If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name Part 19

"PARTIES," TED GREGG often said, "make the world go round." And he would have known. Ted was one of the few men in this town who actually had dinner parties, as opposed to feeds-as in a game feed or fish feed. Other men ate; Ted dined. As far as I know, he is the only man in Haines who ever wore a silk smoking jacket and cravat. He had many costumes for daily activities, often punctuated by the right hat. At the beach, he wore flowered trunks and a wide Panama hat. When it was stormy, he put on a yellow sou'wester. He had a plaid tam-o'-shanter and a black beret. Sometimes he even wore a dress tartan kilt. Ted really did make his world a stage.

Ted made what he helped create in Haines the standard, instead of comparing it to what he'd left behind when he came here from Connecticut after the war. Ted taught me that while it's good to hold on to some traditions, it's just as important to make new ones-ones that both reflect and spotlight this place and our lives in it. I still listen to Handel's Messiah in December and think about New England. But the Snow Dragon means Christmas to me now. And it isn't until I hear Alvin and the Chipmunks' version of "Frosty the Snowman" from inside the dragon costume that I know Christmastime has arrived.

In spring, when the new sun makes everything look good as it falls over Pyramid Island, the river, the sea, and the green mountainsides, I often think about Ted. I watch the crows flying back to their tree on the island and the shadow from a cloud moving across a far slope. A bike tour heads down the road. There's a cruise s.h.i.+p at the dock on the other side of town. In the distance, I can hear planes full of tourists taking off at the airport to see Glacier Bay or Glacier Point. Skiffs are trolling for king salmon out at Letnikof Cove. In twenty years, we've never had another April quite as warm and sunny as that very first one when I met Ted on his front lawn. I remember how he compared Haines to Madeira. I now know that Haines weather is really nothing like that on the balmy island off Portugal. But in a way, he was telling the truth. Lots of people have willed Haines to be a paradise, and because we do, it is. Ted wanted Haines to be like Madeira, and he made it so. And when I was in his company, playing the part of a young mother or an old friend, it was.

DULY NOTED

Pet owners can go through a lengthy grieving period when a beloved animal friend dies. Haines hospice volunteer Beth MacCready is finding that out firsthand after the death of old age of Bonsai, her constant companion for thirteen years. "I was holding him in my arms when he died," she said, but "there's still this sense of disbelief. It's like someone came in and moved all the furniture around." Bonsai lived through two German shepherd attacks and made the news in 1993 when, using standard human CPR techniques, Dave Nanney revived the seemingly dead West Highland terrier, who was choking.

Mother Nature had help recently bringing spring to Haines. Tired of waiting for a thaw and anxious to open for the season, Troy Fotta and Yngve Ollson cleared all the snow out of the woods at the Port Chilkoot Camper Park. It took them two days and many dump-truck loads.

Parents Les and Jan Katzeek and Terry Heinz stayed behind to clean up after a fourth-grade picnic at Battery Point in the rain this week and were given an unexpected treat for their trouble. They were lucky enough to spy a pod of about ten killer whales cruising toward Portage Cove.

Fis.h.i.+ng and good weather don't often coincide, but they did recently. Charter boat captain Craig Loomis showed off a tan that looks more Baja than Berner's Bay while he was in town this week. The lifelong Haines resident said he's never seen anything like the eighty-degree weather we've been having. "But hey, I'm loving it," said Craig, who recently received a $750 tip from a happy client. "Can you believe it?" he asked.

I Am Not Resigned

THE SUMMER WE WERE building our cabin, there were a lot of bears around. Although my dog, Carl, was with me, I carried bear-repellent pepper spray in my pocket all the time. The three carpenters working with me were even more cautious; they had rifles. We never did run into any bears. I did suffer from one minor bear-spray attack, though. On a wet afternoon, I wiped my nose with the back of a glove, and in seconds it felt like I'd been punched in the face. My eyes watered, my lips went numb, and the tender rims of my nostrils stung something fierce. The builders noticed and quit working.

"Pepper spray," I squeaked. "Must have leaked in my jacket." The biggest guy acknowledged that the stuff could really sting. Then he launched into a long story about bartending in Hawaii when he was married to his first wife, who left him to join the marines-or maybe it was for an ex-marine-and he had to use bear spray to subdue drunken Samoans when they got out of hand at the bar.

"They'd run down to the beach and stick their head under water to get rid of it. Funniest thing I ever saw," he said. I grabbed his water bottle and poured it on my face. Then I sucked up some water and blew it out my nose. Three times. Carl wagged his tail. He's not much of a protector. He'd rather be sleeping on the sofa.

I used to try to keep my dog off of the furniture, stacking lamps and books on the couch before going to bed. In the morning, I'd catch him wedged into an armchair. When he's in Christian's room, he'll take the bottom bunk and wriggle as close to the wall as he can get, then stretch out, like a person. He weighs 110 pounds and thinks I can't see him. My favorite picture of Carl was taken outside; he's in a lawn chair. And Carl will always get in the truck because the seat is as soft as a couch-and it takes him places. Try getting him to ride in the back, like any self-respecting Alaskan dog, and you end up driving away with Carl chasing behind until you stop, open the door, and let him in.

Water dogs outnumber huskies at least three to one around here. Carl is a black Labrador retriever. He's never been duck hunting, but throw a rock into a pond or the ocean and he'll go after it like a pearl diver. He looks like a seal. The last thing you see before he completely disappears is the tip of his tail. He always surfaces, breathless, with a rock. Not necessarily the one you threw, but still, it was pulled off the mucky bottom with his teeth. Carl does have one hobby he shares with the furry huskies most people a.s.sociate with the north: He's a runner. Not a take-off-in-the-woods-and-don't-come-back-for-three-days Bad Dog kind of runner. Carl would never run alone, or even with another dog. Carl runs with me, almost every day.

Ten years ago, I was sitting in a doctor's office in Juneau, looking at the framed doc.u.ments on the wall while he lectured me about getting more exercise. I was tired, eight months pregnant with my fourth child in nine years, and not in a very good mood. I skipped over all of the medical school diplomas and settled on a Portland marathon finisher's certificate. It said 3:43. I memorized it, vowing silently to start training for a marathon as soon as I had the baby, go to Portland to run it, and do it faster than my doctor had.

My dad was a marathon runner, and Chip is, too. Which may be why I didn't think it could be all that hard. When I told Chip about my plan he wrote me up a training schedule, advised me on running shoes and gear, and, most important, came home every day at lunch to stay with the kids while Carl and I went running. Next to reclining on the couch and diving for rocks, running is Carl's favorite hobby. I asked him to run with me when a former police chief warned me that a woman running alone on remote roads might not be safe, even in Haines. The chief said there was a man living in his car, out by the derelict sawmill, who didn't have proper ID to get through the Canadian border. He also didn't have enough money to pay for a ferry ticket south. But he did have a long police record, much of it for s.e.xual a.s.sault. "You didn't hear it from me," the chief said. "He's rehabilitated in the eyes of the law, so I can't do anything about it. Wouldn't be legal. But I thought you should know." I ran the Portland Marathon with Chip a year after J.J. was born and beat my doctor's time by twenty minutes. When I called to tell him, he was thrilled. We're all friends now, and he cheerfully takes full credit for my postpartum activity.

Today Carl and I are taking advantage of the extra hours of spring daylight to stretch our run out past the sawmill to Lutak. I'm training for another marathon and need the twenty-plus miles right now. Lutak is a neighborhood of houses cl.u.s.tered on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lutak Inlet, next to the Chilkoot River and Chilkoot Lake, ten miles from Main Street in Haines. There's no city power or telephone. Generators and solar panels run households that range from cabins with outhouses to modern waterfront homes. A gravel road separates the main settlement from a wide, sandy beach and expansive tidal flats. Fish running up the river attract sh.o.r.ebirds, sea lions, whales, and more of the ever-present seals. Everyone loves to watch the seals.

Carl and I usually go all the way out to the lake, but this time we stop at the bridge, where a small crowd has gathered. One woman points out three dead seals on the beach. She says she saw the killers: three Native men and one white man in a green pickup truck. After they shot the seals, they paddled out in a canoe to retrieve them. When they couldn't find them, she says, they put the boat in the truck and drove away. She was so mad she called the paper.

Tom headlined the story SEALS SHOT, ABANDONED AT LUTAK. He used the woman's photograph of a dead seal, belly up, on the flats at low tide. In the background is another dead seal, and the caption explains that a third carca.s.s was just out of sight. "I think it's gross. Just to shoot them and leave them there," Tom quoted her as saying. He also reminded readers that it's not illegal to shoot seals. Alaskan Natives are allowed to hunt them as long as the meat isn't wasted. Lutak residents argued, with pictures to prove it, that the seals had been left to rot.

The next week the paper printed a letter to the editor from one of the seal hunters. He had just moved to Haines but was originally from Gambell, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. He didn't argue with the sequence of events. What puzzled him was our reaction. He wrote that in Gambell when a seal is shot and not recovered, a person who finds it before sunset is obligated to return it to the hunter. If the seal isn't found until the next day, tradition dictates that the finder is "lucky enough to keep it." He blamed the people living at Lutak for wasting the seal meat. He wanted to know why no one had asked around town about who owned the new green truck. He pointed out that someone could have put a "Listener Personal" on the radio. Since no one tried to find him, he asked, why didn't they at least butcher the seals? The lost seals could have fed his family for several weeks.

As had others, I a.s.sumed the seal killing was a senseless act of violence, disturbing the peace of a rural neighborhood. It never occurred to me that someone should eat the seals, any more than I would think to eat a dog. It also turned out to be more complicated than that. Haines is about 15 percent Tlingit, unlike the mostly Native Gambell, which means most of us couldn't have claimed the seal meat even if we had wanted to.

The hunter views seals as healthier than shrink-wrapped beef and their killing as part of a time-honored tradition. He needs wild game to live, both economically and spiritually. Some of the critics of the seal hunter also live a simple subsistence life. They rely on big gardens, goats, and chickens to feed their families. They rightly object to the sensibility of some hunters to shoot anything that moves, often with no respect for people's homes or safety. Several years ago the old dirt road to Lutak was upgraded to two full lanes, chip-coated, and lined. The people who live out there have seen a lot of changes. Tourists now crowd the road, riverbank, and lakefront most of the summer. Residents are increasingly concerned about finding ways in a growing town to preserve the natural beauty without compromising local customs. We all are worried about how to make a living by sharing the beauty and peace while at the same time protecting it. After hearing the hunter's explanation, the residents acknowledged that they might have overreacted.

ON A CLEAR MORNING a few weeks later, as Carl and I walked on the beach by our house, Carl brought me the forelimbs and shoulder girdle of a seal skeleton. It was clean except for the neatly cut flippers hanging from it like big gloves on a scarecrow. I recognized the carefully cleaned seal remains as a sign that there are enough seals living in Haines to hunt; the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife wouldn't allow it if seals weren't so plentiful. I also knew that my Native neighbors are hunting them, even this close to town, without bothering anyone. This time, I considered myself lucky to have stumbled onto a well-used dead seal. It's been a long time since I really changed my mind about something, and I'd forgotten how good it feels: like suns.h.i.+ne after a dark winter.

BUT ALL THAT was a long time ago. Now Carl and I are both going gray: his face and my head. I tell him I don't mind, if he doesn't. Chip likes my gray hair, too; he says he'd feel funny if I still looked twenty-five when he was going bald. Aging is not a big worry for Chip and me. We are in our forties, and with any luck we still have miles to go before we sleep. But at almost twelve, Carl doesn't. His full name is Good Dog Carl-the kids named him after the series of children's books about a rottweiler. They loved those picture stories. When Chip came home with a black puppy, although he was a Labrador, they immediately thought it must be "Good Dog Carl," and so he became, and still is.

Carl was easily housebroken. He never chewed anything he wasn't supposed to, never jumped up and knocked anyone over, never ran away, and even as a puppy seemed to have an old soul. From the beginning, he understood what I was saying. Carl used to run in front of me; now he trots faithfully behind me, his tail wagging like a metronome. When I first noticed a lump on his shoulder, I took him to the vet, who visits seasonally from Juneau. She said it didn't look good. It might be cancer. If she cut into it, the disease might spread. At his age, she said, it would be best to let nature take its course.

CARL IS BARKING and running back and forth, in his stiff way. I see him out the window and go down to the beach to find out what's the matter. A harbor seal is stuck in the sand a long way from the water. She must have fallen asleep in the sun and been left high and dry when the twenty-foot tide went out. She is built like an overinflated torpedo-shaped balloon. Her belly rests on the ground, but her flipper sticks out sideways above it. The only way she can push across the sand is to roll over almost ninety degrees so one flipper can grip the sand, then roll back and use the other flipper the same way. She's going nowhere fast.

I shut Carl inside and call the Fish and Game officer, who sensibly says to wait until the tide comes up, when she'll swim away. But I'm worried. My dog isn't the only one who frequents this beach. A big malamute that lives nearby might stumble upon the seal and instinctively kill her.

It's Thursday, and the paper is at the printer in Juneau, so Steve, who's at home next door, says he'll help me. He walks over with a blanket to drag the frightened animal back into the water. We stand over the seal and she blinks her big wet eyes at us. "She's crying," I tell Steve.

"No, she's not," he says, and tells me that seals need to keep their eyes wet to see. Then he drops the blanket on top of her, and together we roll her into it. She suddenly whips back and forth, shaking the blanket loose and baring salmon-shredding teeth very close to my hands. At least she doesn't seem sick, just frightened. Still, we have to help her get back to the safety of sea, whether she likes it or not. Steve steps behind her and she moves forward, rolling herself, slowly, across the sand with her flippers. Fright and anger have motivated her to make the awkward push. I walk to the other side, and she zigs, and then zags, to avoid us. Like two sheepdogs, we herd her slowly toward the sea, until she slips into the waves. Before leaving, she pops up her sleek head for one last long look. I suppose I could say she was thanking us, but that wouldn't be true. Looking into those deep brown eyes, I didn't feel a soulful connection-certainly not like the one I have when I look into Carl's eyes. There was no mutual acknowledgment of love or even respect from the seal. I wanted to feel it, but she wouldn't let me. "Leave me alone," her wild eyes said. "Go away."

It was, though, a look I'd seen before. Actually, J.J. saw the moose first-and screamed. Her sister froze, terrified. Stoli had seen only one other moose this close, a few months before, on our way home from the cabin. Then, Chip and I were closing up the house and let the kids go on down the trail ahead of us. Sarah told us later that the huge bull moose lowered his antlers and charged them. Sarah's a high school all-American swimmer. Her nickname is Xena. She broke a tree branch and wielded it like a sword, yelling for Eliza and the little kids to get up a tree. The moose kept coming, shaking the ground with each step. He was so close Eliza said she could smell his breath when Sarah yelled and threw her stick at him. The moose veered hard into the forest and disappeared.

Now another big moose was standing on the edge of our beach. At first, she looked at us like a curious horse, but J.J.'s scream and Carl's barking frightened her, and she pivoted with a grunt and galloped through the wild roses toward the house. The little girls panicked and raced that way, too. Chip and I ran behind, yelling for them to stop. The last thing we wanted was for the moose to get mad and hurt them. She didn't. Instead, barely snapping a branch, she vanished into the brush.

Moose don't always take off so fast. Last spring, a cow moose had her calf across the road from our house. They wandered into the backyard of a vacation home where a little girl was on a swing. When she screamed and her dog barked, the confused calf ran toward the child instead of away from her. The mother moose charged at the swing set to protect her young. The little girl's mother also ran from the garden into the tangle, to rescue her child. Screams, barks, and the bellowing moose brought the next-door neighbor outside onto his porch, but before he could get close enough to help, the frightened moose chased her calf from the yard and the terrified mother scooped up her toddler and ran to the shelter of a playhouse.

The moose broke the little girl's arm and left her mother badly bruised. They were flown to the hospital in Juneau. After the child's arm was set and the mother's injuries declared miraculously superficial, they decided to spend two weeks convalescing back home in the Lower Forty-eight, far away from any wild animals. A few days later the cow and her calf showed up outside Betty Holgate's kitchen window. She called to let me know that they seemed unharmed and appeared content, nibbling the fresh green shoots by her stream. "I told her she had a lovely baby, and she seemed to like the compliment," Betty said. The cow even tipped her ears toward Betty as she spoke.

I told Betty we'd been watching a bear and her cubs across the river with a spotting scope. She'd seen them, too. And lately I've been seeing more bears from the car and while out riding my bike. There are lots of them, fairly close to town. Bear viewing has been good and bear hunting even better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. Because spring was late this year, a lot of bears were killed in a short time. Over forty, including twelve big grizzly, or brown, bears. Smaller black bears are baited with doughnut grease from the bakery. A popular place to kill brown bears is a man-made salmon-sp.a.w.ning channel hunters can drive right up to. A little girl's first brown-bear hunt was even featured in the Eagle Eye Journal. The child was photographed with her dead bruin. Then there's the story of the hunt gone bad.

It began when three hunters, a father, a son, and a friend, spotted a large brown bear on the banks of the Chilkat River, about fourteen miles north of our house. One of them shot it, wounding it in the shoulder. They fired again, hoping to kill it, but missed, and the injured bear swam across the river. The hunters got in a canoe, crossed the river, and then followed the b.l.o.o.d.y trail for nearly three miles on foot through thick brush. Bears are dangerous animals. As with moose, you never want to get between a mother and her youngster, and you really don't want to meet a wounded bear. The hunters had both a safety and a moral obligation to finish the job. It would have been cruel to let the animal suffer a slow death.

They couldn't see the bear, but they noticed that it was bleeding less and resting more. They figured it must be dying. So they were completely surprised when the angry bear came charging back down the trail at them. It was thirty feet away and running fast when a bullet caught it in the chin. The stunned bear didn't slow down. Another hunter fired, this time hitting the bear in the paw, but the recoil from the rifle knocked him off balance, and he fell into the brush. That hunter's father shot the bear in the back as it grabbed his son's leg with its teeth. The father shot the bear again, but the bear wouldn't die and it wouldn't run away. The third hunter shot the bear in the side, and finally in the head. The bear never quit. His dead jaws had to be pried off the son's leg. The men walked back to the boat. The wounded hunter was flown to Juneau, where he spent the night in the hospital, got about fifty st.i.tches, but otherwise was fine. Actually, he's something of hero, what with surviving a bear attack.

Bear biologists don't know how many bears there are in Haines, because they're hard to count. But one bear expert with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game a.s.sured me that there were enough for every hunter to kill two every year. He said the greatest threat to bears-and all wild animals, for that matter-is not managed hunts but the destruction of habitat. He asked me if the bears that used to eat dandelions every spring on the bank where my house is come around as often. They don't. I told him about the cow moose and her calf. He said she'd keep having babies in the neighborhood because it's her territory, regardless of how many new homes are built, but it is causing her stress. Just by living here, he said, my family is doing more harm to wildlife than hunters are. I may be well meaning, but the animals don't know that.

For my birthday last year some of my also well-meaning friends gave me a beautiful mother duck with eight babies to put in Rutzebeck Lake, which is really a pond next to our cabin. We had planned a big cookout, so of course it rained for the first time all month. Everyone said it was unfortunate, but after we all crowded into the cabin they agreed it wasn't so bad after all. When the ducks arrived in a dog kennel, I knew the weather was a good omen. It was a perfect day for ducks. We opened the kennel door and the mother duck, which I immediately named Ingaborg because she's a Blue Swedish, led her ducklings into the water. There is nothing quite like the sight of a proud mother duck with her ducklings in tow. When the party was over, everyone walked down the trail in rubber boots and rain gear, waving good-bye to the ducks. We spent the night listening to the rain on the metal roof. In the morning, Chip left early for work. After the children and I woke up and ate, we checked on the ducks. Carl led us to the landing where the kennel had been. The ground was full of muddy bear prints. The dog kennel the ducks came in was smashed and sinking, twenty feet out in the pond. There were only six baby ducks left.

That evening a bull moose stepped into the lower end of the pond, and Ingaborg took off full speed toward it with her family paddling behind like little hydrofoils. We thought they were goners, but in the end it was the moose that retreated, not my ducks. But by the middle of the week, we were down to four ducklings and a wounded mother. Ingaborg survived the bear attack and the moose charge only to be eaten by an eagle. The last time we saw her alive she was listing to port and sculling toward the weeds. That afternoon Christian found a pile of down and Ingaborg's carca.s.s picked clean. At the sight of us raking up the remains of his mother, a fifth duckling toppled over in shock, dead. Another duckling was bobbing her head and making odd little circles on the pond, so the girls and I hopped into the canoe and scooped her up with a snow shovel. The two ducklings still on the pond wouldn't let us rescue them. We carried the sick baby duck into the cabin, sat her by the fire, and spoon-fed her Cheerios and milk while Carl stood guard.

By the end of the summer, we had one feisty brown duck left. Chip named him Braveheart. Like his namesake, he lost the battle but won the war. Domestic ducks can live almost anywhere in the world, while eagles, moose, and bears can't. I suppose I could have protected my ducks with a barn, chicken wire, and a shotgun. I was tempted to, especially when everyone was crying at the relentless slaughter. But then Alaska would become just like everywhere else. It may be our backyard, but wild creatures still have the right of way.

THE VET IS IN town for her fall appointments. While she examines Carl, I tell her about the sad fate of my ducks, and she laughs. When I tell her about the seal rescue, she says I'm lucky it didn't bite me. She says it's sometimes best to let Mother Nature take her course; other times, she needs some help. We talk about bears, and she says she agrees with Jay Hammond, our former governor and a big-game hunting guide. He said he quit shooting bears when he realized that the prey was n.o.bler than the hunter. I tell her that although Carl is getting slower, he's still good company. He does sleep so hard sometimes that I have to put my hand on his side to be sure he's breathing. Other times he's almost perky-especially around food. She feeds him about six dog biscuits during the exam. We talk about Carl's cancer, and she draws some blood and says she'll call me when she gets the results.