Alaska Dispatches
# 12  —  4 January 2001

Ice Fishing

I don’t know exactly what the temperature is today, but the moisture from my eyes (the only exposed parts of my body) froze in my eyelashes while I was skiing out to the ice fishing holes. It was crisp and beautiful on the tundra as I left the village and headed up river about 5 miles to the fishing spot. I expected to see a crowd of folks at the fishing spot, where a slough meets the main river, but the holes were deserted.
I took off my skis and broke through the layer of ice covering one of the holes with one of my ski poles (most of the holes were completely frozen over; fortunately I found a hole that must have been fished earlier today). Grabbing a discarded piece of smelt from the ice, I baited my hook and dropped the line into the water. By the time I got my down jacket and malaggaiq (seal skin hat) out of my backpack there was a fish on the line. Things got even better when I warmed the frozen bait in my mouth a bit. After deciding to cut a freshly caught fish for bait things really picked up.
It was bitterly cold. It is tricky to dress for a multiple purpose trip these days. When skiing you keep yourself warm, but as soon as you stop you can feel the chill creeping in. If you break into a heavy sweat, your clothes are wet and things can get uncomfortable quickly once you stop.
When ice fishing, you need to use your hands to cut bait and bait hooks. Out of their gloves mine get nonfunctional fairly quickly. I am constantly in awe of the feats I witness native people performing, such as sticking their bare hands into the ice fishing holes to remove the surface ice, or riding to the next village, 19 miles away, by snow machine with only a baseball cap and ear muffs on their heads. 
It was amazing to be out there by myself this afternoon. I made the jiggers I use, which are rudimentary: sticks found around the village, line, a weight, a piece of red yarn and a simple hook. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got a fish when the wind blows or the water at the surface of the hole starts to ice up and moves your line a bit, but when there is a real fish on there you know it viscerally and completely. Pulling fish from a hole in the ice is so damn fun. You feel like the king of the world, awesome and powerful, smart, effective. I often try to recall the feeling before drifting off to sleep at night.
When ice fishing for smelts, oftentimes the fish are not actually hooked. They are in the process of eating the bait, so you need to pull quickly to bring them up out of the water and onto the ice, but not too quickly so that they realize what is going on and disappear. The goal is to yank the fish from the hole and slam it onto the ice, freeing the bait from its mouth so that you are ready to press it back into service immediately without removing your gloves. Captured smelts flop around on the ice next to your hole for a few brief minutes before freezing.
As well as jiggers, people here also use traditional “hooks,” which are made up of several pieces of string-like seal gut attached to a large weight made of walrus tusk. They tie large pieces of bait onto the end of each of these gut strings, and drop the whole contraption into the hole, trying to lure fish to the surface so they can then grab them with homemade nets. I have heard of people getting 4 and 5 fish at a time with these traditional hooks.
Whenever I catch a fish, I try to reset the hook in the same exact location, and repeat whatever it was I was doing when the fish bit. When you go for a stretch without a bite, there are all kinds of things to try: fresh bait, raising or lowering the position of your hook in the water, changing the dance of the line. And you can always pick up and try a new hole. The more fish you bring up and have lying around next to your hole, the better you look to everyone else there with you trying to do the same thing.
One morning I caught around 70 fish, and folks were calling me “nukalpiaq,” or great hunter. It was nice to be able to repay some of the many people who have given us food with fresh smelts, which are a prized commodity around here. Other days I have spent hours freezing my tail off for a handful of fish. At times you can feel so alone, even though you may be fishing with a dozen others. At other times you joke with the folks out there fishing with you, usually about how big the ones that get away always are. 
Today I caught about 20 fish at a fairly steady pace before getting too cold to continue. I filled my backpack with the smelts, most of which were already frozen, and took off the heavy coat and hat for the ski back. Ten minutes into my return trip I started to overheat. I’m looking forward to fried smelt for dinner tonight.

9 January

Today was the kind of day that makes me feel that we could stay here forever.
I had a great steam last night, the kind that melts every remaining strand of tension out of your body and leaves you utterly relaxed and ready for deep, deep sleep. The power went out at some point during the night, rendering our alarm clock blissfully ineffective. We got up with the sun this morning, at around 9:30.
We have access to a snowmachine for the time being, which makes life so much easier around here. Especially on a day like today when we received a shipment of anxiously anticipated fruit juices and baby wipes from Sam’s Club in Anchorage. Jules loves riding around on the snowmachine, and looks so damn cute all bundled up with his facemask and goggles. He was so adorable today running around, reading books to me, and just having a blast playing with his toys.
Our door has been finicky since we moved in, and stopped closing completely this morning. This was a major problem, particularly given the temperatures outside (it has been below 0˚ F for most of the past week). So this afternoon I fixed the door on my own. Tonight was KBA night and I got the chance to play the entire game, and actually played decently. A teammate was yelling “Kavialaq Ayuq” as a drove to the hoop. I’m not sure exactly what it means, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.
And to top it off I just returned from a late night ski way out onto the tundra past the airstrip. There is a full moon this evening, bathing the snow and tufts of grass with a pinkish glow. The moon is huge and unbelievably bright in the crisp air, and perhaps that inspired the distinct feeling I had that I was exploring its surface as I kicked and glided over endless windswept snow drifts undulating with patches of small, iced-over tundra lakes.

©2001, Michael Thornton Wyman