On the Edge of Nowhere Read online

  On the Edge

  of Nowhere

  by James Huntington as told to Lawrence Elliott

  Foreword by Gregory Frank Cook

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  Published by

  Epicenter Press, Inc.

  EPICENTER PRESS

  Alaska Book Adventures™

  Epicenter Press is a regional press founded in Alaska whose interests include but are not limited to the arts, history, nature, and diverse cultures and lifestyles of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

  Text copyright ©2002 Jimmy Huntington Foundation and Lawrence Elliott Cover photographs copyright ©2002 Alaska Stock Images Third Edition published by Epicenter Press, 2002 Second Edition published by Press North America, 1991 First Edition published by Crown Publishers, 1966

  Photographs by Lawrence Elliott

  Digital conversion by Lava E-books Inc.

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  ISBN: 978-1-935347-29-3 (eBook)

  PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Foreword

  Jimmy Huntington used to say, “Where there’s life there’s hope.”

  It was his maxim for survival in the wilderness, as when he fell through the ice on a sub-zero day and had about five minutes to get a fire going with wet wood and numb fingers before he froze to death. It was also his philosophy of life, and he said it so often that it became a joke between us, as when he pointed out a pretty girl across the street with an old man’s shaking hand and we both spoke together: “Where there’s life there’s hope.”

  We met when Jimmy was on the Fisheries Board, the toughest job in Alaska, and I was executive director. It fell on the shoulders of the seven Board members to make the regulations for the conservation and management of all the fisheries resources in this immense state—commercial fishing, a multi-million dollar industry; subsistence fishing, the life blood of the Native villages; sport fishing, a pillar of tourism, Alaska’s third biggest moneymaker—and that was the easy part. To cut up this pie, to decide who gets what, to take a stand in the fierce competition between this region and that, between seiners, gill netters, trollers, crabbers—that was the hard part.

  The Board met between 50 and 80 exhausting 12-hour days a year, taking public and scientific testimony all over the state, deliberating and voting. Almost without exception, Jimmy came down on the side of the little guy. And at the end of each day, he and I, sharing a room in some hotel or boarding house, would walk home in the cold night rehashing the testimony and the decisions and, if we were lucky, find a place where Jimmy could “warm up” with a banana split.

  Somewhere along the line, he “adopted” me, although I wasn’t sure I deserved it. But along with the honor came invitations to go hunting and trapping with him, and let me tell you, that beat the daylights out of Alaska Fisheries Board meetings.

  At that time—it was in the early 1980s—Jimmy lived in a small log cabin downriver from the village of Huslia on the south bank of the Koyukuk. It was decorated to his taste: on the wall hung a fan made from the tail feathers of a spruce grouse, and a white ermine skin; a faded panel of wood nailed up near the door said, “Carnation Milk From Contented Cows.” The landscaping consisted of a stand of short spruce and birch trees typical of the latitude. But they were tall enough to hide a bear so you never went far from the cabin without a rifle.

  One September I came flying up to Huslia to join Jimmy on a moose hunting trip, excited as a kid with his first rifle. We traveled in Jim’s river boat, running for days on end through the endless untouched forests of interior Alaska. My most cherished memories of those crisp cold days along the Koyukuk and Yukon are of Jimmy calling over his shoulder, “Grab the grub box—time for tea.” We would beach the boat and I would gather wood while Jim “made fire” and roasted moose ribs, and we ate and talked and enjoyed the feeble heat of the midday sun less than 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle. One night a foolish black bear tried to rob our cache of moose meat and wound up hanging on the drying rack beside the moose.

  Another year we spent a month trapping beaver at the base of the south slope of the Brooks Range. We were in the woods through all of a bitterly cold February, sharing a small canvas tent, sleeping on top of spruce boughs and using birch bark to start the morning fire. In my mind’s eye I still see the Jimmy Huntington of that magic time, moving ahead on his snowshoes, ax in hand, utterly at home in the wilderness, happy as a man can be.

  Anyone who knows me knows that my teenage daughter Slim is the light of my life. And one of my devout wishes for her is that sometime in her life she comes to know as solid and singular a human being as Jimmy Huntington.

  —Gregory Frank Cook

  Chapter One

  My Mother

  MY MOTHER WAS ATHABASCAN, born around 1875 in a little village at the mouth of the Hogatza River, a long day’s walk north of the Arctic Circle. The country was wild enough—blizzards and sixty-below cold all the winter months, and floods when the ice tore loose in spring, swamping the tundra with spongy muskegs so that a man might travel down the rivers, but could never make a summer portage of more than a mile or so between them.

  And the people matched the land. From the earliest time in Alaska, there had been bad feeling between Indian and Eskimo, and here the two lived close together, forever stirring each other to anger and violence. If an Indian lost his bearings and tracked the caribou past the divide that separated the two hunting grounds, his people would soon be preparing a potlatch to his memory, for he was almost sure to be shot or ground-sluiced, and his broken body left for the buzzards. Naturally this worked both ways. Then, in the 1890s, prospectors found gold to the west, on the Seward Peninsula, and the white man came tearing through. Mostly he was mean as a wounded grizzly. He never thought twice about cheating or stealing from the Native people, or even killing a whole family if he needed their dog team—anything to get to Nome and the gold on those beaches.

  And once, through two winters and a summer, my mother, who looked like a child and weighed less than ninety pounds, walked a thousand miles across this desperate land to get back to her home and her two children.

  Her name was Anna, and her father was a Native trader. All year he traded among his own people. Then, with the first long days of March, he would make his way down the Hogatza to the head of the Dakili River, the divide between the Eskimo and the Indian lands, and there he would meet Schilikuk, the Eskimo trader. This was permitted because each needed things that only the other had, and it was the only known peaceful contact between the two races.

  As soon as Anna was old enough, she began to accompany her father on these trips, and so she learned the Eskimo language. They would load up the sled with their goods and set off toward the Dakili, a five-day trek for a good strong dog team, and make camp on the south slope of the boundary hills. This was as far as it was safe to go. On the other side, Schilikuk the Eskimo would be making his way south along the Selawik River, and the great trading ritual was about to begin. In all the years that Anna went with her father, it never changed.

  First the old man would walk, alone and unarmed, to the top of the divide. He carried only a long pole. If he saw no sign of the Eskimo trader he would stick his pole straight up in the snow and return to camp. Every day that it was not storming he walked back up the long hill, l
ooking to see if a second pole had been stuck in the snow alongside his. That was the sign that Schilikuk had arrived, and that trading would begin the next good day.

  Then my mother would help pull the sled up the hill— they could not use the dogs for the two teams would have fought to the death—and they would lay everything out on the snow. There were tanned hides, and wolverine fur for parka ruffs. There was a mound of soft red rock found only along the Koyukuk, which could be dipped in water and used to paint snowshoes a brilliant red. Meanwhile the Eskimo was laying out his stuff, too—salt from the Bering Sea and seal skins to make mukluks, a kind of boot worn in the spring and fall to keep out the wet.

  Making believe they couldn’t care less, the two traders would then inspect each other’s goods. Say the Eskimo wanted a handful of red rock. He would pick it up, walk over to his own pile of things and toss a seal skin off to the side. That meant he was offering to pay that much for the rock. If my grandfather wasn’t satisfied—and of course it was part of the ritual that he had to pretend to be insulted by the first offer—he would pull a second skin out of the Eskimo’s pile. This was Schilikuk’s signal to look hurt. He’d snatch back both skins and they’d have to start all over again.

  All this took a long time and a lot of patience. There was always the danger of tempers really flaring, and day after day there was the hard work of hauling the sled back up to the top of the divide. Once Anna told her father: “You could trade everything on the first day if you didn’t have to go through that business of acting mad at each other.”

  My grandfather smiled: “Ah, but the Eskimo’s sled is heavier than mine. Soon he will get tired of pulling it up the hill and then I will be able to buy his goods cheaply.”

  Years later Schilikuk the Eskimo would tell my mother that he had used exactly the same strategy.

  In 1901 my mother was married to a trapper named Victor Biffelt, and they built their cabin close to the place where the Hogatza runs into the Koyukuk. They had two children, Fred and Edith, and were happy together, although the country was very lonely. They were five days’ journey from Anna’s people, and the only neighbor was a white man, a hothead called Ned Regan, four miles downriver. And with all that great land to trap in, Regan and Biffelt got into an argument over a certain trap line.

  “Clear that line or I will kill you,” Regan warned, which was the wrong thing to say to Biffelt. He had lived off the land all his life and felt he could take care of himself. Though he might have listened to reason, he was not about to be run off by threats.

  “Try it,” he said, “and you are the one who will wind up dead.”

  After that he watched the land for signs of the white man and always kept his rifle within quick reach. But even the most cautious man is liable to drop his guard in his own cabin, and that was the chance Regan waited for. One winter afternoon, with the last daylight fading in the woods, Biffelt was sitting at his table over a cup of tea. My mother was feeding her babies. With no warning, the door was flung open and there stood Regan, a shotgun at his shoulder. “Die,” he said, “and be damned to you!” He pulled the trigger and, at a distance of eight feet, shot Biffelt full in the face. Then he backed out of the doorway and calmly walked off.

  My mother, still holding one of the babies, could not believe what her eyes saw. Her husband, who never even had a chance to go for his gun, was a horrible sight as he sprawled dead in the chair. In the barest second her whole world had been torn apart and she was stunned with grief and shock. Years later she remembered how hot tea ran off the table from the overturned cup.

  At last she realized that the children were crying and that she had to do something. She eased Biffelt to the floor and covered him with a blanket. But when she went to close the door and saw the tracks of Regan’s snowshoes disappearing toward the woods, she knew that she could not stay in the cabin that night. She was suddenly afraid of many things, but mostly that the white man would come back to kill her and the two children. She must take them away, and she must leave at once.

  She gathered some food and put the children in the sled. She wrapped blankets and skins around them, and with the dragline around her shoulders began hauling them up the frozen Hogatza toward its mouth a hundred miles away, where her people were. Soon it was so dark that she had to guide herself by the looming bank, but she pulled on. Not for four hours did she stop, and even then she sat up wide-eyed and watchful through most of the night, listening for the crunch of a snowshoe downriver.

  “I had my man’s gun,” she said. “If the other one came, I would have shot him.”

  For five days she pulled the sled northward, always looking back over her shoulder and alert for any sign of trappers from her village. But there were none, and when she finally reached her father’s house, she shook with exhaustion and hunger. When she told him of the murder of her husband, the old man looked off into the distance, and anger and sadness were on his face.

  “It would satisfy me to kill him myself,” he finally said. “But the white man’s law says that we may no longer kill our enemies. Let us see, then, how they will deal with one of their own.”

  He sent his oldest son, Hog River Johnny, overland to the trading post of Ed Monson on the Kanuti River. Monson was one white man who had been fair to the Native people, and my grandfather hoped he would do the right thing. He did. When Johnny told him what had happened, he wrote a letter to the marshal at Nome, the only law officer in western Alaska, and sent it out to Fort Gibbon on the Yukon with two Indians. It finally reached the marshal just before breakup, and in April he ordered a deputy to take a dog team out and find Regan.

  Although Alaska is a big land, it is a hard one to hide in. People are scarce, and so they are noticeable. By asking in the Native villages along the Yukon, the deputy soon picked up Regan’s trail. He had apparently left the Hogatza and was making his way downriver. In June, the lawman caught up with him a few miles from Nulato and placed him under arrest. Then he started back to Nome with the prisoner, stopping at Koyukuk to send word that Biffelt be properly buried. But the body had lain in that cabin for five months, and the animals had broken in and there was not much left to bury.

  After a time the court sent two men to fetch my mother to Nome so she could be a witness at Regan’s trial. She didn’t want to go—Nome was in Eskimo country, a thousand miles to the west, and she would have to be separated from her babies all winter—but my grandfather said that unless she told what had happened, Regan would go unpunished. Anna and the two deputies went by riverboat down the Koyukuk and Yukon to St. Michael’s, then crossed Norton Sound to Nome on the last steamboat of the summer, arriving early in September, 1904.

  It was a bewildering place for a Native girl. She had never seen so many thousands of people, nor felt so completely lost as she did in their bustle and confusion. Since she could not stay with the Eskimos, the court paid a white couple to shelter her until the trial began, and though they treated her well, every day was an agony of loneliness and homesickness. She was afraid to walk in the streets of the city, and so through each long day she sat in her little room and thought about her children and wept. Sometimes she went alone to the beach and looked out over the frozen sea and tried to imagine what it would be like when the ice finally broke up in summer and the steamboat came and she could go back home.

  The trial was held in February, 1905, and of course Anna was the only witness. Regan denied that he had killed anyone. When it was my mother’s turn to testify, she was afraid and spoke poorly—she knew only a little English— and they could not find anyone to translate her Athabaskan dialect.

  Whether it was because of this, or because a jury of white men could not bring themselves to take the word of a Native against one of their own, Regan was found not guilty and freed of all charges.

  When this was explained to my mother, she was heartsick. She tried to tell them what an awful mistake they were making, but they shrugged and said there was no more they could do. Slowly and alone she wa
lked back to the house where she was staying and made a light pack of her few possessions.

  “What are you doing?” the woman of the house asked her.

  “I am going home,” Anna said.

  The woman, a kindly person, tried to talk her out of it. She said that no one could hope to walk such a distance across northern Alaska in the dead of winter. “Wait until breakup,” she said. “Stay here with us until the steamboat comes. Then the court will send you back.”

  “I want nothing from the court. They took me from my children and made me stay the winter in this place. And for what? They have freed the man who murdered my husband, and now he is better off than I am.”

  When the woman realized that she could not stop my mother from leaving, she gave her some food and a note. “I have written down what you are trying to do,” she told her. “Show this paper to anyone you meet on the trail and they will help you.” Then they walked together to the edge of the town and, at the last minute, the woman put two gold coins in Anna’s hand. “Good-bye,” she said. “May God walk with you.”

  And my mother started off on her long journey home.

  She was bound north, across the Seward Peninsula toward the village of Candle. All she knew of the land was that somewhere beyond Candle, a three days’ walk, some said, was the place where the Kobuk River emptied into the salt water. She remembered that Schilikuk, the Eskimo trader, lived somewhere along the Kobuk, and she reasoned that once she found its outlet she could follow it east into the hills dividing Eskimo and Indian territory. From there she would know the way to her father’s village.