In the winter season, when frost has locked up miry swales and swamps, and snow lies in deep, limitless drifts, a white hunter at Kolmakov can join the Kuskokvamoots in trailing and shooting giant moose which come down from the mountains of the Nooshagak divide. This animal is quickly apprehended by the native dogs, so that whenever winter weather will permit, a native Innuit spends most of his time, not employed by ice-fishing on the Kuskokvim, in this sport.
The fur-trade at Kolmakovsky is quite active, but it is almost exclusively transacted with a few Indians up the river, and not with the numerous Innuits below. The latter are, commercially speaking, very poor, having not much of anything but little stores of “mahklok” seal-oil. These big phocaceans are almost as great fishermen as the Innuits are themselves, and find the mouth of the Kuskokvim as attractive as it is to their human foes. In this frame of mind the mahklok ventures on to those tidal banks of the estuary below, and this rash habit enables the natives to capture a great many of them there every year. Those Innuits below Kolmakovsky have no land-furs whatever, save a few inferior mink-skins; but they trade their surplus seal-oil with the Indians above and on the Yukon for that ground-squirrel parka and tanned moose-skin shirt which they universally wear. There is an exceeding rankness to an odor of rancid fish-oil, but the aroma from a bag of putrescent seal-oil is simply abominable and stifling to a Caucasian nose—an acrid funk, which pervades everything, and hangs to it for an indefinite length of time afterward in spite of every effort made to disinfect.
The Indians of the Upper Kuskokvim were once said to be a very numerous tribe; but the severity of successive cold winters has so destroyed them, as a people, that to-day they exist there as a feeble remnant only of what they once were. An intelligent trader, Sipari, who has traversed their entire country, in 1872-76, declares that “forty tents,” or one hundred souls is an ample enumeration of their number.
The Innuits of the Lower Kuskokvim are much better physical specimens of humanity than are those of their race living on the Lower Yukon. These latter are called by all traders the most clumsy and degraded of Alaskan savages. The portage from Kolmakovsky to the Kvichpak is only three days’ journey in winter, or five days by water in canoes, during summer. It is a trip made by large numbers of the natives of both streams, in the progress of their natural barter and moose-hunting.
The forests of the Kuskokvim and the Nooshagak mountains and uplands are frequently swept by terrible conflagrations, which utterly destroy whole areas of timber as far as the eye can reach. This ruin of fire, of course, absolutely extinguishes all trapping for any fur-bearing animal hitherto found in those brulé tracts, and entails much privation upon the natives who have been accustomed to gain their best livelihood largely by hunting in those sections. A burnt district presents a desolate front for years after; the fire does not, in its swift passage, do more, at first, than burn the foliage and smaller limbs of trees in a dense spruce forest; but it roasts the bark and kills a trunk, so that all sap-circulation is forever at an end in it. As the years roll by, these trunks gradually bleach out to almost a grayish white, the charred, blackened bark is all weathered off, and gradually such trees fall, as they decay at the stump, in every conceivable direction upon the ground, across one another, like so many jack-straws, making a perfectly impassable barricade to human travel without tedious labor. A brisk growth of small poplars, birch, and willow springs up in place of the original spruce forest, but none of these trees and shrubs ever grow to any great size. At rare intervals a young evergreen is seen to rise in sharp relief, towering over all deciduous shrubbery, and in the lapse of long years it will succeed in supplanting every growing thing around with its own kind again.
“Brulé” Desolation; Alaskan Interior.
[A view on the Stickeen Divide: bears, in search of larvæ, ripping open decayed logs.]
The traders at Kolmakovsky make up their furs into snug bales and descend the river in wooden and skin boats, every June, to a point below, about one hundred and fifty miles, where they meet their respective schooners, or go still lower to an anchorage of larger vessels, and renew their annual supplies. These river-boats are then poled and rope-walked up the river back to the post. The principal trade here is beaver, red foxes, mink, marten, land-otter, and brown and black bears.
The traders say it is exceedingly seldom that a white man ever comes in contact with the natives of the Lower Kuskokvim, and that there is nothing to call them there; also, that the labors of the Russian missionaries of the Yukon never extended to this region, though their registers and reports show quite a number of Christians on the Kuskokvim River. The only trace of Christianity among this tribe, outside of the immediate vicinity of a trading-station with its chapel, consists of a few scattered crosses in burial-places adjoining the settlement. At the village of Kaltkhagamute, within three days’ travel of the Russian mission on the Yukon, a graveyard there contains a remarkable collection of grotesquely carved monuments and memorial posts, indicating very clearly the predominance of old pagan traditions over such faint ideas of Christianity as may have been introduced for these people. Among monuments in this place the most remarkable is that of a female figure with four arms and hands, resembling closely a Hindoo goddess, even to its almond eyes and a general cast of features. Natural hair is attached to its head, falling over the shoulders. The legs of this figure are crossed in true oriental style, and two of the hands, the lower pair, hold rusty tin plates, upon which offerings of tobacco and scraps of cotton prints have been deposited. The whole is protected by a small roof set upon posts.