Perfection, far away on the horizon

KOTZEBUE — A few days ago on a sunny spring evening, I took young Johnson Black Jr. hunting for ptarmigan. He doesn’t get to go out on the land as much or as far as he would like — partly my fault for being busy — and he was excited to be on a snowgo, with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

We traveled south behind Kotzebue. The land and ice sprawled for miles in all directions, snow-covered and glaring white under a huge blue sky. I felt that ache of longing and love for spring, the land so big and beautiful and bright after winter, and that feeling I have every year of not wanting this season to end. I had to squint, and wished I’d brought my sunglasses, then realized I was wearing them. Way off on the distant horizons, mountains were pale lumps and hazy peaks, and I wanted to explore all of them.

Within a mile we ran into ptarmigan, like white marbles scurrying from twig to twig, pecking at frozen willow buds. Their bodies were still snow white, but their necks were beginning to show the first brown of spring plumage. They worked fast, focused intently on gathering food, running from shrub to shrub. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I knew more about this species, so busy out here, living off the tundra. I wondered if the deep snow provided them buds higher up the branches than usual, and if they couldn’t wait for a seasonal change of diet — cranberries and crowberries melting out. All spring I’ve marveled at the huge numbers of ptarmigan, especially along the Kobuk River, and marveled too at how their million trails in the snow appear like an alternate form of art.

We stopped, and Johnson aimed and hit perfectly, in the head, his first shot. He wanted me to congratulate him, which I did, but not repeatedly as he wished. I figured there would be more birds ahead, more shots, plenty that might go poorly. Hunting is that way, a teetering balance between perfection and an unproductive unpleasant mess.

I showed him how to pluck the fine white feathers. Johnson has a bit of an issue with fleeting attention (as do I these days) and was only half listening. He told me about metallurgy and a knife he’d made from a file. “Want to see it? I brought it. Want to see it?”

I refused, suggesting maybe later, and kept returning to explaining how to pluck cleanly and perfectly, to not tear the tissue-thin skin. “Ptarmigan are easy. Geese are harder. Swans even harder. Loons, they’re just about impossible.”

“How did you used to pluck loons?” Johnson asked.

“We didn’t, we skinned them!”

I stared out over the tundra and back through the years, suddenly remembering traveling to the coast with my parents as a 9-year-old, and Keith Jones in his brown homemade wooden boat, getting out his loon-skin tool bag to work on his 40-hp Johnson outboard.

“People used to make tool bags out of loon skins,” I told Johnson. “They said the greasy skin kept your tools from rusting. We’d sew the neck and wing holes closed, and sew an old zipper up the back.”

By then it was 8 p.m., the light on the land growing more beautiful. The evening was calm, a rare thing on the Baldwin Peninsula. We found more ptarmigan, and he made more shots, some not quite as accurate. I fired a few times, and immediately felt that draw to hunt, to get, to achieve, to pull the trigger, to send bullets as perfectly as possible, taking lives in the process — all subliminal good and bad components of hunting.

We parked up on a rise, and I plucked a third bird, then showed Johnson how to remove the crops and guts. I blew up a crop to show him how we used to make our own tiny balloons. Down below a flock of ptarmigan watched from beyond the black lump of a beaver lodge. “Do you want to get more? Are we going to go down there?” He pointed at the beaver house.

I shook my head, and showed him how to save the gizzard. Johnson wasn’t in a hurry to work on the birds he’d shot — two more through the body — and got out his homemade knife to show me. I told him we needed to keep working; I’d promised to cook dinner for a friend.

We were on the lagoon ice, almost home, when I looked back. Johnson wasn’t behind me. He was zooming east, toward the ocean. In my shack on the edge of town, I built a fire but didn’t take off my gear. I texted his mom to see if he was home. I had seen I had a text from Ambler, reminding me to call my own mom — it was her birthday — and another from a Fish and Game biologist, Brendan Scanlan, saying his team had arrived by snowmobile from Noatak. I called my mom, then fired up my snowmobile to stop by the Federal bunkhouse. I was in a hurry; I’d promised to make dinner, my propane burner wasn’t working and my caribou was still frozen.

Brendan and his co-worker, April Behr, were very red-faced. They’d spent the last 10 days tagging sheefish, then traveling in cold weather and a lot of sun to study Dolly Varden near the Kelly River. I was a little worried about April’s cheeks being permanently scarred, but reminded myself I hadn’t looked in a mirror lately, and had spent the last 50 years burning and freezing my own face.

It was good to catch up. We talked fast, sharing the beers I had while they cooked. They reported not being overly successful catching and tagging Dolly Varden — what we locally call trout — and how welcoming and kind Noatak people had been. Somewhere in there, Brendan mentioned observing local fishers at times leaving skinny spawned-out trout on top of the ice. Leaving them in favor of fatter better-tasting trout. He asked me the Inupiaq word for that fish, at that stage of its life cycle. “Seth, how do we get folks to put them back down the holes so they can spawn again and make more fish?”

“I don’t know that word.” I grinned suddenly. “As a kid we called them ‘mean’ trout! The fat silver ones we called ‘nice’ trout. Back then I thought they were two different species.”

I found myself remembering Keith again. I was 4 and my brother Kole was 5; Keith led us down the hill from our old igloo, out onto new fall river ice. Along shore the water was only a foot or so deep under the glass clear ice. We peered down, blocking the light with our mittens, staring at bright magical pebbles, sunken logs and unidentifiable tiny fish. Keith showed us how to set bent-nail hooks, and the next day -- lo and behold! -- on our line was a long dark skinny trout with glowing pink dots. It was the first mean trout I’d ever seen. We boys were very excited about our fish, and yet disappointed that it was skinny, not a desired thing in Inupiaq culture. I don’t remember whether we ate it, fed it to the dogs, or let it go. That was a long time ago, the Arctic felt impossibly vast back then, and I don’t think we thought to put that poor tired female Dolly Varden back down under the ice.

“Let me think about your question,” I told Brendan. I glanced at my phone, embarrassed to do so but needing to. Johnson’s mom had replied: saying, no, he wasn’t quite home; he’d gotten sidetracked and was out on the ice now, phoning her to ask if he could hook for sheefish. I apologized, told Brendan and April that I had to go. My attention felt fragmented, the pieces not useful. I peered around for my beaver hat and then halted with it in my hand. “To answer your question. Hmmm. I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like people are changing here in the region, like there’s a change in the air. Definitely the threat of the proposed Ambler Road is part of it. That — and the caribou not migrating.”

I told them I thought people were beginning to see resources such as trout and sheefish, salmon and caribou and all the rest as not endless, or infinite, and actually in need of our thoughtful protection. I mentioned that I was still mulling over my recent trip across the Seward Peninsula with beaver and permafrost biologists. “I believe there’s some kind of a balance between science knowledge and our land-based knowledge. It can be a good combination. We just so seldom get the proportions right.”

Outside, I fumbled for my sunglasses, and checked the time. I was late, as always. The sun seemed to hang in the sky, unmoving. I started my snowgo, and headed north along the ice on the edge of town. Ahead I could see distant black dots on the snow, a group of people jigging for sheefish. Out across the smooth frozen expanse toward Siberia, the horizon glowed orange, a perfect flat line. For a few moments, I felt the presence of untold millions of creatures, everywhere, under the ice, under the snow, in the sky, so many lives out there working to make more lives.