swallowed great land

AL A S K A /M E M O I R
$15 . 95 U. S .
“Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.”
—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal
A new collection of Alaska stories from
the bestselling author of Ordinary Wolves
Seth Kantner is a
commercial fisherman,
writer, and wildlife
photographer. Born and
raised in northern Alaska,
he was schooled at home
and on the land before
attending the University
of Alaska. His writings
and photographs have
appeared in Outside,
Alaska Geographic, the
New York Times, Prairie
Schooner, and elsewhere.
With his wife, Stacey, and
daughter, China, he lives
in northwest Alaska.
Visit his website at
www.sethkantner.com.
Now in his latest book, Swallowed by the Great
Land, more than fifty slice-of-life essays and
stories delve, with startling lyricism and insight,
into the duality in Kantner’s life today, and
explore his village and community on the remote
northwest coast of Alaska. From memories of
making snowshoes out of birch and caribou hides
alongside a wizened old-timer to the economic
development that brings more jobs but more
violence, and from watching his eight-year-old
correctly identify bear tracks to building trust
with a resilient hand-me-down dog, Kantner’s
stories reveal a complex mosaic of rich and varied
lives carved out on the ever-changing tundra.
“Kantner’s pull-no-punches, head-on
stories are raw, beautiful, and unnerving.”
—Orion
backcover tagline,
baseline of text is .25”
from bottom of book
swallowed by the great land
“Kantner is a natural storyteller . . .”
—Bloomsbury Review
KA N T N E R
When Seth Kantner’s debut novel, Ordinary
Wolves, was first published, Publishers Weekly
called it “a tour de force” and, for many readers,
it was a literary revelation. Kantner’s raw, earthy
voice introduced millions of readers to Arctic
Alaska, subsistence living, and a fresh perspective on the push-and-pull of modern society.
His memoir, Shopping for Porcupine, was still
more compelling—an intimate look at his Arctic
homestead upbringing.
s wa l l ow e d
by the
great land
A n d O t h e r D i s p a t c h e s f r o m A l a s k a ’ s F ro n t i e r
SETH KANTNER
Author of Ordinary Wolves
MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS
front cover, logo lines up
flush left at .25” from spine
baseline of text is .25’’ from
bottom of book
Mountaineers Books is the publishing division of
The Mountaineers, an organization founded in 1906
and dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and
enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.
1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98134
800.553.4453, www.mountaineersbooks.org
Copyright © 2015 by Seth Kantner
backcover, left align text to
All
rights
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
text
onreserved.
backcover
form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States
Distributed in the United Kingdom by Cordee, www.cordee.co.uk
18 17 16 15 54321
Copy editor: Sherri Schultz
Design and layout: Jen Grable
Cartographer: Bart Wright, Lohnes+Wright
All photographs by the author, except for those on pages 50 and 205, which are
courtesy of Stacey Glaser
Some essays or portions of essays included in this book were previously
published, in slightly different form, in the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch,
Orion magazine, the National Parks Conservation Association magazine, Ruralite,
the Arctic Sounder, Dutch Harbor Fisherman, and the Bristol Bay Times.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kantner, Seth, 1965Swallowed by the Great Land : and other dispatches from Alaska’s frontier /
Seth Kantner.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59485-968-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-59485-969-4 (ebook)
1. Self-reliant living—Alaska. 2. Sustainable living—Alaska. 3. Wilderness
survival—Alaska.
4. Alaska—Social life and customs. 5. Kantner, Seth, 1965- I. Title.
GF78.K36 2015
979.8'6—dc23
[B]
2015010791
Printed on recycled paper
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-59485-968-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-59485-969-4
WI LD LI FE
REF U GE
P RESERVE
contents
Introduction
11
I. Life Around the Igloo
Memories of a Handmade Man 16
Plenty of Beaver 23
Glassing for Caribou 25
Cups of Gold 29
Wolf Eyes 32
A Private Space Flight 35
One More Day in the World of Machines 39
Gathering42
Alien Visitor 45
II. Characters of the Arctic
Diomede Dichotomies 52
The Elevator Shaft 57
Slow Tales of Long Ago 61
Precarious Symbiosis 64
The Lucky Swede 67
Cliffs of Deceit 70
Fishing for Memories 72
The White-Guy Fence 75
Weather-Wise 79
Cold Fishing 81
Tribute to Belmore 83
An Old Friend Sails Home 87
Thirdhand Dog 90
III. Bringing Home the Bounty
The Food Web 96
Tinniks100
Always More Fish 105
Finding Caribou 109
Just Take Normal Precautions 111
Stinkweed114
Hometown Fishery 116
Paniqtuk 120
Gardening Tips 122
The Hum of the Land 128
The Magic Inside 134
I V. I c e a n d S n o w
Good Morning, Kotzebue 140
Fun with Frostbite 142
On Thin Ice 145
Spring Travel 149
Boiling Water 151
McCarthy 154
Checking the Ice 158
Shutting the Door 160
Twilight163
Nature Coming Soon 166
Snowy Owl Trap 170
Swallowed by the Great Land 173
V. S t o r m C l o u d s
Snow Travelers 180
Guns along the River 182
December Rain 186
Food of the Future 189
Howl192
E p i l o g u e
Arctic Homeboy 200
Acknowledgments
203
introduction
Here in the Northwest Arctic, over the years I’ve noticed that
Inupiaq friends and acquaintances—when introducing themselves—have
a way of starting with where they were born, their parents’ names, and how
they grew up. Without even noticing, I guess I absorbed that cultural way
of considering myself.
For me, now fifty years old, everything begins on a two-mile-long bluff
called Paungaqtaugruk, where I was born and raised in a sod igloo along
the Kobuk River. My parents, Howard and Erna Kantner, were not miners,
or teachers, or homesteaders. They were just people who admired the old
Inupiaq way of life.
In that life my brother and I were taught to skin animals, run dog
teams, and do subsistence activities. Caribou and wolves, bears and wolverines, and other animals were significantly more common than humans.
My family didn’t wake up mornings and disappear to daily jobs and
school—mostly we all stayed home on the hill, cutting wood, scraping
hides, drying fish, and hunting, which often meant waiting for food and
furs to come to us. The nearest village, Ambler, was twenty-five miles
11
i ntr od u cti on
away. Visitors (hunters and travelers) didn’t show for weeks on end, sometimes longer, and were a welcome sight on the land.
Nearly everyone we knew in Ambler and other villages hunted and
fished, picked berries, and hauled firewood. Depending on the season, people were busy gathering various necessities from the country. Outsiders
who over the years appeared from the south—commonly referred to as
“white people,” even if they happened to be black, Asian, or otherwise—
would shake hands and before long invariably ask: “What do you do?”
None of us were quite sure how to answer that strange question. In the
villages, and out on the tundra and along the river, most people didn’t have
“careers.” It made no sense why these Outsiders all carried that question
north.
“We just live,” is what folks replied. And shrugged, and glanced at
the sky to check the weather, and at the river to check if any animals were
crossing. “We just live.”
Just living is what these stories are about—life here, and some of
the characters living it, above the Arctic Circle and hundreds of miles from
the nearest road.
Locally, a seasonal-nomadic lifestyle has always made sense. Villagers
often boated to the coast in summer to escape mosquitoes and to fish. In
winter people roamed far and wide, trapping; in fall and spring, hunters
from the coast traveled upriver and inland to find caribou and waterfowl.
Around the time I turned nine, my family started fishing for salmon
in Kotzebue Sound. It meant a 150-mile boat trip, down the Kobuk and
across the bay, to camp at Nuvurak near other fishermen from villages
around the region. It was there we first met Bob and Carrie Uhl, wise elders
and friends who appear and reappear in my writings.
I’ve continued to commercial fish, forty years and more now. When
I turned thirty and was married, my wife got a real job in Kotzebue. At
that point I hired on with the Garden Project, doing seasonal work assisting gardeners along the Kobuk and up the coast to Kivalina and down
to Deering. Winters I roam the hills and sea ice surrounding Kotzebue,
and travel upriver to our old igloo—always gathering, although now my
harvest includes photographs and stories in addition to meat and berries,
furs and firewood. I spend spring and fall at home on that bluff called
Paungaqtaugruk. There my wife and daughter, Stacey and China, often
12
i ntr od u cti on
accompany me. Other times I am alone, though our dog, Worf, sometimes
came with me before he passed on.
My ties to the land remain of utmost importance to my identity, as is
the case for many people in this region. Over the years, my family’s strongest ties to the village have been via the Williams family—Don and Mary,
who repeatedly turn up in my stories. They have been a second family to
me and mine, as have their kids, Alvin, Cindy, and Jennifer. Andrew Greene
later married Jennifer and became my fishing partner and close friend. He
appears and reappears in these pages, too.
No account of local characters along this river and out on the tundra, in
my stretch of years, could be complete without one name: Clarence Wood.
Here where hunters vie for status, he towers above the rest. Growing up on
that windblown bluff, when my brother and I heard our dogs barking the
warning that meant visitors, or heard the distant drone of a snowmobile,
our first guess was Clarence. He spent countless nights at our small home,
paid countless visits, drank countless cups of coffee sitting on our bearskin
couch. His humor, his knowledge of the wild, his way of telling tales, his
legendary toughness out on the land—all beg for many more words than
I’ve put down here.
This collection of words, these dispatches from the Arctic, span six
or seven years and are mostly in chronological order but sometimes move
back and forth in time. I was raised in a life of making things to survive,
not buying material goods, and have always made my kayaks, woodstoves,
boats, sleds, and the like. To this day I feel the need to create. Writing, for
me, creates a way to unravel the dichotomies between the candlelit memories of our first sod igloo and the glowing screen of today. Writing is my
way to possibly illuminate a trail or two through the blizzard of change that
has swept north. I hope these stories shine a light on this amazing place, the
people and animals and land of my home, the Arctic.
13
I.
life
a r o u n d
the igloo
M e mo r i e s of a
Han d m ad e Man
Snowflakes were falling, coming down on already deep
drifts outside our windows: winter, and a gray world out there stretching
to dark horizons. I don’t recall how Oliver Cameron arrived at the buried
sod igloo where I grew up, but I picture him coming on snowshoes, plodding, dragging one of his home-fashioned narrow-runner sleds, the line of
runner tracks already buried by the time he pulled his parka off beside our
stove.
Snowshoe travel makes sense, certainly, and it was handmade snowshoes that he spent weeks that winter building for my mom and brother in
our small house during his visit.
For the first few days, he filed at my dad’s ripsaw with a triangle file.
He worked each metal tooth until he was satisfied with how he’d modified
it, making it bigger and sharper, and adjusting the set to the teeth. Oliver
always enjoyed filing and whittling tools and handles down until he liked
them better than before.
He was a tall, thin man who wore heavy drab patched clothes, wool
pants and a wool shirt, always buttoned at the sleeves. He had broad square
shoulders. His wrists and throat were pale, his fingers long and rough from
making everything by hand. He had big ears and broad lips, and if you
paid attention you noticed his hands shook a little, something we hadn’t
seen during past visits. The look in his eyes, and the little cap he wore,
too, recalled photographs from the 1930s of thin hungry men who lived
through the Great Depression.
16
me mor i e s of a ha nd m ade man
Of course, we didn’t know much of that back then. To my brother,
Kole, and me, Oliver was an encyclopedia of intriguing projects. We were
aware, too, of his stature along the river in the extended family of our parents and their friends: he was the man, more often than not, those back-tothe-landers turned to for expertise. He was perpetually helpful, mysterious,
and strange, always serious, polite, and impossibly ancient—nearly fifty
years old.
After the ripsaw was fashioned to his satisfaction, he set up sawhorses
across the floor of our little home. Slowly and meticulously, he sawed strips
of birch wood. He wasn’t in a hurry. The snow was deep, all of us deep in
winter. No one we knew was in a hurry. Time, and tundra, we had in
unlimited supply. Oliver sighted down each strip of birch, then leaned it in
the corner against the post there and began ripping another.
When he was done sawing all the strips he needed, he worked them
down with a spokeshave and hand plane. He showed us how to hold the
plane at an angle to make it cut easier. He seemed to like making things
smaller and smoother.
I don’t remember the pale sawdust and plane shavings quite as sharply
as something else in our possession back then—a store-bought item, and
therefore significantly more interesting to us kids raised on the tundra than
anything made from materials as natural as a birch tree and caribou leather.
The item was a bag of Nestlé chocolate chips, still unopened, brilliant
yellow, smooth, small, and solid. You could feel the chocolate chips inside
when you held the bag. It was only sixteen ounces, I think, or maybe twenty.
On the back, printed in tiny, perfect chocolate-colored writing, was a recipe.
Kole and I asked my mom if we might be allowed to bake those cookies it described. We weren’t sure it would be okay, with Oliver staying the
month. Mom had told us that Oliver had a problem with sweets—he
couldn’t resist them, but had health problems somehow connected to sugar.
But chocolate chip cookies were so alluring. And there was something even
more, something about that recipe: it claimed to make eighty cookies! Was
that even possible? Kole and I were determined to find out.
My family had a plywood table at that time. It was two feet wide and
five feet long, with the corners cut off. The grain ran crossways the narrow
way, and you weren’t supposed to lean on the ends. They overhung the leg
framework and were unsupported, and downward pressure would crack
them. We didn’t have any more plywood, and it seemed very important that
17
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
our table didn’t break; we warned visitors and strangers about this danger
promptly when they sat down. “Careful! Don’t lean on that part.”
We asked Oliver if it would be okay to make cookies. He nodded and
smiled politely, more comfortable with the idea than we had expected. Still,
we were a little worried about what might happen.
That evening my mom cleared the table and wiped it clean with a dishrag. As we pulled each tray of hot cookies out of the cookstove, my brother
and I spread them in rows on the table. The air hung thick with their warm
chocolaty smell. We didn’t eat a single one. We waited for the last tray. We
wanted to count them all. It seemed important to try to make eighty, as the
bag promised. My brother and I always had a need to verify numbers and
facts, to prove or disprove claims the big world out there had the habit of
sending our way. In the end, there were only forty-eight, and we wondered
how we might have made each one smaller.
Oliver put down the red-handled spokeshave. He sat on a sawhorse
with one leg crossed over the other, hunched forward, his wrists crossed
on his thigh, thoughtfully contemplating the rows of cookies. He wasn’t
fiddling with birch boards now, nor filing tools into more agreeable tools.
All he was doing was looking over all those cookies.
I remember watching him, a little meanly, I think—really, what we’d
done was no different than baiting a trap—and suddenly feeling bad. I
don’t remember what Oliver’s sugar problems were, just my feeling that
we probably should have waited until he left to bake those cookies. But
people often stayed for weeks back then, with no end to the visit in sight.
And that yellow bag of chocolate was magic waiting to be unwrapped.
At the same time, though, there were no other adults like Oliver, and
we wanted him to stay as long as possible. Back then kids out in cabins
and igloos, far away from neighbors and other children, counted on people
like Oliver to show them amazing things like how to temper steel, and to
clamp interesting things in the vise to carve and file out of chunks of root
and bits of metal.
And I guess men like Oliver, who lived hard coarse wilderness lives,
counted on families for comforts such as warm cookies. I don’t remember whether he was sick and low for a few days, the way he sometimes
got. I know he ate the chocolate chip cookies, and eventually steamed and
bent the strips of birch, and formed two pairs of snowshoes, one for my
mom and a smaller pair for my brother. (I got my brother’s old pair.) Oliver
18
me mor i e s of a ha nd m ade man
soaked caribou hides in the corner in a washtub to slip the hair and made a
tiny knife to cut the skin into perfect thin strips of babiche, which he then
wet until soft and rubbery, to lace the snowshoes tight. Afterward, he let
the babiche dry, and in drying, it drew up even tighter.
Now, forty years later, I still have the larger pair. I’ve hunted miles
and miles on them. Now I wish I’d paid attention to how he did all of it—
eyeing the grain of the wood, and making the babiche, and that intricate
pattern of lacing. But of course I was only six or seven, and enamored, too,
by things like that printed promise of an inconceivable quantity of cookies.
Two very different childhood events.
I do remember during that month, Oliver showed Kole and me how
to make crooked knives—for carving wooden spoons out of spruce roots—
and how to anneal used files in the stove, to soften the metal and then file
it into sheath knives. And then how to quench the steel, and how to boil
chunks of caribou antler in a pot of water until they were soft enough to
pound onto the tangs of our knives, for handles. And finally, to soak ugruk
(bearded seal) hide to form it into sheaths for our knives.
It was a bold and worldly feeling, to climb into your pants in the morning and walk around as a six-year-old with a knife on your belt, one that
you’d made yourself, just yesterday, with Oliver, of course.
Oliver might have stayed until spring. Or possibly it was another
spring when he camped up by Amoktok Slough, along the bluff, up in the
big spruce trees. He walked to our house almost every day the spring he
camped there. He was our only company and worked with my dad, showing him how to build a kayak, then skin it with canvas and paint the canvas
with something reddish to keep it from leaking. When the ice went out,
he went back upriver. In a second kayak, I think, that he built at his tent.
Maybe from his tent!
A few evenings ago I walked up Amoktok. I was hungry, needing
meat, searching for a porcupine or spruce hen to put in the Dutch oven.
Oliver’s old spruce poles still lean up against a big tree in those woods. If
they didn’t, I probably couldn’t find his camping spot all these years later.
The brush is thick and lush now, growing so tall with our new warmer
seasons, and so many years have carried my mind to so many places, I can’t
instantly remember which tree towers over his old campsite. Only those
leaning poles tell me the spot.
19
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
Across the river, too, along a cranberry ridge, are the gray timbers of
another one of Oliver’s spring camps, from later years, my teenage years.
The moss and cranberry plants grow happily up the sides of abandoned
poles, planed boards, and sections of firewood. Upriver, I know, are igloos he
built, and helped build, and lives he touched, kids and adults from Kobuk to
the coast who remember him.
Now I know Oliver really did live through the Great Depression and
World War II, where he was a radioman in a B-24, before we ever knew
him. As with memories that are so far back and so strange they feel no
longer your own, it seems almost inconceivable that the kind, gentle man
we followed faithfully to the workbench had been a soldier in that war. Like
the heroes we read about in books, Oliver was shot down over Yugoslavia,
crash-landed and survived, half-starved and hidden by Partisans, and
walked nearly four hundred miles behind enemy lines to escape.
Later he married and moved to Kotzebue, and then to the north shore
of Kobuk Lake. From there he moved up the Kobuk River to Shungnak
in 1958, and later to Ambler, where he built his own sod igloo east of the
village.
As is often the case with little kids, my brother and I didn’t know this
man’s history; we didn’t know where his family had gone, only that the
knives and tools and snowshoes, and that kayak, too, were enchanted creations fashioned from wood and skin and cloth and rusty metal—boring
things brought to life.
One spring evening after the ice had gone, Oliver showed us something new. To me it will always be the epitome of his teachings. For weeks
he had told us we had to wait until breakup—when the snow melts and the
river ice cracks, rises, and flows downstream—and the ground was exposed
and sap was running under the bark enough for him to show us.
He fashioned a short section of willow into a stubby flutelike whistle,
scored the bark in a circle, tapped it all around with his knife handle, and
then, with his ears sticking out, wrapped his broad lips around the willow
to wet it and further loosen the bark. “Spittle,” he explained. It was a new
word for us, and of course it rhymed with Oliver’s other favorite word:
whittle. The way he did it was a little unnerving, and I remember paying
attention but looking away, too, from that glistening saliva.
Regardless, the willow whistles he showed us how to make were marvels, amazing and valuable toys that fit into your pocket. Walking the game
20
me mor i e s of a ha nd m ade man
trails barefoot, you could pull your whistle out and blow notes whenever
you felt the desire. To this day, I can’t make them work the way he did, or
even at all. Somewhere along the years, I forgot some important notch with
the knife, or the shape of the flat hollow area under the bark, or something.
Down the hill, below the cache Oliver helped my dad build—now
nearly gone—a small clump of willows grows straight and true. We found
them when Oliver sent us out to find the straightest willows around. After
being flattened by breakups, they still come back perfect. Even tonight,
those willows are out there, tall. I could run down with a flashlight and cut
one right now.
When the sap runs in the spring, occasionally I do wander down with
a saw to cut a short section. I feel bad cutting one of those willows, straight
as bamboo, knowing I won’t succeed. I try to resurrect a perfect whistle. But
it never comes out right. It never whistles; it won’t make a sound, and I wait
several more years before I try again.
Thinking about that lets loose a string of memories, and tonight in
the dark, by flashlight, I hurry over to our old workbench and dig in the
drawer. Under new screwdrivers with red plastic handles, and gray hacksaw
blades and files, sure enough, there amid sawdust and stray pencils are old
handmade tools.
A tear comes to my eye when I pull out a tiny antler-handled saw.
My saw! How could I have forgotten my saw? Oliver helped me make it.
I loved that little saw like a friend for so many years. I used it a thousand
times to cut caribou antlers and willows, spruce roots, and forked limbs for
slingshot handles. Next I pull out a crooked knife, and after more rummaging I find an awl. Kole and I loved making awls with Oliver. They were so
sharp, and useful for drilling holes in moose hide, and leather, and wood.
Finally, I find a tool I’d long forgotten but somehow knew was in the
drawer. A flat spruce handle, a foot long, and half an inch by an inch and a
half: the folding saw Oliver made with us almost half a century ago. When
I lift it, out drop its two hand-filed blades and the stub of a third, snapped
off at some point. Peened nails rivet the ends of the wooden handle tight.
A bolt with a hand-filed nut acts as a pivot for the two crosscut blades. In
green and red marker are faint faded words: kole & seth.
Wind blows outside, and in the darkness a gust of raindrops pelts the
roof. Under the small circle of light, I remember more. Oliver walking with
me out on the tundra, behind my dad’s cache. He’s tall, with long legs in
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swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
wool pants and worn leather boots. Peering at small trees, he’s searching
for the perfect spruce. It must be thin and narrow, and a black spruce—
whatever that means. I don’t know that spruce can be black or white, only
that Oliver is helping me make a bow. And of course that means arrows,
too, with tips and beautiful split duck-wing feathers, and each arrow pierces
another memory, of that quiet, earnest, eminently resourceful man we all
knew as Oliver, up and down this river, along the shores of my childhood.
22
P l e n t y of
B e aver
My daughter, China, and I are skimming past sweepers, boating up the Hunt River. Snow cliffs line the north bank, and ice sheets drape
the rock bar along the other shore. We’re heading up a tributary that flows
out of the mountains to the north.
Breakup swept through here just a few days ago, and now rafts of ice
tower in contorted mounds. Pintails and wigeons paddle into the current
and lift off, and a kingfisher swoops and dives ahead of us.
After seven months or more of ice, we’re traveling on water. The sun
shines off windy blue and white ice. Up on the bank, peering out of the
alders, a cow moose on a snowdrift eyes us, wondering if harm comes along
with the sound of this engine. She doesn’t wish to run, having positioned
herself in a curve in the river to give birth to a calf and defend it against the
hungry brown bears.
Two Canada geese lift off a sandy island point, doing the same thing as
the moose, no doubt. Over the drone of my twenty-horsepower outboard,
sparrow songs pierce the air. Spring is here; we and all these creatures have
made it through another winter, although some of these birds wisely went
south for the duration.
In the mud and willows along the shores, at waterline, the golden glint
of peeled saplings catches our eyes. Up higher, poplars lean off stumps, as
if an army of woodchoppers has moved up this valley. Everywhere is the
sign of beaver.
23
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
In my lifetime there have always been beaver. Plenty of lodges, plenty
of dams. Now the population seems to be exploding. Something is different. A few years ago I started noticing more beaver setting up homes
along riverbanks. Some of my friends in the Eskimo villages—hunters—
commented on the same thing.
I remember beaver living in lakes, one family with one lodge and one
or more dams keeping the water at a level deep enough to not freeze out in
midwinter. In late summer and into fall, the beaver families gathered food
piles in front of their doors. Come spring they kicked their teenagers out
to face the daunting task of swimming out to the main river, surviving boat
hunters, finding an unclaimed homesite, meeting a girlfriend or boyfriend,
and building a home and a new food pile, all before the next freezeup, when
the lakes and sloughs and river freeze over and become impassable.
Most of that lifestyle hasn’t changed. Lately, though, beaver are simply
building along the banks of rivers, right out in the open, accessible to hunters and sometimes even in sight of their beaver neighbors.
Now a brown head crosses the current in front of our boat. Far downstream, one of his cousins whacks his tail on the water; we don’t see the
animal, just the plume in the distance, like a .30-06 bullet hitting water.
Since I noticed this new beaver behavior, I’ve also noticed that lateseason rains have raised the current in the rivers and washed away countless hard-stacked food piles—something that doesn’t happen when a lake
floods. And I’ve wondered, how does a family make it through the winter
when the last thing to happen before winter is the loss of all its food?
Somehow, though, many of them do; there are a lot of beaver, an amazing number of them. Normally I’d say they are doing great. But . . . today,
here, alone in the beautiful wilderness with just my camera and dog and
daughter and a sunny day stretching away forever, I think of overpopulated
cities elsewhere on this same planet, of Myanmar and Sichuan Province,
and I wonder: Are all these beaver really doing well, or are there just a lot
more of them?
24
G l a ss i ng
fo r Carib ou
Along the river just before midnight, the north breeze falls
away and the sun drops low enough in the north to spread golden light
across the tundra.
The smell of melting-out soil and last autumn’s leaves, cottonwood
buds, and pussy willow pollen is almost honey-sweet in the air. The night
is calm and still, and at the same time ringing with song, a million avian
tourists having just arrived—sparrows and thrushes and warblers, all busy
and excited and singing about it. Robins announce some shrill irritation,
terns and gulls cry and wheel over the river ice, Canada geese honk in
the distance, and the invisible and relentless warbling wings of kuukukiaq
(snipes) remind everyone of their territories.
I grab my binoculars, skirt the woodpile, and scramble up our old
wooden tower. I’m looking for caribou—and everything else, too. I’ve been
up here a dozen times today already to look out over the land and see what
breakup is up to.
I climb fast even though some of the steps are loose, the spruce crosspieces rotten. It’s lucky I’m light because the whole tower is gray, weathered, and rickety. My brother peeled the poles and built it more than
thirty years ago.
The steps peter out. Below, the world is a huge fling of white and blue
river, tundra, mountains, and sky. Most of the treetops are under me now,
and I grip the platform and clamber up onto the last section, the old steel
tower from the Sioux City Wincharger my parents bought in 1976. At the
25
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
very top, I brace my binocs under the tail and swing it around to start from
upriver, as far as I can see around the shoulder of this bluff, toward the land
south of Onion Portage to the low distant blue mountains.
Below me the current carries ice pans down this side of the Kobuk
and the far side, too. The center ice is still a wide white highway, stretching upriver as far as I can see to the island opposite Ole Wik’s old igloo,
then down to the west, past the Hunt River and Clarence Wood’s lonely
wind-shredded cabin perched on the tundra bank.
Wigeons and pintails paddle in the flooded willows, whistling and
quacking, scooping up floating seeds. Across the river, spruce line the shore,
glowing pale green the way they do this time of year in the night sun.
Snowdrifts below the timber are bright white, and a cow moose stands
there, munching willows from the platform of the packed drift, stopping
occasionally to stare at ice pans gliding past.
Incrementally, I swing south to glass the huge brown tundra stretching
to the Waring Mountains. There, finally, are the scattered dots of caribou,
marbles glowing in the evening light. It’s great to see them. What took so
long, guys?
For months the traveling has been firm and solid, lots of windblown
tundra. Now the ice is breaking up and the shoreline and sloughs are a
maze of flooded willows and alders, the waterways treacherous crossings.
And the cows are pregnant, just hours away from having their calves.
It was an icy spring, with temperatures near zero into mid-May.
Meltwater refroze, and wind and snow blotted out tundra that had already
gone brown. I spent time up here on the tower, clinging on in the wind,
peering at gray sky shrouding gray land. On my snowgo I was lucky to find
caribou, a few weeks ago, back toward the Jade Mountains. We needed
meat, though I had wanted the normal fare for this season, fresh goose. I
haven’t seen caribou since. I’ve been watching daily, lonely for them.
I sweep my binocs down and bump into the huge dark lump at the top
of a tall spruce directly across the river—a growth that my wife and daughter have named the Aapakiilik tree, for my Eskimo name. There along the
riverbank, three swans take off directly toward me, wings thumping the
water. They’ve got some marital issues to sort out, and they’ve been squabbling and beating their wings all afternoon.
Farther south, something catches my eye behind a row of spruce,
beyond Horseshoe Lake. Finally, I get a better glimpse—gray cranes fly26
gl a ssi ng for ca r i bou
ing low. And beneath the cranes, caribou fill the binoculars, a small herd
grazing. On a ridge a distant dark shape looks unfamiliar. I breathe, and
watch. It’s miles away, but I hold still and wait. Finally, the shape elongates.
The color shifts to black and then almost white. For a moment it’s clearly a
grizzly bear, and just as quickly it turns, again a nondescript dot on the land.
Along the base of the Warings, the Kobuk Sand Dunes form a long
sandy line. Closer, on the tundra, a string of caribou stretches in this direction. I get excited and try to remember what lens I left on my camera.
I slide my binocs down the snow along the riverbank, past a fake
moose—a big black stump that’s fooled me before. Above the willow island
a small group of caribou stands on an ice pan, surrounded by water, indecisive and awaiting leadership. Small gulls circle and perch beside them.
Beyond the Hunt River, clumps of alders dot the tundra. Snowdrifts
are white squiggles, almost too distant to distinguish. I imagine movement,
and then there it is—a half dozen caribou moving toward the mountains.
The duck pond is flooding, floating the ice, and through willow thickets I see the Nuna River running ice, flooding pans over the bank. A marsh
hawk patrols a grassy swamp. Poor guy, I think—no mice this spring, not
even in our sod igloo, where they always make camp. Last summer and fall
were too rainy, too much flooding, tough for mice.
Where two ponds meet, in the reeds and grasses, goose necks are visible. I hear their distant hollering—fighting and mating, I guess. On the
north side of the biggest lake, the ice runs to the snowdrift, and I see two
black dots on the snow in front of a half-buried black lodge: Mr. Beaver
has been out in the sun for the last few days, and I’m glad to see he’s finally
brought his wife out, too. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
I can’t help wondering: As much as I love spring, maybe it’s nothing
compared to how a beaver feels when he pokes his head out into the air
and sun after being stuck in the lodge all winter, in the dark and under
ice. Maybe my exhilaration is little compared to how a moose feels after
all the terror and hardships of winter. And the bears in their dens. And all
these songbirds, sandpipers, and Arctic terns, so happy to arrive from all
the places they’ve been—the States, Antarctica, open ocean, and wherever
else they’ve traveled.
I don’t want to climb down yet. I start again, glassing the whole world
in the opposite direction. If my friend Alvin Williams were here, he’d stay
up even longer than me, inhaling the land through his eyes. We grew up
27
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
together, staring at this land, searching it, wandering across it in the bright
nights, hunting and hunting and hunting, and we both know this addiction.
There—already in the river, swimming this way, backs bleached white
as ice—is a herd of caribou. The lead cow struggles in loose ice, trying to
climb out on the main ice sheet. Behind her, the herd is like a rope beginning to swing sideways in the current. The pale knobs of warbles, a parasitic
fly that burrows under the skin, show in their hair, and the black of the bulls’
new velvet antlers is visible in the distance.
I sprint down the tower, not stopping to glance below my boots or
around the woodpile to see if a bear has wandered close, as they sometimes
do, while I was up in the air. I want to get my camera and tripod before the
caribou splash into the willows and begin climbing this bluff.
As I swing onto the ground, behind me there’s a roar and shuddering
of the air. For an instant a spruce grouse startles the heck out of me. It
settles in a tree, alert and alarmed too. I smile at it, then glance around the
brush quickly. I don’t mind my heart beating faster. It’s part of spring, and
I run to meet the caribou.
28
C u p s o f G old
“There’s been a brown bear at the sauna. And a male black bear,
Dad,” China tells me.
I just smile, don’t judge her eight-year-old abilities. “Get another armload of wood, ” I suggest.
It’s finally breakup, she’s finally done X-ing days off her calendar till
school’s out, and we’re finally home, prying the boards off the door at
Kapakavik.
Ice pans still dot the river. The air temperature is seventy, but inside
the igloo it remains cold, insulated the way it’s supposed to be, only ten or
twelve degrees above freezing. We warm up outside under singing birds,
sunshine, and stray mosquitoes, then go back in and build a fire, sweep up
mouse turds, and fill the kettles to make hot water.
“Want me to read you Huck Finn?” China drags volume one of
the Mark Twain collection over by the crackling barrel stove. She sits
on a stump; I sit in my dad’s old black rocking chair, salvaged from the
Fairbanks flood of 1967, and crank the coffee grinder. She reads aloud:
about the Widow Douglas and Tom, and Pappy selling the new judge a
line about going clean but, by and by, in the night developing a powerful
thirst and slipping out for a jug of forty-rod. My mind is thinking coffee,
and also that it doesn’t sound like a whole lot has changed in the last 150
years.
The water in the kettles heats. I keep jumping up to watch for caribou
crossing. Outside sunshine is everywhere, and down below, the big river
rolls by. No boats are passing: the nearby town of Ambler is out of gas
again, and when some does come in, it will be expensive.
29
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
After coffee there’s lots to do, but no hurry. We have to boat up to the
village in a couple days to meet the Hageland Aviation plane and pick up
my wife, Stacey, but right now we’ve forgotten clocks and such.
We bolt the tail on the wind generator. Geese call from the ponds, and
three cranes fly over. China and I unload boxes out of the boat, carry them
over ice pans heaped on top of crushed willows, and haul them up the hill.
We bring buckets down to chop needle ice for water. A porcupine is down
there, working on fresh greens. He is huge, an elder, with orange teeth and
big round nose holes. Nothing cute about him. We name him Uncle Prick,
and all three of us return to our work.
The buckets are almost full. I glance up the river: here comes a stray
ice pan drifting past and, behind it, a dozen caribou striking for the shore.
They climb out a few yards below us and shake off, dark soft velvet horns
and bleached-out flanks.
We carry the buckets up and spot fifteen more caribou crossing below
the cache. I hurry inside and rustle around for ammo. China starts another
story, which I only half hear, as I am intent on finding at least one more
.270 cartridge.
In the story, King Solomon has a tailor begging him for his daughter’s
hand, and this tailor gives him a cup, which every morning keeps filling
with gold. Apparently the king likes that and allows the tailor to marry his
daughter.
My thoughts of the caribou and China’s tale stir together like soup.
These caribou, they show up every spring, every year of my life, climb into a
cold river, and swim straight for the house—or straight for the clothesline,
or the outhouse, or the hill here at least.
I feed the fire, my brain back on the self-filling cup of gold. I shove
in rounds of spruce that my friend Jim Sterling and I cut here last month,
gray and pitchy and light, killed by porcupine. There’s so much deadwood
around; I can’t begin to keep up with the wood killed by age, beaver, or porcupine. Uncle Prick and his people like south-facing draws—and why not
pick a wind-sheltered, sunny draw to live and work in? I wonder what kind
of place King Solomon lived in. Me, I would have lived right here.
I lean the .270 rifle against the front of the qanisak, the entryway. On
a log, China and I cut up my old siphon hose, and on the hill we tap half a
dozen birch trees for sap. Excited, she checks the pots every ten minutes at
first, carrying cups of sap inside. I put a pan on the stove to evaporate the
30
cu p s of gol d
sap, to show her how syrup is made. When I’m at Kapakavik alone with
China, I always think, “Oh boy, I’ll teach her so much.” Maybe. Sometimes
I wonder if it’s more the other way around.
The river grows calmer. Birds are coming out even more now, calling across the distances. Nighttime is happening time in the spring in the
Arctic. We strap on a pistol and binoculars and follow the trail up the ridge.
As we come out on the tundra, the Jade Mountains glow in the distance.
A white-crowned sparrow is singing in the top of a young spruce. The
spruce has been thrashed by something. Shreds of green limbs lie on the
trail. I point to the tree, a question in my gesture. “Moose,” China says.
I smile sideways at her self-assurance. “Let’s check.”
We bend close. She peers at the limb stobs, a few feet off the ground.
“No. Grizzly bear. A female.” Behind her, I smile really big. She pinches a
single hair she’s found. It is wiggly. And pale blond.
My glance strays to the damp black caribou path where we are standing and slowly focuses, among the caribou hoofprints, on the faint pad
mark of a bear cub. This time I let China see my smile. “Good job!”
The sun is to the north, scallops of snow in the mountains. The hollows
in the tundra and the trees and the last snowdrifts beside our feet are refilling with evening light like cups of gold.
31
Wo l f Eyes
The land is greening up. Out on the country, everything is busy
making leaves and berries and babies. I’ve seen wolves this spring, and
there’s one out there along the river in the mosquitoes that I keep thinking
about, wondering how he’s doing.
Here at my old igloo, the bugs started getting bad early. We got out
mosquito bed-nets to sleep under. After the river ice went out, we boated
up to Ambler. Kituq Williams, my friend Alvin’s ten-year-old son, returned
with us. That first evening, after midnight, after the sun finally slid behind a
peak for an hour or so—after we made ice cream and got a caribou because
we were out of meat—we strung up netting for him, too. The kids were
happy about their personal screen tents and looked like a little prince and
princess sleeping under them.
China crawled out early, at noon, and opened a box of Rice Krispies
that Stacey had bought for her at the Native Store. Inside was a surprise,
a red plastic step counter, Mickey Mouse big-eared and grinning on the
front. She dropped her spoon and ran out barefoot to the food cache, dug
in the second box and, sure enough, found a blue one to give to Kituq when
he woke up.
It was a hot sunny day with lots to do, but no real time when it needed
to be done. The kids played, checking sap buckets, climbing trees, and circling porcupine on the hill. I was surprised how many steps they took in
an hour—thousands. (Shucks, I’m probably worse.) They kept bumping the
reset to zero, so I taped pistachio shells over the buttons.
They were already back up over two thousand when we spotted caribou
crossing. The animals came ashore above our little boat and hit our trail.
They appreciated the easy walking and marched up under the windows,
32
w ol f e ye s
then split into two groups and flowed by on both sides of the house. The
dog and kids ran after them—the dog using his legs lots, too, but minus a
step counter.
Afterward we walked over to the pond to try to sneak on geese. We
took the wrong trail, a caribou trail, and somewhere, China lost her step
counter.
We got home all sweaty and hot and bug-bitten, but carried on with
our original plan, to pack a picnic and motor up the Nuna River. Before
we left, I spotted more caribou downriver and a black bear on the willow
island.
Up the Nuna, we climbed out on a huge dripping snowdrift. The sky
was brilliant blue, the tundra turning green. We continued on. In a sideslough a brown bear rose up just yards beside us and disappeared into a
thicket. In the brush was a drowned moose the bear had recently discovered, and we were glad he had jumped away instead of into our tiny boat.
A few bends farther, we stopped on a rock bar and built a fire. It was
hot—seventy or so—and ice still along the eddies. The kids jumped into the
freezing water and seemed to bounce right back out. “Come on, try it!” they
shouted. “It’s warm!” I waded up to my knees, shivering and grinning at the
ice floating just beyond them. “Yeah,” I said. “I see that.”
Afternoon stretched into evening, still bright and relentless sun, and
we headed downstream, drifting occasionally, surprising beaver that leaped
off the bank as we passed and moose that faded into willows. Near a beaver
lodge we found a level bench packed with baby spruce like a Christmas
tree farm, then more beaver, one big dry one letting us float a few feet away
from it while it stayed on the cutbank.
The kids were having a great time. It was still warm, though I’d finally
put a shirt on. No one wanted to get home, though of course China still
expected me to find her step counter that night, somewhere on the tundra.
On the main river, to lengthen the journey by a few hundred yards, I
cut behind the willow island and motored up the south shore, staying out
of the current, heading for home. In the mounds of dirt, something began
running right beside us. I thought it was a bear, but no, it was a black wolf!
We passed him immediately—unusual for a slow boat against a running
wolf. It all happened fast; just twenty feet away, we saw that something was
terribly wrong with his left front leg. It was flopping, and then he turned
and stared at us.
33
swa l l ow e d b y the gr e at lan d
I don’t know if I’ll forget that wolf ’s gaze. He was big, dark, and rangy,
with a long powerful face and piercing pale eyes. In his eyes was the most
haggard look. That’s the part that cooked into my memory.
He turned into the willows, then came back out and ran on three
legs the other way. I howled. He stopped, looked at us—silent now, in the
boat—and ran again.
When we got home China was still worried about her step counter. It
was 9 p.m., still warm and sunny. I was tired but didn’t take off my hot hip
boots, just slung the shotgun over my shoulder; Kituq, China, and I started
across the tundra for the pond. In the tussocks we walked slow, searching.
I was sweaty and sun-cooked. After a hot day of hiding in the shade, the
mosquitoes were coming back out, hungry. Kituq moved off ahead. Where
the caribou trail hit the shore, he found the red plastic toy. He read the
digits. “Almost five thousand,” he said.
“That was just this morning,” I marveled. “Long day for you kids after
that.”
I was thinking about the longer days ahead for that wolf. Surely he
was aware of each step, with that mangled foreleg. No store-bought step
counter for him. I thought about hospitals and health care, and his world,
where he didn’t have any of that.
Recently, a few boats had passed; maybe someone had shot at him.
A bear might have bitten his wrist. Moose were having babies—he might
have gotten stomped by a mom protecting her young. Wolves live tough
lives. They kill things and get killed.
It was the look on his face that I’m left with. He knew things had
changed; he knew he was big and tough, capable and ruined.
34
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AL A S K A /M E M O I R
$15 . 95 U. S .
“Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.”
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A new collection of Alaska stories from
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Seth Kantner is a
commercial fisherman,
writer, and wildlife
photographer. Born and
raised in northern Alaska,
he was schooled at home
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attending the University
of Alaska. His writings
and photographs have
appeared in Outside,
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With his wife, Stacey, and
daughter, China, he lives
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Visit his website at
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swallowed by the great land
“Kantner is a natural storyteller . . .”
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KA N T N E R
When Seth Kantner’s debut novel, Ordinary
Wolves, was first published, Publishers Weekly
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A n d O t h e r D i s p a t c h e s f r o m A l a s k a ’ s F ro n t i e r
SETH KANTNER
Author of Ordinary Wolves
MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS
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