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“that the rock might see”
News of the North from John Haines
Al Vero Lettore. With this dedication
“To the True Reader,” John Haines (b. 1924) begins his memoir of twenty-five
years in the northern wilderness, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire. Ah, but if you
haven’t followed a wolverine ’s “loping, toed-in track” through Alaskan snow
“uphill for two miles one spring morning, until it finally dropped away into
another watershed,” can you still be Haines’s true reader? Or haven’t trekked
six miles (and back) in a cold wind, chiseled a three-foot-deep hole in pond ice,
built a spruce tripod to sink an aspen-baited trap below the ice, then returned
days after the hole has frozen over to chop it open and pull up a drowned forty-
pound beaver? And this is not to mention rabbit, marten, fox, lynx, deer, moose,
caribou, and grizzly bear.
Haines felt troubled over his first killings, and fearful at times, but meat and
pelts meant a living. Unlike Native Americans “a long time gone” who matter
so much to him, unlike the “quiet hunter” who carved or painted on cave walls
“an image of the thing he followed,” Haines chose this elemental life. We can
be grateful he did.
No other poet has brought such news of a stark locale where “I could walk north
... all the way to the Arctic Ocean and never cross a road nor encounter a village.”
Last night I heard wolves howling,
their voices coming from afar
over the wind-polished ice.