Caught, Released

I’m finishing up a book, a profile of a very interesting man. The book is The Final Frontiersman: Heimo Korth and His Family, Alone in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness by James Campbell (2004, Atria Books, New York NY).  Mrs. Orr and I first learned of Mr. Korth and his family a few years ago when we watched a Discovery Channel series about him and the few remaining homesteading families in the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge in Alaska. We were quite taken with Heimo and his winsome family, and have followed them via interviews and profiles over the years. The series we watched was called The Last Alaskans, and if you can ever find it, I highly recommend it. There are no staged scenes or manufactured drama, just mesmerizing profiles of these families, profiles that are poignant, hair-raising, amusing, and often unexpectedly tender. These folks live lives of relentless labor and watchfulness, wasting none of their precious hours on the silly frivolities of Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. They live, in the purest sense of that misunderstood word. I won’t say much more about the Alaskan homesteading families because information about them is so easy to access via the internet.

The book I’m reading was written by Heimo Korth’s cousin, and is a revealing portrait of a truly hard man. Certain passages are difficult to read for a softie like me, and I thought I would share one such passage here. Life is a grinding experience, but I benefit from being reminded that we are, all of us, here between the millstones of hope and grief, being ground and sifted and….what? Prepared? Equipped? Made worthy? I no longer carry the easy, smug confidence about life’s meaning and purpose that I once did. But I enjoy the genuine and the meaningful and the powerful and the unalloyed when I encounter it. This is damn fine stuff.

And Heimo was right. Sometimes it’s hard.

~ S. K. Orr

Before leaving, he wipes snow over the chains to conceal them and then uses a small spruce bough to dust the snow clean of our footprints.

He’s happy with the set and is eager to check another one a mile down the trail, where we saw fox tracks a week ago. I am hardly in the sled when he takes off. He is driving faster than usual, and I’m holding on with one hand and fending off spruce boughs with the other. When we arrive at the trap, Heimo throws his arms up as if signaling touchdown. “Got ‘im,” he celebrates. “A red fox.” It’s the same one, he says, that was prowling the hillside only eight days ago. We walk up to the fox, and unlike the wolverine, it doesn’t hiss or lunge at us; it slinks low to the ground and trembles, and I feel a pang of guilt. Heimo lifts his leg and steps on it heavily, collapsing its lungs. The fox looks at me, and I turn my head and look away. “Are you okay?” Heimo asks. “Sure,” I say. As he puts his weight into it and pushes the air from the fox’s lungs, it emits a long, high-pitched sound like an asthmatic’s wheeze.

Heimo pulls apart the jaws of the #4 double longspring trap and gives me the fox to take back to the sled. Sitting down, I hold it in my lap. I take off my mitten and glove and rub my hand along the soft, cherry-red fur along the fox’s back. Though I am a hunter and have shot deer, rabbits, and countless grouse, pheasants, and waterfowl, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the fox’s death, as Aldo Leopold did when he shot a wolf and reached it in time to see a “fierce green fire” dying in its eyes. I stroke the fox and watch Heimo reset the trap. He returns to the snowmachine, straddles the seat, then turns around, facing me.

“I know,” he says simply. “Sometimes it’s hard.”

pp. 57-58