Coming into the Country (5 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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On nothing, though, do the forest Eskimos depend so much as on caribou. They use the whole animal. They eat the meat raw and in roasts and stews. They eat greens from the stomach, muscles from the jaw, fat from behind the eyes. The hide goes into certain winter clothing that nothing manufactured can equal. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the number of available caribou gradually declined in the Kobuk valley. Why the herd avoided the region perhaps had to do with climatic cycles and their effect on vegetation, but nobody knows. From the turn of the century until about 1940, people of the Kobuk had to go into the Brooks Range to find caribou, making prodigious journeys in winter, and feeding much of the kill to their dogs, on which they depended for the trip home with essential skins and sinew. In the nineteen-forties, the herd began to return—in numbers that increased each year. The caribou cycle—dearth to plenty and back again—seems to close itself in sixty to a hundred years. The Arctic herd numbered two hundred and forty thousand a few years ago, and has been fast decreasing. Some fifty thousand come over the mountains now.
With the rise and fall of such cycles, the people of the Kobuk
from earliest times expanded and contracted over the riverine lands. Whenever caribou were plentiful, people were able to congregate in relatively large winter villages. Where caribou were scarce, people had to spread out—up and down the river in small family groups—for hunting small game and for fishing through the ice. Pursuit of furs for trading purposes tended to disseminate them as well. The arrival—seventy, eighty years ago—of white missionaries, schools, and trading posts tended to force the Eskimos together in places like Noorvik and Kiana, but Kobuk River people have not traditionally thought of their homes as permanent in location. Through much of their history, they built new houses—on sites shiftingly appropriate—each fall. With their Evinrudes and their Arctic Cat snowmobiles, their range has been extended—they can cover more miles from a fixed base—but cycles of climate, of salmon, of caribou cannot be levelled by gasoline. In order to continue existence as they have known it, the forest Eskimos must follow where the cycles may lead. So they are worried. It is difficult to see how the essential flexibility of their history is going to be advanced by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the so-called national-interest lands. By the terms of the law, the Eskimos must choose specific land—to become theirs according to the settlement—and the land must, by and large, be contiguous to the villages. When a boundary is established around native land, what if the caribou go somewhere else? Suppose the caribou concentrate for a time in the Kobuk Valley National Monument? Hunting is not permitted in national parks. Oh, but exceptions will be made in Alaska, where people can hunt on their traditional grounds. A tradition of 1920 may not be a tradition now, but will be again, in all likelihood, some decades in the future. The government understands that. The government may understand that today, but officials change, regulations change. Will the government understand in 1990? The Eskimos undeniably got a good deal in the Native Claims Settlement Act, but it was good only insofar
as they agreed to change their way—to cherish money, and to adopt the concept (for centuries unknown to them) of private property. “No Trespassing” signs have begun to appear up here, around villages where those words would once have not been understood. Boundaries now have to be adjusted, adjudicated, where boundaries never existed. Kobuk societies once functioned like the clans of Scotland. Terrain was common to all. Kinship patterned things; ownership did not. Use determined use. If you had been using a place—say, a fishing spot—it was respected as yours while you used it. Now the enforced drawing of lines on the land has created tensions among the Kobuk villages that did not exist before. Under the ingratiating Eskimo surface is a sense of grave disturbance.
There is, as well, an added complication. In 1906, the Native Allotment Act provided that any Alaskan native could file a claim for a hundred and sixty acres of Alaska. This meant next to nothing to the people of the Kobuk valley, since they were not attracted to private ownership, and, in any case, could make little use of such a minuscule amount of land. Few people bothered to file. When the Native Claims Settlement Act came along, however, a final deadline was set for native allotments, and many people, thus pressed, decided to register claims after all. They took the allotments in violation of their own customary principles. Bad feeling inevitably followed and to some extent soured their society.
The sense of private property that has been jacketed upon them is uncomfortable, incompatible with subsistence harvesting and its changeful cycles. It is ironic that while the land-claim settlement is being effected relative plenty has been close to the villages. In 1900, the people could easily have shown that they needed a vast area in which to subsist. Of late, they have needed less. They will need more again. It is impossible to draw lines around a situation like this one, but the lines are being drawn.
The people of the National Park Service, for their part, seem
to be amply sensitive to the effects their efforts might have. They intend to adjust their own traditions so that Alaskan national-park land will not abridge but will in fact preserve native customs. Under the direction of Douglas Anderson, of the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, an anthropological team commissioned by the Park Service has recently described and voluminously catalogued what must be every habit, tic, and mannerism, every tale and taboo—let alone custom—of the Kobuk River natives. The anthropologists make a convincing case for helping the people preserve their modus vivendi, but the most vivid words in the document occur when the quoted Eskimos are speaking for themselves:
Eskimos should make laws for those people outside. That would be just the same as what they try to do to us. We know nothing about how they live, and they know nothing about how we live. It should be up to us to decide things for ourselves. You see the land out there? We never have spoiled it.
Too much is happening to the people. Too many outside pressures are forcing in on us. Changes are coming too fast, and we are being pushed in all different directions by forces that come from someplace outside. People thought that the land-claims settlement was the end of our problems, that it meant the future was secure; but it was only the beginning. Even before the lands were all selected the government wanted pipeline easements and road corridors right through our territory. These would take away strips miles wide, cutting right across our land. And instead of open access to the land, the Eskimos might be surrounded by huge pieces of country that are declared national resources for all the people. Land that has always belonged to the natives is being parcelled up and divided among the takers.
The forest Eskimos' relationship with whites has made them dependent on goods that need to be paid for: nylon netting, boat materials, rifles, ammunition, motors, gasoline. Hence, part of the year some Eskimo men leave the river to find jobs. These pilgrimages to the wage economy are not a repudiation of the subsistence way of life. They make money so they can come back home, where they prefer to be, and live the way they prefer to live—foraging the wild country with gasoline and bullets. If subsistence living were to be, through regulation, denied to them, the probable result would be that the government would have to support them even more than at present —more aid to dependent children, more food stamps—for they would not be able to find sufficient work, at home or on seasonal trips outside, to support their families.
As long as I have the land and nobody tries to stop me from using it, then I'm a rich man. I can always go out there and make my living, no matter what happens. Everything I need—my food, clothes, house, heat—it's all out there.
 
And another thing, too. If we have nothing of our Eskimo food-only white-man food to live on—we can't live. We eat and eat and eat, but we never get filled up. Just like starvation.
Breakfast in the frying pan—freeze-dried eggs. If we were Kobuk people, one of us might go off into the watery tundra and find fresh eggs. Someone else might peel the bark from a willow. The bark would be soaked and formed into a tube with the eggs inside, and the tube would be placed in the fire. But this is not a group of forest Eskimos. These are legionaries from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody's skin is going to turn brown on these eggs—or on cinnamon-apple-flavored Instant Quaker Oatmeal, or Tang, or Swiss Miss, or
on cold pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. For those who do not believe what they have just read, allow me to confirm it: in Pourchot's breakfast bag are pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias—the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian—which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou's eye?
It is raining. A wind is rising and pushing back a morning fog. The air—fifty-four—is cooler than the Kobuk. We have twenty miles to cover, downriver to Kiana. Each of us has put in identical time in the various boats, so now we draw lots to see who goes where, and Fedeler and I are the losers. We draw Snake Eyes. Even before we shove off, whitecaps have formed on the river, and waves two feet high. They are coming from the west, and that is where we are going. As we pack up, Fedeler and I are subjected to intense gratuitous ridicule because we are condemned to Snake Eyes; and, indeed, a chill wet day on a half-sunk log is about all we can expect. So we plow westward, into the waves, and the wind is so strong it brings tears to the eyes. They mix with the rain and the spray of the river. The length of a mile varies. These are three-league miles. The current flows west, the wind and waves come east, and they more than cancel the force of the river. To stop paddling is to move backward. The waves are so big they wash over the bow of the Grumman. Light and bobbing in its ride down the Salmon, the canoe here is too much up in the wind. John Kauffmann and Stell Newman have to bend their paddles on every stroke. The single Klepper, with Pourchot in it, is better off, but not much. It is so light that he has to strain to drive it. Snake Eyes, however, is thirty per cent submerged in its own leakings, another third by the natural depth of its draft. Snake Eyes is in and of the river. The wind cannot get to Snake Eyes, because the wind can't swim. The waves that wash over us roll over the deck, asserting an upstream thrust of zero. Snake Eyes, property of the United
States government, is today straight out of Groton, Connecticut—a nuclear-powered submarine. Fedeler and I, the nuclei, begin to suffer in a way unimaginable before. We become chilly, and a little stiff, waiting for the others—idling at the river bends, scanning the gray river through its flying spray to see where the others might be. After six or eight miles, we are so cold we stop. We build a bonfire of drifted cottonwood, and stand downwind of it at the edge of the flames.
The wind gradually subsides through the afternoon, and the low gray sky begins to pull itself apart. The weather here is like the weather in Scotland. It can change so abruptly—closing in, lifting, closing in again—that all in an hour, let alone a day, wind-driven rain may be followed by calm and hazy sunshine, which may then be lost in heavy mists that soon disappear into open skies. We pass under a high bluff and go around a final bend; then the water spreads open before us in a three-mile reach to Kiana. The village is quite lovely from this perspective, lifted on its own high bluff above a confluence of rivers—the Squirrel and the Kobuk—and with a European compactness of buildings that contributes emphasis and irony to the immense wilderness in which it is a dot. We stop three miles away and camp on a flat gravel bar. The sky over supper is shot with color —with washes of salmon light on accumulating clouds. Their edges are gray to black, growing heavy. To the north, we hear thunder and see lightning. Such storms are rare in much of Alaska, but they are common here. This one rolls on into the Brooks Range and leaves us bright and dry. The talk over the campfire is entirely about Alaska. We are at the end of this trip now, and from the moment it began no one has once mentioned anything that did not have to do with Alaska.
 
 
 
In the morning—cool in the forties and the river calm—we strike the tents, pack the gear, and move on down toward
Kiana. Gradually, the village spreads out in perspective. Its most prominent structure is the sheet-metal high school on the edge of town. Dirt-and-gravel streets climb the hill above the bluff. Houses are low, frame. Some are made of logs. Behind the town, a navigational beacon flashes. Drawing closer, we can see caribou antlers over doorways—testimony of need and respect. There are basketball backboards. We are closing a circuit, a hundred water miles from the upper Salmon, where a helicopter took us, from Kiana, at the start. Under the bluff, we touch the shore. Kiana is now high above us, and mostly out of sight. The barge is here that brings up supplies from Kotzebue. The river's edge for the moment is all but unpopulated. Fish racks up and down the beach are covered with split drying salmon—ruddy and pink. We disassemble the Kleppers, removing their prefabricated bones, folding their skins, making them disappear into canvas bags. I go up the hill for a carton, and return to the beach. Into envelopes of cardboard I tape the tines of the caribou antler that I have carried from the mountains. Protecting the antler takes longer than the dismantling and packing of the kayaks, but there is enough time before the flight to Kotzebue at midday. In the sky, there has as yet been no sound of the airplane—a Twin Otter, of Wien Air Alaska, the plane that brought us here to meet the chopper. Stell Newman has gone up the beach and found some people at work around their fish racks. He now has with him a slab of dried salmon, and we share it like candy.

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