Coming into the Country (39 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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We passed fish camps all down the river, for the most part established by Indians and abandoned now—places that once netted as much as thirty tons of salmon a year. At one fish camp stood the biggest cache I have seen in Alaska, virtually a full-size cabin in the air, resting on columnar stilts. All it contained was a beaver's forepaw.
Tues Nov 18.—22°. The other day when I got them grouse, a funny thing happened .The last grouse was perched in the top of an alder about 30 ft high. I shot at it twice from about 35 yds and thought I'd missed it. But it stayed up there. I snuck up to about 20 yds from it and emptied the pistol. It still sat there. It was gettin dark and I was out of shells. I figured that that grouse wouldn't be a meal for me. Then all of a sudden I got MAD, went over to the tree, shook it, and yelled, “Get outa there you son of a bitch.” Well, down comes a blanket of snow on my head—but also Mister Grouse, who is only winged. He scooted along the ground for awhile and then just disappeared! By God, he was gone just like that. Then I flashed to a memory that Dad had told me a story of a grouse he had winged and the dog pointed at a bunch of leaves. Finally he seen a feather stickin out of the leaves, took off his hat and caught him a grouse in it. Well, I seen where he last was and used my mitten (it was 20 below and didn't want to take off my hat) to clamp down on the snow and by Jesus if I didn't come up with another supper in my hands. Made me laugh just a bit to think that my anger had been changed so fast into a memory. Had some grouse gumbo last night. Ummm!
The brilliance of this north country under the full moon is dazzling to say the least. At midnight the sky is still a
deep
blue with the twinkling of many bright stars. Moon shadows of the tall spruce are everywhere and the Yukon River lays quiet and white. This moon seems to stand guard on this country.
There has long been talk of a tourist road connecting Eagle and Circle. Running for the most part beside the river, it would “open up” what is generally regarded as the handsomest stretch of the Yukon in Alaska. The longest piece of road along the Yukon now runs three miles upriver from Eagle to Eagle Indian Village. On the river near that road, I have paddled more than once in dust that was thicker than smoke.
Mon Nov 24.—6°. Plan to go upriver.
Tues Nov 25.—4°. On the way up, Bob's lead dog got caught in one of Fred's Conibears. Boy it was a mad scramble for Bob and I to get to the front of 9 dogs and prise the jaws apart on that trap. The dog acted like nothing had ever happened and went right on again. Could have been tragic but it turned out funny … . Found out that Thanksgiving is on the 27th … . It was fun to run them 9 dogs all strung out single. Bob and I took turns as it was a rough run over the muskeg and the sled was loaded heavy (probably 500 lbs +). It tipped over 5 or 6 times but things went smooth. Both of us were wore plumb out … . I fell through the ice 2 or 3 times yesterday, & ran around with wet pacs. Feels like I frosted the ends of my big toes a bit, but they're far from my heart, so I'll keep on truckin.
We stopped one night at an abandoned cabin, containing so much clutter of junk debris that we decided to sleep outside. Mosquitoes were dense there but tolerable—not yet coming in clouds. In the Yukon Flats, beyond the mountains, were thirty-six thousand lakes and ponds, with geese, canvasbacks, scaup, cranes, swans, teal, and widgeons in millions, and mosquitoes in numbers a physicist would understand. But we were still upriver, and only five or six thousand of them were now close around us. I asked Brad if he would like to share my netted tent. Inside it moments later, he told me how his wife plays
what she calls Revenge. In the security of a tent, she places near the netting an example of her flesh until it drives to frenzy the singers in the night. A truly ambitious mosquito will soon thrust its proboscis through the net. She then seizes the proboscis and yanks the bugger inside. For my part, I mentioned that when mosquitoes seek human blood they are fulfilling their sexual cycle, doing what nature is instructing them to do, and therefore an authentic conservationist will never react unfavorably to the attentions of a mosquito. This simple test—a way of telling the phonies from the truly committed—I had first come upon long ago in the Lower Forty-eight. Gradually in Alaska, however, I had come to realize that an Alaska mosquito is not a Lower Forty-eight mosquito that has moved north. Before getting into the tent, I had slapped my leg, turned the palm up, and counted seventeen corpses in my hand.
Sat Dec 13 … The weather has been—50 or lower (—60 was the lowest) for 12 days but this morning the wind started blowing and the weather warmed up some 40° to —8. I ran the dogs down across the river to get a load of fish yesterday. Saw fresh moose sign and Errol & I spent all day today hunting. Lots of sign but no luck. I haven't checked my line since the new moon and it's already past half. Tomorrow will be the day. There seems to be more cat around since it got cold.
Sun Dec 21 … Errol and I were hunting cause the 2 moose were staying in this area. Errol ran into them and got us both of them, by God! We eatin high nowadays. Moose liver and steak for breakfast. Hmm! We had a real chinook for a few days and the temp went up to 39° above. Couldn't believe it.
 
Mon Dec. 22. Zero. Oboy! Biscuits gravy & moose steak this fine day. Yepper, sure wish Sara were back home where she belongs.
Tues Dec 23. Zero and clear … Made a few more cat sets today in the slough. Missed a cat in one of my cubbies.
A “cat” is a lynx. A “lynk” is also a lynx. Nine times out of ten, people who say “lynk” are trying to sound like trappers.
Mon Dec 29. +15° … Walked up to 3 Mile today with Molly on a lead rope (she was leading me). We didn't hit a fresh track till after dark on the way back. She struck out on the cat's trail but didn't run it very far, it was in thick alders. She sure wanted to though.
 
Jan 7.—40. I've had some bad luck. Molly run off about 3 days ago at 25 below. I could hear her howling bloody murder from the cabin here. I'd just got a fire started after a 6 mile hike down river. Well, I figured, she got herself in a trap, so I went to looking for her. Found her 3 hours later, almost to Errol's cabin with her right front paw in a number 4 doublespring. It was frozen solid. My lantern had run out of fuel and there was no moon. We ran to Errol's cabin where I soaked her paw in lukewarm water for about an hour. It swelled plumb up as big as a cat track, but today it started to blister and I think it may heal. The swelling's gone down a bit. Poor ole Molly Blue!
 
Jan 8.—40. Red is the color of my barrel stove when it's 40 below, when it's 40 below! A bit nippy these last few days, but it's nice to set by a roarin stove.
Snow and I lingered at the mouths of tributary streams, and went miles up the Charley, the river of Leon Crane. Logs cruised toward us like alligators, and with the same stately glide. We surprised ravens, geese, a bald eagle, which lumbered into flight. It slowly achieved altitude, its wings barely recovering from flap to awkward flap. Peregrines, which nest on bluffs above the Charley, can pin down one of these eagles and keep
it where it is indefinitely—the falcons diving, pecking, strafing, dominating, while the symbol of national grandeur cowers on the ground, a screaming eagle. After nine or ten miles, the Charley, with riffles, increased its gradient rise, and the immense, confining forest began to open to big, long-distance views. Far up the corridor of the river were white-patched mountains, and far behind them more and higher mountains totally covered with newly fallen snow. We tied up in an island slough and climbed the steep face of a bluff—loose, flaky shale; no trees; not much to hang on to—and when we had worked our way upward five hundred vertical feet I looked back at what seemed a straight plunge to the river. It was a bluff of swallows and lupine, blueberries and bears. We saw only sign of the bears. Brad was carrying his rifle. He remarked that his friend David Evans, who has been in the country about as long as he has, apparently rejoices in a nearly perfect state of “anestrophic anticipation.” Asked to explain what that is, Snow said, “You have no sense of catastrophe. You walk through the valley of the shadow of death and you fear no evil—not because you are fearless but because you have no awareness of what may happen. David walks miles and miles, unarmed, and doesn't seem to understand that there's a chance of being mauled.”
We sat down and ate berries, looking up frequently at many hundreds of square miles of dark broadloom forests curling at the edges into rising tundra fells, which ended in mountain rock. Through the mountains came the clear river, often deep within its peregrine bluffs, which were pinpointed white with visible Dall sheep and darkened by invisible bears. It was landscape uncompromised, under small white cumulus by the tens of dozens evenly spaced to the corners of the sky. I remembered Frank Warren, in Circle, talking about the Park Service's yen for the Charley, and saying, “What can you do to improve an area that is perfect? What possible satisfaction could a hiker ever get walking on a man-made trail?” We descended the bluff and descended the stream, stopping at the
cabin built by Al Ames, where the government had posted a sign beside the door forbidding habitation.
We drifted down the Yukon through a windless afternoon. The fast-flowing water was placid and—with its ring boils—resembled antique glass. Down one long straightaway, framed in white mountains, we saw ten full miles to the wall of the coming bend.
Fri Feb 6. Been traveling this ole Yukon from Sam Creek (at times to Coal Creek) all the way to 20 miles this side of Eagle. Not much cat sign anywhere … Molly is healed up pretty good.
 
Sat Feb. 7.—37° before sunrise, now an hour later it's —40 and droppin fast, looks like another snapper! Beautiful light show last night … Sara, where are you?
Stanley Gelvin grew up in the country, and therefore has no capacity to see it as exotic. He has sampled other worlds, which have failed to attract him—Fairbanks, mainly, and a visit or two outside. He has spent most of the nights of his life in sleeping bags. When he sleeps in a bed with sheets and blankets, he turns, tosses, and flips until the bedding is out of tuck and is composed in mummy shape around him. While Stanley was growing up, Central, Alaska, with its population under twenty, did not offer him a large reserve of playmates. Instead, he had engines. Getting to know them, he acquired a primary skill of the country, and now has almost a maker's sense of their design and function. In mining, hunting, trapping, ice fishing, he and his family used everything from rasping little two-cycle chain-saw engines to the turbocharged diesel of the D9 Cat. They have pumps, generators, airplanes, snow machines, washing
machines, automobiles, pickups—and when you are well over a hundred miles from the corner garage you do not go there to have someone listen to what seems to be wrong. Stanley, in his middle twenties, has never known that sort of dependence. Like his father, Ed Gelvin, he routinely works on the pumps, the saws, the cars, the planes. “Living in the bush, you have to,” he says. “I don't know anything different. You just have to be a good mechanic. You have to modify machinery until you get the imperfections out. I never found nothing I couldn't fix.”
From early youth onward, Stanley's gold fever has been chronic, running along steadily a few degrees above normal. As a child, he made little rocker boxes and took them out to Deadwood Creek to separate from its gravels its cereal flakes of color. As he moved through the boxes small heaps of pebbles and sand, the point was not lost on him that a guy could move a whole stream bed with a big machine, and when that day came a guy would have to be able to maintain the machine. For ten dollars, he bought from a neighbor a pre-Second World War Chevrolet. It was long since dead on the road. He sent off for piston rings and gaskets from Sears in Philadelphia. The bearings were babbitted and could not be replaced, so he took out the shims and adjusted them for proper clearance. He was seven years old. He had a book on auto mechanics. He did a valve job. He installed the new gaskets and rings. The engine sat up in its coffin.
Ed and Ginny Gelvin ran the Central roadhouse for a time. To drivers who had made the long trip from Fairbanks up the dusty seasonal road Stanley was generous with alarming advice. “Why don't you turn that bearing over? If you don't, you'll be sorry.” A truck driver came in once, hauling supplies to Circle, and before he could fairly sip his coffee he was confronted by this little kid telling him his differential was in bad trouble. “Don't worry about it, son. It always sounds like that,” the driver said, departing. Thirty miles up the road, the truck went
around a curve, and the wheels tried to turn—as they are wont to on curves—at varying rates of spin. The differential failed to see the difference anymore. The breakdown was complete.

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