Swallowed by the Great Land: And other dispatches from Alaska's frontier

By Seth Kantner

“Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.” –Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

• Nonfiction short stories that pull you into the lives of those living in an otherworldly place
• Seth Kantner received a Whiting Award naming him one of the nation's top-ten emerging writers
• Publisher’s Weekly called the author’s 2004 debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, "a tour de force"

When Seth Kantner’s novel, Ordinary Wolves, was published 10 years ago, it was a literary revelation of sorts. In a raw, stylized voice it told the story of a white boy growing up with homesteading parents in Arctic Alaska and trying to reconcile his largely subsistence and Native-style upbringing with the expectations and realities tied to his race. It hit numerous bestseller lists, was critically acclaimed, and won a number of awards.

Seth’s nonfiction second book, the memoir Shopping for Porcupine, was even more compelling for many readers—the same raw details of a homesteading upbringing, but intensely personal. Now, in Swallowed by the Great Land, he once again brings us into his lyrical wilderness existence.

Swallowed by the Great Land features slice-of-life essays that further reveal the duality in the author’s own life today, and also in the village and community that he inhabits—a mosaic of all life on the tundra. Unique characters, village life, wilderness and the larger landscape, a warming Arctic, and hunting and other aspects of subsistence living are all explored in varied yet intimate stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountaineers Books
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781594859694

Seth Kantner

Seth Kantner was born and raised in northern Alaska and has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, wildlife photographer, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, and Smithsonian. Kantner is the author of the award-winning novel Ordinary Wolves, memoir Shopping for Porcupine, and collection of essays Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. He has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades and lives in the Northwest Arctic.

Book preview

contents

Introduction

I. Life Around the Igloo

Memories of a Handmade Man

Plenty of Beaver

Glassing for Caribou

Cups of Gold

Wolf Eyes

A Private Space Flight

One More Day in the World of Machines

Gathering

Alien Visitor

II. Characters of the Arctic

Diomede Dichotomies

The Elevator Shaft

Slow Tales of Long Ago

Precarious Symbiosis

The Lucky Swede

Cliffs of Deceit

Fishing for Memories

The White-Guy Fence

Weather-Wise

Cold Fishing

Tribute to Belmore

An Old Friend Sails Home

Thirdhand Dog

III. Bringing Home the Bounty

The Food Web

Tinniks

Always More Fish

Finding Caribou

Just Take Normal Precautions

Stinkweed

Hometown Fishery

Paniqtuk

Gardening Tips

The Hum of the Land

The Magic Inside

IV. Ice and Snow

Good Morning, Kotzebue

Fun with Frostbite

On Thin Ice

Spring Travel

Boiling Water

McCarthy

Checking the Ice

Shutting the Door

Twilight

Nature Coming Soon

Snowy Owl Trap

Swallowed by the Great Land

V. Storm Clouds

Snow Travelers

Guns along the River

December Rain

Food of the Future

Howl

Epilogue

Arctic Homeboy

Acknowledgments

introduction

HERE IN THE Northwest Arctic, over the years I’ve noticed that

Inupiaq friends and acquaintances—when introducing themselves—have a way of starting with where they were born, their parents’ names, and how they grew up. Without even noticing, I guess I absorbed that cultural way of considering myself.

For me, now fifty years old, everything begins on a two-mile-long bluff called Paungaqtaugruk, where I was born and raised in a sod igloo along the Kobuk River. My parents, Howard and Erna Kantner, were not miners, or teachers, or homesteaders. They were just people who admired the old Inupiaq way of life.

In that life my brother and I were taught to skin animals, run dog teams, and do subsistence activities. Caribou and wolves, bears and wolverines, and other animals were significantly more common than humans. My family didn’t wake up mornings and disappear to daily jobs and school—mostly we all stayed home on the hill, cutting wood, scraping hides, drying fish, and hunting, which often meant waiting for food and furs to come to us. The nearest village, Ambler, was twenty-five miles away. Visitors (hunters and travelers) didn’t show for weeks on end, sometimes longer, and were a welcome sight on the land.

Nearly everyone we knew in Ambler and other villages hunted and fished, picked berries, and hauled firewood. Depending on the season, people were busy gathering various necessities from the country. Outsiders who over the years appeared from the south—commonly referred to as white people, even if they happened to be black, Asian, or otherwise—would shake hands and before long invariably ask: What do you do?

None of us were quite sure how to answer that strange question. In the villages, and out on the tundra and along the river, most people didn’t have careers. It made no sense why these Outsiders all carried that question north.

We just live, is what folks replied. And shrugged, and glanced at the sky to check the weather, and at the river to check if any animals were crossing. We just live.

JUST LIVING IS what these stories are about—life here, and some of the characters living it, above the Arctic Circle and hundreds of miles from the nearest road.

Locally, a seasonal-nomadic lifestyle has always made sense. Villagers often boated to the coast in summer to escape mosquitoes and to fish. In winter people roamed far and wide, trapping; in fall and spring, hunters from the coast traveled upriver and inland to find caribou and waterfowl.

Around the time I turned nine, my family started fishing for salmon in Kotzebue Sound. It meant a 150-mile boat trip, down the Kobuk and across the bay, to camp at Nuvurak near other fishermen from villages around the region. It was there we first met Bob and Carrie Uhl, wise elders and friends who appear and reappear in my writings.

I’ve continued to commercial fish, forty years and more now. When I turned thirty and was married, my wife got a real job in Kotzebue. At that point I hired on with the Garden Project, doing seasonal work assisting gardeners along the Kobuk and up the coast to Kivalina and down to Deering. Winters I roam the hills and sea ice surrounding Kotzebue, and travel upriver to our old igloo—always gathering, although now my harvest includes photographs and stories in addition to meat and berries, furs and firewood. I spend spring and fall at home on that bluff called Paungaqtaugruk. There my wife and daughter, Stacey and China, often accompany me. Other times I am alone, though our dog, Worf, sometimes came with me before he passed on.

My ties to the land remain of utmost importance to my identity, as is the case for many people in this region. Over the years, my family’s strongest ties to the village have been via the Williams family—Don and Mary, who repeatedly turn up in my stories. They have been a second family to me and mine, as have their kids, Alvin, Cindy, and Jennifer. Andrew Greene later married Jennifer and became my fishing partner and close friend. He appears and reappears in these pages, too.

No account of local characters along this river and out on the tundra, in my stretch of years, could be complete without one name: Clarence Wood. Here where hunters vie for status, he towers above the rest. Growing up on that windblown bluff, when my brother and I heard our dogs barking the warning that meant visitors, or heard the distant drone of a snowmobile, our first guess was Clarence. He spent countless nights at our small home, paid countless visits, drank countless cups of coffee sitting on our bearskin couch. His humor, his knowledge of the wild, his way of telling tales, his legendary toughness out on the land—all beg for many more words than I’ve put down here.

This collection of words, these dispatches from the Arctic, span six or seven years and are mostly in chronological order but sometimes move back and forth in time. I was raised in a life of making things to survive, not buying material goods, and have always made my kayaks, woodstoves, boats, sleds, and the like. To this day I feel the need to create. Writing, for me, creates a way to unravel the dichotomies between the candlelit memories of our first sod igloo and the glowing screen of today. Writing is my way to possibly illuminate a trail or two through the blizzard of change that has swept north. I hope these stories shine a light on this amazing place, the people and animals and land of my home, the Arctic.

I.

life around the igloo

Memories of a Handmade Man

SNOWFLAKES WERE FALLING, coming down on already deep drifts outside our windows: winter, and a gray world out there stretching to dark horizons. I don’t recall how Oliver Cameron arrived at the buried sod igloo where I grew up, but I picture him coming on snowshoes, plodding, dragging one of his home-fashioned narrow-runner sleds, the line of runner tracks already buried by the time he pulled his parka off beside our stove.

Snowshoe travel makes sense, certainly, and it was handmade snowshoes that he spent weeks that winter building for my mom and brother in our small house during his visit.

For the first few days, he filed at my dad’s ripsaw with a triangle file. He worked each metal tooth until he was satisfied with how he’d modified it, making it bigger and sharper, and adjusting the set to the teeth. Oliver always enjoyed filing and whittling tools and handles down until he liked them better than before.

He was a tall, thin man who wore heavy drab patched clothes, wool pants and a wool shirt, always buttoned at the sleeves. He had broad square shoulders. His wrists and throat were pale, his fingers long and rough from making everything by hand. He had big ears and broad lips, and if you paid attention you noticed his hands shook a little, something we hadn’t seen during past visits. The look in his eyes, and the little cap he wore, too, recalled photographs from the 1930s of thin hungry men who lived through the Great Depression.

Of course, we didn’t know much of that back then. To my brother, Kole, and me, Oliver was an encyclopedia of intriguing projects. We were aware, too, of his stature along the river in the extended family of our parents and their friends: he was the man, more often than not, those back-to-the-landers turned to for expertise. He was perpetually helpful, mysterious, and strange, always serious, polite, and impossibly ancient—nearly fifty years old.

After the ripsaw was fashioned to his satisfaction, he set up sawhorses across the floor of our little home. Slowly and meticulously, he sawed strips of birch wood. He wasn’t in a hurry. The snow was deep, all of us deep in winter. No one we knew was in a hurry. Time, and tundra, we had in unlimited supply. Oliver sighted down each strip of birch, then leaned it in the corner against the post there and began ripping another.

When he was done sawing all the strips he needed, he worked them down with a spokeshave and hand plane. He showed us how to hold the plane at an angle to make it cut easier. He seemed to like making things smaller and smoother.

I don’t remember the pale sawdust and plane shavings quite as sharply as something else in our possession back then—a store-bought item, and therefore significantly more interesting to us kids raised on the tundra than anything made from materials as natural as a birch tree and caribou leather.

The item was a bag of Nestlé chocolate chips, still unopened, brilliant yellow, smooth, small, and solid. You could feel the chocolate chips inside when you held the bag. It was only sixteen ounces, I think, or maybe twenty. On the back, printed in tiny, perfect chocolate-colored writing, was a recipe.

Kole and I asked my mom if we might be allowed to bake those cookies it described. We weren’t sure it would be okay, with Oliver staying the month. Mom had told us that Oliver had a problem with sweets—he couldn’t resist them, but had health problems somehow connected to sugar. But chocolate chip cookies were so alluring. And there was something even more, something about that recipe: it claimed to make eighty cookies! Was that even possible? Kole and I were determined to find out.

My family had a plywood table at that time. It was two feet wide and five feet long, with the corners cut off. The grain ran crossways the narrow way, and you weren’t supposed to lean on the ends. They overhung the leg framework and were unsupported, and downward pressure would crack them. We didn’t have any more plywood, and it seemed very important that our table didn’t break; we warned visitors and strangers about this danger promptly when they sat down. Careful! Don’t lean on that part.

We asked Oliver if it would be okay to make cookies. He nodded and smiled politely, more comfortable with the idea than we had expected. Still, we were a little worried about what might happen.

That evening my mom cleared the table and wiped it clean with a dishrag. As we pulled each tray of hot cookies out of the cookstove, my brother and I spread them in rows on the table. The air hung thick with their warm chocolaty smell. We didn’t eat a single one. We waited for the last tray. We wanted to count them all. It seemed important to try to make eighty, as the bag promised. My brother and I always had a need to verify numbers and facts, to prove or disprove claims the big world out there had the habit of sending our way. In the end, there were only forty-eight, and we wondered how we might have made each one smaller.

Oliver put down the red-handled spokeshave. He sat on a sawhorse with one leg crossed over the other, hunched forward, his wrists crossed on his thigh, thoughtfully contemplating the rows of cookies. He wasn’t fiddling with birch boards now, nor filing tools into more agreeable tools. All he was doing was looking over all those cookies.

I remember watching him, a little meanly, I think—really, what we’d done was no different than baiting a trap—and suddenly feeling bad. I don’t remember what Oliver’s sugar problems were, just my feeling that we probably should have waited until he left to bake those cookies. But people often stayed for weeks back then, with no end to the visit in sight. And that yellow bag of chocolate was magic waiting to be unwrapped.

At the same time, though, there were no other adults like Oliver, and we wanted him to stay as long as possible. Back then kids out in cabins and igloos, far away from neighbors and other children, counted on people like Oliver to show them amazing things like how to temper steel, and to clamp interesting things in the vise to carve and file out of chunks of root and bits of metal.

And I guess men like Oliver, who lived hard coarse wilderness lives, counted on families for comforts such as warm cookies. I don’t remember whether he was sick and low for a few days, the way he sometimes got. I know he ate the chocolate chip cookies, and eventually steamed and bent the strips of birch, and formed two pairs of snowshoes, one for my mom and a smaller pair for my brother. (I got my brother’s old pair.) Oliver soaked caribou hides in the corner in a washtub to slip the hair and made a tiny knife to cut the skin into perfect thin strips of babiche, which he then wet until soft and rubbery, to lace the snowshoes tight. Afterward, he let the babiche dry, and in drying, it drew up even tighter.

Now, forty years later, I still have the larger pair. I’ve hunted miles and miles on them. Now I wish I’d paid attention to how he did all of it—eyeing the grain of the wood, and making the babiche, and that intricate pattern of lacing. But of course I was only six or seven, and enamored, too, by things like that printed promise of an inconceivable quantity of cookies. Two very different childhood events.

I do remember during that month, Oliver showed Kole and me how to make crooked knives—for carving wooden spoons out of spruce roots—and how to anneal used files in the stove, to soften the metal and then file it into sheath knives. And then how to quench the steel, and how to boil chunks of caribou antler in a pot of water until they were soft enough to pound onto the tangs of our knives, for handles. And finally, to soak ugruk (bearded seal) hide to form it into sheaths for our knives.

It was a bold and worldly feeling, to climb into your pants in the morning and walk around as a six-year-old with a knife on your belt, one that you’d made yourself, just yesterday, with Oliver, of course.

Oliver might have stayed until spring. Or possibly it was another spring when he camped up by Amoktok Slough, along the bluff, up in the big spruce trees. He walked to our house almost every day the spring he camped there. He was our only company and worked with my dad, showing him how to build a kayak, then skin it with canvas and paint the canvas with something reddish to keep it from leaking. When the ice went out, he went back upriver. In a second kayak, I think, that he built at his tent. Maybe from his tent!

A FEW EVENINGS ago I walked up Amoktok. I was hungry, needing meat, searching for a porcupine or spruce hen to put in the Dutch oven. Oliver’s old spruce poles still lean up against a big tree in those woods. If they didn’t, I probably couldn’t find his camping spot all these years later. The brush is thick and lush now, growing so tall with our new warmer seasons, and so many years have carried my mind to so many places, I can’t instantly remember which tree towers over his old campsite. Only those leaning poles tell me the spot.

Across the river, too, along a cranberry ridge, are the gray timbers of another one of Oliver’s spring camps, from later years, my teenage years. The moss and cranberry plants grow happily up the sides of abandoned poles, planed boards, and sections of firewood. Upriver, I know, are igloos he built, and helped build, and lives he touched, kids and adults from Kobuk to the coast who remember him.

Now I know Oliver really did live through the Great Depression and World War II, where he was a radioman in a B-24, before we ever knew him. As with memories that are so far back and so strange they feel no longer your own, it seems almost inconceivable that the kind, gentle man we followed faithfully to the workbench had been a soldier in that war. Like the heroes we read about in books, Oliver was shot down over Yugoslavia, crash-landed and survived, half-starved and hidden by Partisans, and walked nearly four hundred miles behind enemy lines to escape.

Later he married and moved to Kotzebue, and then to the north shore of Kobuk Lake. From there he moved up the Kobuk River to Shungnak in 1958, and later to Ambler, where he built his own sod igloo east of the village.

As is often the case with little kids, my brother and I didn’t know this man’s history; we didn’t know where his family had gone, only that the knives and tools and snowshoes, and that kayak, too, were enchanted creations fashioned from wood and skin and cloth and rusty metal—boring things brought to life.

One spring evening after the ice had gone, Oliver showed us something new. To me it will always be the epitome of his teachings. For weeks he had told us we had to wait until breakup—when the snow melts and the

Reviews for Swallowed by the Great Land

[narshkite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written and transporting series of dispatches that provide an account of living in the wilds of Alaska, with some up close and personal reporting on living through palpable climate change and destruction of the last primordial places. Kantner uses memoir to tell a much larger story, and does it very well.