ing up and stopped dead. There was a
huge bundle of it!” Once I had collected
everything I could see, I put it on the
scale that I carried with me. There wasn’t
enough of it even to pull down the bar.
Still, I estimated that I might have as
much as a quarter pound—which meant
that, if qiviut was worth its weight in
gold, I was holding about eight hun-
dred dollars’ worth of matted, pungent
fur. I allowed myself a celebration: I
crossed the tundra to the river that came
out at Nash Harbor and plunged in for
a bath, my first since leaving Girdwood.
At nine that night, Tom and the boys
took me out on the boat for a shooting
trip along the cliff face. It was still dusk
on Nunivak, and in the pallid light the
birds wheeled above us: ducks, puffins,
auklets, terns. The boys spun with them
and fired their guns. It was more of a
massacre than a sport; we killed twenty-
five birds and left several floating in the
water. I shot two myself, a guillemot
and an Arctic tern. Tom’s friend John
said they were no good for eating, but
he offered to trade me an edible bird
for them, because his uncle made masks
from the feathers, to sell to tourists on
the mainland. (Missionaries had banned
such spirit masks in the early twentieth
century, but they were retrieved by ex-
plorers and traders, and became prized
by art collectors in New York and Eu-
rope. André Breton was said to have
been entranced by them.)
At the hut, the boys built a fire to
roast birds, stoking the flames with goose
feathers. Over dinner, John confided to
me that he made his living as a boot-
legger. Many of Alaska’s local govern-
ments had banned drinking. In Meko-
ryuk, I’d met the town’s two policemen,
who seemed primarily engaged with
keeping the island dry, holding local
drunks in their jail. But people still man-
aged to smuggle alcohol to the island
by boat, or on the mail plane. John
boasted that he made eighteen hundred
dollars a month smuggling booze into
Native communities, where whiskey
could sell for forty dollars a bottle. At
the end of the month, he never knew
where the money had gone.
With their haul of birds, the boys
decided to head back home. Tom told
me that if I wanted to stay to collect qi-
viut I might be able to hitch a boat ride
back with his uncle, who spent a month
every year at a place called the Dahloon-
gamiut Lagoon, on the southern coast,
catching and drying fish. His uncle’s
time there was almost at an end, he said,
but if I hurried I might just catch him.T
he next morning, I helped the boys
load the boat, giving them some of
my gear to lighten my pack: the qiviut,
the scale, the artifacts I had collected.
At the hut, I cooked two ducks I had
shot, which would be my protein for the
coming days. Tom had left me a plastic
squeeze bottle filled with seal oil, advis-
ing me to eat it to stay warm. I planned
to hike upriver and then strike out over
the hills toward Dahloongamiut. “It’ll be
a long day, but sunset isn’t until 10 pm,”
I wrote in my journal, adding, “Lonely
here. Must have a little more to eat, roast
my birds, and be on my way.”
I didn’t make it far. After a few hours,
a fog rolled in and I couldn’t see more
than twenty feet in any direction. For
most of the morning, the southwest wind
blew on my right cheek; in the after-
noon, it was suddenly on my left, and Ibecame frightened that I was walking
in the wrong direction. (As with my fish-
ing rod, I’d never recovered the compass
after it vanished on the plane ride over.)
It would be reckless to risk getting lost,
and so I found a tussock, set up my pack
to shield me from the wind, and put on
all my warm clothes. I began kicking
the grass, trying to make a flat spot where
I could pitch my tent, and also to get
warm. “I kicked and kicked,” I wrote.
“My feet were numb, no feeling.” When
I finally got the tent up, I found a can
of V-8 juice in my bag; that was dinner.
I awoke to blue sky showing through
the heavy bank of cloud. As I walked,
though, the mist came in again, dim-
ming everything. I wrote in frustration,
“To really hike around the isle, at the
rate I’m going, would take three weeks.”
Late that afternoon, along the west-
ern edge of the river, I startled a flock
of Canada geese, which flew off and set-
tled on the other side of a low ridge. I
had been subsisting on Bisquick and
Spam; goose would be better. As I swung
my rifle into position and crept forward,“If you thought that the way I asked you out was cryptic, wait till
we try to figure out who’s paying for this expensive dinner.”