Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

Dispatches from the Edge

Photo: Tim Cunningham retrieving his snow-go after it went through the ice

10am, still dark out.  I’m drinking coffee, sitting by the fire, my rifle leaned across my parka and snowpants.  Waiting.  I’m worrying about the weather, an old reality here in the Arctic.  People have been asking for meat, and I’m going to go look for some when the sky starts to get light.  A friend needs help rescuing his snowgo where he went through the ice, and I may do that too.

Always the weather: too stormy, too cold, buried trail, whiteout.  We don’t have roads, we travel on ice.  I miss being a kid and worrying about weather only as far as a few days on dog team, not this Al Gore stuff.  Fifty below or colder my brother and I used to wear big fox mittens; the land was hushed, hardly a raven out, and even the dogs frosty and not anxious to run.  Dog shit was like stone and tripped us in our mukluks, and along the riverbanks ice-fog hung in the willows above moose.

Now I haven’t seen fifty below in years, let alone sixty.  Fall stretches on past Christmas and folks get tired of waiting for winter.  Right now, again, upriver they are searching for a body, a young Eskimo man who went through the ice.

The house is shuddering, creaking.  The window over the table bends in and out distorting reflections.  When I’m not here and it storms from the east my wife and daughter eat dinner in the bedroom, afraid of the wind.

How to dress?  The ice is wet, overflow spreading along the edge of the ice below the porch, and along the edges of Kotzebue Sound, and up into the river mouth.  Where to hunt?  The caribou did not migrate through along this coast this fall—too warm, or too many new trophy hunters flying in from the lower-forty-eight, who knows? The tundra is windblown and brown and rough.  The sea ice, well, it isn’t—there’s gray water out there.

Outside I dig out my basket sled and snowgo in driven snow gusting out of blackness, a wall of winter.  Exactly the way it should be—this is December on the northwest coast of Alaska—storms are normal, just not this pasty snow and 26 above.

A bit warmer and our world here is going to be a mess.  I go back inside, wrap my rifle in a Hefty bag and change into lighter snowpants and a windbreaker without a wolf ruff.  In the low hills to the east I stop and scan small nearly invisible three-toed tracks in the snow.  Ptarmigan.  The sky has lightened, lifted.  To the west and north, out over the shore-fast ice is the big ominous cloud we’ve all become more familiar with—the reflection of open ocean on winter sky.