Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

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      But trapping was important. Some of it was muskrat, but in the fall we trapped for mink and other fur-bearing animals. Trapping beaver and turning in beaver pelts was good business. If you got cash you could use it for ammunition for your rifle and for supplies like flour, sugar, coffee, and other necessities.

      Usually we bought things like that in Bethel, but we also had mail-order catalogs around the house like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. That was the American way, wasn’t it? Every year my mom ordered things for us before school started. We didn’t get our winter coats from a catalog. A lot of our protective clothing was handmade. We had mukluks for our feet that were made from sealskins or fur-bearing animals. My mom made us parkas. The coats came from fur-bearing animals.

      Fall camp was set up in September. It was before it snowed. Camp could be anywhere from five miles to a hundred miles away from home. We went by boat along the Kuskokwim River for those camps. Somebody said that was pretty much like the lifestyle in the West in the United States in the 1800s. That’s probably true. I’m not sure how much people in the Lower 48 of the US know about our lifestyle now, whether they would believe it or not if they heard about it. I don’t know if they understand it. They live near big grocery stores that have everything. We provide our own food—most of it—still today. I think we need to educate them as much as we can about that way of life. It’s not a chosen lifestyle just for the heck of it, it is life. The lifestyle we adopted long ago was practiced from generation to generation and has been going on from time immemorial.

      The place we live also dictates what we do. We live off the land, but the land is alongside the river. We do not live near a highway that can take you anywhere to go shopping. The lifestyle and the place come together. This is a big part of me. This is where I grew up. That’s how my dad and my grandparents lived and it goes way back. Each generation is taught the same way of doing things.

      Akiak is a small place with only about 350 people. A lot of the people are interrelated as cousins because in the beginning there were four Williams sisters who were here and got married. Not very many people have moved out, but they always stayed here and existed here. So we’re interrelated to a large extent and we have been helping each other survive over the years. It is not a transient community. The door is always open in my house and my relatives come in and out and they stop by for lunch and eat whatever we have.

      In a small community like this everybody helps everybody. If we see people that need help we give them help. If they need food or they need water, if they need shelter, we’ve been able to prevent problems in our community for a long time. There is a sense of family, a sense of being together and supporting each other.

      People might be surprised by this, but in summer it can get up to eighty or ninety degrees. Not every day, but it can. That would be June or July, not usually August. Temperature year-round averages about fifty degrees, so it is pretty cold in the winter. Winter comes early compared to what the calendar says in other places, but it used to come earlier. Over the last fifty years I think I have seen climate change. When I was young fall was in early September and by the end of September we would see the river freeze. Now it’s like late October or mid-November.

      I’d also say that about twenty or thirty years ago we used to see a lot more snow. We seem to be seeing less and less. Still, our winter is much more winter than most people around the United States get, for sure. When it’s really cold in Akiak it can be between minus sixty and minus seventy. It does get that cold, but we still have to do things. I’ve got to put on my parka and go out and feed the dogs.

      I know when the average person in the Lower 48 hears those temperatures they shiver. They wonder how we could function and do anything at all. They ask how we put up with it, why don’t we stay in the house. That’s the way that people think.

      You have to have good clothing and some good protection for the dogs. You have to be protected from the cold and the wind. But we just can’t afford to stay home and not do anything. Maybe if it was for one day, but not more than that.

      When it is that cold our snowmachines won’t start. Before we had snowmachines when it was extremely cold, we went out by dog team. They didn’t mind going out at any time. And they never broke down. Even when it was so cold we had to go out to chop wood and haul it. We went between five miles and twenty miles from home to chop spruce. It was very dry.

      I was seven years old when I started going out with someone in the family to chop wood. Then I went on my own with my friend Willie Lake. In the winter we had a team of five to seven dogs and a saw. We went out, cut the wood, filled the sled, and came back. I learned about Alaska huskies from an early age. When we wanted to go visit someone in another village the dogs were our mode of transportation, not snowmachines, at least not in the 1960s.

      Snowmachines started showing up in the 1970s and that’s when our life changed. Everybody in Akiak had dogs then, but after the snowmachine arrived they got rid of a lot of them. There are probably four families in Akiak now that still have dogs. We have a kennel of about fifty or sixty dogs. We have always, consistently, had dogs. My family has had dogs as far back as I can remember. Now it is me and Mike Jr.

      Another chore that I had as a kid was to haul water. It came from the Kuskokwim River. My dad made a kind of well and we’d pump out the well. We also got blocks of ice from the river and melted them.

      When I was a kid sprint mushing was a big thing in the Alaska villages. Everyone had races and it was the biggest thing to do in the winter, the best entertainment. There were a lot of winter carnivals—there are still some—and the featured event was always the dog races. They included kids, so when I was a little boy my first races were with three or five dogs in the villages. Akiak held them, but there were races all over the area in Bethel, Tuluksak, Kwethluk, everywhere. They took turns each winter.

       CHAPTER 2