ALONG THE HADWEENZIC RIVER — Sixty miles from the nearest village, in a frozen arctic swamp filled with stunted black spruce, a middleaged man in a red corduroy parka wades through kneedeep snow.
He finds what he’s looking for at the base of a tree. He grabs the No. 11|2 leghold trap, a shiny steel clamp the size of a hamburger bun. Caught in the trap is a marten, a footlong relative of the weasel and mink. The animal is frozen stiff.
Paul Williams, trapper, is on his way to making $48.
He works here in the flats, hills and dense northern forest between the Yukon River and the eastern Brooks Range, on a network of winding trails used by people for generations. Williams has been out checking his trap line for two days, and so far has three marten to show for it.
The air is 30 or 40 degrees below zero. Williams doesn’t know; he never carries a thermometer. But the cold coats his eyebrows and glasses with thick frost and it bites at his skin as he blasts his snowmachine across the deep powder that blankets the muskeg.
Williams is 53 years old. He is Athabascan, born and reared in a camp on the upper Yukon River near the village of Beaver. He talks with the lilt and occasional broken phrasing of a man who learned English as a second language when he was a teenager.
He has trapped here off and on since the 1950s. In this part of Interior Alaska, he is widely known as one of the best.
Williams is master of a hundred skills. He can repair a snowmachine engine quickly on a cold trail, knows how to survive without a tent at 50 below, and is a thoughtful and entertaining conversationalist on a long winter night. He’s strong and fit, neither fat nor thin, and talks a lot about what older people here say about the land and animals.
Like many from his generation of Native Alaskans, Williams is a knot of old and new. He speaks mostly the Gwichin Indian dialect with his wife, mother and five kids, but is a fanatic for cowboy movies and country music. He eats moose ribs while watching “Good Morning America” on satellite TV; quotes Time magazine and Jay Leno while traveling on a trail his relatives used before they ever saw a white person.
In a good year Williams may make $20,000 from selling his pelts. There’s no such thing as a rich trapper, he likes to say. But you can do OK if you’re skillful, patient and lucky. He gets itchy to hit the trails when the snow begins to fall and rivers start to freeze in October and November. Trapping pays for his boat, guns and the other tools necessary to survive in his village the rest of the year. It also allows his family to shop at the store.
Many of Williams’ neighbors in Beaver also depend on trapping. The 84 residents, nearly all Native, live in a collection of log cabins hugging the north bank of the Yukon River. Only a few yearround cash jobs exist: store clerk, school janitor, teacher’s aide.
Men work construction or fight wildfires for the government in summer, but trapping is the one sure way to make money the rest of the year. A dozen men and at least one woman are trapping this winter, as people in the village have done for most of this century.
Historically, the Indians in this part of Alaska didn’t trap much; those who did used deadfall pits and crude snares. Mostly, they made their clothing from caribou and moose hide. But many took up trapping after white traders made their way down Interior rivers in the 1800s, with steel traps and offers of money, food and goods in exchange for fur.
PROTESTS FAR AWAY
Today, trapping is increasingly a trade under fire. And some trappers, including Williams, are nervous about the future.
A protest movement has declared war on the fur industry from the ritzy bigcity stores that sell expensive fur coats and the affluent customers who buy them to trappers like Williams who provide raw pelts. Killing animals to make luxury clothing is barbaric and unnecessary, the animalrights movement holds, and the number of fur boycotts and protests in the United States and worldwide seems to be growing.
From his cabin, Williams has been watching the antifur movement with curiosity for months now. He first heard about it a couple of years ago at a Native gathering in Fort Yukon. He couldn’t believe his ears.
Just as people in faraway cities saw trapping as coldblooded and cruel and couldn’t understand how anyone with a conscience could do it, Williams said he couldn’t figure why someone so far away would object to him going out and taking animals in the woods.
Williams said he really got to thinking this fall, when he saw an episode of “L.A. Law” on the state satellite TV channel. The show portrayed animalrights protesters on trial for splattering fur coats with red paint. It was the first time he felt like he’d met those people face to face.
“I think I understand what they’re saying, ” he said recently, sitting on a stool at his kitchen table before heading out to check his traps. “They think it’s wrong to kill animals. But I think they don’t understand how we live here. My values are different from their values.”
The TV drama got him thinking about something his father said years ago.
“He mentioned that, a long time ago, about killing animals. He said you gotta use a method to kill ‘em quickly. I thought then he was talking about struggling and damaging the fur. But that’s not what he meant. He was talking about suffering. Killing ‘em quick so they don’t suffer.”
Williams said he tries to kill animals as quickly and painlessly as he can. He works his trap line often, twice a week if the weather’s good enough. That way animals won’t lie struggling in traps for days.
When he has to kill an animal caught in a trap, he puts a snare a tight wire loop around its neck with a pole and yanks, quickly strangling the animal. He has disdain for some trappers who beat animals to death.
But on this frigid afternoon on the trail, as Williams lifts the frozen marten out of the trap and carries it back to his sled, there is no denying what he does: He kills animals for their fur and sells them.
“Killing animals is sort of like melting snow, ” he says. “It’s time for their use. We don’t waste animals. It’s just time for their use.”
COLD WORK
Williams wanted to check his traps a day earlier, but the cold stopped him, as it often does in the heart of winter.
The thermometer on his front porch said 42 below when he woke up, and it stayed there. Too many things can go wrong in that kind of cold. Snowmachines break and frostbite becomes likely instead of just possible. A lost mitten can mean lost fingers. He stayed home.
By the next morning, the temperature climbed to 25 below, and a gray blanket of clouds had rolled in from the south. Clouds usually mean warmer weather. So Williams headed out. He kissed his wife, Lois, hugged his mother, Mary Sam, and checked the sled behind his snowmachine one last time.
Williams packs an ax to cut firewood, a Thermos of coffee, roast moose and mayonnaise sandwiches and slabs of smoked salmon, a bundle of tools and spare snowmachine parts, two 5gallon cans of gas, a $400 arcticweight sleeping bag, extra socks and gloves, a .22caliber rifle, lots of matches. He wears a thick nylon snowmachine suit under a downfilled corduroy parka, a beaver hat and mittens, heavy wool gloves, and homemade moosehideandcanvas boots lined with felt.
He roared out of the village on a borrowed orange snowmachine, followed by his soninlaw, James Erick. Williams’ own SkiDo is 40 miles up the trail with a broken steering mechanism, and he and James hope to fix it while checking traps.
The trail snakes through forests thick with spruce nearly doubled over from the weight of snow. The flat country, covered with rivers and sloughs and teardropshaped lakes, slowly gives way to hills.
Williams’ trap line starts 15 miles northeast of the village, almost smackdab on the Arctic Circle. His stepfather passed the trap line on to him. It sits entirely in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Although it’s on public land, trappers here respect an informal ownership code each family has its own trail and you trap only on your own.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
As Williams drives down the trail, signs of life are everywhere: tracks of marten, snowshoe hare, fox and an occasional wolf or lynx. The only animals he sees are birds and a pair of moose munching on alder bushes along a creek bank.
Williams can control the kind of animals he catches by varying the size of traps or snares he uses, and where he sets them.
What he tries to trap depends on economics. This year, they have been fairly awful.
Prices have plunged for most of the furbearing species in this region. That’s nothing new fur prices are notoriously erratic, rising and falling year to year in step with global economics and the whims of fashion designers.
A trapper here has a direct connection to the livelihood of, say, a Pontiac dealer in Indianapolis. If times are good, the dealer can afford to buy his wife a $10,000 fox coat for Christmas. But if the economy is sour, people have less money to spend and the sale of luxury items like fur coats suffers. Prices paid to trappers dip accordingly.
After peaking two years ago, world fur prices have fallen steadily. The drop is due mostly to a tightening of the economy, but also has to do with a glut of highquality, farmraised fur that’s hurt the demand for wild pelts.
The antifur movement claims responsibility for at least part of the drop in consumer demand.
The low prices have meant a rough year for Interior trappers. Williams says he’s made only about $3,000 since fall, far less than last year.
Beavers flourish here, it’s how his village got its name. But prices $50 or less per pelt don’t make them worth the trouble for many trappers. Hardly anyone is buying fox. So Williams has concentrated on marten, which have held their price better than most animals. He can get up to $70 for a topgrade pelt.
Marten coats are usually called Alaskan or Canadian sable in stores, and demand is especially high in Japan and Europe. Biologists and fur traders say marten populations in the Interior are at record high levels. But the snow has been deeper than normal on Williams’ line, making it harder for the small animals to move around, and he hasn’t trapped nearly as many as he expected.
Wolf used mostly for trim on coats still sells for as much as $400 a pelt, but Williams says he and most of the others in his village won’t trap them because populations here aren’t big enough to withstand it. If a species isn’t abundant, Williams won’t trap them.
“I know there’s a family of about six wolf out here, but that’s not enough, ” he says. He isn’t trapping lynx, either, partly because the price has crashed from $600 to less than $100, but also because there don’t seem to be that many of the cats here this winter.
Trappers are like farmers, dependent on prices, weather and luck. If all three don’t improve soon, Williams says, he’ll have trouble making his $100amonth payments for his boat motor, and may have to put off replacing his 2yearold snowmachine another year. This spring his family will probably end up eating more frozen moose and fish, and less bacon, eggs and other store food.
Checking the trap line is hard and tedious work. Williams has 70 traps spread over about 50 miles of trail. He drives from trap to trap, and the farther he goes up the trail, the deeper the snow and the harder it gets to steer the snowmachine. He often walks in on snowshoes instead.
Williams checks the bait of each trap a putrid slab of frozen fish guts and resets it if it has been disturbed. Each marten trap sits in a “cubby, ” a small, opentopped box of sticks intended to draw animals to the bait without showing the trap.
Williams has competition. Wolverines are notorious bait thieves, and catching them is very hard. The creatures look and behave like miniature grizzly bears. Williams swears he’s seen wolverines that have gnawed off their own legs to flee a trap, and while their fur can bring a good price, he doesn’t think they’re worth the time and effort it takes to catch them.
At two of Williams’ marten traps on this trip, only the furry stumps of marten legs remain. Fox tracks cover the snow around the traps, and it looks like they found an easy meal.
A LIVING, A WAY OF LIFE
After six hours on the trail, with sunlight waning, Williams’ snowmachine buzzes across a wide section of river and bounds up a bank. There, in a clearing along the trail, stands a tan canvas wall tent, a skinny stovepipe poking through the roof.
“It’s 5 o’clock, ” announces Williams. “Time to get off work.”
His soninlaw sets about building a fire in the little stove and melting snow for coffee. Inside is a stash of frozen food, including moose meat and Pilot Bread, and an assortment of skillets and pots. Old issues of Time and Inside Sports lie on the floor. With a fire roaring in the stove, the tent heats up quickly. The men hang gloves and hats to dry.
Williams disappears outside and brings back two armloads of spruce boughs. He spreads them on the floor of the tent, forming a thick, soft, insulating layer.
“There’s a whole forest of carpet out there, ” he says. “More carpet out there than Giant Don’s.”
Williams turns on a batterypowered radio with an antenna booster. A talkshow host on a Fairbanks station is giving advice on personal finance. Sometimes, you can pick up Japan, Williams says. The talk show fades and an Anchorage country station comes in. Dolly Parton sings about a pain in her heart.
“In our language, when you say that, it means you’re having a heart attack, ” Williams says.
He serves moose steaks, beans, fry bread and chitsyaa a greasy, superrich concoction of moose fat, ground caribou meat and berries. It looks like lard. His soninlaw calls it Indian fruitcake. Keeps you warm, he says. Williams pours afterdinner coffee and leans back on a homemade blanket filled with black duck down.
He has lived all over Alaska. He worked on a seine boat in Southeast, as a geologist’s assistant in the Brooks Range, on a pipeline survey crew, as a seasonal firefighter. He was in the Army for six years and ran an office for the Tanana Chiefs Conference.
But he decided a few years ago he liked living here best. He’s comfortable with village life, and he’s good at the skills it demands. He says he doesn’t have to worry about ending up in trouble in a bar on Second Avenue in Fairbanks, and he has been able to provide a decent living for his family.
Trapping opponents say Natives have always been exploited by white fur buyers, that they would be more selfsufficient if they didn’t depend on the fur industry for cash.
Williams doesn’t see it that way. As difficult and unpredictable as trapping is, and as dependent as it makes people like him on the rest of the fur industry, few other opportunities exist in his village. He considers trapping a part of subsistence no different from hunting moose and duck or setnetting salmon in the river. He and his family rarely eat the meat from small game he traps, but the money from trapping is what makes other subsistence activities possible.
“It’s a cycle, ” he says. “You can’t separate trapping from the others. Everything fits together all year long.”
Still, he’s not sure he wants his three sons all of them at college in Kansas to trap like him. It’s a hard living, he says. “If they want to, fine. But they should have a choice.”
The fire goes out in the night, and when the people in the tent wake, frost covers their heads. The clouds outside have vanished, and it feels much colder than the day before. The snowmachines argue when Williams tries to start them. After spending the day checking the rest of his line, Williams is eager to get back home. Two days on the trail have yielded four animals.
He nearly collides with a moose on the dark trail driving back to the village, and the air becomes more frigid as evening arrives. Williams’ chin turns numb, and his soninlaw has a couple of patches of white on his face. When they finally reach Beaver, the temperature is 43 below and still dropping. It finally bottoms out the next morning at 57 below.
FUR AND FRUSTRATION
The dead marten sit in a frozen clump by the wood stove in Williams’ oneroom cabin. After 15 hours, they finally begin to thaw.
The money a trapper is paid depends on the condition of the pelt and how well he skins and dries it. Williams is meticulous. He squats on a little stool in the middle of the cabin, carefully cutting a series of slits on the legs and belly. He slowly peels the skin in one piece, turning the animal inside out until it is skinned.
Then he grabs a drying board from the rack under the TV. The board is pointed at one end, six inches wide and two feet long. As he slips the board inside the pelt, the coat stretches to twice the animal’s original size. After a few hours, he reverses the pelt.
A couple of the pelts look good soft and dark brown. But the other two aren’t saleable; mice have eaten away bits of the fur. Williams’ wife will make children’s hats from the damaged fur.
Williams usually mails his good pelts to one of several Fairbanks fur buyers, who send the cash back to him. Last year, he participated in a Nativerun furbuying cooperative in the region, but the coop has had trouble raising money this year. Alaska buyers sell furs to auction houses or manufacturers as far away as Tokyo, Toronto and Copenhagen.
Earlier in the morning, the satellite TV channel showed “The Price Is Right, ” a show that’s been popular for a long time in Alaska villages. Its host is Bob Barker, an outspoken critic of the fur industry who led thousands of protesters down New York’s Fifth Avenue last November.
Williams, who’s chief of the Beaver tribal council, says he’s been getting frustrated with outsiders telling people here and elsewhere in rural Alaska how to live their lives.
“I consider myself an American first and an Alaskan. But I also belong to a distinct group of people Athabascan Indian. And we’ve got our own way of living, you know. And it’s never been threatened. I don’t think it’s being threatened now, but sometimes I wonder . . .
“Sometimes I wish we could live out here and just be left alone.”
But as much as any Alaskan — maybe more — a trapper like Williams participates in the global economy. He understands this. That makes the fur debate frustrating at his end.
Faraway protests and boycotts may eventually hurt how he makes his living, yet sometimes he feels voiceless in the argument. When he hears about an antifur march in New York on the network news no one talks to Native trappers who have no other way to make a living.
“I’ve heard them say we can get into another line of work. But how do we get into another line of work? We come from a certain line of living. This is what I know.”