Sunlight floods in the window from the north. At eleven p.m. it has a piercing brilliance. It had the same glare all day; the same at five a.m. too, when it came around to my bedroom window and woke me. Now I’m thinking without much interest that I should get some sleep. Sometime. Suddenly I remember my thousand vegetable starter plants are out there, parching in cold west wind and relentless photosynthesis. I gather buckets and head out to water them.

On Sunday night when I arrived home from my book tour it was rain and thirty-nine degrees. Not atypical mid-June weather on the northwest coast. I stashed my clean traveling jeans, strapped on my sheath knife. For a couple days I sorted seeds and supplies, and then climbed on a Cessna, hauling fertilizer, potatoes, baby cabbage starts, and turnip seeds to Inupiaq villages. My job: to encourage hunter-gathers to grow gardens.

Maniilaq Association, the local Native nonprofit social services provider, runs a $30 million hospital here and a bunch of other programs. The remains of the old Garden Project is one of those. Running it is one of my many careers, or more accurately, one of my many attempts to avoid a real job.

Inland, upriver in Shungnak, Wesley Woods was one of the best gardeners around. But he passed away a few years back. The gold miners taught him how to grow plants—mostly turnips. He had a big garden down by the river, where the river floods every spring. He showed me how to store turnips all winter in the ground. Over in Deering, Flora Karmun taught me how to salt the greens in a wooden barrel, for winter.

Before all this crap-food started coming off the airplanes, turnips were practically niqipiaq—Eskimo food. I grew up eating them sliced and dipped in seal oil. My parents composted everything: caribou hides and horns, egg shells, fish guts. Moose left our gardens alone, mice we trapped in coffee cans.

Wesley’s uncle and dad took part in the great reindeer drive in the 1930s, from here to the MacKenzie River delta in Canada. It was supposed to take a year but took five. (Why the story never made it to Hollywood I don’t know; that drive in Arctic storms and summer bugs made those cattle drives across the West look like camping in a hotel room.)

Waiting on the gravel airstrip in Ambler I say hello to Nelson Greist. “You Kobuk River boy!” he says. I’m honored to be recognized by this elder.

In the late 1930s Nelson walked with his family from the North Slope, finding food along the way. Now he’s 85 or so; he can’t hear, and his knees bother him. He’s building a huge wooden boat in his yard. “Gonna too late hunt ugruk,” he says acceptingly.

Giggling girls roar past us on Honda four-wheelers, escaping mosquitoes and boredom. I glance after them, fairly certain I could teach them gardening—if I was allowed to grow marijuana.

A woman waiting beside a dirty Honda turns to me. “My plant is funny. Leaves coming off.”

“Is it a house plant?”

“I think.”

“If you can’t eat it, I don’t know anything about it.” I smile. Over the years that I’ve done this summer job I’ve had my work cut out to stay positive. My mind jokes with me: Try to keep the Brussels sprouts under $500 apiece. If only we were hunting turnips, everyone would be interested.

When the twin engine Cessna lands, I’m happy to see Abe is the pilot. He’s one of few Native commercial pilots in the region. We fly west, low. The tundra is green down there, a million billion mosquitoes making life hell for every living thing with blood. We swoop along the river. Traveling at two hundred knots. I can’t help looking over at Abe—young, cool, handsome—and thinking: this is the modern Eskimo.

Off to the north I can see the dark bluff I was born on. As kids, my brother and I walked barefoot there, bugs driving us to water or sandbars or into the sod igloo. Our sled dogs went crazy in the willows. My mom wore a head net in the garden to keep the bugs from choking her.

Traveling now, for a time, we’re above it. In a bubble of continuous sound. Down below I know exactly the sound the animals hear. You hear a drone. You stop, raise your head. The drone grows to a growl that fills the hillsides. And then a spaceship roars overhead, going somewhere impossibly fast, and it all feels as if it might tear your head skin. As quickly, it’s gone. Silence fills and falls back down to humming.

I remember being one of those mosquito-bitten creatures along the river.

I’m in the New York Hotel, in Ketchikan Alaska—wildernessboy following the trail of a booktour, past the halfway mark and heading home.

Outside it is raining, and my hair drips on the keyboard from a foray out to find a grapefruit, my only connection to nature right now besides my shrinking bag of dried caribou.

Below the window steady traffic roars past. Just beyond the narrow road is water; sailboat masts rise like aluminum light poles in the harbor. Something tied to the dock looks like a hovercraft, or maybe a UFO. Out across the water gray clouds drape beautiful timbered hills.

I’m finally back in Alaska, though now a zombie, the result of leaving Breakup in the Brooks Range (where ice drifted down a quiet river, sparrows sang, my dog lay in the trail watching for caribou crossing; where my family and I spent our days peeling logs and looking for meat for dinner), then landing too quickly in LA, at a convention: Book Expo America. Fifty thousand book publishers and booksellers all under one most amazing roof.

“Too much pook,” the Eskimo elders from my childhood would have said.

I arrived in LA without sleep, strolling stunned past people and thousands and thousands of books on display, embarrassed that I—who worry about the environment—had written another one and jetted here through polluted skies to promote it. Wondering why the world needed a book about some long-ago kid who ate frozen fish and wanted to be Eskimo and now was concerned by climate change.

What followed was a blur of taxi rides, coffee in paper cups, dinner on top of a skyscraper with an open-air swimming pool beyond the bar, more taxis, jets, TSA, freeways, signing books, shaking hands.

In San Geronimo I gave half my dried caribou to Willow Jones, a family friend formerly from the Arctic. Another one of those, Mara Schiro, gave me a green shirt to wear on tour. The night was warm and dark—a strange and pleasant combination, something we never have at home—and we talked long into it, catching up on the years. In San Rafael I whined to a third friend, Linnea Wik, and she dropped her duties as an organic strawberry-seller to accompany me northward for a few days as navigator and automobile driver.

Flying over Oregon, I sipped water from one more plastic cup, stared down. The Earth everywhere was marked and marred by people sign: roads and scabs—deforestation—and yellow flowers where it was healing. Or trying to.

In Eugene, my dad’s old friend and climbing partner Paul Dix appeared at my reading. He talked of war-crimes in Nicaragua. I signed books, tried to spell my name right. In Sisters a woman pressed into my hand an article she’d written about the melting Arctic—square in the gun sights of the oil companies. In Redmond a man said there was no hope for Northwest Alaska, too many minerals there in the ground. I scrawled my autograph, went next door to the bar, drank grayhounds—grapefruit squeezed on vodka.

In Portland I read in a glitzy mall. The next day Linnea drove, calmly swirling us out the dangerous cement spaghetti to I-5. Highway and more highway blurring under my gas-powered ride. Mr. NatureWriter in a blue convertible Chrysler, satellite radio panting against rain-laden air.

The last night in the Lower Forty-Eight I read at Elliott Bay Books, downtown Seattle, to forty people who knew how to laugh. Afterward in the car I pressed buttons on the Avis Garmin GPS. Karmen, I’d nicknamed her, and she told me to fasten my seatbelt. Over and over she repeated in her Replicant voice: “Recalculating.” I hurled north toward my brother’s house, top down, heater blowing, radio bashing out a beat. The river of red taillights flowed in front. The terrifying yellow eyes of the pursuing automobiles glared in my mirrors. I rocketed down an exit, changing lanes, muscling through yellow lights. The night was full of damp dark, speed, and power. After all these years I thought I might understand what people liked about the city. For a few seconds I loved it.

I pressed Seek, and Hank Williams Sr. came to life, singing: “Your cheating heart will tell on you . . .” What came next was the feeling of being a hypocrite, a frigging environmentalist blazing though the night, radio forcing back the lonesome dark.

Now, here in Ketchikan, in a small room, the miracle of the internet has Hank singing to me in his long-ago voice. In the sink is my grapefruit. I’ve been squeezing it on vodka and ice. The grapefruit has a thumb hole in it. Because I lost my knife in Seattle, or Port Angeles, somewhere. I was doing fine until I lost my knife. Life without a knife is not one I care to live. I can manage without a gun, much as I don’t like it, but not without a knife. I’ve tried everything, tried to cut the grapefruit in half with Gore-Tex dental floss.

Tonight I’m so homesick I could die. Although I think Hank wrote all this before me.

My daughter, China, and I are skimming past sweepers, boating upriver. Snow cliffs line the north bank, ice sheets drape the rock bar along the other shore. We’re heading up a tributary river that flows out of the mountains to the north.

Breakup swept through here just a few days ago; rafts of ice tower in contorted mounds. Pintails and widgeons paddle into the current and lift off; a kingfisher swoops and dives ahead of us.

After seven months or more of ice, we’re traveling on water. Sun shines off windy blue ripples and white ice. Up on the bank, peering out of the alders, a cow moose on a high snow drift eyes us, wondering if harm comes with the sound of this engine. She doesn’t wish to run. She’s positioning herself in a curve in the river to soon have a calf and defend it against 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 them 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.

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 Eskimo friends—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 to the bottom in mid-winter. 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 home site, meeting a girlfriend or boyfriend, and building a home and a new food pile, all before freeze-up.

Most of that lifestyle hasn’t changed. Lately though, beavers are simply building along the banks of rivers, right out in the open, accessible to hunters and even sometimes 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 that 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 late-season 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 when the last thing to happen before winter is to lose all their food?

Somehow many of them do; there are a lot of beavers, an amazing number of them. Normally I’d say they are doing great. But today, here in beautiful wilderness with just my camera and dog and daughter and a sunny day stretching away forever, I think of cramped cities somewhere 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 of them?

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.

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.

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.

Kneeling on snow, I’m bent over my snowgo, shivering and greasy. My toolkit is open; wrenches are laid along the seat. Beside me are rounds of firewood and an axe with a broken handle. I’m mechanicking again—something that the farther north a person gets, the more likely you are to be doing on your own.

The sky is blue fading to hazy horizons. Bright yellow sun off the snow makes the world look warm and inviting. Today’s the first day of spring, brilliant with light. This morning was minus twenty-five; yesterday minus thirty; whatever it is now isn’t balmy.

We crossed the ice of the sound last evening, coming home with a load of wood, and camping gear, and a blown piston on the machine. Now I’m about to find out the damage.

It’s a March day of the kind made famous by Johnny Horton singing: “When it’s springtime in Alaska it’s forty below.” Finally, momentarily, we have the same day length as the rest of the planet, and it’s easy to look out a window and get fooled about what to wear.

It’s a fan-cooled 440 engine, the size made popular with Native hunters after Snow Travelers replaced dog teams. Now I remove the airbox, carbs, muffler, and manifolds. I’m wearing snowpants and boots and a ripped Red Dog Mine jacket with a broken zipper. I’ve repaired this engine—and this zipper—countless times. Red Dog is the largest lead and zinc strip mine in the world, just up the coast, run by the Native corporation and Tech Cominco, a Canadian conglomerate. They’ve violated the Clean Water and Clean Air acts since they opened twenty years ago. I’ve got a personal pact going to make this rag of a jacket last until that mine is gone. So far I’m losing, bad.

When I tap the cooling fins and lift the head off, everything is wrecked. Chunks of ring are embedded in the head; the cylinder (four hundred dollars new) has a terrible gouge up the wall; the piston is cracked, ruined. I stand staring at the wreckage.

This snowgo has driven a distance equal to North Pole to South Pole and part way back. My Nikon and rifle and I have been on it every battering mile. It’s rolled down mountains, sunk in sub-freezing salt water, had the windshield ripped off by a bear, and carried every kind of edible animal and half my best photographs home. But I have no interest now in pouring another seven hundred dollars into this crankcase glinting with metal shards. I’m cold, freezing actually. In my busy mind, I’m thinking about gas and crude oil prices, Bear Stearns belly up, and wondering what bits of my igloo-boy life I could go back to overnight. What would I carry? What would I curse myself for not buying today if money became paper tomorrow?

I run pieces of rag in and out with the connecting rod, then dig in my tool bag, find the worn piston I carry for spare on the trail. With a shovel I dig up a box of junk parts and find a scored cylinder wall left from a previous blown engine. New parts are hundreds—or thousands—of miles south. 

I polish the coarse surfaces on the old cylinder and piston with sandpaper, carve chunks out of the head with my knife until it fits back together. Four hours have passed. The sun is setting. Around me my daughter, China, is playing in the snow with her friends. The dog sits, shivering, waiting. I’m ignoring the cold, pretending I’m half as tough as those Eskimo hunters who used to repair their equipment in front of our igloo when I was a boy. I can see Clarence Wood squinting at an inlet needle between his big brown thumb and forefinger; north wind, dark, flashlight in his fist. Twenty-below gas dripping across his hands. Not a twitch in his fierce concentration. Everyone was a hunter back then; everyone their own mechanic. Everyone their own sled and boat builder.

I ratchet the head down. The carburetor boots are stiff, a bastard to put in and I fight them with all my strength, feeling warmth manufacture itself under my skin. In a can I mix a pint of my dad’s old 1978 Johnson Outboard oil, and dump it in the tank with the gas. And pull the rope. Finally, the old beast fires to life. And then, testing it, I race across the ice, my forehead freezing, my cheeks freezing—one more day in the world of machines.

I’m on snowshoes, carrying camera gear. The sky is white, the snow white, the light what we call “flat.” It’s overcast, snowing faintly, 15 above zero—thankfully no warmer. Daylight is back for spring; we’re enjoying our snow and have no interest in losing it yet.

Crossing the tundra I trip on invisible wind drifts; my feet feel the ground but in this no-contrast glare my eyes ache, I’m dizzy and feel like I’m walking on cloud.

The temperature has been unpredictable. The Interior has had it worse: 70 below followed by record warm. Yesterday I called Tom Walker, a friend and well-known photographer who lives near Denali Park. “Two days ago it started looking grim,” he said. “It looks like May—45 and going to rain.”

Now, on fresh powder, I work up a rise, into a thicket. My snowshoes catch on stobs, one comes off. The snow is deep, bottomless. Actually, bottomless is the wrong word. The snow is not layered as it often is—I sink all the way to the bottom. This reminds me of my joke about moose and deep snow: Moose walk on the ground. All year round.

Surprisingly, there are no fox tracks in among the snowshoe hare trails. I think it’s too soft and deep. Snow comes in many consistencies, and surely the animals have their preferences and requirements too.

I’ve been spending time in the willows, photographing a cow moose with two calves. I’m taking advantage of a new moose-career choice: living here near town, benefiting from a modern reality that doesn’t work at all for wolves, bears, caribou or most other animals.

High performance snowgos and semiautomatic rifles—death—await the larger furbearers and food animals. But this moose has kids, the law has a season, and the majority of the population here is Native and prefers caribou meat. It’s a niche, albeit precarious.

Five hundred miles south, Anchorage and that surrounding sprawl have spawned a whole population of urban moose. They charge skiers, bicyclists and their dogs; they have big moose sex beside bike paths; they wander onto the great trails (roads) and cause traffic fatalities.

Wolves noticed; they saw the symbiotic good times and this year tried to come near Anchorage, too. Regardless of their record (infinitely less dangerous than moose) they did not receive the same welcome. Historically, humans are frightened by wolves, don’t like sharing with them, and now that a Fifi and a Rover or two have end up on the packs’ menu, some are demanding gunships and airstrikes.

None of this cozying-up would have worked a hundred hungry years ago. Musk oxen, a century back, found out how modernity and their traditional method of self-protection didn’t mix; they were extirpated from Alaska. But that’s a different story.

Bob Uhl, a longtime naturalist here in the region, tells of the first moose that wandered this far north and west, in 1953 I think it was. Some sort of climate change must have been taking place, even back then. Eskimo hunters came across the tracks, Bob says. Tracks of the extra-large tutuu, (caribou.) They followed them until they got to the animal, shot it, and cooked some. Bob grins. “It was determined to be good eating.”

Regardless, many people still prefer caribou, and that’s good for this mom and her calves. Now, she lets her legs fold and collapses into the pillow of snow. Overhead, a Bering Air mail-plane is on approach to the runway. The animals aren’t concerned by the engine sound, nor the pack of howls that float over the ridge from Lucy Nordlum’s dog yard a mile north.

Teenagers on snowgos surely have buzzed this family and other moose nearby, giving themselves a thrill and the moose initial terror. Luckily, no one is presently shooting them for fun, and these mechanical buzzings are small prices to pay compared with being taken apart by wolves.

Here in the willows the evening light falls. This deep snow is a good place to get stomped, dangerous for wolves, too. We’ll have to see what spring brings—the crusted snow of the past few Aprils and Mays have favored the brown bears, allowing them to walk on top while the moose wallow on the bottom. The bears then can stroll up, jump on dinner.

Now all three moose are resting, taking a break from chomping willows. I glance at my f-stop, pull my tripod back up from where it has stabbed out of sight, and then quickly, warily, tighten my bindings. This snow is bad running snow, and I know how fast and fluidly a moose can force aside thickets and drifts as if all is liquid.

The other day I shoveled out the door to the porch and brought in a caribou hindquarter. It was thirty below out, the hindquarter hard as stone. I clanked it against boards, knocking off snow and marveling at what a great club the meat made. You could kill someone with it.

Beside the stove it turned gray with frost. My intentions were to cut it into strips to dry. Paniqtuk, in Inupiaq. Dried meat. I grew up on the stuff. We ate dried caribou and fish most lunches, dipped in seal oil or bear fat. My dad taught me to cut the meat half-frozen so as to shave the strips thin and perfect. Everybody else we knew cut it thawed; their strips were thick, still tasty, but requiring more jaw.

My family made flour-sacks full of pemmican, too, which is not an Eskimo food. Pemmican is a Native American tradition, I think, from the buffalo days. We rendered jars of caribou fat and poured it over cake pans packed with dried meat that we first cranked through the meat grinder to pulverize. My mom measured in a few dried currants and cranberries, but our pemmican was mostly meat and fat. Squares of it were good while camping, good all summer—although, after a certain amount of travel and wear and warmth it tasted rancid and looked like something unrecognizable that you find in the bottom of your junk box.

Hours later, after the hindquarter partially thawed, I spread cardboard and sharpened my knife. A couple of friends dropped in; I said some words, but left Stacey in charge of visiting. The meat needed to be cut or put back out. First I trimmed the surface tissue. Worf was in, getting a respite from his doghouse, and inhaled the scraps.

I worked around sinew, shaving each strip as large and thin as possible. My daughter, China, seasoned each new layer I laid out with a mixture of salt and pepper. Afterwards, we hung it on a rack I’d made, like a folding clothes-drying rack.

Mid-winter is chapped—good for drying things. This cold weather wrings the moisture out of the air. Frost can fall out of a clear blue sky. By morning the paniqtuk is ready to take off the rack. Some of it is dry and I send China to school with fresh pieces in her lunch. Kids hit her up for it. Apparently even the coolest girl in fifth grade, the one with the Hannah Montana purse, likes it. China’s Inupiaq language teachers are worse—they seem to be able to sniff it out. One of them corners me in the school hallway, asks me to make her some.

It’s a busy world and even I have to force myself these days to take the time to dry meat. The Arctic used to run on bartering, and people who still make paniqtuk trade it. Mary Williams has told me she’s gotten calls from as far as California asking for some. Paniqtuk for money? That would have been crazy in my former life, but I guess it’s no different from people now who spend a hundred bucks for a block of whale muktuk.

The day after the meat is done I stuff a bag full. As it turns out, a close friend and fellow Alaskan writer, Nick Jans, offers to give me a few lengths of stovepipe. “I can pay you,” I say.

“Let’s do it Inupiaq way,” he says. “Trade me some of your dried meat.”

Ah, man, when will I learn to keep my mouth shut? I’ve seen Nick eat most of a Ziplock full—half a hindquarter’s worth—after dinner and in the middle of one conversation.

On my snowgo, miles out on the ice, thirty below, east wind drifting snow, getting dark—finally this winter I find caribou.

Forty animals in a line, plodding into the wind.

After months of going out, roaming the tundra, I’m excited although my chances of getting meat are still slim. My machine is old—the odometer broken at 16,000 miles. It’s an uncomfortable riding machine to begin with. And the front undercarriage spring is busted, the rear idler bearings shot, the limiter strap just a piece of rope I had handy on the trail when it broke. A few miles back I took out the aluminum foil I use to make my headlight work—to not scare the animals—and now the ice-hard drifts from this week’s blizzard hit me blind.

I stop and with fogged binoculars, glass into the falling light. The herd bunches, and races away into the wind, disappearing in the dust-cloud of snow and ice fog from their breath. I feel disappointment, and some relief. All winter here hunters having been searching for caribou, and more and more I’ve heard mention of an old tradition. Don’t shoot the leaders.

Well, I didn’t; now the leaders are gone into frozen darkness.

As usual, there’s more to the story.

Earlier today I headed east on the tundra. I was surprised to run into drifting snow at such cold temperatures. A few ptarmigan flew and quickly resettled. My .22 was iced up; most of my shots were misfires, the firing pin sluggish in the cold. I got four of the white birds, saw no caribou, no sign. Back in town, I dropped three ptarmigan at an elder’s house and came home with one. I’d taken off my heap of warm gear when the phone rang. It was Andrew Greene, a friend and fellow hunter. He was stuck at work, employed by DOT, clearing the runway. A pilot had just radioed—caribou on the ice.

I was thawing out, making coffee. “What kind of Eskimo are you?” I teased. “Taking advice from airplanes?”

Andrew shot back: “Hey. We Eskimos know how to adapt. That’s how we survive.”

The funny thing is people have been blaming airplane hunters for the drought of caribou here on the coast. These last Septembers we’ve been invaded by “Cabela’s Army”—trophy hunters. Hundreds of big camo-clad white guys with guns get off Alaska Airlines, climb into Super Cubs and Cessnas. They fly north to meet the herds, something most of us landlocked locals can’t do. If an animal has big antlers they have no taboo against shooting the leaders of the migration.

I don’t have an airplane, don’t want one, don’t like to fly. But I jumped back into my gear, grabbed my long-range rifle and snowgoed out on the ice—feeling trapped between the pride of years of finding animals on foot and the reality of spending mid-winters in town lately and how much gas it can take even to locate caribou. We eat caribou or moose every night, and like a lot of people here we need meat.

And now, the herd has disappeared, darkness is settling; behind me across eight miles of ice the lights of Kotzebue twinkle. My cheeks freeze against the binocs, and still I’m unwilling to give up searching the ice. 

There out of the gray, running into the wind, following tracks, there comes three more caribou. With fumbling gloves, I untie and unwrap my rifle where it is lashed to the cowling. The caribou are passing two hundred yards away, growing farther. I kneel in the snow, hold my breath so as not to fog the scope, swing with the dark shapes. The middle one has small upright antlers and I hope it’s not a young bull but an adult female—the fattest gender at this time of year. I fire. Far across the ice the caribou falls.

I pocket the cartridge, pull on my gloves. Now to see the meat! And work barehanded in dusk and searing wind, to lash it on, and to go home to bury it in snow to keep the meat thawed and aging. To fry fresh liver and heart, and to give away to elders and friends the choice tongue and brisket and most of the animal, another tradition believed to break trail for more to come.

This morning I’m boiling stinkweed, the Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos’ favorite medicinal plant. My wife, Stacey, has the flu; China, my daughter, is getting over it. The windows are steaming up. Around the bottom edges of the glass the hoar frost, thick from the recent cold snap, is melting and pooling on the frames. The forty-below stretch, with its squeaky snow and dead calm, has vanished.

Now the wind buffets the house again. We’re having the first blizzard of the New Year. Outside it has warmed up 70 degrees—a switch but still not bikini conditions. Snow, blowing snow, freezing fog, the National Weather Service says. Wind 45 knots, visibility one-quarter mile. China and I are itching to get out and get some wind under our gills.

Last summer, the stinkweed grew lurid green and huge. Here in the Northwest Arctic all the shrubs and berries and plants seemed to be on steroids. The stinkweed, or Artemisia, made clouds of pollen—more than I’d seen before—and seeds by July, a month early.

My mom learned from the Inupiaq how to harvest and use the plant. Unfortunately, my “traditional” knowledge is more tangled. Nowadays the elders’ information has gotten that way: some people say pick the early leaves, some say harvest the plant late in fall after it has turned brown, some say put it in the microware and then the freezer. July seemed too early to be harvesting, and I couldn’t remember: were the seeds important or just the leaves, and was I supposed to hang it upside down to dry? Or was that traditional knowledge from pot-growing friends?

I make Stacey a tent with a towel draped over her head. The water in the cooking pot is tea brown. Astringent steam rises into her breathing passages. Somehow I’m not convinced this year’s crop is as strong as previous years. Maybe I’m wrong though. China and I tiptoe out of the room, pull on boots and mukluks, overpants and jackets, hats and hoods and neck-warmers until only our eyes are showing. The door is buried to my thighs. Outside is a frenzy, the snow-filled air at times making it hard to breathe.

This is just a storm. Yet unconsciously, something about the amount of snow gives me a twinge of concern. I lean close to China and shout, “Hope this doesn’t go on for a week.” We struggle upwind to find the dog, and then tumble with the gusts, find a towering drift and play king of the mountain.

Later, I hear we’ve broken three records today. Record warm for this date; most precipitation in a day; record snowfall in twenty-four hours. No one that I know of is counting those record tall stinkweeds.

It’s dark, and finally a little cold. Twenty below. A sharp little north wind streams white exhaust away from each smokestack and tailpipe in this close-packed town. The red lights of huge Dodges and Fords—and even one Hummer now—roll past me, delivering children the few hundred yards from homes to school.

I’m on my bicycle, bundled to the eyeballs: heavy snowpants, polar fleece, jacket, facemask, and snowboarding gloves. My Ice King shoepacks only partially fit on the pedals. Behind frosted goggles I can’t see very well. I’m accustomed to the instant falls on snow and ice, but today with this box of frozen vegetables bungy-corded to the bike’s rear rack things are more precarious.

Courtesy of our Visa cards, fossil fuel and Full Circle Farms, a CSA in Washington state, these waxed boxes of vegetables once a week jet their way to the Arctic. My wife likes vegetables. Alone, I’d probably just eat meat and cranberries. Today I’m packing home solid salad, thanks to someone carelessly leaving the order out to freeze.

My mind wanders from icefog and giant vehicles to those people I meet on my book tours who repeatedly tell me how envious they are of me living in the pristine wilderness, not using up resources.

With Kotzebue virtually surrounded by ice, just one mile long and less than that wide, and with only a few miles of roads that lead to the deconstructed Air Force site, a person wouldn’t think we’d have hundreds and hundreds of trucks jammed in here together—half of the time idling to keep their interiors warmed. Plus hundreds more snowmobiles and four-wheelers.

Before all these machines, we walked. Snowshoed. Used dogs. Before stove oil we burnt driftwood. Before spinach we stored tukkaayuks (sea lovage) in seal oil in wooden barrels for the winter. Not very long ago, but before . . .

Before this breeze, icefog hung over town, spilling out onto the ice, chilling and malodorous. Now the bridge of my nose is freezing, as is a spot on my throat where the air is searing my skin like someone focusing the sun through a magnifying glass. Except of course there’s no sun.

A yellow loader lumbers by, its bucket cascading lumps of snow.  Someone, a person, swishes past with the sound of nylon, masked in a tight black neck warmer and hat, a slit for eyes—possibly a woman I know, or a bank robber. A Honda four-wheeler turns in front of me, burping fog, the woman driving shouting at three kids clustered on the seat behind her. Ahead I see the bobbing headlight and hear the throaty roar of a powerful snowmobile ripping my way, the wrong way down the edge of the street.  The carbide skegs make a tortured sound on the frozen gravel; sparks comet out behind. I stop pedaling and grip. The machine screams past two feet from my knee.

Good morning, Arctic town. 

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.