Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

Interlude: An Excerpt

Seth Kantner is traveling, so we’re pleased to offer up an excerpt from his new book Shopping for Porcupine, by Seth Kantner (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Seth Kantner. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.

Iñupiaq Mailman

My first memory of him is without sound, his brown face encircled by his wolf ruff, peering in the door, shrouded in the cottony gauze of a snowstorm. The swirling flakes hid his sled down on the river ice, loaded with letters and packages he had brought miles across the tundra and down the river from the village. Any stranger’s or grizzled hunter’s face at the entrance to our sod home was a welcome sight, and maybe that’s all Harry Ticket would have been if his wife hadn’t been postmistress. During the years I was growing up, Harry and Sarah ran the post office out of their house, metering out little bits of the world—welfare checks and sweepstakes, catalogs and letters—to the villagers. My dad told me Sarah had replaced a man who for a few months had had the post office in his log cabin. But he took the stamp money and bought bootleg whiskey and finished off with a free trip to jail.

Harry’s job wasn’t to deliver mail, but once or twice each winter, when his house became crowded with our packages or he had a sudden urge to hunt, he would hitch his sled behind his snowgo and break trail across the miles to our place. Harry’s arrival was like Christmas, only better. It came as a surprise.

He was a heavy man with a respectable stomach and padded limbs. Like many Eskimos, he now only walked when he had to. He loved his snowgo and hunting with it. People hunted caribou when their meat piles got low, but it was chasing and killing wolves that was a passion to most—it brought prestige. In Harry that passion ran strong.

He would duck into our low, buried doorway, set down an armload of boxes, take off his muskrat parka, and shake the snow out of the fur. In those first moments his cold-stiffened face was expressionless, a mask. With his thick hands he would carefully sweep the snow across the hewn boards to make a pile next to the door where it wouldn’t melt. I would quickly slip into my caribou socks so he wouldn’t laugh at my grubby red feet. And then Kole and I might shyly nudge the mailbag and the brown cardboard packages to see what he had brought, to read the return addresses and imagine the contents and the huge cities they had traveled through.

No envelope would be opened while Harry sat at our plywood table. He slurped his scalding coffee and questioned my dad: “Wolf been come around much?” And Howie would run his fingers through his long, dark hair and glance into the surface of the mug of coffee clamped in his right hand. He had hunted and provided for Mabel Thomas, the daughter of an anathuq. The wildness of the tundra and sea ice had captured his heart and made him turn his back forever on his zoology degree as if it had been nothing but a pinch of tobacco in the wind. He told us she had taught him to feel the land, to hear its voices. But that wasn’t the sole reason hunters asked him about the wolves. Here, in this area, we were the only people who lived Out, away from the clamor and the barking of the village. The wolves wandered by as if our home were part of the bluff, which it was, buried in the ground and snow.

Howie trapped other animals for cash and fur for our clothes, but for reasons I didn’t understand, he loved wolves, loved to see a whole pack stroll unafraid down the wide, frozen river, spread from shore to shore, or to watch them track down a moose, or just to listen to their howls wavering in the night. There was something he valued in them that I never valued when I was young. Their skins sold for more than lynx or wolverine, as high as six hundred dollars, and occasionally there were eight or ten on the ice out beyond where we tied the dogs. I always wanted to shoot three or four and have word sweep through the village.

“Yeah, they showed up awhile back out in front on the ice,” he would say. I thought that if he and Harry switched places the questions and answers would be exactly the same, comfortable yet vague and noncommittal, the way people spoke in the village.

When Harry had finally rapped his empty coffee cup down and thanked my mom for the food he seldom touched, he would say, “Well, I gonna go check ta’ country.” Kole and I threw impatient glances at each other. Then Harry would shake the glistening drops of water out of his parka for a last time, grin at us, and call me Apakilik, the Iñupiaq name an old man in the village had given me; it had belonged to an old hunter who had lived on this bluff earlier in the century. Harry walked up the snow steps and disappeared, leaving us excited to open the Grandma packages and library boxes, yet somehow lonesome for people.

WHEN WE WERE LITTLE RAGGED KIDS growing up in the shadow of the Brooks Range, weeks or months would drift by between travelers stopping to warm up and have coffee and dried meat. People seemed to get farther and farther away as the light and sun shrank until the land was only blues and grays.

My mom missed people and light and the freedom of cars. In the winter she stared south at noon at the orange horizon and waited in quiet anguish for the sun to return. Our dad was from a city, too, yet that somehow made him love this silence more. Sometimes he told us about Toledo: the train tracks, gray buildings, a muskrat he once saw down by the river among the old tires. His stories were bleak, the wild animals missing. Erna didn’t join in those stories. Her stories were infrequent and crowded with aunts and uncles and family.

Kole and I liked the land in our different ways, but in the long nights we read books and of course some of those books were about kids who had friends, and we yearned for some of our own. On those nights Howie sawed boards, read, or sewed a mink hat or mukluks, or fox mittens. In the twilight days we could persuade him to crawl through the snow caves we chipped out of the deep wind-packed front drift. I don’t know why we spent hundreds of hours chipping caves. Maybe in the confining blue-blackness of our winding tunnels, caverns, and two-story rooms there was simply less space to miss people, and there under the snow our imaginations had the power to shape the world.

April 23, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner. Open creek with icefog from the cold.

I’m heading west into a warm storm that’s melting the trail. I’m following the river (local bush pilots quip that “IFR” here doesn’t stand for “instrument flight rules,” it means “I fly rivers). In my case I’m on the ice, although snowgoing in this near-whiteout does feel as if I’m racing along through a cloud. A cloud with invisible, rock hard, frightening bumps. And a few sinkholes where the river ice has collapsed.

Miles back I left the trail stakes where they veered up onto the portage; I was worried I’d get lost on the open tundra. Now fog shrouds the willowed riverbanks. Snow has been falling for twelve hours, heavy; it’s turning to rain. Gusty south wind streaks slush past my eyes. I’m trying to get 150 miles from my sod house, where I’ve been staying, to the coast. There I have to pack supplies, answer book-related emails, and then get the family back upriver before travel on the snow and ice is over—what we call Breakup.

Yesterday, in the village of Ambler, I dropped off Andy Koster, a friend who’d come up to camp.  He’s a young pilot for FedEx, and the first thing I did was put him on my dad’s old 1978 Arctic Cat snowgo. “I’m used to gauges,” he joked. He gestured below the tied-on, cracked windshield. “Oil pressure, temperature?”

“There’s a gas gauge,” I said, not sure a twisted wire through a cork—reading E—would satisfy this Boeing 727 driver. Regardless, within a few miles Andy proved to be amazingly adroit at handling a snowgo, dropping over riverbanks and climbing cliffs.

Now, it’s almost hard to remember thirty-six hours ago. The sky was blue, and we were sliding down a slope in steep powder in the Jades after hiking to the summit. Up on top was cold, with a north wind. There was sign of caribou wintering on the rocks at the very pinnacle, an icy place to over-winter. Fresh sign of wolves, too, that had climbed up to visit themselves upon the caribou. Back at our campsite, the valley had chilled and was falling toward another twenty-below night. The moon came over the peak behind us; the sun hung orange over mountains to the northwest. I lit a campfire on slabs of slate—to keep it from plummeting—and stirred a sizzling pan of muskox burger and rice, slipping in a chunk of butter when my athletic friend wasn’t looking. Fat is good for handling the cold.

On the way home, crossing cold white tundra, we came across a flowing creek, ice fog hanging over it. The open water didn’t make sense. Somewhere back here last week, an Eskimo friend told me he’d shot four beavers. He’d wondered why they were out, and if their lodge had flooded. Maybe from ground water.

Now, rain sweeps the fog-shrouded river. Spring travel is often tenuous and tense, the trail so important, yet in balance between sun, warmth, and the date on the calendar when all falls apart. We’re accustomed to this precarious balance. But raise the temp a few degrees, bring down the rain, and our traditional knowledge feels like how it feels when we get on the jet to Anchorage—not too useful.
In the wet gray of this warm storm-front blowing inland, and with so much travel left contingent upon cold, I feel a twinge of envy for my friend, up in the sun, flying away to towns and cities, roads and roofs, where weather isn’t the boss.

April 8, 2008

Photo: Seth Kantner

We’re hunting rabbits. My neighbor, Wayne, and me.

Again, I point carefully. “He’s sitting behind that leaning willow. Straight below that tallest clump of alders. See, above the bush with the red-brown branch?”

Wayne points his .22 here and there. He raises the barrel and bellows, “They’re all leaning!” His big laugh rips out. “I didn’t grow up with ‘that leaning willow’ as a street address.”

He’s right, now that I think about it. I remember Keith Jones and my dad talking about resting their dog teams at Lone Spruce, and then again at Willow Island. Willow Island was a good place to find rabbits, as was the Wood Slough.

Snowshoe hares, they’re officially called—white rabbits on white snow. Hard to spot until your eye gets the hang of looking for the outline of ears and maybe the faint hint of gray where their hair parts. Pretty quick these guys are going to start turning brown, in synch with the snow melting—I hope.

Out here on the tundra it’s dazzlingly sunny and a wind chill of thirty below. Wayne’s a computer guy from Ohio—bearded, tattooed, big, and heavy. This crust on the snow—from that strange rain last week—is fast hopping for the hares, but drops him like a moose.

It’s good to see rabbits again. Upriver, the population had their last high when I was a teenager, thirty years ago. My family and my dog team ate rabbits all winter until we were full of them. They were fun to have around and great for furbearer populations. When they disappeared we missed them.

Now, finally we give up, get out of the wind, and I skin the four I shot. On the way home we pass three dog teams finishing the last miles of the Kobuk 440 dog race that began a few days ago. One musher hollers, asking something. It turns out he’s asking for a cigarette. Wayne has a pack and the man brakes his team. The dogs remain standing—something my dogs never could have done after 430 miles. His sled, too, has little resemblance to the hand-lashed sleds we built and used. Aluminum and plastic, it’s blue and silver and looks like something imported from Pluto.

At home, I put one rabbit on to cook and then take the others to Bob and Carrie Uhl. Under my parka, I take along a book my wife ordered for Bob: Mammoths, Giants of the Ice Age. Bob is into mammoths lately. In the months previous it was an aquatic plant with a float-sack that had been washing up along the coast before freezeup.

The Uhls are in their eighties and now spend winters in town, in a Senior Center apartment. When I walk through their door, Carrie hollers something in Inupiaq. Something about a white person. She rises from near the TV, comes over to take the bag of meat. She peers in.

Bob looks in the bag, too. His eyes know exactly where to look for fat on the carcasses. I hand him the book and he grins and mentions that mammoth meat allegedly was marbled with fat, and likely was good eating.

“You look tanned,” Carrie shouts. “Not like George McCain. Arii, he got no blood.”

“You mean John?” I smile, surprised. “It’s cold out,” I say. “And sunny.”

“I know it is!” Carrie is Eskimo, 83 or so. She was raised in seal hunting camp and along the coast and has lived “Out” for nearly her entire life. Lately, in town, waiting to return to their cabin, she’s been watching a lot of Law & Order and news and other shows. Obama is her man.

I sit, eat caribou stew, listen to Bob talk of mammoth. I wonder how I’m going to hunt down one of those animals’ hindquarters for him to sample. Summers the permafrost cliffs have been melting, sloughing away to muck; the ancient bones surface. I’ve found a few, and bits of hair, and a mammoth turd—but no meat. I wonder if I’ll find one before scientists make one.