Travelers' Tales Alaska (27 page)

In the following days, Marc came to recognize his mortality, so alien a notion to a healthy young man. As for me, I had wanted the true wild, and almost had got it in spades. In the wilderness, a small mistake or a moment of blind, bad luck can have grave consequences, and there is neither anything nor anyone to rely on but yourself and your skills, your friends and their skills. Not that we came to look upon the wilderness as heartless or hostile. Nature and her creatures are neither cruel nor compassionate. They are complete unto themselves, and
therefore indifferent to human fate and emotions, to human ideas of right and wrong. Curiously, Marc's close call made us feel more a part of the world we had entered, because it humbled us. In the wilderness, where things die every day, we're merely creatures, subject to nature's laws and deserving of nothing. I knew I never would forget the look on Marc's face as he clung to the log, nor my own thought that I was going to lose him; yet, if the worst had happened, the rivers, forests, and mountains would not have acknowledged my grief and loss no more than they would the she-wolf's loss of a pup.

Thus endeth the lesson. We put the mishap behind us and went on.…

M.M.
235—
JUNE
29. We passed the northern limit of the tree line, marked by a short white spruce and a sign that said
LAST SPRUCE TREE—DO NOT CUT.
From there to the Arctic Ocean, 180 miles away, the tundra would be as barren as a desert. In fact, the coastal tundra, receiving an average of only eight inches of rain a year, would be a desert if not for the permafrost.

M.M.
240,
THE CHANDALAR SHELF—JUNE
30. A grizzly's tracks led across the tundra and down the bank of a nameless mountain stream that fed the Chandalar River. The tracks were old, but I was apprehensive. The night before I'd seen a couple of square yards of tundra mat gouged to a depth of three feet, excavated not by a psychotic backhoe operator but by a grizzly, probably pursuing some small, burrowing animal; you could almost feel its savage determination. The bears of southern Alaska, fattening in rivers thick with salmon, have so much to eat that they've grown selective and wasteful, just like humans. They often suck the roe out of female fish and toss the rest away. But on the Chandalar, nature's shelves are not
well-stocked; here, even the fiercest predator in North America has to settle for prey fit for a house cat, and work hard to get it.

Yes, I had come to be where the grizzlies roam in great numbers, but I did not want to run into one at close quarters. That led me to wonder if Marc and I should push into the thickets across the stream. The age of the tracks was no guarantee that their maker was not lurking about; and a bear so famished that it had exerted tremendous efforts to capture a tiny animal would probably
welcome
an intrusion by two well-fed human beings. If I had to subsist on crackers, wouldn't I welcome a porterhouse delivered to my door? I was petrified of the grizzlies.

Tony, a veteran of hundreds of bear encounters during his years guiding out of King Salmon, had a deep respect for the creatures, but they didn't terrify him. He told us it is mannerly, as well as prudent, to make noise if you think a grizzly might be near. Talk, sing, ring bells. Marc and I started chattering and bantering and thrashed through the alders like a troop of urban Boy Scouts on their first outing.

We passed through without any ursine confrontations and tramped on to a ridge, where we scanned the valley for caribou. The big migrations take place in the fall and spring, herds of 100,000 or more surging over distances of 1,000 miles. But in the summer, in flight from the tormenting mosquitoes and flies, smaller bands of, say, 100 or 200 move from the valleys and coastal tundra into the high ranges.

Late the day before, after passing the last spruce tree, we'd backpacked into the Chandalar hoping to spot a summer caribou trek. After hauling our forty-pound packs over the tussocks for three full hours we had seen a pair of shed antlers but no caribou. And we had covered just three miles. I felt as if I were walking on a waterbed with a sack of rocks on my
back. A thunderstorm, building up over the Brooks Range, had given us an excuse to pitch our tents on a desolate windswept meadow.

Marc and I scanned the valley below with binoculars. It was empty of game, as were the mountains on the far side, their slopes green at first, then black with scree, then white. The silence was dense and primeval, a silence that had never been sundered by the clatter of industrial or post-industrial civilization.

After the storm passed, Marc opened our tent door and said, “Look at this.” A rainbow, its colors so vibrant that it appeared solid, arched over the river. It must have been 1,000 feet across and 1,000 feet high, and we were looking down on it. No caribou, I thought, but this is enough. More than enough.…

M.M.
414,
DEADHORSE—JULY
3. This was it, the end of the road. We voted Deadhorse the strangest and ugliest town any of us had ever seen. Every structure, whether warehouse, office, or airplane hangar, looked the same, built of extruded steel or aluminum and set on pilings (to avoid melting permafrost and causing the buildings to collapse). There were no churches, schools, bars, banks, or shops—we did find one general store, where a box of Triscuits went for $5. Deadhorse exists solely to house and feed the 1,500 men and women who work in the oil fields.

Since we hadn't seen any caribou on the way up from Galbraith Lake, Tony chartered a bush plane in Deadhorse. “No guarantees on seeing caribou,” an insouciant flyboy named Rick told him. “Those animals were born under a wandering star.”

Marc, Jeannie, and I got an unofficial tour of the oil fields from twenty-year-old Teddy Westlake, who knew his ethnic
makeup down to the fraction: 13/16 Eskimo, the rest white. My friends in the eco corps would have drummed me out: I
liked
the oil fields. I liked seeing caribou trails and even bear tracks within sight of the wellheads; I liked seeing eiders, tundra swans, and red-throated loons nesting in thaw lakes below drilling rigs. Most of all, I liked being in a place where real people worked at real jobs.

The tour finished, Teddy drove us to the northern limit of North America. We got out of the truck and dipped our toes in the Arctic Ocean.

M.M.
188,
WISEMAN—JULY
4-8. Three miles off the Dalton down a gravel track, Wiseman is a helter-skelter collection of mud-chinked log cabins, sled dogs barking in kennels, rutted dirt lanes, and a general store. It was founded in 1907 as a supply depot for miners. Robert Marshall used it as a base for his explorations, and described it as a village “Two hundred miles away from the twentieth century.” The opening of the Dalton has brought it closer: In a few cabin yards, amid the huskies'
cages and oil drums and battered pickup trucks, satellite dishes point skyward, seeking the signals of
Oprah
and
Monday Night Football.

Eleven miles from Wiseman was the Silverado Mine. It would be our jumping-off point for a four-day hike into the Brooks Range and Gates of the Arctic. Despite its name, the Silverado is a gold mine, and it is a big outfit: thirty miners and Cat skinners whose huge bulldozers had removed half a hillside.

We backpacked into the bush, following a dogsled trail westward toward the Glacier River, ten miles away. About two miles in, we crossed into Gates of the Arctic. Around us, mountains soared, patched with dark-green spruce and the lighter greens of alder and willow swales. After five miles, we took a break beside a lake where a wigeon hen swam with her ducklings in tow.

“Howdy!”

The voice startled us. Up the trail came a man of about thirty, with a blond goatee. He wore a floppy hat, and an old Stevens side-by-side shotgun was in a scabbard strapped to his backpack. A gold pan shone from underneath the pack's top flap. Beside him trotted a mongrel carrying a saddlebag of dog food.

We invited him to join us for lunch. He declined food but sat down. His name was Doug, and he was a body-and-fender man from Homer, Alaska. He was camped near Wiseman, on the Koyukuk, where he was waiting for his partner to arrive from California.

“We got a little gold claim we work up at Wild Lake,” he explained, gesturing vaguely at 100,000 acres of wilderness. “Summer's my slow season, so I take some time off to work it. My partner's late, and I got restless, thought I'd wander for a bit.”

He noticed me eyeing the shotgun. “Only a twenty-gauge, but with rifle slugs, it'll penetrate a bear's skull.” He patted his cartridge belt. “Birdshot in case I run out of food. I wouldn't shoot one of those wigeons, unless I got real hungry.”

We chatted for a while, then Doug shouldered his pack, saying, “Be seeing you around.” Off he went with his dog, his gun, and his gold pan, as free as anyone can expect to be.

It was 10:30
P.M.
when we crested a 600-foot ridge, from which we looked down on the Glacier River, shimmering in the soft Arctic glow. We pitched camp on a bluff across the water from an abandoned cabin and built a crackling fire. There were wolf tracks in the river bank below, and the rocks in the riverbed were coral-hued and laid like the tiles in a terrazzo floor.

We explored the Glacier River Valley the following day. If we hadn't seen Doug, we would have thought ourselves the only people within fifty miles. He visited again, telling Marc that he had spotted a grizzly. Marc asked him what he liked most about Alaska. “The greatest thing,” he replied, “is that you only have to dig down a foot to keep your beer cold.”

For me, it was the country that went on and on, the absence of marked trails and fences, and the presence of bears and wolves. It was the bald eagle on the Jim River, the golden eagles soaring above the high, windy Atigun Pass, and the Dall sheep in the Atigun's meadows. It was the lone caribou bull whose rack rose like a king's crown as he trotted across the tundra while we were heading back south from Deadhorse. It was the beautiful yellow blossom that's called the tundra rose, and the fireweed that blazed on the mountainsides with a violet flame. It was nameless mountains and lakes.

And it was watching Marc hike out of the wilderness on his own. He had grown impatient with our plodding, middle-aged pace and declared he would push on ahead, out of Gates
of the Arctic. Still a bit shaken by the accident, I was reluctant. I thought about the grizzly Doug had seen, the fresh tracks we had spotted by a nearby creek, and the ten miles of Alaskan bush that lay ahead. But he was twenty-two. Robert Marshall had been in his twenties when he mapped the Brooks Range. Time to let go. Past time.

“Well, take off, then,” I said and watched him stride across a broad tundra valley, his figure growing smaller until it was gone.

Philip Caputo is a contributing editor for
National Geographic Adventure
magazine, and the author of numerous books, including
A Rumor of War, Horn of Africa,
and
Means of Escape.

MIKE STEERE