A Northern Exposure -- Watching The River, And Traditional Life, Flow By On An Intimate Tour Of The Remote Native Alaskan Village Of Hus Lia

HUSLIA, Alaska - It's midsummer in an isolated village.

Skinny black-and-white sled dogs pant in the 84-degree noonday sun. Old men sit silent on rough-hewn benches overlooking the Koyukuk river. When the day cools, they'll tell each other stories of going downriver.

About 280 people live here in Huslia (pronounced Hoos-LEE-ah), some 250 miles northwest of Fairbanks. No roads lead to the village; people arrive by boat or plane, or they're born here.

The village crouches on the edge of a ridge, overlooking the river.

There is the graying Good Shepard of Huslia Episcopal church, with the freshly-painted Jimmy Huntington Elementary School next door.

About 40 houses - aging two-story wood frame homes and elegant new log cabins - sit back from the gravel main street in shady groves of birch and spruce. Behind most homes are elevated caches used for storing meat and skins. Battered snowmobiles are parked alongside sleds.

As we meander through town, we're as much spectacle as spectators. That's because we're Huslia's first bona-fide, paying tourists. Vicki Kiltz and Jerry Really, husband-and-wife Boeing test flight engineers from Woodinville, Wash., and me.

But the gawking is good-natured, on both sides. Those few residents who don't like tourists tramping around their town let us know in frank, but civil, terms.

We've come as part of a 4-day/3-night "cultural" tour offered by a new village enterprise, Athabasca Cultural Tours.

As with all Alaska bush travel, the price is steep: $1,650 including airfare from Fairbanks.

But we know there are few doors open to Native Alaska. Once invited in, we hope to learn something of the Koyukon (pronounced Coy-YOU-Kon) Athabascan Indians who call this vast wilderness home.

The plan is to go about 40 miles downriver where our base camp is being set up. From there, we'll set out daily to explore the region by boat.

The Koyukuk River runs swift, curving along the village's west edge. Every spring, the rush of melting snow causes the river to rise and fall up to 30 feet, constantly reshaping the landscape and redefining village boundaries.

Three times since 1950, villagers have been forced to move their town to save it from the advancing river.

Down the river

We head downriver in a weathered fishing skiff. Along the high banks, silver birch rattle in a warm breeze. Willows glimmer in the shallows. A fish leaps and twists in the air, flashing the orange-red belly of a spawning salmon.

There's a saying among the villagers that when you travel the Koyukuk, you travel in God's pocket. As the village slips from sight, we understand what they mean.

Rounding a bend, we see an eternity in unspoiled wilderness. Virgin forest and untrampled meadows stretch to the horizon; it's as if nothing has changed from the moment of creation.

The Koyukon have inhabited this land for a millennium, but there is little evidence of their occupation. Forced to develop an intimate understanding of their subarctic world or die, early Koyukon patterned their lives to the shifting seasons. They limited their needs and wants, conserving precious resources. Learning to coexist with the natural world, they had no cause to dominate it.

Modern Koyukon people have inherited this cultural tradition of coexistence; whether they will be able to preserve and perpetuate it remains to be seen.

Toward that end, the Koyukon are depending on travelers for help.

"We tell stories and teach you traditional ways and the young people have an excuse to listen and learn," says Steven Attla, a village elder.

Owner and captain of our fishing skiff, Attla is taking us downriver. His wife, Catherine, and her dog, Spotty, also are on board. Already at camp, preparing for our arrival, are Fred Bifelt, Albert Vent and Patti Ballard, all of Huslia. For the next four days, they will be our guides and mentors.

Creature comforts

Our accommodations are deluxe - like a set for a safari movie.

Our camp sits on a high, sandy bank overlooking the Koyukuk River in the Koyukon National Wildlife Refuge. The canvas tents are roomy with extra-wide cots, cozy sleeping bags, pillows and towels. Topographical maps of the area, binoculars, fishing tackle, head nets and insect repellent are laid out on our cots.

There's an outdoor washroom complete with scented soap, mirrors and a line to hang wet washcloths. An outhouse, with a padded toilet seat, is a discreet distance down the beach.

We're invited to wash up; dinner is ready. Learning to be useful

There is no shortage of food. In fact, our greatest concern is that we'll gain 10 pounds - the menu is heavy on wild game and sweets.

Our first meal is moose stew and beaver-meat jerky; a lettuce-and-tomato salad (edible gold in the Alaska bush); then a tasty chocolate cake that Ballard and Catherine Attla have somehow managed to bake in a portable, wood-burning oven.

Washing up is left to Ballard. All the daily chores are done by staff.

But there's no lounging by the fire reading detective novels for us.

The Koyukon don't want their culture viewed as some kind of museum piece - we're expected to participate.

"People need to be useful," Steven Attla says. "Too many people don't know how to do nothing useful."

Attla reaches for a beaver pelt and begins a story.

"In distant time, Kk'adonts'idnee, all the animals were human. Really," he says stretching the pelt on a willow frame. To make us "useful," Attla is teaching us to tan hides.

"Like this beaver, it would have had human form and spoken human language. Really, that's true. But then something happened and some creatures died," he says, handing me the pelt and a moose-bone scraper.

Gesturing at me to get busy and scrape the inside skin, he continues.

"After a while some of the dead came back to life, only they were different. They had fur or feathers or fins. Really, it was strange.

"I didn't see this happen," he says "but it did. Really."

More than fireside fables, stories from Kk'adonts'idnee are like those told in the Bible's book of Genesis. Explanations of Koyukon origins, they're to be taken on faith.

I give up on the beaver pelt. Attla inspects it closely. Shaking his head and laughing, he hands it to visitor Kiltz. "I gotta teach one of you to be useful."

Days are spent exploring the river, casting for salmon and pike, stopping in at native fish camps, touring archaeological sites, bird-watching, tracking wildlife and hiking along beaches and across muskeg (a kind of northern bog).

But the pace is relaxed. In the Koyukon world, time is a teacher.

Most of our hours are on the rivers. The Koyukon are inland people, but their lives are dominated by the rivers which bind the irregular patchwork of boreal forest and muskeg that is their homeland.

Rivers define community boundaries, create avenues and barriers, sustain life and end life.

When Attla explains where we're going, his directions are based on physical features of the Koyukuk River, not points of the compass.

This coming summer, tourists will cruise the rivers in a $27,000 shiny aluminum river boat purchased solely for Athabasca Cultural Tours. But we are happy on the Attlas' old boat. During all but a few squalls, we are stretched out in the bow enjoying unusual 80-plus degree weather.

A former commercial river pilot, Attla handles the skiff easily; years of local knowledge allow him to avoid submerged snags and sandbars.

On our second day, we started out early for the Dakli River and a lake where we're likely to see moose, or dineega. (The Attlas are trying to teach us Koyukon.)

We pass fish camps of families from Huslia. Nets stretch from the steep, sandy river banks to the edge of the main current. Cotton and nylon nets have replaced those made of willow bark. But even these modern nets are said to possess a powerful spirit, biyeega hoolaanh, which can punish anyone who steals fish.

Atop the banks, tents are pitched in the tangled forest of birch, spruce and devil's club.

Pungent smoke from campfires and portable woodstoves drifts low to the ground; to fend off Alaska's vicious mosquitoes, fish-campers are burning punk, a heavy white fungus that grows on trees. Drying racks hang heavy with finely filleted sides of salmon, dogs guard against marauding bear.

Because it is July, or Ggaal nogha' (king salmon month), nearly everyone has at least one net in the water.

But there are few king salmon in the Koyukuk. Chum salmon, or noolaagha (island swimmers) are most abundant. Because chum are often mushy and tasteless, most are fed to the village dogs. Only those few with iridescent scales and bright red flesh are saved for the dinner table.

Silver salmon, or saan laagha (summer swimmers), are just appearing in the river. As we land at one fish camp, Huslia resident Joe Ambrose and his nephew, Edward Sommer Jr., are pulling in nets. They've been hoping to catch fat saan laagha (silver salmon) but the nets are heavy with noolaagha (chum salmon).

Careful with words

"Don't say nothing about the fish," warns Catherine Attla. "The salmon might hear and think you're ungrateful. Then you bring bad luck, hutlaanee."

A raven swoops low, brushing its wings against the net.

"Maybe we better say prayer to that raven," Steven Attla says.

"Tseek'aal, Old Grandfather," he shouts, "bring us good luck!"

The Attlas are not putting on a show for the tourists. The Koyukon world is filled with powerful spirits, both benign and malevolent.

Outsiders, not wise to the Koyukon world, aren't usually able to distinguish the supernatural. But in the company of skilled guides, even we begin to hear the spirits' whisper.

Watching the wolf

In Kk'adonts'idnee, or Distant Time, certain stretches of rivers had earned spiritual power. Later, other parts of the region's rivers were blessed or cursed by shamans or extraordinary events.

As we approach the abandoned village of Cutoff, Steven Attla slows his boat. But we do not linger. The river is said to be dangerous here because two children drowned in this spot and a shaman is buried not far away.

In a world devoid of street signs and skyscrapers, memories of people and events serve as local landmarks. A place in the river where a hunter breaks through the ice on his snowmobile might become known as Fred's Fishing Hole, for example.

On our third day, as we speed up the Hogatza (Hog) River, Steven Attla sees a black wolf on the far bank. He has seen only a gold eye and bright pink tongue in the dense birch forest, but Attla knows it is a wolf. Cutting the engine, he allows the boat to drift into shore until finally we can see the teekkona.

Resisting its fight-or-flight response, the wolf stops and returns our stares. For 20 minutes we watch each other, hardly daring to breathe. Finally the wolf breaks from the trees, disappearing into a hole halfway down the mud bank.

Even in Alaska, where wolves are not considered endangered, this is a rare event. "From now on, we'll call this `Wolf Point'," Attla says. "Everybody will know what happened here and will take care. Maybe this wolf intends good luck for hunters."

Over the centuries, the Koyukon have discovered that where there are wolves there are moose and other game.

The Koyukon landscape is filled with such spots, distinguished by people and events past and present. And while all cultures have such places, few mark them only in memory.

Running through this collective memory are the rivers - routes through an ever-watchful world teeming with wildlife, supernatural spirits and memories of relatives long dead.

Instead of isolated, we have begun to feel almost crowded.

Telling the stories

It's our last night in camp and Catherine Attla is telling stories. The drone of mosquitoes has risen, making her nearly inaudible. We add more punk to the fire and the ravenous swarm retreats.

Attla and her husband have talked almost nonstop for the past 3 1/2 days, but never have they repeated a story.

"My father was the only man in the village with false teeth. He went all the way to Ruby (two days by river) to get his teeth. It was really something," she says, reaching for a strand of sinew.

She is teaching us how to make fish hooks from willow and use our palms to spin sinew into fishline.

"But sometimes, my father, he'd drink too much and lose his teeth," she continues. "That was okay, though. He'd always get them back because everybody know he's the only one around with false teeth.

"That would really be something now," she says, beginning to laugh. "So many people got false teeth now it would be a real crazy mix-up."

We all laugh a good long time before we realize how late it is. It must be after 2 a.m.; even the midnight sun is fading.

We say our goodnights. In the morning we return to Huslia.

We'll leave early so there is plenty of time to visit with villagers, to sit on rough-hewn benches and talk with old men of going downriver.