smoked.” Jobe, a Cup’ig man in his thir-
ties with intelligent eyes and a thought-
ful presence, had worked for six years as
an instructor for Head Start, going to
Cup’ig villages and training local teach-
ers. His family stayed in Anchorage while
he travelled, and things soured between
him and his wife: he described coming
home and finding that she’d taken cash
he’d saved and gone down to the strip,
staying drunk for days. He left her in
Anchorage, and took his two kids back
to Mekoryuk. He was now drawing un-
employment, a hundred and ten dollars
a week, to provide for his kids, his par-
ents, and a younger brother.
Jobe pointed to a dogsled that lay
bleaching in the sun outside the house.
It had belonged to his father, who he
said was the last man on Nunivak to
use a sled with a team of dogs. Every-
one had been giving them up in favor
of snowmobiles, except for those who
lashed their old sleds to snowmobiles
to haul supplies. On one of his father’s
last trips, he’d gone out on the ice be-
yond the seashore, and the ice pack had
separated from the land. Realizing that
he couldn’t make it back with his dogs,
he cut them loose, dived into the freez-
ing water, and swam for shore. Much
later, when I had children of my own,
I realized that Jobe was offering me
a gentle warning about the danger of
roaming around Nunivak alone. He also
lent me his rifle, “a Luger 10-shot au-
tomatic .22.”
Jobe told me that the town council
had agreed to allow hunters from “out-
side” to shoot some of the island’s musk
oxen. It had set up a lottery system, and
the winners were allowed to shoot one
apiece, for a fee. Jobe mostly hunted
walrus, but he had guided eight hunt-
ing trips for outsiders looking for musk
oxen, earning as much as a thousand
dollars per expedition.
Marvella Shavings’s husband, Ed-
ward, was also a guide, and when he
heard about my plan he invited me over
to talk about musk oxen. The walls of
their house were decorated with pho-
tos of him with hunters he’d guided,
posing with staunch expressions next
to enormous beasts crumpled at the
shoulder. For the past three years, Ed-
ward explained, the hunters had been
allowed to come in March and Sep-
tember, and the community permitted
forty musk oxen to be killed each sea-
son. I was shocked: the island’s entire
population of musk oxen was about
four hundred.
I’d intended to start collecting qiviut
at Nash Harbor, an uninhabited site on
the northwest coast where the musk
oxen traditionally grazed, and where
Matthiessen had set his base camp. But
Edward said that the oxen, made skit-
tish by the hunting, had abandoned their
usual grazing patterns. Nobody was sure
where they were these days. I made a
new plan: an overnight hike, for recon-
naissance, to an inland summit that the
locals called Musk Ox Hill. From there,
I was told, I’d be able to see for miles
in every direction.B
efore leaving Anchorage, I’d bought
a U.S.G.S. topographical map of the
island, from the Fish and Wildlife Ser-
vice, and had it laminated against the
weather. The map depicted an arrow-
head-shaped mass of volcanic rock, forty-
seven miles wide and sixty-six long,
dotted with ancient cinder cones and
dormant volcanoes that ranged as high
as seventeen hundred feet. The coast-
line was notched in places with lagoons,
where rivers from the interior flowed
into the sea. Elsewhere, the land ended
abruptly in cliffs, where the winds could
blow a man over the edge.
The map showed the interior as an
expanse of undulating tundra, riddledwith hundreds of blue spots that indi-
cated water. The larger dots were cra-
ter lakes; the smaller ones, speckled
across the island, were muskeg, or Arc-
tic bog. Jackie Williams, an old Cup’ig
man in Mekoryuk, had warned me
about muskeg. The water was frigid,
he said, and the surfaces were thick
with algae, making them indistinguish-
able from the surrounding tundra. If I
fell in wearing a backpack, I might not
get back out.
Undaunted, I packed a few days’ pro-
visions and made my way inland. Jackie
hadn’t misled me. The island was cov-
ered in mosquito-infested bogs, and hik-
ing through them felt like wading
through drifts of snow. Dry land was
not much less treacherous: tussocks of
tall grass made for unstable footing,
where it was easy to turn an ankle or
break a leg. The weather was raw and
cool during the day, freezing at night.
Still, I was finally in the Alaskan wil-
derness, and it was exhilarating. “Totally
alone on the tundra,” I wrote, from a spot
that I named Reconnaissance Camp 1.
“Jet streams occasionally, but that’s all.”
I followed reindeer tracks upriver, pass-
ing lichens and flowers that covered
the terrain in outlandish colors. Gulls
and kites wheeled overhead. I slept out
in the open that night, with my sleep-
ing bag spread on a waterproof pad.
Along the river, I had shot two more
humpies with Jobe Weston’s rifle, and I“Hold my briefcase. I’m feeling reckless today.”