Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

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      “Bleak.” I interrupted again. “Who wants to grow up, no matter how safely, in a bleak and joyless world?”

      I took a deep breath and let my eyes rest on the beach. It was so quietly itself, undisturbed by my arguments. “Phil, I need to know what being an animal means before I can understand what it is to be human. I want to be like these willows, sinking my roots into the earth and knowing the direction of the sun. I can’t do that in the city.” I studied him, this stranger that I wanted to spend a lifetime with, wondering if we can ever know anyone.

      Whatever Phil was thinking, he only said, “I’d like to try to photograph the geese before dinner. I didn’t hear them leave.”

      He pulled on his wet socks and boots and set off across the twenty-acre bar, camera and lenses slung around his neck, leaving large, pigeon-toed tracks in the sand. I smiled at his retreating back, thinking of the wise, old honkers I have chased.

      There were sociable congregations of Canada geese on the Yukon, and nearly every sandspit boasted a wary clan. My mother had called them “bachelor birds,” for they were not nesting. The breeding pairs were already established on ponds inland. Geese see everything and soon I heard the excited bark of many voices followed by the flip-flap of weighty bodies becoming airborne. With every wingbeat their beaks opened, warning other geese up and down the river. The cry was taken up on neighboring islands where black stalks of agitated necks bristled, before they too burst into flight.

      Theirs is a world of sky and water. I marveled at the V of poetry staining the late afternoon where parting notes still lingered. I focused on them, drawing my mind to a point. Perhaps it is a question of vision, I decided. Some people find more inspiration in their backyards than others do in the Himalayas. Still, wouldn’t it be easier here? The wild geese of my school years were the silver Vs of fighters blasting out from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

      Smoke curled with the steam from our unmistakable horse-chip dinner as I sat in stillness beneath a hemisphere of sunset and birds. When you live under it, the sky makes up half your life. Down the beach I could see the silhouette of Phil returning, looking small yet somehow complete, at home here as much as I. He greeted me with a soft smile and a handful of wildflowers and then joined me at the fire to recount the things he had seen.

      I finished eating and handed the blackened pot and spoon to Phil where he sat tracing circles in the cooling sand with a polished stick. Across the channel an elevated cutbank stood sharply defined by the sinking sun. I could see that it had been the site of a burn in recent years. It was clothed in vigorous new bushes, wildflowers, and the carcasses of trees that had once lived there. A time for everything, I thought. Some life thrives only on old burns.

      “I wonder if seagulls are good to eat or legal to shoot,” I said, breaking the stillness.

      “Probably not much there but feathers,” Phil replied, roused from his own contemplations.

      “I bet they taste fishy. At least it would be fresh meat.” I had been raised believing that milk, eggs, and meat were the only proteins and hadn’t known to pack more whole grains and beans. We had fallen into the habit of two meals of horse chips a day. It seemed a bother to stop for lunch, and we were also conscious of conserving food.

      “We do need some fresh food soon,” he agreed, “to improve our outlook as well as our diet.” We had yet to catch a single snowshoe hare or fish—not a promising omen for people who intended to live off the land.

      “Why don’t we try to camp in a slough tomorrow and set out the fish net,” I suggested. “There’ll be LOTS of bugs, but we won’t catch anything here. At least not without fresh bait. The current would carry our net away or shred it, and it’s too muddy for fish to see a lure.”

      “Okay,” Phil nodded in agreement.

      I rose from the chilly ground and dusted off my trousers. My clothes were sooty and stained from life on the ground, but it didn’t seem important. A lone duck flapped overhead, going somewhere. He veered sharply off to the north when he spotted us, members of a species universally shunned. I watched him, thinking that ducks were never meant to fly. But they do.

      CHAPTER 2

      Before I was born, my parents had wintered in a small cabin on the Alatna River in the Brooks Range, much as Phil and I intended. The following year they dismantled their homemade canoe and hitched a ride in a plane across the Continental Divide. They floated down the Colville River to the Arctic Ocean where they met a truly wild people, Eskimos living much as their ancestors had for hundreds of years. Life on the tundra is very different from the forest. These people were nomadic, following the seasonal migrations of game, and wise to the land. Without their help, my parents would never have survived the winter.

      My mother told me stories of the Eskimos she knew. There was an old man who had never owned a rifle. He caught seals in a handmade net under the ice. He was eaten by a polar bear. Another old man had only an ancient single-shot .22 rifle to hunt grizzly. He would lie on his stomach on the tundra in the path of the browsing bear and move his hands to imitate ground squirrels. He once told my mother that he had seen “many babies left in the snow.” These were good people who loved their children, but they were realists too. They knew that in a bad year the entire family would starve if there were too many of them.

      Alaskan Indians were different from the Eskimos in many ways, but they shared a common heritage of recent primitive existence in this wild, northern land. Life close to nature can be a tough teacher.

      Phil and I arrived in Fort Yukon early one bright morning. We nosed our canoe between a group of tethered flat-bottomed boats, and I jumped ashore with a line to stand ankle deep in mud, holding our bow.

      “Is it okay to leave our outfit here?” Phil called to a small figure leaning against the general store and watching a fish wheel revolve in the current.

      He was an older Indian, dressed in dark and dusty street clothes and beaded moose-hide moccasins. The visor of his blue baseball cap was flipped back to reveal a stubble of salt-and-pepper hair and obliquely observant eyes creased between wrinkles.

      The man’s mouth twitched in what may have been a smile as he shook his head. “They steal everything here.”

      The sun was already hot, reflecting off the string of Jon boats that rocked in a backwater of floating debris. The smell of the river mingled with a fishy odor. Not a hint of breeze stirred the muggy air. Behind us, the featureless blue sky was separated from its reflection by a ragged thread of green islands.

      I tied the bow painter fast to the covey of boats and lumbered up the bank, pulling each foot free with an audible “sssssluck.” Running a self-conscious hand over my wispy braids, I grinned at the quiet little man.

      “Is this your fish wheel?” I asked him. “Are you catching any? Could we buy some?” A fish wheel is a wonder of simple technology. Turned by the current, it scoops the migrating salmon into a basket.

      He smiled down at his feet saying in a low voice, “No good for fish here.”

      Why put a fish wheel where there were no fish? I wondered. From atop the bank I could see a clutter of wooden buildings and log cabins, some leaning at unusual angles.

      “I think you’d better stay with the canoe while I try to buy a few things,” Phil said, coming up behind me.

      I settled onto the grassy bank a few feet above the canoe just as a skiff loaded with shouting Indians zoomed past a hundred feet offshore. Mesmerized by their speed, I watched them skim over a bar, noting how they could raise their outboard vertically on a lift to avoid hitting ground. The square bow and shallow draft of the flat-bottomed boat formed a practical combination for river travel. I felt a twinge of envy, followed by alarm as their waves struck our canoe, causing it to wallow deeply in the heaving, muddy water.

      “Where you going?” came the soft