July 30,2009
Dear Friends,
Last night after a hectic day spent in radiotraffic at Maniilaq Hospital in Kotzebue, I headed over to my friends' house for some R and R. Wendell Stalker and his wife Mary have a small beachfront home laden with animal skins, garlands of artificial flowers punctuated by pots of the real thing, pictures of family everywhere, and 5 or 6 guitars huddled along one wall of the living room. I detected as before the faint odor of dog, the scent of its rearend apocrine glands subtly wafting across the room.
Mary, who is usually the first to give me a big hug and big smile, hung back while Wendell, a gentle small Inupiat man in his fifties greeted me in his reserved way with a pat on the back and a mere meeting of chests. Wendell, pony-tailed, wears large glasses which allow one to track his very expressive eyes as he tells his stories in sotto voice. He met Mary five years ago in church where they began singing and playing guitar together. She's a down-sized Mama Cass, a California transplant who has spent her adult life in Alaska.
We started by talking about Wendell's music career. He and his four brothers taught themselves how to drum and play guitar. He played in an underground bar in Kotzebue in the 60's where he had a "chaperone" because he was underage afterhours in an alcohol saturated environment. After high school, Wendell took off for the Jobs Corps, a track many motivated Inupiat youth take to get work that pays. He started playing in a blues band and pretty soon he was making way more money than he was likely to make after graduating from the Corps with a technical skill. He and two other dropouts -- Native Americans from the West -- formed a band called The Local Blues Band -- and they got an agent and made some really great money playing all over the Northwest. He said, "Man, people in Missoula were only good for C and W until we came to town." No one up there knew how much they could like the blues. They made $15,000 on one gig -- gone getting high. Mary laughs then saying, "Yeah, we were all doing drugs, sex, and rock and roll back then." Wendell eventually played with Muddie Waters.
The Inupiat have a long tradition of partying for days on end after a successful hunt. It's like a prolonged carnivorous harvest celebration. Then they sleep for days. Wendell describes Thanksgiving homecomings in the 80's when all five brothers would stay up Thursday through Sunday playing music. "That's how many songs we knew back then." Now two of his brothers are dead and those are bygone days.
A break in the conversation, and Mary tells me that four days ago someone shot and killed Hunter, their 7-year-old dog she raised from just 4 weeks. She starts to tear up and says "I am so mad and I don't want to be mad." Somehow Hunter got out onto the road and when the neighbor children found him he was floating in the ocean face down. I looked blankly at her and asked why anyone would do that and she said, "it's fishing season." I just held her hand and said how sorry I was because a dog is as close to your heart as a child. And I knew too that her oldest son was killed in an auto accident in Fairbanks.
I said,"Well there's nothing like music to raise the spirits -- how bout you guys playing me some songs?" Then they dueted on "The Sweet By and By" and several Christian songs that seemed somehow familiar but I couldn't have named them. And it worked and before you know it they were telling me stories about living "at camp," which means the tundra, wild tundra of northwest Alaska.
Wendell reminisces about the years he and his brothers left their home in Kotzebue to help their aunt and uncle with chores on their homestead in Point Lay, a windy, forsaken settlement on the Arctic Ocean west of Barrow. They squatted in the abandoned sod homes, eventually building new places for themselves. It was a hard place to live for long as the wind never seemed to blow less than 35 miles per hour, 70 to 80 mph being the norm. Two of his brothers stayed on, married, and brought their wives to live there making it a tiny settlement without any amenities in the 80s.
"So," I asked Wendell, "tell me the truth about bears. How dangerous are they really?" The two of them then told me the story of their trip out to Wendell's family camp in a remote part of the tundra two years ago. They only had a tent and a fish-drying rack so this wasn't like a second vacation home. It was spring and a good time to hunt ugruk (bearded seal) from an immobile ice flow, shoot migratory ducks and geese, and fish.
They chose a fishing spot about a thousand yards from their camp where two streams meet forming a little peninsula. About three hours into an idyllic afternoon, Mary, Wendell, and their friend, Roy, spotted two grizzly bears moving aggressively toward them on the peninsula.
"They looked hungry," Mary said. Mary and Roy were very frightened. Wendell said he knew he could not let their fear enter him. He started yelling loudly in Inupiat telling the bears he would kill them if they ventured across the stream. He yelled at them for a very long time. He shot his duck rifle in the air to show them he meant it.
Wendell explains that he had to intimidate them with his body language, his vocal inflection, his eyes or they would surely cross the stream and attack the three of them. He described it as a very spirit-driven confrontation. Underlying it was a fierce cultivation of mutual respect between man and wild animal.
The problem was they had no weapon adequate to kill the bears. Now Mary talks about how stupid she was to have come unprepared. She left her Magmum 375 in the tent and her handgun had no ammo because she had removed it for safety reasons while on the bush airplane. She says this was the only time in all her years in Alaska when she wasn't prepared. "I let my husband down," she said, her disappointment in herself still palpable in the retelling of the story.
The bears turned around and ambled up the hill a ways. Then they turned back again and lay down facing Wendell, and watched and waited for 4 hours. He explains he couldn't retreat or they would have attacked. Mary by that time had rejoined Wendell with her Magnum 375. But they didn't want to kill the two bears except in self-defense. Killing them meant skinning and gutting them without proper equipment or the means to get them home. And a true Eskimo hunter never kills an animal only to leave it there to fester. This is considered deeply disrespectful to the animal's spirit.
Finally the bears went up and over the hill and soon the humans heard a great deal of squalking in the distance as the bears plundered the duck and geese nests, gobbling the eggs and the birds that remained to protect their young.
I asked Wendell how many times he had encountered bears in his life. He said about 15 times -- always with other male Inupiat hunters. I asked how those encounters were different. He said "The bears always ran away."
At the end of the evening I asked what happened to the brothers who stayed on in Point Lay. Wendell said one was eaten by a polar bear. I didn't have the courage to ask about the other.
The problem was they had no weapon adequate to kill the bears. Now Mary talks about how stupid she was to have come unprepared. She left her Magmum 375 in the tent and her handgun had no ammo because she had removed it for safety reasons while on the bush airplane. She says this was the only time in all her years in Alaska when she wasn't prepared. "I let my husband down," she said, her disappointment in herself still palpable in the retelling of the story.
The bears turned around and ambled up the hill a ways. Then they turned back again and lay down facing Wendell, and watched and waited for 4 hours. He explains he couldn't retreat or they would have attacked. Mary by that time had rejoined Wendell with her Magnum 375. But they didn't want to kill the two bears except in self-defense. Killing them meant skinning and gutting them without proper equipment or the means to get them home. And a true Eskimo hunter never kills an animal only to leave it there to fester. This is considered deeply disrespectful to the animal's spirit.
Finally the bears went up and over the hill and soon the humans heard a great deal of squalking in the distance as the bears plundered the duck and geese nests, gobbling the eggs and the birds that remained to protect their young.
I asked Wendell how many times he had encountered bears in his life. He said about 15 times -- always with other male Inupiat hunters. I asked how those encounters were different. He said "The bears always ran away."
At the end of the evening I asked what happened to the brothers who stayed on in Point Lay. Wendell said one was eaten by a polar bear. I didn't have the courage to ask about the other.
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