First Wilderness, Revised Edition: My Quest in the Territory of Alaska by Sam Keith

Author:Sam Keith [Keith, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, nature, essays
ISBN: 9781513261836
Google: 3IFjDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Published: 2018-09-11T23:47:23.405812+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Kenai Moose Hunt

From the window of the Pacific Northern Airlines plane, I looked out on the sharp peaks of Afognak Island. Beyond them was ocean, but it appeared a shimmering lonesomeness through which long, slender clouds sailed. To the west loomed the high white ranges of the Alaska Peninsula. At first you would think they were clouds, but when you looked long enough, you knew they were mountains.

The wheels touched down on the gravel strip at Homer, and the land rushed past. In the distance I glimpsed a glacier, pale blue in the sun, like a mountain torrent stopped with a fast film. Jess Willard, the camp owner, was waiting for Vard, Bob, Tom, Reynold, and me to arrive.

Jess was long, lean, and blue-eyed. His face was bronzed and weather-lined. He wore a bushy moustache with waxed ends and made me think of a high-collared dandy on a tintype or a Confederate cavalry officer.

Johnny Klingbiel, the Bush pilot, had just finished a busy season spotting salmon for commercial fishermen. The tiny floatplane could only carry one passenger at a time, and Johnny singled me out to make the first trip with him into Caribou Lake. I guess I looked the most big-eyed of the group.

I climbed aboard the tiny floatplane with my gear, and we taxied out for takeoff. As we sped over the water and lurched into the air, a boyish delight must have spread all over my face, because Johnny looked at me and grinned. I waved to the others as we shot over them. Some ducks flying below us cast their shadows on the bay so that it looked like two flocks instead of one. Soon we were moving over brown meadows that pockmarked the spruce timber. In one of them I spotted the first moose and jabbed my arm at him excitedly. It was a big bull. He tossed his antlers at us.

“Pretty safe there,” Johnny shouted. “No lakes close and a man’s a damn fool or awful hungry to pack meat that far out of the muskeg without horses or a tractor.”

We saw several cows, some with calves.

“Three blackies,” yelled Johnny, nudging my arm and gesturing. Sure enough, poking through the willow brush was a large black bear followed by two smaller ones. With the sun on them they rippled like black velvet.

About twenty-five minutes out and there was Caribou Lake before us. I looked down on a great raft of lily pads on the one end, their edges upturned by the wind. I noticed several beaver houses, and then I saw the peeled log cabins that Jess had built. It was like a small settlement on the edge of a wilderness.

We landed, the beach hurtling toward us until Johnny throttled down. At the float I met Jess’s wife, Alice, a large woman beaming with warmth. When she laughed she really meant it, and her entire torso shook. She introduced me to their sixteen-year-old daughter, Jo, who promised to show me some trout fishing. Jo exuded all the wholesomeness of one advertising a breakfast cereal.

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