Coming into the Country (4 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Now, for the first time in days of river travel, we hear the sound of an engine. A boat rounds a bend from the west and comes into view—a plywood skiff, two women and a man, no doubt on their way from Kiana to Ambler. A thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude shoves them upcurrent. They wave and go by. There are a few kayaks in the villages, small ones for use in stream and lake hunting, but the only kayaks we are at all likely to see are the one-man Klepper and Snake Eyes.
Four miles from Qalugruich paanga, it is five in the day and time to quit. We are, after all, officially an extension of bureaucracy. Walking far back from the water, Kauffmann picks tent sites on beds of sedge. A big cottonwood log, half buried in sand, will be a bench by the fire. Mosquitoes swarm. They are not particularly bad. In this part of Alaska, nearer the coast, they sometimes fly in dense, whirling vertical columns, dark as the trunks of trees. But we have not seen such concentrations. Kauffmann talks of killing forty at a slap in the Gates of the Arctic, but the season is late now and their numbers are low. I slap my arm and kill seven.
The temperature of the Kobuk is fifty-seven degrees—so contrastingly warm after the river in the mountains that we peel off our clothes and run into the water with soap. However, by no possible illusion is this the Limpopo, and we shout and yell at the cold water, take short, thrashing swims, and shiver in the bright evening sun. The Kobuk, after all, has about the same temperature—at this time of year—as the coastal waters of Maine, for which the term most often heard is “freezing.”
Wool feels good after the river; and the fire, high with driftwood, even better; and a dose of Arctic snakebite medicine even better than that. In a memo to all of us written many weeks ago, Pourchot listed, under “optional personal equipment,” “Arctic snakebite medicine.” There are no snakes in Alaska. But what if a snake should unexpectedly appear? The serum in my pack is from Lynchburg, Tennessee.
The salmon—filleted, rolled in flour, and sautéed on our pancake grill—is superb among fishes and fair among salmon. With few exceptions, the Pacific salmon that run in these Arctic rivers are of the variety known as chum. Their flesh lacks the high pink color of the silver, the sockeye, the king salmon. Given a choice among those, a person with a lure would not go for chum, and they are rarely fished for sport. After sockeyes and humpbacks, though, they are third in the commercial salmon fishery. Many millions of dollars' worth are packed each year. Athapaskan Indians, harvesting from the Yukon, put king salmon on their own tables and feed chum salmon to their dogs. Hence, they call chum “dog salmon.” Eskimos up here in the Arctic Northwest, who rarely see another kind, are piqued when they hear this Indian term.
We look two hundred yards across the Kobuk to spruce that are reflected in the quiet surface. The expanded dimensions of our surroundings are still novel. Last night, in forest, we were close by the sound of rushing water. Sound now has become inverse to the space around us, for we sit in the middle of an immense and almost perfect stillness. We hear the fire and, from time to time, insects, birds. The sound of an airplane crosses the edge of hearing and goes out again. It is the first aircraft we have heard.
Kauffmann says he is worried, from the point of view of park planning, about the aircraft access that would probably be developed for the Salmon River. “It's not a big world up there. I'm not sure how much use it could take.”
This reminds Fedeler of the cost of travel to wilderness, and
makes him contemplate again who can pay to get there. “The Salmon is a nice enough river,” he says. “But it is unavailable to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the people. I wouldn't go back to Fairbanks and tell everybody that they absolutely
have
to go and see the Salmon River.”
“It's a fine experience.”
“If you happen to have an extra six hundred bucks. Is the Park Service going to provide helicopter access or Super Cub access to some gravel bar near the headwaters?”
“Why does there have to be access?” Pourchot puts in.
“Why do there have to be wild and scenic rivers?” Fedeler wants to know. “And why this one—so far up here? Because of the cost of getting to it, the Salmon Wild River for most people would be just a thing on a map—an occasional trip for people from the Park Service, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Meanwhile, with pressures what they are farther south, the sportsman in Alaska is in for some tough times.”
“His numbers are increasing.”
“And his opportunities are decreasing, while these federal proposals would set aside lands and rivers that only the rich can afford.”
“The proposals, up here, are for the future,” Kauffmann says, and he adds, after a moment, “As Yellowstone was. Throughout the history of this country, it's been possible to go to a place where no one has camped before, and now that kind of opportunity is running out. We must protect it, even if artificially. The day will come when people will want to visit such a wilderness—saving everything they have in order to see it, at whatever cost. We're talking fifty and more years hence, when there may be nowhere else to go to a place that is wild and unexplored.”
I have a net over my head and cannot concentrate on this discussion, because something worse, and smaller, than mosquitoes—clouds of little flying prickers that cut you up—are in
the air around us now and are coming through the mesh of the head net. They follow us into the tents, ignoring the netting there. They cut rashes in our faces all through the night.
 
 
 
For two days, we stare at the hypnotizing vistas of the Kobuk, while its spacious novelty wears off. Uncannily, the river comes in almost precise two-mile segments, bend to bend. We move downstream a little more than twenty miles one day, only sixteen the next, in part because of stiff western headwinds. Having had one bad night with insects, we next choose to pitch our tents far out on a gravel point, on a dry part of the riverbed, two hundred yards from the nearest blade of vegetation, confident that the water will not rise, and preferring anyway to be drowned outright than consumed piecemeal. The instant the bows touch shore, mosquitoes in grosses try to settle upon us. As we finish putting up the tents, a light rain begins to spit. The sky is slate gray in the east. We are camped on an island, and we fish the slough that goes behind it. Nothing there but six-inch grayling. Kauffmann and I try to walk around the island, but it is bigger than we imagined. Moreover, the beach runs out some distance down the slough. Plowing on through dense willow and alder, soaking wet, we give up the circumambulation and traverse the island to return to camp. We see wolf tracks seven inches long—amazing size, but there is a tape measure in my pocket and that is what it says. Less than a yard separates one set of prints from another—the tracks of a slow loper. Earlier in the day, fishing by the mouth of the Kallarichuk tributary, we saw wolf tracks intricately intertwined with the tracks of a running moose. There were changes of direction, overlapping circles. No other sign. The calligraphy seemed to report some unresolved encounter—unless two extremely odd animals had been through there at
different times. Now, after dinner, in light rain, we look upriver and see a cow moose walk out of willows. She drinks from the river. She stands, for a while, immobile, and stares across the water. Slowly, she retreats into the thicket. Moose are so numerous now in this part of northwest Alaska that it is difficult to imagine them absent, but they have been here scarcely fifty years. The patterns of other creatures—the bear, the fish, the caribou—run in long cycles over time, cycles of waxing, cycles of waning; but they have been in the region for ten thousand years, and when they have locally been gone for a time they have always returned. In the case of the moose, though, there is no evidence that they were ever here before the early part of this century, and now they are established in the milieu and in the native economy.
Eight boats, outboard-powered, going upriver, passed us in the course of the day—all with at least three people in them, some with children. Four have come back, and passed us again, during the evening. It seems to be the rhythm of the Kobuk that Eskimos go by about once an hour—at least on this part of the river, many miles from the nearest village. I remember Bob Waldrop saying how he counts on random Eskimos to pick him up near the finish of certain trips he makes. Waldrop is a Brooks Range guide, who leads long journeys, mainly on foot, on both sides of the Arctic Divide. Much of the time, he does not know exactly where he is. Maps lack detail, he explains; many mountains are unnamed. He generally has a fair idea of his position, within eight miles or so, but he finds it impossible to plan things more precisely than that, and people who expect to know just where they are and to follow an exact schedule, who are (in his words) “set in their ways,” are likely to be unhappy on such trips, and unenjoyable company. Waldrop, like Kauffmann, does not want his Brooks Range any other way. He wants it imprecise. He wants to preserve its surprises. When he goes up nameless mountains and finds on their summits containers identifying someone or other as the
first visiting conqueror, he puts the containers in his pack and hauls them out. If you say to him, “You're altering history,” Waldrop says, “The people were altering history who put the registers there.” When Waldrop comes out of, say, the Sadlerochit Mountains, and makes his way across the wet tundra toward the Arctic Ocean, he has no idea when or where he will come to the water; nevertheless, he relies on “flagging the nearest Eskimo” for a ride to Barter Island, where mail planes land. An hour here, a day there, he waits with patience until one comes along.
The Eskimos on the Kobuk never seem surprised when they come upon us, as if nothing could be less extraordinary than the Grumman canoe, the small blue single kayak, and Snake Eyes—all afloat under five white faces. And now, as we watch from our campsite, another skiff approaches, coming downriver. It passes the sandspit where the moose was standing. A couple of hundred yards from us, a heavyset man in the stern cuts the motor. There are three people—two men and a woman. They drift and observe us. The woman is wearing a long calico dress, fringed at the bottom, rubber boots. The men are wearing short parkas with fur ruffs. There is an exchange of waves. At length, the man in the stern picks up an oar and sculls the boat toward the edge of the river. The boat is plywood, about eighteen feet long, apparently homemade, with a flat bottom, a square stern, and a thirty-five-horse Evinrude. The woman jumps out, into a couple of feet of water, where she firms the skiff against the current. She acts as an anchor while the heavyset man—her husband—talks with us. His name is Clarence Jackson, and he is from Noorvik. The other man is his uncle. In the boat is a full cartridge belt and a .45-calibre pistol. This is their annual trip upriver, he says, to visit his great-grandmother's grave. We ask about fish, and he says the runs have been mediocre this season. He says the caribou were plentiful near Kiana. He smiles amiably, somewhat diffidently, as he speaks. He wonders if we happen to
know anything about a party of white people, far down the Kobuk, who had no boats, and who summoned a young Eskimo to shore and when he got out of his boat were extremely rough with him. We are surprised, and as dismayed as Clarence Jackson. He says, grinning, that if he had not seen our boats he would not have come so close. Up in the country where we have been no one much goes in summer, but Kobuk people sometimes hunt there in winter, he says, his friendly tone unaltered. His wife gets back into the boat. With toothy smiles, they say goodbye and move on down the river.
The people of the Kobuk are among the few Eskimos in Alaska whose villages are well within the tree line. They have a culture that reflects their cousinship to Eskimos of the coast and that borrows also from the Indians of the Alaskan interior. The combination is unique. At first glance—plywood boats, Evinrudes—they may seem to be even more a part of the world at large than they are of this Arctic valley. Much of their clothing is manufactured. They use rifles. They ride on snow machines. They seine whitefish and salmon with nylon nets that cost upward of four hundred dollars. Now and again, they leave the valley in search of jobs. They work on the pipeline. Without the river and the riverine land, though, they would be bereft of most of what sustains them. Their mail-order likeness to the rest of us does not go very deep. They may use Eagle Claw fishhooks from Wright & McGill, in Denver, but they still know how to make them from the teeth of wolves. They may give their children windup toys, but they also make little blowguns for them from the hollow leg bones of the sandhill crane. To snare ptarmigan, they no longer use spruce roots—they use picture wire—but they still snare ptarmigan. They eat what they call “white-man food,” mainly from cans, but they also eat owl soup, sour dock, wild rhubarb, and the tuber
Hedysarum alpinum
—the Eskimo potato. Some of them believe that Eskimo food keeps them healthy and brown, and that too much white-man food will turn them white. Roughly half their carbohydrates come from wild food—and fully fourfifths
of their protein. They eat—and, more to the point, depend on—small creatures of the forest. Rabbit. Beaver. Muskrat. Thousands of frozen whitefish will be piled beside a single house. At thirty below, whitefish break like glass. The people dip the frozen bits in seal oil and chew them. From fresh whitefish, as they squeeze, they directly suck roe. They trade mud-shark livers for seal oil from the coast. Mud sharks are freshwater, river fish, and for maritime Eskimos the liver of the mud shark is an exotic and delicious import. The forest Eskimo has a reciprocal yen for seal oil. When a Kobuk woman goes “fishing for seal oil,” mud sharks are what she is after. Loon oil is sometimes substituted for seal oil, there being a great deal of oil in a loon. Sheefish, rare in the world and looking like fifteen-pound tarpon, make annual runs up the Kobuk. They are prized by the people.

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