Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (52 page)
I tell him he hasn't read enough of it to me. The book was written by John Fire/Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, and is dedicated to Frank Fools Crow, Pete Catches, George Eagle Elk, Bill Schweigman, Leonard Crow Dog, Wallace Black Elk, John Strike, Raymond Hunts Horse, Charles Kills Enemy, and Godfrey Chips. Such names are as unfamiliar to Michael as they are to me, for they belong to the Minneconjou Sioux, in the Lower Forty-eight, and he is of the Hungwitchin of the Athapaskans. His family came into the country in immemorial time. Long before their settlement became known as Eagle Indian Village, it was known as David Camp. David, Juneby, Malcolm, and Paul are the four major families of the Village now. Michael throws a stick onto the fire and continues: “âLiving in boxes which shut out the heat of the summer and the chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent, hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature, watching some actor on TV having a makebelieve experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself, eating food without tasteâthat's your way. It's no good.'” He laughs aloudâa long, soft laugh. His voice is soft, tooâfluid and melodic, like nearly all the voices in the Village. The contrast with my own is embarrassing. No matter how I try to modulate it, to experiment with his example, my voice in dialogue with Michael's sounds to me strident, edgy, and harsh. He is twenty-five years old. His body is light, his face narrow, his nose aquiline. His hair, black and shining, passes through a ring behind his head and plumes between his shoulder blades. He wears a khaki jacket, patched pink denim trousers, leather boots, a belt-sheathed jackknife. He may be an Indian, but he looks like a Turk. On his head is a fur hat that
has the shape of an inverted flowerpotâa long-haired fez. His thin, Byzantine mustache droops at the wing tips. He has a miniature beard, scarcely a quarter inch long, tufting from the point of his chin. His brother, Minicup, teen-age, wears bluejeans, a red headband. Minicup is taciturn but obviously interested and even inquisitive, his eyes moving back and forth between Michael and me. He was baptized Edward David. Minicup is a name he gave to himself years ago.
has the shape of an inverted flowerpotâa long-haired fez. His thin, Byzantine mustache droops at the wing tips. He has a miniature beard, scarcely a quarter inch long, tufting from the point of his chin. His brother, Minicup, teen-age, wears bluejeans, a red headband. Minicup is taciturn but obviously interested and even inquisitive, his eyes moving back and forth between Michael and me. He was baptized Edward David. Minicup is a name he gave to himself years ago.
We are finishing dinner, a common enterprise. It began, after making camp, with a mutual presentation of what each of us had to offer. Michael and Minicup set out Spam, Crisco, Sanka, fresh carrots, onions, and potatoes. I set out tins of beef stew, and corn, tea, sugar, raisins, nuts, chocolate, and cheese. Michael, opening the Spam, said, “I remember when it cost a dollar.” Between us there has been a certain feeling out of ways and means. It is my wish to follow Michael's lead, to see how he will go about things in the woods. To some extent, he seems to want to do the same with me. It was he who chose this campsiteâa couple of hundred yards into the forest and away from the Yukon's right bank, on flat ground covered with deep sphagnum, close to the edge of a small, clear stream. Wicked thorns grow out of the moss on long roselike stems. We hacked at them with our knives until we had cleared an area big enough for my small nylon A-frame and the brothers' wall tentâan orange Canadian affair that Michael, for privacy, often stays in at the Village. Before building the fire, he turfed out the moss, cutting eight inches down and removing a five-foot square. Even so, he did not get to the bottom of the moss. I then, automatically, without pausing to think, went off to the river for rocks. I brought back two or three in my arms, like loaves of bread, and dropped them on the moss. I returned to the river. The brothers followed. We all collected rocks and carried them back into the woodsâgathering, in several trips, more than enough for a fireplace. I was about to begin building one but checked myself and relinquished the initiative. Why should I build the sort of three-walled fireplace I would make
in Maine? I wanted to see what they would do. I fiddled with my pack and left the rocks alone. Michael and Minicup laid them out singlyâone after another, scarcely touchingâin the closest thing possible to a perfect circle. I could not see what the purpose of such a circle might be. It could not shield the fire from wind, nor could it support the utensils of cooking. Possibly it was to retain the spread of smolderings through the moss, but it seemed awfully large for that. Why had they made it, unless purely as an atavistic symbol, emplaced by what had by now become instinct?
in Maine? I wanted to see what they would do. I fiddled with my pack and left the rocks alone. Michael and Minicup laid them out singlyâone after another, scarcely touchingâin the closest thing possible to a perfect circle. I could not see what the purpose of such a circle might be. It could not shield the fire from wind, nor could it support the utensils of cooking. Possibly it was to retain the spread of smolderings through the moss, but it seemed awfully large for that. Why had they made it, unless purely as an atavistic symbol, emplaced by what had by now become instinct?
Now Michael, finishing his dinner, has a question for me. He says, “Why did you go get the rocks?”
I mention fireplaces I have made on lakes and rivers in Maine.
“Maine?” he says. The word “Maine” seems to excite him. “Have you been to L. L. Bean? I sometimes send for shirts and pants from there, and boots similar to yours.”
Through the late but barely graying evening, we walk a couple of hours beside the Yukon, going upstream at first, within sight of the shaved incongruous border, which, on the far side of the river, comes up from the south and plunges down a ridge to the water. For the most part, we walk by the river, but we make occasional penetrations through alder hells and into the woods to assess the trees. In many places we see upheavals where bears have dug roots. The ground appears to have been plowed. Bear tracks, heading upriver and down, are in sand at the edge of the water. Michael tells of a couple of tourists who were approaching Eagle not long ago when they saw a grizzly chasing a black bear. The grizzly caught the black bear, tossed it around, broke its neck, and started to eat the warm carcass. The people got out of their car with cameras and moved toward the feast. The grizzly charged them. They were lucky. They made it back to their car.
Resting on Michael's shoulder is his .30â'06. After a time, we turn around, retrace our tracks, and then go on for some miles downriver. We pass the high stump of a white birch,
eight inches in diameter. Inside is nothing. The wood, over many years, has completely disintegrated and disappeared. The barkâfirm, unaltered, and solidâstands like a stovepipe on its own. Michael stops, and lifts his rifle as if he is about to fire. He moves it slowly, pointing along a bend of the river. He does not intend to shoot. He is using the rifle's six-power scope as if it were a monocular. He often raises the gun just to look around, to look at anything at allâthe better to examine it, through the scope. This is more than a little disconcerting when he happens to be looking at you. Lowering the gun, he says, “Is âRobinson Crusoe' fiction?”
eight inches in diameter. Inside is nothing. The wood, over many years, has completely disintegrated and disappeared. The barkâfirm, unaltered, and solidâstands like a stovepipe on its own. Michael stops, and lifts his rifle as if he is about to fire. He moves it slowly, pointing along a bend of the river. He does not intend to shoot. He is using the rifle's six-power scope as if it were a monocular. He often raises the gun just to look around, to look at anything at allâthe better to examine it, through the scope. This is more than a little disconcerting when he happens to be looking at you. Lowering the gun, he says, “Is âRobinson Crusoe' fiction?”
I tell him it is, and ask why he wants to know.
He shrugs, and says he has always wondered. A scattering of feathers attracts his eye. He picks one up, saying, “A hawk killed a robin.” He says he once climbed Eagle Bluff for a peregrine chick, trained it, and later let it go. We come upon a set of amoeboid tracks (“Porcupine”) and grapelike clusters with star points in the sand (“Fox”). That brown object in the brushâwhat is that? “A garbage bag from Dawson.”
I ask Michael where he earned the money for his 1967 Oldsmobile Vista-Cruiser.
“The Slope,” he says. As an apprentice heavy-equipment operator, he has two thousand hours to his credit. Operating a bulldozer, he helped build the haul road that accompanies the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
“Thanks to you, people will drive from the Caribbean Sea to the Arctic Ocean,” I remark.
“Caribbean Sea?” he says. “Where is that? Is it far from New York?”
“It would be like going from here to Adak.”
“Pretty far,” he says, and after a moment mentions that one of his boyhood friends in Eagle Indian Village was sent off to be raised in New York. The boy's mother and father and his Uncle Pete mixed grape juice with wood alcohol from the school duplicating machine and drank it. The father went blind. Uncle Pete and the mother died. “The kids were not fed
three times daily after that. Their home was upside down.” It was arranged, somehow, for one boy to go off and live with a family in New York. “When he came back, years later, he knew nothing,” Michael says. “He knew white things but not Indian things. He punched holes in foil in which meat was roasting. The same with potatoes. He saw a porcupine and thought it was a raccoon. He knew nothing.” Michael walks in silence for a while, and then, as if trying the words on his tongue, he repeats, “Caribbean Sea.”
three times daily after that. Their home was upside down.” It was arranged, somehow, for one boy to go off and live with a family in New York. “When he came back, years later, he knew nothing,” Michael says. “He knew white things but not Indian things. He punched holes in foil in which meat was roasting. The same with potatoes. He saw a porcupine and thought it was a raccoon. He knew nothing.” Michael walks in silence for a while, and then, as if trying the words on his tongue, he repeats, “Caribbean Sea.”
Beside us now is a slough. It separates the Yukon's right bank from what Michael calls Old Man Clark's Island. “We have rabbit drives there. Drive the rabbits from one end of the island to the other and kill them. Not now, though. They go through a cycle. Now there are no rabbits.” He has on occasion come to this side of the river to hunt sheep. “When you can barely see a sheep,” he says, “the sheep can count your fingers. That's how sharp eyes they got.” We see a cottonwood that has been chewed by a beaver. We see, moments later, the beaver. Michael raises his rifle and follows it through the scope. Head up, swimming, it cuts a straight wake in the almost still water of the slough. Michael chooses not to shoot but to save the beaver. He will shoot it in time. He looks up from the gun. “This place compared to a city isâwell, pretty nice,” he says. “We have a little bit of everythingâanimals, fish, mountains, forest. Even people down the river envy what there is in this country.” With a slap on the water, the beaver is gone. A light, cold rain begins to fall. We return upriver to the campsite and the tents.
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A few days ago, when I heard that Michael was going up the Yukon for cabin logs, I went to ask if I could join him. In a canoe, I approached the Indian Village, which sits on the left bankâtwenty, thirty feet above the river. It is a linear community:cabins spaced along the river a third of a mile, facing, across the water, a six-hundred-foot bluff. In front of each cabin, the steep slope of the riverbank glitters with broken glass âmicaceous flakes, the Indian midden. I kept the canoe close under the bank, sliding below the Village. When the youth above are drinking, they like to shoot over the river at the bluff âa .30-calibre declaration of joy. That is what they were doing at the time, so it was prudent to be under the bullets. Harm, of course, was not intended. In 1898, one Angus, who lived up there, organized what he hoped would be a massacre of the whites of Eagle, but, like many projects that have got started in the Village, it was not carried out, it was merely conceived. The Hungwitchin appear to be characteristically passive. When and if they do go on what Michael likes to call “the warpath,” their preferred weapons are legal briefs and lobbies âsupplied by the native regional corporation that stands behind them. I went up the bank and found Michael alone in a cabin, sober and disconsolate, sitting in a chair, looking straight ahead. His face seemed less alive than cast. The cabin was spotless and almost empty, with psychedelic posters on the walls. It is shared by Village bachelors, of whom he is one. He was anxious to go upriver and to get back well in advance of the next session of the Village Council, he said. It would be of great importance to him, because it would have to do with control of alcohol. When I left him there, he was still staring straight ahead, listening to the reports of the rifles.
A door or two away was the cabin in which Michael grew up. Like most cabins in the Village, it is essentially one room, twenty by twenty feet, with a storm vestibule full of dog harnesses, guns, mukluks, parkas. In the main room, all furniture is against the walls, which are insulated with carton cardboard (“Burger King Frozen Shoestring Potatoes”). There are three beds, a bench and a table, a tall oval heat stove, a propane oven and range. Cordwood, stacked waist-high, is inside the cabin as well. Yet the first two impressions the cabin gives are a sense
of neatness and a sense of space. Michael, three brothers, and two sisters are grown and away now, if not altogether gone. So his parents, Bessie and Harry David, have only four children at home with them still. The beds touch like dominoes. The three youngest sleep in one, parents in another, Minicup in the third. Clothes are in boxes under the beds. A broom hangs by the door. Coming inside in winter, you sweep your legs free of snow before it melts.
of neatness and a sense of space. Michael, three brothers, and two sisters are grown and away now, if not altogether gone. So his parents, Bessie and Harry David, have only four children at home with them still. The beds touch like dominoes. The three youngest sleep in one, parents in another, Minicup in the third. Clothes are in boxes under the beds. A broom hangs by the door. Coming inside in winter, you sweep your legs free of snow before it melts.
No one seems to knock. People just come in and sit down and don't say much until something occurs to be said. Harry, on the bench by the table, may be slowly sharpening a saw, Bessie pouring cups of tea. A radio plays rock. Charlie Juneby, big as a bear, comes in with a frozen mop, and without explanation sits and drinks tea. He is joined later on by his brother Isaac. Stay in one place long enough and almost the whole Village appears and visits and goes. If consumed time is the criterion, visiting is what the Hungwitchin mainly do. They tell about hunting. Jacob Malcolm impressively describes himself stalking moose on snowshoesâsuccessfully running them down. In the phenomenal stillness of the winter air, he lights a match to see how the flame may bend, then he chooses his direction of approach. Jimmy David comes in, and drops a pair of bloody white ptarmigan on the floor, presenting them to his mother. A fresh snowshoe hare already hangs from a wire on the wall. Bessie wears slacks, has a ready grin. Her hair is tied behind her head. Her oldest child is in his thirties, her youngest is eleven. She is some years younger than Harry. Harry is as trim as a coin. He is short and gray-haired, wears glasses. He is intense, and is known for working hard. “I work hard, come in, take a god-damned good shot before I eat. I like coffee, too, soon as I get up.” Harry is the kind of man who shakes Tabasco on his beans. “At home, I'm kind of hazy like, don't feel very good, no satisfaction with anything. I enjoy myself outside, across the Yukon River, feel fine, feel full of hell and vinegar,
full of life, energyâlots of energy.” So saying, one February day he went out of the cabin and walked seven miles in the snow. I went behind him, in his tracks. We are the same size; he has a rolling gait, a shorter stride than mine, but he made the going easier for me. He wore rubber boots, rubber trousers, a blue down jacket, a dark-brown leather hat. In his cheek he had a dip of Copenhagen snuff. When he stood still, to talk, he leaned forward. We walked some distance on the Yukon River, which, under the snow, was now smooth and now mountainously jagged where the ice floes at freeze-up had jammed. Gradually, we crossed over, and then went up a crease in the bluffâHarry without the slightest pause, as if he were ascending stairs, when in fact the snow on that precipitous ground was underlaid with ice, and a slip could mean a long fall down. He carried a stick. “This is a good place to go up from the Yukon River,” he said, reaching back for me with the stick. Beyond the top, he had cut a maze of trails, miles through a forest burn. He works six and seven days a week cutting cordwood for sale. He does not use a power saw. “John Borg lost his way one time, coming to get some wood, and he said, âGod damn it, Harry, you got too many trails up here'âbut he got a good trail to here, don't kick about that.” We passed a large pile of whole spruce trunksâup to thirty feet long, their bark blackenedâthat Michael had cut and had stacked by himself. “He's a young boy. By God, he handle it,” Harry said. “He's a wellliked boy. The girls are crazy for him. He is the chief. He has done his country good. By talking, you knowâmaking everything go nice. I think he's got a little college in him. He studies the right way for his people. He like to see people get along together, make no enemy with nobody.”
full of life, energyâlots of energy.” So saying, one February day he went out of the cabin and walked seven miles in the snow. I went behind him, in his tracks. We are the same size; he has a rolling gait, a shorter stride than mine, but he made the going easier for me. He wore rubber boots, rubber trousers, a blue down jacket, a dark-brown leather hat. In his cheek he had a dip of Copenhagen snuff. When he stood still, to talk, he leaned forward. We walked some distance on the Yukon River, which, under the snow, was now smooth and now mountainously jagged where the ice floes at freeze-up had jammed. Gradually, we crossed over, and then went up a crease in the bluffâHarry without the slightest pause, as if he were ascending stairs, when in fact the snow on that precipitous ground was underlaid with ice, and a slip could mean a long fall down. He carried a stick. “This is a good place to go up from the Yukon River,” he said, reaching back for me with the stick. Beyond the top, he had cut a maze of trails, miles through a forest burn. He works six and seven days a week cutting cordwood for sale. He does not use a power saw. “John Borg lost his way one time, coming to get some wood, and he said, âGod damn it, Harry, you got too many trails up here'âbut he got a good trail to here, don't kick about that.” We passed a large pile of whole spruce trunksâup to thirty feet long, their bark blackenedâthat Michael had cut and had stacked by himself. “He's a young boy. By God, he handle it,” Harry said. “He's a wellliked boy. The girls are crazy for him. He is the chief. He has done his country good. By talking, you knowâmaking everything go nice. I think he's got a little college in him. He studies the right way for his people. He like to see people get along together, make no enemy with nobody.”
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