keep coming into the country don't belong here. They have fallen in love with a calendar photo and they want to live under a beautiful mountain. When they arrive, the reality doesn't match the dream. It's too much for them. They don't want to work hard enough; they don't want to spread outâto go far enough up the streams. This is relatively poor trapping country. You need a twenty-mile radius. But they won't move away from the Yukon. My cabin is the farthest off the river. Have another cup of tea.”
Tea strong enough to blacken tin. Hanging over the campfire is a No. 10 can, coated with carbon from the fire, and even blacker within, its bottom a swamp of leaves. To use his own term for what he is doing here, Cook is on vacation. In cool spring weather toward the end of ducks, we are close by three lakes near the Yukon, far downriver from Eagle. He is here to hunt. The vacation is from the weight of tasks at home, which is ten miles away. His shelter is only his orange canvas tarp, one side strung between spruce, the opposite staked in the sphagnum. He finishes his duck-and-muskrat stew, and stretches out under the tarp, head propped up, taking his ease. He remarks that Nessmuk could not stand the confinement of an A-shaped or wall-sided tent and neither can he.
Cook's knowledge of wood lore is encyclopedic. Impromptu,
he can, and readily will, give a thirty-minute lecture on just about any aspect of it from wolf dens to whetstones, so it is no surpriseâexcept in a geographical way, far off in the Alaskan bushâto hear him invoke the pen name of the nineteenth-century Eastern writer George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose “Woodcraft,” published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French. Donna Kneeland is beside the fire, her legs folded straight beneath her. She adds wood. She is attempting to dry, possibly repair, a boot that has a two-inch rip near the sole. A parabola of wire crosses the top of the No. 10 can. She lifts it. With a short stick in her other hand, she tilts the bottom, pouring tea into my cup. I welcome it, to defray the chill, which neither Dick nor Donna seems to notice. Staked out in the woods around us are seven sled dogs. They, too, are on holiday.
he can, and readily will, give a thirty-minute lecture on just about any aspect of it from wolf dens to whetstones, so it is no surpriseâexcept in a geographical way, far off in the Alaskan bushâto hear him invoke the pen name of the nineteenth-century Eastern writer George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose “Woodcraft,” published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French. Donna Kneeland is beside the fire, her legs folded straight beneath her. She adds wood. She is attempting to dry, possibly repair, a boot that has a two-inch rip near the sole. A parabola of wire crosses the top of the No. 10 can. She lifts it. With a short stick in her other hand, she tilts the bottom, pouring tea into my cup. I welcome it, to defray the chill, which neither Dick nor Donna seems to notice. Staked out in the woods around us are seven sled dogs. They, too, are on holiday.
When new people come in, Cook continues, he recommends that they rent a cabin in or near Eagle, somewhere close to civilization, and spend a winter there firstâwith the wilderness a quarter of a mile away. “That leaves some unburned bridges. Try trapping, hunting meat, getting some skills togetherâsetting yourself up. Money will not accomplish it, but money is important. You need axes, splitting mauls, rifles, saws, winter clothing. The average person bringsâor buys within a couple of yearsâat least ten thousand dollars' worth of gear. It helps to have a truck at the post-office town. A small boat with a kicker costs twelve hundred dollars. Bring a two-year supply of food. You won't learn enough in a year.”
Donna, looking up from her boot, says, “Steve Ulvi, when he was here last week, wanted to know what traps to buy, and heâ”
“He asked a lot of things, but that is his business,” Cook says, with such sharpness that Donna falls silent.
“Why do people live in Eagle?” I ask him.
“I don't know,” he says. “I've always wondered. Some of
them came with the intention of going on into the bush and have never carried it out. One person in Eagle has tried three times. But a lot of people come with a desire not to workâjust to be there and not to work. I've never understood that. The country and the weather are too hard just to sit.”
them came with the intention of going on into the bush and have never carried it out. One person in Eagle has tried three times. But a lot of people come with a desire not to workâjust to be there and not to work. I've never understood that. The country and the weather are too hard just to sit.”
He draws an analogy between what he has done and what the early Western settlers did. They dug makeshift houses into the dirt while concentrating on the clearing of fields and the construction of barns. That was the way settlement had to take place. “If you built a nice house first, your livestock would die.” Dogs, in Cook's case, were his livestock, so fishnets came first. Then he planted a garden. Then he set traplines. He learned sleds and mushing from Indians. “There were several of the old ones around who knew what they were doing and were still sober enough to talk about it.” He has continued to learn, he says, just by observing other people along the river. “Charlie Edwards does things. I sit and think them out. I've learned more from his mistakes than I've learned from my own. I feel at home now, after twelve yearsâat home on water, in the woods, in summer, in winter. I feel a part of what is here. The bush is so far beyond what anybody has been taught. The religious power here is beyond all training. There are forces here that a lot of people don't know exist.”
“What are they?”
“They can't be articulated. You're out of the realm of words. You are close to the land here, to nature, to what the Indians called Mother and I call Momma. Momma decides everything. The concept is still here, but the Indians have given it up. They say the Indians now have rights to land in which to do their subsistence hunting and trapping. That is ridiculous. It is about time the whites got it equally. There is just no land, no legal place to go, in Alaska. If they wipe out the white people who are living in the bush, they wipe out the native culture.”
He shifts his weight, and for a moment I can see his arm. There is a chamois-cloth shirt under his cotton pullover, but both are so shredded and rent with holes that the arm is visible
behind its curtain of rags. The skin is as white as paper. A skull and crossbones is tattooed there. A dagger sunk into the skull from above protrudes from the chin like an iron Vandyke. It is flanked by the letters US and MC. “I grew up in Lyndhurst, Ohio. My father was in the commercial-industrial air-conditioning business. I helped pay my bills at the Colorado School of Mines by going into the mountains with dynamite, blasting open pegmatite dikes and selling the crystals. Students then all had dynamite in the trunks of their carsâlike nowadays they all wear Vibram soles and carry sheath knives.” Cook's first wife was a model. She left him, and for a time he looked after his two infant children. When she divorced him, he lost in court a case for custody. “Since then, I have never understood trees,” he says. “They put down roots.” He has not seen his children in a great many years. One is eighteen, and has a child of her own.
behind its curtain of rags. The skin is as white as paper. A skull and crossbones is tattooed there. A dagger sunk into the skull from above protrudes from the chin like an iron Vandyke. It is flanked by the letters US and MC. “I grew up in Lyndhurst, Ohio. My father was in the commercial-industrial air-conditioning business. I helped pay my bills at the Colorado School of Mines by going into the mountains with dynamite, blasting open pegmatite dikes and selling the crystals. Students then all had dynamite in the trunks of their carsâlike nowadays they all wear Vibram soles and carry sheath knives.” Cook's first wife was a model. She left him, and for a time he looked after his two infant children. When she divorced him, he lost in court a case for custody. “Since then, I have never understood trees,” he says. “They put down roots.” He has not seen his children in a great many years. One is eighteen, and has a child of her own.
There is a small, square-ended aluminum boatâdragged in here over riverine muskeg and rammed through hells of willow. In it now is an armory of guns, one of which belonged to Dick's father and grandfather. The lakes are small. Quietly, we paddle across one of them, leave the boat, and creep through the woods. We avoid a mound of bear scatâfairly, but not acutely, fresh. It glistens but has stopped smoking. Approaching the shore of the next lake, Dick motions us to get down, and we crawl toward the water without damaging the silence. The forest cover extends to the edge. We lie there, behind trees, looking out. Dick lifts a shotgun. In the beginnings of the twilight, a pair of loons are cruising. They are beyond range. Their heads are up. Their bodies float high. They sense no danger. Their course is obliquely toward the gun. Now we can distinguish the black-and-white shingling on their necks. Silently swimming, they come nearer still. Loons. They are quick. Diving, they can suddenly be gone. He fires. He fires again. The loons elect to sprint down the surfaceâcacophonous, nailingâtheir splayfeet spading the water. A pellet or two may have touched them, but it seems unlikely.
Dick hands one of the guns to Donna and says that he is going to skirt the lake. If the loons return, she is to fire. Silently, he is gone. We hear nothing of his movements among the trees. He is gone an hour. Donna, whispering, asks me if I know much about this gun.
“Nothing,” I tell her.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Neither do I. Those loons will have to come pretty close before I'll try to hit them.”
A single loon now tests that distance. It comes swimming around a peninsula of sedge and adopts a path that leads directly toward the muzzle of the gun. Serene in its ignorance, it glides steadily onward without even a slight change of course until, with the distance nearly closed, its breast seems a yard wide. Still it has not seen us. The gun is aimed and ready. If the bird swims any farther, it will hit the shore. Donna blasts. The loon's move is too quick to be called a dive. It is a complete and instant disappearance. There is no commotion, no blood in the water, no loon.
We whisper through the time. At length, more shots ring out, down the lake. It is the sound of Cook, missing. Eventually, he comes back. We now try another takeâcreeping the final dozen yards through the forest to its shore. “Wait here,” Cook says, and he leaves the .22. “Kill a rat if one goes by.” Meanwhile, he will circle the shoreline. This lake has rats for sure, and thereâhe points to a far cove and a barely visible line of darning-egg headsâare ducks. In the unending twilight, another hour passes. At various distances and times, we hear half a dozen sharp reports. “You can be active in a job in town, but it doesn't seem as important,” Donna whispers. “Here the important thing isâwell, getting your meat.” She mentions that she was a stewardess once for Reeve Aleutian. A muskrat rounds a clump of sedge, swimming before us, left to right. Donna follows it with the rifle and fires. The water jumps a foot. We cannot see the spent bullet, sinking like a pebble
toward the bottom of the lake, but the muskrat probably can. There was something she particularly liked about Reeve Aleutian. The airline was always ready to ignore its schedules and serve as an emergency ambulance service for the entire island chain. And so the work was, as she phrases it, “more interesting than just coffee, tea, or me.” Winds blew seventy miles an hour over the islands sometimes. A DC-3 would try to touch on a runway and have trouble setting down because its wings wished to stay in the air. In an Electra once, she was approaching Adak, winds in the seventies. Suddenly the turbulence increased and the Electra overturned. It was not just steeply bankedâit was flying upside down. Donna noted with interest the silence of the passengers. She had thought that in such a situation people would scream. Objects fell to the ceiling. Toilets spilled. The plane crossed the island, and slowly rolled upright. Its second approach was successful. On the ground, after thanking the passengers for flying Reeve and wishing them a pleasant stay on Adak, Donna suggested to the other stewardess that they have a drink. “That is the only time in my life I have ever done that,” she whispers nowâ“taken a drink, you know, in order to relax.” Intense firing breaks out far down the shore, a Boone and Crockett sonata. When Cook appears again beside us, he has nothing in hand and nothing to retrieve. He says, “One trouble with this type of life is you can go hungry when you screw up.” This is true in two ways, for cartridges cost a few cents apiece and shotgun shells a quarter. In effect, he has been firing grocery money into the lake. We return to the sled dogs and the lean-to, but soon Cook, frustrated, says, “If we don't get something, we're not going to eat,” and, cursing Momma, he takes off once more, for a final walking circuit of the shore.
toward the bottom of the lake, but the muskrat probably can. There was something she particularly liked about Reeve Aleutian. The airline was always ready to ignore its schedules and serve as an emergency ambulance service for the entire island chain. And so the work was, as she phrases it, “more interesting than just coffee, tea, or me.” Winds blew seventy miles an hour over the islands sometimes. A DC-3 would try to touch on a runway and have trouble setting down because its wings wished to stay in the air. In an Electra once, she was approaching Adak, winds in the seventies. Suddenly the turbulence increased and the Electra overturned. It was not just steeply bankedâit was flying upside down. Donna noted with interest the silence of the passengers. She had thought that in such a situation people would scream. Objects fell to the ceiling. Toilets spilled. The plane crossed the island, and slowly rolled upright. Its second approach was successful. On the ground, after thanking the passengers for flying Reeve and wishing them a pleasant stay on Adak, Donna suggested to the other stewardess that they have a drink. “That is the only time in my life I have ever done that,” she whispers nowâ“taken a drink, you know, in order to relax.” Intense firing breaks out far down the shore, a Boone and Crockett sonata. When Cook appears again beside us, he has nothing in hand and nothing to retrieve. He says, “One trouble with this type of life is you can go hungry when you screw up.” This is true in two ways, for cartridges cost a few cents apiece and shotgun shells a quarter. In effect, he has been firing grocery money into the lake. We return to the sled dogs and the lean-to, but soon Cook, frustrated, says, “If we don't get something, we're not going to eat,” and, cursing Momma, he takes off once more, for a final walking circuit of the shore.
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