Looking for Alaska (65 page)

Of all the stories I heard and the people I met in Deering, the stories told to me by Millie, an Eskimo and preschool teacher, best illustrated the intimate relationship these people have with their world. The abundant life and the seasons that affect them are what rule Deering. I had to be around Deering awhile before Dean could get the people to tell me stories. They saw me at graduation, at the end-of-school picnic, their kids told them I'd spoken in their classroom. Everybody in town, especially the children, loved Rebekah; she had come before me and laid the groundwork. I couldn't be too bad if I had a daughter like Rebekah. Right before I was to leave Deering, Millie told Dean it would be all right to bring me by her mother's house so we could talk.

Gladys Iyatunguk is Millie's mother. Both have some gray hair, but I'm not sure how old either woman is. Both are totally alive and involved in living their lives as Eskimo people of the tundra and ocean and rivers and ice. Millie's voice is like a whisper but has incredible strength. I think this Eskimo way of speaking, soft, slow, focused, and songlike, comes from being listened to and from living surrounded by so much beautiful silence and life.

They told me about mouse trading. Gladys said the first part of September, they go into the tundra looking for where the mice have been gathering a root called mussu from a grass that grows in bunches. They look for slight disturbances in the ground where the mice have been building their caches, mouse-size, underground storage places where they store food for the long winter months. Mussu is a root from a grass with purple flowers, pretty flowers, Gladys said. In the fall the flowers and leaves drop and all you see is the stem. Gladys said when they find the grass growing in gravel, the roots are tough.

The mussu has been gathered for hundreds of years for food. Gladys had learned from her mother and aunties when they went out in the tundra to pick mussu. Gladys said we needed to try some; she had some mussu in seal oil frozen in a plastic bag in the freezer. Millie pulled it out of the freezer, where it sat next to the Neapolitan ice cream. The roots were as thick as a pencil and white. Gladys said they are sweet; I thought they tasted like a raw or boiled peanut. Gladys liked them best soaked in seal oil.

Gathering this mussu is called mouse trading. To me it illustrates the people's fantastic appreciation of their environment. Most people would never see what they find. This illustrates how they observe the subtlest of details in nature and understand what it can do for the people. It's called mouse trading because first they must find the mouse's home. They gently open the cache, which shows itself as a bit of freshly dug dirt, to reveal what is inside. Gladys told us that some mice pick the mussu very clean and stack it neatly, while some are sloppy and don't pick the roots perfectly clean of the little “hairs” that grow on them. All mice are not the same, she said, and smiled—just like people. Gladys's eyes are bright and lively. As always in any Native conversation, the elder, Gladys, did most of the talking.

“Sometimes you use your fingers to feel around in their burrow feeling for the cache and,
eey,
you feel a mouse.”

As they are kneeling on the ground, gently entering the mouse's house with their fingers and taking its mussu, they do not just take. They trade. Before they leave on their four-wheelers, Millie leaves cut-up potatoes and carrots and celery in the mouse cache so the mice will have something in return. To trade like this with such a tiny creature that has no way of demanding any equality or any fairness shows such concern that survival is tough around Deering, for mice as well as people.

Normally Millie and Gladys gather about six quart-size bags to last for a year. It is not cooked, but eaten with seal oil or plain. Millie said she liked it best eaten with dried fish or boiled meat. After our mussu, Millie and Gladys served us some of the best food ever to come out of Alaska, a bowl full of salmonberries. Dean and I thanked them for their story and their time. I would try to integrate the concept of mouse trading into the way I lived, I thought as we walked across the street to Eric's for tea.

*   *   *

In a couple of days Dean, Eric, and I would be leaving Deering. Eric has an old Volkswagen bus; and he and Cody and Eric's daughter were going to spend the summer on one long road trip. Dean was going to take the year off; he wasn't sure what he was going to do. He would try to strike up a relationship with an old girlfriend in Tampa; if that didn't work out, maybe he would go to a wooden-boat-building school near Seattle. I thanked them both for what they'd done for Rebekah and me and for introducing us to their world. I left the day after Eric and Cody did. Cody is such a large Alaskan malamute it might cost more to fly him to Anchorage than me.

19

Hobo Night

It was Hobo night at the Yukon Bar in Seward. I had heard a couple college students who worked at Icicle Seafoods call it “the church of Hobo” since he played every Sunday night. The Yukon is about three blocks from Resurrection Bay. Hobo Jim, Alaska's rebel folksinger, has made his living for a couple of decades playing the saloons, festivals, and fairs in every fishing village, town, and city in Alaska. He came to Alaska as a hitchhiker, looking like Che Guevara. In the seventies his shoulder-length hair and full beard were as black as a Greek fisherman's. His last name is Varsos; his father is of Greek descent, his mother Scottish. His beard may be mostly gray, but he can still outperform just about everyone, playing before five thousand or seventy-five. He is such a gifted entertainer that listening to his CDs isn't enough. He enchants people; the audience has more fun than they can remember, even when he's yodeling. I've seen him sing and play guitar for three hours straight, threatening to take a break but never doing it. Before the night's over, he'll probably be singing from on top of a table.

Some people followed Hobo around in Alaska the way people Outside followed the Grateful Dead. Wherever he was playing, Homer, Soldotna, Palmer, Seward, or some biker bar near Girdwood, they showed up. Some people have been going to his shows since they were eighteen-year-old cannery workers just planning to summer in Alaska. Now they're in their late thirties, they never went back to wherever they came from, and they've been fans of Hobo's all this time.

We had Julianne and Luke, Rebekah and Aaron with us. Almost everyone from our family was back in Alaska now, except Jed and Brooke. Jed was in Governors School in Tennessee studying theater and Brooke was planning her wedding. The Yukon Bar's ceiling is covered with dollar bills that people have autographed with the town or city they're from; I'd put one up right over the front little round table where we always sat. We got there early so the kids could hear him do some songs; they'd make requests before they had to leave. As usual, Julianne would request “The Iditarod Song.” Hobo was running a bit behind tonight; he'd got caught in some construction traffic. We sat and watched him unpack his amp and speaker. He slung his trusty guitar over his shoulder. That motion made me remember the time Hobo and his friend Mike Sipes took me, Rusty Jones, and Rusty's friend Gerry Fatzer on a walk in the wilderness.

It was in 1996, and we'd made a “guy trip” to hang out with Hobo. That brief walk challenged me, and my tame world. Not far down the trail, it terrified me. We were staying at an isolated log lodge on Lake Tustamena owned by two of Hobo's friends, Mike and Linda Sipes from Soldotna. Hobo had written some of his most famous songs on napkins at their former restaurant. Linda is a gourmet cook; she and Mike are both wine connoisseurs. Mike, an intense guy, is originally from California and reminds me of a Special Forces colonel I once knew. You would never ask Mike about his life, but you would trust him with yours. I would be doing that shortly. I would never have thought as we took off from their lodge near the banks of Bear Creek that some of us might come back wounded, or worse.

There were five of us. Shafts of sunlight broke through the swaying spruce and sent spikes of angelic light to the forest floor. It was possible that no human had ever set foot in parts of that forest before. The bouncing beams of sunlight highlighted isolated spots of the wilderness. The trail brought us to the middle of a meadow filled with tall grass and wildflowers. On either side of it were deep, dark evergreen woods. About fifty yards off to our left was a small stand of slightly bent white birch trees, and amid the trees stood a mother moose. She moved nervously, looking down at the ground below her, then behind her into the dark forest. Suddenly, a newborn stood up, unsteady on its long, spindly legs. She nudged her calf into the light and out into the natural meadow, surprisingly, toward us.

The grass on either side of the trail was neck high. The temperature was perfect, low sixties, and wildflower and spruce scents sweetened the air. Mike slowed down and pointed to a fresh trail that intersected ours—at a ninety-degree angle—coming through the middle of the high grass.

“The brown bears are in here right now. They cross this trail going to the creek, which is just about fifty yards off to our left, to feed on the salmon. When they get enough, they go back into the woods to sleep in the shade.”

“Really,” Rusty said.

Right then I could feel my nerves jumping a bit. We walked about fifty feet more and reached a big circle of bare ground, like a small bomb crater, about ten feet in diameter. What had once been deep, thick grasses were gone. An indentation in the surviving grass on the edge of the crater marked where something had lain down, and a hole about two feet wide and three feet deep had been dug in the crater's middle.

“What happened there?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing much,” Hobo answered. “Some brownie dug that up looking for the yellow jacket nest in the ground. They like to eat the larvae.” That was when Hobo swung his “elephant gun” off his shoulder into his hands the same way he'd just swung his guitar.

“How can they stand getting stung by those wicked yellow jackets?” I asked.

“They have outrageous pain tolerance,” Mike answered. “You can't imagine what they can take.” I did not want to imagine. Mike mentioned that first the black bears come to this creek seeking the salmon. Then the supreme creatures, the brownies, come and chase the blackies away. Or eat them, whichever the blackies prefer.

We passed several more of the brown bears' trails intersecting ours. What if we met one face-to-face? Although the largest brown bears can be ten feet tall and weigh over a thousand pounds, if one was walking in the tall grass alongside us, we wouldn't see it until it was right on top of us.

My short-lived state of nature-induced nirvana was gone. We passed several more bear-made craters. Inside two of them the dirt was still damp—they had just been dug.

“Mike, what is the worst thing that can happen to us out here as far as these bears are concerned?” Rusty asked, worst-case-scenario lawyer that he is. We were only about three-quarters of a mile from the cabin, and Mike had said we'd hike about five miles up and back.

Mike stopped and gathered us around. He had some Italian-made shotgun over his shoulder. Hobo and Mike were definitely not the lie-down-and-play-dead types or the bear-bells types; most Alaskans know better.

“The worst thing is coming up on a big, old male brownie lying on a kill. They will kill a moose and let it lie there until its gets rank. They are so strong they have been seen carrying a dead eight-hundred-pound moose off the ground slung over their back.”

I got hung up on the thought of how powerful and fast a brown bear must be to be able to kill
and
carry a moose.

“They get real protective over their kills. They probably think humans are there to take it away from them.” Suddenly two huge black ravens cawed at each other; I nearly jumped up into the tree next to me.

“Probably the next worst thing that could happen is to come across a mother bear with twin two-year-old cubs. The two-year-olds are big enough to kill a man or two and act like curious teenagers. They might run up to you, take a swat at you, maybe just testing you or wanting to play, but one swipe with those powerful claws and they can rip your head off.”

“I hope we get to see some bears,” Rusty actually said after that. He's been a successful lawyer too long, I thought; you cannot outnegotiate a brown bear.

“It's doubtful we will see any bears,” Mike said, “but if we do, you three stand behind Hobo and me. They usually smell us and take off before we see them. They have an excellent sense of smell and not very good eyesight.”

We came to a part of the trail that went up on a narrow ridge, into a dark hemlock woods.

About halfway through it we flushed some grouse. The sound of their flapping wings as they rocketed out of the dense hemlock was a new sound to me, and I didn't think of benign little birds when I first heard it.

Mike pointed to our right. In the deep shade of a grove of hemlocks the ground was torn up, but not like a crater. Everything was disturbed, the dirt, the mat of rotting hemlock needles, the rotting trees that had died and fallen, even small saplings. Mike knelt down.

“Look here,” Mike said. “Look at this black fur. Look, here is the mama's skull, and her teeth. Look over here, a piece of foot bone with the claws still connected to it. Over here is a cub's skull; no, two of them. This must have been awful when it happened.”

“What happened?” Gerry asked with his Swiss accent. Gerry hadn't said much.

“Only thing I can figure, this fur and skull and whatever else is left was once a mother black bear and her cubs, and something killed them violently, and then ate them. It had to have been a brown bear.”

I picked up one of the long claws from the mother and put it in my pocket.

“Brown bear claws are about four times that big. Believe it or not, there are more people mauled by black bears in Alaska than brownies,” Hobo said with a teasing grin. Some Alaskans, I now realize, seem to enjoy seeing people from the Outside respond to the dangers that they live with so casually.