THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 43
mists, and soon retreats before the rush
of sea fog, as if uncertain of its author-
ity in this melancholy place.” A few
pages in, Matthiessen described the
bounty available on the island: “Com-
pared to the goat, which supplies but
three ounces of wool annually, the musk
ox is prodigal in its shedding, and about
six pounds per animal, each summer, is
scattered on the winds of the northern
barrens.” By the following day, I had
begun sketching out a new plan: “Have
decided definitely to go to Nunivak,
Bering Sea.”
I had finally found paying work, lay-
ing cinder blocks for an irascible Czech
named Ivan, who was building a cabin
in Girdwood. He promised me eight dol-
lars an hour, which was good money;
canning fish paid only five. With ten days
of hard work, I could just about pay for
my expedition. Making a very rough es-
timate of the quantity of qiviut produced
by the musk oxen of Nunivak, I con-
cluded that I could quickly collect a hun-
dred thousand dollars’ worth—a figure
that stayed vividly in my mind. Hearing
my calculations, Mick decided to invest
in the expedition. He didn’t expect any-
thing back, he said; he just wanted to be
involved. He procured a map of the musk
oxen’s migratory patterns, showing where
they went to breed and where they shed
their qiviut.
The greatest expense was a ticket on
the bush airline that flew to Mekoryuk,
the Cup’ig settlement on Nunivak. Mick
paid for my ticket—two hundred and
fifteen dollars—and gave me two hun-
dred to outfit myself. With this wind-
fall, I could afford a portable stove, a
parka and boots, some food, and other
odds and ends, including a handheld
scale for weighing qiviut, a compass, vi-
tamins, fishing lures, and a flashlight.
Mick lent me binoculars, a mess kit, and
a tent. “What a trusting, considerate
guy,” I wrote. “I shall do my best on
Nunivak to come out wi/something.”
A few days later, Mick drove me into
Anchorage to finish gathering equip-
ment. We arrived early and waited in
his pickup for the Army-Navy surplus
stores to open up on Fourth Avenue.
Known as Eskimo Strip, it was a few
blocks dotted with rough bars, peep-
shows, pawnshops, and liquor stores.
As the sun rose, we saw shapes stir in a
vacant lot: people waking up after a
drunken sleep. We watched a tiny woman
walk into a bar that was already open.
A moment later, she was shoved back
outside and stood there, beseechingly, as
a big white man in cowboy boots waved
her away. It was a depressing spectacle.
“Sleazeville Alaskan style,” I wrote.
At midnight on July 22nd, with the
plane scheduled to leave in six hours, I
took stock. “I am finally packing every-
thing to go,” I wrote. “Got my food, a
pair of boots, a Pflueger fishing rod ’n’
reel with/lures, line, sinkers, leaders,
hooks. Decided to forgo gun, pants and
parka. Treated a coat of M’s with a can
of Scotchgard. Hopefully should work
out ok.” I had also included ten “qiviut
bags,” which Mick had stitched out of
an old canvas tent that neighbors had
given us. We were a bit hazy on how to
go about marketing the qiviut once I
had it, but Mick promised to look into
it while I was away.T
he first airplane took me as far as
Bethel, a frontier town on the
southwestern hump of Alaska. At the
airport—a building that could have
been mistaken for a Greyhound sta-
tion—I learned that my fishing rod hadsomehow been left behind by handlers
in Anchorage. I was told that it would
be sent along on the next flight, three
days later. “Oh well,” I wrote. “It’ll have
to be dried reindeer meat and seal jerky.”
Looking through my backpack, I dis-
covered that my flashlight and compass
were gone, too.
From the airplane, Nunivak looked
wild and forlorn, a rumpled, brown,
treeless mass sheared off from the con-
tinent by a forbidding ocean channel.
The island’s center was invisible—
shrouded in mist, just as Matthiessen
had found it. The only other passen-
gers were residents returning from a
wedding on the mainland. When we
landed, they offered me a lift into Me-
koryuk, so I climbed into the back of
their pickup truck and rode on a dirt
track into town.
Mekoryuk consisted of a few dozen
buildings, mostly weather-beaten clap-
board houses and a few Quonset huts,
surrounded by the detritus of the hunt-
ing and fishing life—tin boats, snow-
mobiles, reindeer antlers tacked to the
sides of houses. There was a school, a
general store, a post office, and a make-
shift jail. The most imposing structure“I’m reassigning the murder case to the Scandinavian police. They’ll
make sure it gets the withdrawn bleakness it deserves.”