Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

It frequently happens after an unusually cold night that a trap, including its contents, is frozen solid. This is another dreaded accident, for it involves great labor, since the trap itself must be picked to pieces and built anew. In spite of all these difficulties, the natives get enough fresh fish during each winter by such method to eke out their scanty store of dried salmon and save themselves from starvation. On the lower river course, within the influence of that tremendous tidal action which has been described, a solid covering of ice never envelops the surface of the Kuskokvim. Here the natives hunt seals, the mahklok, and also the white whale or beluga, which furnishes them a full supply of oil[153] and blubber. A school of belugas puff and snort, like a fleet of tug-boats, as they push between and under tide-broken masses of ice in hot pursuit of fish that abound all over the broad estuary.

There is one particularly distressing and hideous feature that belongs to this entire area of the Alaskan coast tundra and marshy moors of the interior and its forests, its river-margins, and, in fact, to every place except those spots where the wind blows hard. It is the curse of mosquitoes—the incessant stinging of swarms of these blood-thirsty insects, which come out from their watery pupæ by May 1st (with the earliest growing of spring vegetation), and remain in perfect clouds until withered and destroyed by severe frosts in September and October. The Indians themselves do not dare to go into the woods at Kolmakovsky during the summer, and the very dogs themselves frequently die from effects of mere mosquito-biting about their eyes and paws only, for that thick woolly hair of these canines effectually shields all other portions of their bodies. Close-haired beasts, like cattle or horses, would perish here in a single fortnight at the longest, if not protected by man.

Universal agreement in Alaska credits the Kuskokvim mosquito as being the worst. They do not appear elsewhere in the same number or ferocity, but they are quite unendurable at the best and most-favored stations. Breeding here, as they do, in these vast extents of tundra sloughs and woodland swamps, they are able to rally around and embarrass an explorer beyond all reasonable description. Language is simply inadequate to portray that misery and annoyance which the Alaskan mosquito-swarms inflict upon us in the summer, whenever we venture out from the shelter of trading-posts, where mosquito-bars envelop our couches and cross the doors and windows to our living-room. Naturally, it will be asked, What do the natives do? They, too, are annoyed and suffer; but it must be remembered that their bodies are daily anointed with rancid oil, and certain ammoniacal vapors constantly arise from their garments which even the mosquito, venomous and cruel as it is, can scarcely withstand the repellant power of. When the natives travel in this season, they gladly avail themselves, however, of any small piece of mosquito-netting that they can secure, no matter how small. Usually they have to wrap cloths and skins about their heads, and they always wear mittens in midsummer. The traveller who exposes his bare face at this time of the year on the Kuskokvim tundra or woodlands will speedily lose his natural appearance; his eyelids swell up and close; his neck expands in fiery pimples, so that no collar that he ever wore before can now be fastened around it, while his hands simply become as two carbuncled balls. Bear and deer are driven into the water by these mosquitoes. They are a scourge and the greatest curse of Alaska.

Two hundred miles up from the Kuskokvim mouth is a focal centre of the trade in this district. It is Kolmakovsky, established by the Russians in 1839. It consists of seven large, roughly built frame dwellings and log warehouses, and a chapel, which stand on a flat, timbered mesa well above the river, on its right or southern shore. Here the current of the stream has narrowed, and flows between high banks over a gravelly bed. These terraces, which rise from the water, are flat-topped, and covered with a tall growth of spruce. Mossy tundras and grassy meadows roll in between forest patches. The timber is much larger here than it is anywhere else in the great Alaskan interior, and that scenery along this river is far wilder and more agreeable than any which is so monotonous and characteristic of the Upper Yukon. The desolate flatness and muddy wastes of the Lower Kuskokvim are now replaced by this pleasing change, which we have just mentioned, a short distance below Kolmakovsky.

KOLMAKOVSKY, ON THE KUSKOKVIM

Old Russian trading-post, established in 1839, two hundred miles up the River: these houses were once surrounded with a stockade, but such a defence has long been needless. This view is taken from the opposite bank of the River, looking over to the high hills of the Nooshagak divide, and Mount Tamahloopat in the distance

Back of that post, and clearly defined against the horizon, are the snowy-capped summits of those mountains that form a Nooshagak divide. One of them rises in an oval-pointed crest to a very considerable elevation[154] above all the rest, and is the landmark of every traveller who comes over the Yukon divide to Kolmakov. The river here, as it brawls swiftly in its course, is about seven hundred feet in width, with bends above and below where it expands to fully twice that distance.

While the Kuskokvim is the only considerable rival of the Yukon in this whole Alaskan country, yet when seriously contrasted with the great Kvichpak[155] itself, then the Kuskokvim bears about the same resemblance to it that the Ohio River does to the Mississippi.

Kolmakovsky marks the limit of inland migration allotted to the Innuit race on its banks, who are not permitted by those Tinneh tribes of the interior to advance farther up the river. It is also removed from that disagreeable influence of Bering Sea, where the prevalence of rain and of furious protracted gales of wind make life a burden to a white man on the Lower Kuskokvim. Its environing forests break the force of these storms, and there is also less fog, so that the sun usually shines out clear and hot, especially in July and August.