Asylum--Chapter Four On the River

Chapter Four
On the River

Getting out on the Yukon River was a priority before I left, and I wanted to visit someone who truly lived in the bush—off the road system, miles from Eagle. I managed to wangle an invitation to the Gibson homestead if I could find a way to get there. A man named Ward, whom I’d met at The Whistle Stop, agreed to take me if I paid for gas. Jack, Miranda, and their teenage son, Cole, lived some distance from the river. They didn’t want me to hike up the long trail because of the many bears in the area. Ward was supposed to radio the Gibsons when we arrived, and Jack would come get me on his four-wheeler. But Ward couldn’t raise them on the radio, and he wanted to take me back to town rather than let me walk through the woods unarmed. I managed to talk him into just dropping me off. He offered me his .44 Magnum but I told him I’d never shot a gun. This made him look even more doubtful about leaving me, an inexperienced city slicker, alone on the riverbank. But I insisted, quickly climbing out of the boat and heading up the trail. 

As I peered into the trees, I tried to recall the conflicting information I’d heard about dealing with bears in Alaska: Put bells on your backpack. Sing loudly. Have bear spray ready. (Range: only thirty feet!) The locals said all such ideas were hogwash. They seldom ventured into the woods without a gun. The National Park Service split the difference, training their summer volunteers how to use both bear spray and a shotgun with a good-sized slug. I remembered the old man I’d met on the bus going from Whitehorse to Tok. He got on at the Native community of Northway and sat down across from me. We talked about where we were going and why, and who we were going to meet. At one point, I asked for his advice. He said, “Talk to the bear. Tell him, ‘I am a small person, a woman. You are big and strong. I will not bother you. Please do not hurt me.’ Try it. It works.” I decided to sing instead. The woods rang with the comforting sound of John Prine’s words: “Oh, your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore . . . ”

At the cabin, I was greeted by the deafening barking of countless sled dogs. When I told the Gibsons we’d tried to contact them from shore, Jack jumped at the chance to put one over on Ward. He called him on the radio and asked, “Where’s that woman who’s supposed to coming down here today?”

 “I dropped her off forty-five minutes ago. Didn’t she get there yet?” Ward said, sounding a bit concerned.

“Nope.” 

Miranda, Cole, and I stifled our laughter in the puzzled silence that followed.

Jack finally said, “Aw, I’m just pulling your leg. She’s here.” He chuckled at how Ward swore at him before signing off.

Over a simple lunch of salmon spread on Pilot Bread, I gave in to my natural curiosity and plied them with questions, starting out with how they met. Jack, a former pilot on the Bering Sea coast, said he’d put a personals ad in the newspaper and Miranda had answered it. To all appearances, it was a good match, both of them tough, capable, and at home in the woods. The reason they had so many dogs was that they ran a wilderness adventure business, taking people out on multi-day dog sled trips into the backcountry. To feed the dogs through the winter, it took more than three thousand chum salmon, which they caught in their fish wheel.

Thirteen-year-old Cole had a remarkable faraway look in his eyes, so different from the myopic, screen-focused look of the teens I knew at home. It was as if he were used to surveying the country with an appraising view. I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up and said, “I don’t know but not anything that has to do with dogs.” His parents laughed, acknowledging the hard work involved in feeding and watering three dozen dogs every day. 

I commented that the children and teenagers in Eagle seemed to have a strong work ethic. I always saw them hauling water, stacking wood, helping out the old people in town. 

Miranda said, “Kids in bush villages are different in their maturity. They have more responsibility and fewer restrictions than town kids.”

I said, “The principal told me a lot of the school’s graduates become firefighters, EMTs, and state troopers. She said they are highly competent, the kind of people you’d trust to place your life in their hands.”

“Yes, I think that’s true,” said Miranda.

We got around to talking about people in Eagle, and, without being too obvious, I asked about the man named Billy whom I’m met at The Whistle Stop. Jack said he’d hired him as a packer on a Dall sheep hunting expedition high in the mountains. 

 “When I first met him, I thought he was a bit slow, but then he’d say something funny, even profound.  He’s intelligent. He’s independent, but not too proud to make a small amount of money lugging a sheep’s hindquarter over fifty miles of trail.” 

Jack described the highlight of the trip: lying still on a rocky hillside as a herd of thirteen sheep slowly surrounded him. Accustomed to spotting sheep through a rifle site or binoculars, he watched them just a few yards away as they chewed their cud side to side, scratched behind an ear with a hind foot.

“That didn’t stop me from making sure that bicycle cop from New Jersey got his full curl ram the next day,” he laughed.

After about an hour of visiting, I could tell they had work to do so I told Jack I was ready for him take me back to town. He motored close to shore, steering clear the undercut banks where trees, still rooted in the dirt, had toppled into the water, their branches presenting a danger to boaters. It was easy to be carried by the current into one of these “sweepers,” Jack yelled over the sound of the engine. I thought of the way the Yukon changed every day, banks eroding, gravel bars shifting, eddies appearing and disappearing, and I realized how much skill and guts it took to negotiate this powerful river.

The Taylor Highway had opened at last but only the brave or the foolhardy were making the trip over the still-icy road. The Yukon Queen, the boat that ran to Dawson up in Canada during the summer months hadn’t started making trips yet. Despite the excitement in town about the road opening, I sensed a certain sadness, too. Every year, when winter comes in October and the road closes, the locals don’t say, “We’re snowed in”; they say everyone else is “snowed out.” They cherish their isolation and are somewhat reluctant to end their hibernation—the long dark days when there’s little to do but keep warm, spend time with family, visit with friends, and work on crafts like beading and woodworking. 

I’d gotten just a taste of bush life, but it had given me a glimpse of Smokey’s own experience and why she had loved it so. For me, as it had been for her, the pull of the north was proving to be a current as strong as the Yukon River. I felt comfortable with the lifestyle here. A phone and running water no longer seemed necessities. The few items on the shelves of the tiny general store were adequate for my needs compared to the overwhelming number of goods in the big box stores at home. This place was so different from Outside with its bright lights, billboards, and freeways. Things moved slowly in Eagle. Cars. People. Life. My month here had seemed like a year. 

Once I stayed out until after two a.m., watching the slow fade of the midnight sun, which stretched on for hours, leaving a lingering light in the western sky. The birds were starting to sing already as dawn gathered at the edge of the eastern range, lighting the distant ridges with a luminescent glow as if a whole new world were forming there just beyond the mountains. I felt myself drawn to that new world, beckoned to a future I couldn’t resist. 

Five days before I was to leave Eagle, Billy and I drifted down the Yukon River in his aluminum canoe. He seldom spoke, but I could feel his presence behind me, a welcome stillness emanating from him. It was so different from being with Thomas, who was so intense that it was exhausting merely to be in the same room with him. “How do you do it?” more than one of my siblings had asked over the years. “No offense, but if I was around him all the time, it would drive me crazy.”

Across the river, steep cliffs rose to a forested ridge top. On the near shore, the woods came to the water’s edge. A formation of ducks whooshed overhead so fast the wind through their wings roared like far-off jets.

“What were those?” I asked, not having seen or heard ducks flying so fast before.

“Pintails,” Billy said, a smile in his voice.

A soft hissing came from the underside of the boat.

“What’s that sound?” 

“Glacial silt.” Billy explained that so many tiny bits of rock—pulverized by glaciers high in the mountains—were suspended in the water that you could hear it against the metal hull of the canoe.”

I thought about the processes of glaciers both sculpting and breaking down mountain ranges, and the particles of stone being born all the way to the Bering Sea, 1,400 miles away.

We passed the collection of log cabins that made up the Native village. The small community perched at the top of a steep bank, looking much as it must have a hundred years ago when sternwheelers carried hordes of gold-seekers down the river. They had left Seattle by steamboat, arrived in Skagway, then hiked over the Chilkoot Pass into Canada and negotiated their way through river rapids, finally arriving at the gold fields at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers in Dawson City. Some pushed on to  Eagle and even farther north, heading for the many mining camps that sprang up and quickly disappeared again. An eager cheechako from San Francisco or Chicago must have stood on the deck staring with interest at the village, just as I was. Perhaps he had marveled at the tenacity of the Han, the “people of the river,” who had survived along this stretch of waterway for thousands of years. 

I, too, had ventured north from Skagway, taking a different route than the miners, but seeking something, too. Those dauntless men and women were lucky in knowing what exactly it was they sought. For me, it wasn’t yet definable. But I was finding some of it here on the river: the susurrus of silt against the boat; the still, dark forest with patches of aspen showing a tender green; more ducks—bluebills and shovelers—passing overhead, flying north with the spring. I realized the peace flowing through me like the water beneath the canoe had a great deal to do with the silent, upright man behind me. 

We passed a cluster of wooden crosses on the bank, leaning at various angles as they settled into the permafrost. A lone feather waved from the top of a white cross. I pointed, and Billy yelled, “That’s the Native cemetery.” I called back, “I like cemeteries.” Every June on the anniversary of my mother’s death, I drove out to any one of the tiny graveyards that dot the Palouse. There, in the undisturbed grasslands that had never felt a plow, I laid a carnation—my mom’s favorite flower—on the crumbling gravestone of someone’s mother. 

“I do, too. There’s an old cemetery up by the campground and a newer one behind the school.”

I decided to check out all three graveyards before I left Eagle.

We arrived all too soon at the boat landing at the edge of town, and Billy walked me back to my cabin. I kept close beside him, trying to edge into the pool of warmth around him I’d felt at The Whistle Stop. I was reluctant to say goodbye. When he turned to leave, I called to him and stuck out my hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he took my hand. His clasp was strong, his skin warm and dry.

For the next two days, I could not get Billy out of my mind. I couldn’t figure out why I’d been more at peace on that float down the river than I had been in years. I concluded it was both Billy and the Yukon itself—each an inseparable part of the landscape. I came up with an excuse to go looking for him. I felt like a schoolgirl riding my bike past a boy’s house hoping he would notice. But this was different. I didn’t have a crush on him. Billy was too unlikely a fellow—small, usually grubby, not especially good-looking. True, he had nice arms, but that was beside the point. I was married. But there was that look in his eyes. It was the opposite of the far-away, preoccupied expression Thomas often wore.  I asked him once what he was thinking about.

“Music,” Thomas said. “I almost always have music in my head. Sometimes it’s a phrase that just keeps repeating, or simple baroque melodies spinning out endlessly, eighteenth century cliches played with violin double stops. I hear it and I see the notes in front of me, and even feel the fingerings in my hand.”

“You see the written music?” I asked, fascinated.

“Yes. It's an automatic reaction to hearing music; like, when I’m watching a movie, I see the score in front of my eyes and I have to shut it off because the music notation crowds out the visual image.”

This was so different from Billy’s eyes, which indicated he was all present, all there. Like a dog’s eyes, I thought unflatteringly. Well, I would go looking for this mild-eyed man, and I would start at the church. 

Half the town went to the bible chapel every Sunday. The restaurant was still closed for the winter and the pool hall had been shut down for years now, so the chapel was one of the few places people could come together and visit. There was an off chance Billy might be there, though he usually made himself scarce. I didn’t have the nerve to go to the service, itself, but I casually strolled by after it was over. Billy was standing in the gravel parking lot talking to a man on a four-wheeler. 

When I caught Billy’s attention, he looked surprised to see me.

I blurted out awkwardly, “Would you be willing to take me to see the cemeteries?” 

Billy smiled. “Of course.” He held the door for me and I climbed into his old Datsun pick-up. A rifle stood propped up against the seat and there was a long, machete-like knife and a fishing pole on the dashboard.

“For cutting salmon,” he explained. The knife was scary-looking enough, but it was the gun that made me nervous. Billy assured me it was safe where it was.

 “Does that mean it’s not loaded?”

He looked at me like I was crazy, as if to say “What’s the use of a gun that isn’t loaded?” I wasn’t surprised. Many people in town, both men and women, carried guns, either in their trucks, on their belt, or in a shoulder holster. Once, when I was at the library, a man had even casually stashed his shotgun under a table while he browsed for a book. I held my legs toward the door so they wouldn’t touch Billy’s gun and tried to ignore it. 

The oldest cemetery in Eagle, which dated to the gold rush era, was at the top of a hill not far from the campground. It was sunny and warm amidst the few scattered spruce trees. We entered through a gate in the white picket fence, and I was immediately taken with this small do-it-yourself graveyard. There was no manicured lawn, no professionally carved gravestones, no florist’s flower arrangements. Instead there were crude crosses and wooden markers with hand-written names set in the mossy tundra. Some were graves of soldiers stationed at Fort Egbert, others were probably miners or early settlers, but there were more recent graves, as well.

We walked through the grassy enclosure, delighting in the simple serenity of the place. I felt comfortable with Billy, and I remembered the feel of his strong warm hand the previous afternoon. I slipped my hand into his. I was strangely calm, with no thought as to why I was holding hands with a stranger, other than that it felt good and right. I strained to figure out what he was thinking. He did not pull away but held my hand gingerly, as if fire alarms were going off in his head. We got into the truck without meeting each other’s eyes. Billy said little on the way to the next cemetery, tucked in the woods behind the school. We did not linger at the shady graveyard, which was even more secluded than the other one. A tie existed between us now, something unspoken. 

I was puzzled by what drew me to Billy. Was it simple fascination? I was intrigued by many people in Eagle and yet had no urge to get to know them better, let alone take their hand in a private moment. Was it pity? Everyone, more or less, in this little end-of-the-road village was an outcast or refugee from Outside. I sensed in him a profound isolation and a loneliness which made my own, in comparison, merely skin-deep. I wanted to reach across that void and make contact, as if with an alien from another planet. With Billy’s subsistence lifestyle in a cabin in the northern woods and my ordinary life in a split-level house in middle America, we did indeed inhabit different worlds. I didn’t know if that gap could be bridged, but I wanted to try.

As he drove me to my cabin, I told Billy I had found an army belt pouch at the old dump, which I was going to give to my young nephew, an army nut. He offered to give me several different kinds of bullets to fill it with. I leapt at the opportunity this presented to see him again.

“I could pick them up if you give me directions to your place. I was planning on going out to the Native village tomorrow to look around and maybe take a few pictures of those old cabins we saw from the river.”

If he was surprised, Billy didn’t show it. He just nodded and said, “Well, my cabin isn’t too far from there. After you go through the village, turn right, go up the hill, and come around the corner.” (I’d already learned that “corner” around here meant a curve in the road.)  “Cross Buckeye Creek—there’s a dip in the road there—keep going past the dump on your right—past the gravel pit—there’s a broken-down yellow crane there—then follow that long straightaway. You’ll pass a couple of driveways but keep going—you come around another corner and then start looking for a driveway with a yellow stop sign.” I’d lost him after the first two turns, and I knew the only thing I would remember was to look for a yellow stop sign.

The next day, I caught a ride out to the Native village and wandered around looking at the cabins, some so old and small it seemed impossible for anyone to be living there. It was a bright, warm afternoon but the roads were still muddy and there were patches of dirty snow on the ground. Everywhere, the cabin doors were open and people were coming and going. I wanted to take a photo of a cabin with grass and moss growing on the sod roof and a pair of crossed snowshoes nailed to the wall, but I didn’t dare without someone’s permission. A burly man with the rolling walk of a sailor came out of the house next door and said in a friendly manner that it was okay to take a picture of the cabin—no one lived there anymore.

“I grew up there. Eight people in my family,” he said.

Peering in the door of the one-room cabin, I thought of the large house I grew up in. We had one more person in our family than he did, and eleven more rooms.

Thanking the man, I shook his hand and walked on.

An elderly woman was sitting on her porch watching the river go by, and I asked if I could take a photo of the miniature pole cabin in her yard—a playhouse for her grandkids, she said. But before I could raise my camera, two men appeared around the corner of a cabin spray-painted with the words “GO AWAY.” The thin one with long hair came up close, leaning in toward me, all skin and bones and anger. “What do you think you’re doing taking pictures around here?”

 I was stammering an answer when his companion came to my defense. 

“It’s okay. I remember her. She’s that writer at Redmen Hall. Right, the potluck?”

 “Yes,” I said gratefully, recognizing the man with the overgrown gums. “Your name is Denny.”

The other man interrupted, “A writer, huh? What are you writing about?” He glared at me and then his eyes flitted to the dilapidated cabins around us and back to me again.

“I’m working on a book about my grandmother.” As soon as he heard I wasn’t there to write about the Native village, as too many people had in a derogatory way, his shoulders relaxed and he stood back, allowing Denny to resume the conversation.

“Yeah. What are you doing out here?”

 “I’m actually on my way to Billy’s place but I’m not sure where it is.”

“That’s too far to walk. You know how to ride a bike?” Denny said, looking at me like he wasn’t sure I knew how to tie my own shoes.

“Yes.”

“You gotta borrow my bike, then,” he insisted. He then gave me simple directions to Billy’s house. I thanked him several times before mounting the bicycle awkwardly, aware they were both watching me.

I rode carefully on the rutted dirt road, keeping an eye out for rocks and patches of loose gravel. At the dump, which was much newer than the one near Fort Egbert, ravens swept over the mounds of garbage, reminding me of the talkative ravens in Skagway that made sounds like a cat up a tree, a lost toddler, the hollow “glunk” that a metal bucket might make when hitting the bottom of a dry well.

 At one driveway entrance I passed, a homemade sign proclaimed in large letters: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NAZIS, RADICAL MUSLIMS, AND NATIONAL PARK SERVICE KEEP OUT. I’d heard similar mutterings at The Whistle Stop, something about an on-and-off-again feud between Eagle residents and the Park Service ever since the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve had been established in 1980. According to some of the locals, it had started when “the feds” kicked out the back-to-the-land hippies who’d squatted on federal land downriver. The “river people’s” cabins were burned, although a few historical cabins were spared and restored for public use. The Park Service employee I talked to had a different take on the decades-old events. She said, “With three exceptions, people left willingly.”  Marshall had also told me, “They would have left anyway. Bush life is a young man’s game.”

Hunting and trapping were still allowed in the preserve to keep alive the traditional subsistence use of the region. But some locals now loudly objected to what they saw as increasing regulation and heavy-handed law enforcement by rangers from the Lower 48 more accustomed to dealing with crowds at Yosemite or Yellowstone than finessing their way with a bunch of tetchy individuals already distrustful of outsiders. The Park Service represented everything that many in Eagle hate: big government and its intrusion into their lives.

I was coming to realize that living in such a small community could have its drawbacks, with the clash of strongly held opinions, gossip, opposing factions, and long-held grudges. Relationships were as complicated as those of siblings, with squabbles, rivalries, and shifting allegiances. This was the flip side of what I’d observed at the spring potluck: generosity (thirty-six dollars for a cake!), neighborliness, and a genuine respect for the elderly.

A half-mile farther on, the yellow stop sign came into view. I got off the bike and leaned it against a tree. Billy was in the yard and he walked up the path through a stand of birch and spruce trees.

“Hello.”

“Hello.” 

Billy looked slightly more disheveled than he had been three days before in the canoe. His dark hair had not been combed and had separated into ringlet curls that brushed his shoulders. His glasses were dirty again. There was a beat or two of silence before he turned and beckoned me to follow him. With the exception of pretty little clumps of bluebells here and there, it was like walking through the old dump I’d been poking around in for the past few weeks. Piles of old bottles, pickle jars, and cider jugs. Rolls of chicken wire. A torn fishing net. Rusted traps. A tin bathtub. A camp stool. A couple of metal gas cans. A dogsled turned on its side. A half dozen small animal skeletons hanging in the crook of a tree. A broken oar. Boxes of empty shotgun shells. A rusted out enamel teapot.

Billy bent down and picked a bluebell from its stalk and offered it to me. They taste like cucumber, he said. To my surprise, he was right. Although Billy had said he built it just fifteen years ago, the log cabin in the clearing looked like it had been there forever. Smoke curled from the stovepipe. There was a stillness about the scene despite the barking of two large huskies chained to their doghouses.

“Nicky and Smokey. Yard wolves.” Billy said, by way of introduction, gesturing at the sled dogs.

  “My grandmother’s name was Smokey,” I said.

He simply nodded and held the cabin door for me. 

The enclosed porch—called an arctic entry here—was crammed with more stuff: tools and old coffee cans full of nails and garden seed packets and a rolled up canvas tent tied with rope. But what caught my attention was the door, which was almost entirely covered by a copy of the “Bill of Inalienable Rights,” handwritten by Billy on a piece of heavy paper weathered the color of parchment. Figuring prominently, in especially heavy lettering, was the second amendment: the right to keep and bear arms. Billy pulled the string to lift the latch, and we stepped inside. I felt like I’d entered the home of a Klondike gold miner from the days of ’98.

Dim light filtered in through a few small windows in the log walls. A pair of wood stoves dominated the room: one made of white enamel and other made from an oil barrel turned on its side with a flat piece of cast iron welded on top. A half dozen sooty pans and skillets hung from nails over a chipped sink with a slop bucket beneath the drain. The homemade counter was covered with a nailed-down piece of tin. Dingy gingham curtains partially hid several shelves of canned food. I wondered how long it had been since a woman had set foot inside this cabin, if ever.

A kerosene lamp and a bulky manual typewriter sat on a table made from an old door. In one corner, twenty-five-pound sacks of rice and pinto beans sagged against each other. A doorway led to another room, in which I could see a leather rucksack, a cot covered with stacks of neatly rolled-up clothes, and a bed made of plywood. A pair of well-worn cowboy boots stood beside the bed.

The cabin had no electric lights, no refrigerator, no telephone. The only modern touches were a propane stove and a plastic garbage can used as a water barrel. It smelled of clean dirt, animal hides, kerosene, and the sharp tang of split spruce. The mixture of odors was familiar to me, reminding me of the smell that greeted me whenever I stepped into my friend Liz’s ranch house in Idaho, where the scent of wood smoke lingered and rattlesnake and cougar skins hung on the walls.

Warmth radiated from the barrel stove, and I asked, “Why do you have three stoves?” 

  “The barrel stove you can really stuff with a lot of wood and it puts out a lot of heat. I usually cook on the propane stove, but it’s kind of a pain when it gets really cold, because propane stops flowing at about fifty below, and I have to go out and pour boiling water on the tank. The wood cookstove I just use when I run out of propane.”

From his threadbare clothes, his rusty relic of a truck, and all the other indicators he didn’t have much money, I assumed that running out of propane happened fairly often.

As Billy removed the pistol I’d noticed on his hip and stuck it in a holster hanging on the wall, I continued my survey of the room. On the back of the door was a photograph of Geronimo holding an assault rifle. I looked closer. The rifle was a cut-out picture that had been glued into place in the Apache’s hands.

“It’s an AK-forty-seven,” Billy said. “From a gun catalog.” 

I nodded, not knowing what to say. Above the door a set of caribou antlers held a rifle—or maybe it was a shotgun—and a battered leather hat with two large feathers stuck in the band. The door closed with a latch made from a heavy wooden bar that could be lifted from the inside with a peg or from the outside by a string. Billy showed me it could be locked by putting a 30.30 bullet into a hole drilled through the bar and into the doorframe. He did not lock the door. I was alone in a strange man’s house, and yet I had no fear. It was he who seemed uneasy.

  “Would you like to sit down?”

I looked dubiously at the ancient couch with a black bear hide slung over the back, the fur worn and none too clean-looking. Billy started clearing a place for me. I thought he was trying to unearth the couch cushions, hidden beneath an impressive array of junk mail, bulk food catalogs, work gloves, towels, hunting magazines, old jeans, and stray socks. It was not until he stopped tossing objects to the other end of the couch and laid a caribou hide over the remaining mound that I realized the odd assortment of stuff served as cushions. He explained he had acquired the couch before adding on the arctic entry and he was now stuck with it because it was too big to fit through the door.

“I’ve thought about taking the chain saw to it, but then where would I keep my mail?”

I laughed at his gentle humor, and he surprised me by sitting down close to me with a thick, glossy gun catalog. He turned the pages, pointing to one photo after another, explaining how he once had this particular pistol but had swapped it out with someone named Memphis for this other one, here. Billy spoke of the weapons with a mixture of affection, admiration, even reverence, but to me, the guns were black, brutal, and scary.

  “I give up,” I said, flopping back on the couch. “They all look alike to me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, truly apologetic. “Get me talking about guns, and I can go on and on. I didn’t mean to bore you. You’re probably not too interested in guns.”

“I’m not,” I confessed, hoping it didn’t sound too rude. But it was better than explaining I was not just bored by guns, I abhorred them. I hated the NRA. I regularly sent money to a gun control organization. I thought semi-automatic weapons were heinous and should be banned. But this was Alaska, after all.

“Oh, the stuff for your nephew! I almost forgot.”

He went to the gun rack, pulled out a drawer and poked around before handing me a fistful of bullets of difference sizes, including a perfectly round one, which he called “a pumpkin ball.” I stood up to put them in my backpack and then took another look around, intrigued by the curious things I saw on the log walls.

“Do you mind?”

“No, please do.”

I saw many objects I couldn’t identify, including a shrunken something that looked like part of an umbilical cord.

  “What’s this?”

  “The gall bladder of a lynx.”

 “And this?”

“Dried castor from a beaver.”

Billy didn’t seem to mind my questions, so I continued slowly around the room, examining everything. A map of the upper Yukon River. A fan belt hung on a nail. A photo of his mother. A cross dangling on a string, pinned to a post with a rusty dart. An ad for a Russian pistol. A picture of his family when he was a kid in Maine. A calendar with a wholesome-looking young woman wearing nothing but a dozen ermines dangling from a string around her waist. She was snuggling up to a horse, so her breasts were not exposed, but all the same, Billy looked embarrassed. “They’re all local girls. Well, they’re from Dawson,” he explained.

Dawson City, Yukon Territory, seventy miles away by water (or one hundred and forty miles by road) was the closest town to Eagle, if you didn’t count the twenty-five gold miners scattered along the streams near Chicken. Apparently Billy considered Dawson near enough to be part of his immediate neighborhood. 

On the windowsill sat a small scale like the kind used in old Western movies to measure gold dust. 

“That’s for weighing gunpowder.”

Next to the scale was a cocoa tin.

“What’s in here?”

“Homemade gunpowder.”

Making your own gunpowder seemed something akin to cooking up a fresh batch of nitroglycerin.

  “Don’t tell me you make your own bullets.”

“All right, I won’t, but I do.”

 “You melt the lead and everything?”

 “Yes.”

I noticed Billy never said yeah or yup, the way the other men here did, but always yes. There was a certain formality to his speech that I found appealing. He spoke hesitantly, with long pauses as he searched for the right words. He seemed in no hurry to get his thoughts out. I didn’t feel the urge to finish his sentences for him, as I often did with people who talked slowly.

I looked for a long time at a large map of Eagle drawn by a young woman named Lena who had grown up on a homestead downriver. There was a childlike simplicity to it, as there was to Eagle itself. Both in town and on the map, the few commercial buildings were labeled “Groceries,” “Laundromat,” “Pool Hall.” It appeared more like a game board than a geographical map, and I had, again, the sense of Eagle being not quite real.

I knew that many villages around the state were “dry” communities, banning all alcohol, but Eagle was a “damp” community. Here it was legal to consume alcohol but not to sell it.

“The pool hall has been closed for a long time, but it used to be a speakeasy with a room at the back where you could buy an illegal drink. Now the bootleggers keep everyone supplied with booze, if you want to pay three times as much as you can get it for in Tok. Plus a lot of people make their own wine and beer.”

“That explains the pile of beer bottles in the yard.”

He laughed, “Yes, sometimes I clean them out and brew up a batch.”

I returned to examining the map. It showed elderly Esther walking her dog on the grass airstrip, Bob’s sled dogs sitting on top of their doghouses across from Redmen Hall, and the men gathered at the millionaire’s bench. Here was the log church on the riverbank and the barn on the hill. The old schoolhouse was there, too, looking like it had been airlifted in from New England. Passing it one day, I’d wished I could see inside the little white building, but it was now only open during the Yukon Quest sled dog race as a place for exhausted mushers to collapse into bunk beds while their dogs curled up and slept on straw outside. People were proud that Eagle was known as the friendliest checkpoint along the thousand-mile route that traversed wilder, more remote country than the more well-known Iditarod.