Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

the protection of mature spruce trees, many of which had been stripped of bark. The bark, which comes away easily in large sheets in the spring, was used like plywood to cover lean-tos.

      After a brief conference in their own language, one of the old men, Ambrose Williams, turned to Phil with a big smile and said, “This my lucky day! I see moose over there. I shoot ’em and he swim across and die on this side. I didn’t have no boat. I was just gonna eat those little fishes and I don’t like ’em.” He pointed to a can of sardines.

      The three young men unloaded the boat and set off to retrieve the skinned and disjointed carcass of a yearling bull. This they heaved onto a bed of willows in the shade near camp. No one seemed concerned about the flies, which will lay their eggs on meat, converting it to maggots in a short while. The two old men stood quietly by as the quarters were hefted ashore. I thought of the skill that lay in those small, veiny hands. Butchering a moose is no small chore.

      We ringed their smudge fire, sipping coffee while the Indians exchanged news. Finally Robert turned to us in English saying, “Jim Christian, Abraham is his brother. He don’t speak English good. His gran’son, Jimmy Christian, he was supposed to take ’em up the East Fork to their cabin, but he run out of gas and went down to Fort Yukon to drink and just leave ’em here.”

      Old Jim Christian grinned and nodded, perhaps not understanding a word. There was something gentle about him. Like his companion, he was of slight build, coming only to my shoulder, dark and weathered. His almost beardless face was carved by history, as were his small, gnarled hands. In the near blindness of age he wore thick glasses. He was dressed in baggy slacks, red-checked flannel shirt, and beaded moose-hide moccasins. His short-brim cap secured a flutter of gauzy material to protect his neck from bugs.

      Ambrose Williams offered us the interesting animal matter that was gurgling in a thick, green soup over the fire. The others were already at work with their pocketknives stabbing long strings out of a five-gallon can.

      “Moose guts,” Robert said, glancing over his knife as he chewed. “The old people, they really like this stuff. They eat it when they was young.” Ambrose nodded and smiled.

      Phil and I looked timidly at one another and dug out our knives. When in Rome, I thought. Phil leaned over and whispered, “They still have the shit in them!” I nodded and smiled. Rubbery, but not bad.

      Next came boiled tenderloin. The backbone was severed with a knife at each vertebra and plunked into our large kettle. Most Native cooking seems designed to reduce preparation of the food, not a bad idea for people living outdoors. We finished the meal with the usual sugar-laced tea and the budding antlers of the young bull. Jim Christian singed the velvety skin by roasting them in the fire.

      We camped with them that night. After breakfast of boiled moose the next morning, I squatted on the bank, scraping impervious moose tallow from Mightypot with sand. Ambrose had a tape recorder playing Native chants sewn together with his fiddling. I listened, feeling across the cultural chasm that separated my world of science from this ancient heritage. I was intrigued and would have stayed to listen, but Robert, who had taken most of the moose to the village and returned during the night with extra gasoline, considered the old folk dull company and was impatient to be off. I hurriedly packed up our camp gear and loaded the riverboat while the recorder fiddled on and Ambrose danced.

      “You know,” I said to Phil as we shoved off and the waving old men dwindled into arctic vastness, “in our culture we’d lock those two up someplace safe where they couldn’t hurt themselves. Did you hear that old Ambrose spends every winter alone up on the Wind River? As blind as he is too. I suppose someday he’ll die out there and people will wonder why somebody didn’t stop him. But he’s alive now.”

      We hadn’t been long underway when a major fork veered off taking most of the water with it. Because of the shallows, I and half of the gear remained at the junction while Phil and the other half continued on up the diminished river.

      As the noise of the engine melted into the river, I looked around. We were now in hilly country, able to glimpse mountains through breaks in the green. Underfoot was a springy, six-inch carpet of multicolored sphagnum moss, lacy white reindeer lichen, and dainty sprigs of lingonberry, also known as lowbush or mountain cranberry. This was woven with minute flowers and inconspicuous plants of many varieties. The scattered trees, spindly and often draped in threads of pale green moss, contrasted somberly with the bright ground cover. The land seemed brilliant and fresh after the dank Yukon Flats and the dusty village.

      This new country pleased me, evoking some forgotten childhood memory. Its very openness should enhance our ability to see animals, I decided. As if to prove me right, I caught the cautious hippity-hop of a feeding snowshoe hare, brown now in its summer attire. I unsheathed my old .22 rifle and soon was cleaning the luckless rabbit—our first game. A flash drew my attention to a hole in a tree where a pair of yellow flickers tended a brood of demanding young. Everybody is busy this time of year. I rinsed the hare, very unimpressive now, and was saddened that it was a nursing mother. Guiltily, I tasted the milk on my bloody fingers, then washed the fluids from my hands in the river.

      When the boat returned to shuttle me upstream, I was ready. Phil had set up camp by the time we arrived, and a short while later I was preparing rabbit and dumplings. The Indians seemed tired of our slow travel and we did our best to make them comfortable. As we sat gnawing diminutive bones and glancing at one another, Robert announced that he could take his boat no further. Tomorrow they would leave us and head happily downstream hunting.

      As for us, we would be left entirely to our own strength and imagination. These were the last people we would see in almost a year.

      CHAPTER 3

      Beautiful as the wilderness is, I don’t recall enjoying it that first summer. Somehow we had expected the sweetness of an extended hike and were unprepared for the continual stress that faced us. We found ourselves in the position of wild animals, dependent upon the land, but unlike them we were neither highly adapted nor specifically trained for this role.

      I heard the Indians leave early, the guttural growl of their big engine hushing the woods. The sound faded as they slipped down current and was lost in the song of the river. It was the first of July.

      It felt good to be alone. I lay still, listening to Phil’s deep breathing. The ceaseless babble of water soothed me, tempting me back into the fairyland of sleep, where I had been doing . . . what? I couldn’t quite remember. Closing my eyes, I shut out the day ahead and listened. The river sounded like people all talking at once, the pitch seeming to rise and fall. Sunlight dappled my face, teasing me. I rolled onto my elbows. The screen door of the tent was dotted with mosquitoes and I shook it before zipping down one corner to let Net-Chet-Siil out.

      The Arctic was no longer in bloom. The succulent green of deep summer was swollen with mature plants coming to fruition. Many had burst from hidden roots, rocketing into the brief summer on energy stored the year before. I call this country “Arctic” because it is north of the Arctic Circle, but the ecosystem is better referred to as taiga. Unlike the tundra of high Arctic, lower vegetation here is mostly boreal forest of spindly white and black spruce.

      We were camped on a thinly spruced cutbank. I lay on my stomach and studied the bright ground cover a few inches from my face. Each curl of moss was perfect to its kind. An earthy smell rose from the warm carpet to mingle with the spice of Labrador tea and the rich vanilla scent of spruce bark. The river had changed too. Semitransparent like fine jade, it tumbled over large stones. Close green hills descended to gravel bars, obscuring the mountains beyond.

      “They’ve gone?” Phil asked.

      “Uh-huh.” I dropped my gaze to his upturned face and kissed him on the lumpy bridge of his nose. “I was just contemplating getting up.”

      Even from the tent I could see that the flies were busy with our half-dried