Lotus

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As I was making my way up Birch Creek from Fort Yukon back to Circle, where my truck was parked, I found a dog. Other than the residents of Birch Creek Village, where I stopped for a couple of days, I met only a man and woman floating downstream on a makeshift raft.

I heard whining one evening and wondered if I might have come across an abandoned wolf pup. But while eating supper I spotted a medium-sized dog across the river with the build and coloring of a Doberman Pinscher. Next morning she swam across the river to join me for breakfast. We became fast friends.

Five days after Lotus and I met, the two of us reached the Steese Highway. We walked to Circle to get the truck, and I went inside the store/bar to celebrate completing the trip. Lotus waited outside while I talked about my trip and was treated to more drinks than I should have had. When I came out a couple hours later, Lotus hadn't moved from her spot by the door. 

We drove back to the bridge at Birch Creek to load up. Along the river was a camping area, with no facilities. We stayed there for the night. Lotus had apparently learned to scavenge during her time alone in the woods, and she must have found where the campers did their business. She was difficult to live with on our drive to Fairbanks, but I didn't kick her out of the truck other than for a few much-needed breaks.

Not long after my canoe trip, Lotus and I headed back to Michigan and to Dianne, who had agreed to marry me in spite of my wild plans to try living for a year as an Alaskan mountain man. When I arrived in Hudsonville, I was road weary, so I took a nap. Dianne decided to take Lotus for a walk. She practically dragged Lotus for a block or two away from the house, until she gave up. Then Lotus dragged Dianne back to the house. Lotus had been left behind before and apparently didn't want to take the chance I might leave while she was away.

So she came with us when we went somewhere that evening. Dianne sat close to me on the bench seat of the truck. Lotus jumped over her lap and wriggled between us. I occasionally took her with me to school and left her unleashed while I attended class. She wouldn't budge from where I left her until I returned. Over time, though, Lotus became more fond of Dianne than of me and became more relaxed about my absence.

About a year after returning from Alaska I wrote a letter to Joe Firmin, who lived in Fort Yukon. I had met Joe while working on a river barge. I told him of my travels, which he had helped me plan, and said I had found a dog. He wrote back with some background on Lotus:

Shortly after you left Fort Yukon the State Troopers found a car parked near the Birch Creek bridge on the Steese Highway. The car belonged to a fellow that had escaped from the federal prison. He was doing time on a cocaine dealing charge. Well he escaped; met his girlfriend in Anchorage; bought 10 rifles, 3 pistols, 15 cases of ammo, grub, winter gear, etc. and started floating down Birch Creek on a raft. He planned to build a cabin on the creek and spend the winter there while things cooled off. I guess the police figured out what he was up to and flew up and down the creek looking for him. He had planned to hold off the police with all of the firearms he had, but they landed downstream from where they saw him floating along and waited for him to come floating by. I guess they caught him floating down the creek like a sitting duck without a shot fired. Jim and I sat in as jail guards when they brought him into Fort Yukon. He said that he had a dog and it ran away and was left behind on Birch Creek.

I found it impractical to keep Lotus in the apartment I shared with friends when I returned to college that fall. My sister lived in a house with a fenced yard near Chicago, so I asked her to keep Lotus. Three times she dug her way under the fence and ran away, to be returned by an increasingly frustrated neighbor. So Lotus joined us at the apartment, where she produced a litter of pups. We managed just fine.

Dianne and I married, had our first child, and then took a job in West Africa. It wasn't feasible to take Lotus along, so good friends adopted her. She lived where she had room to roam, not far from Alaska, MI, and the Thornapple River, where it is similar in width to the part of Birch Creek we traveled together.

By the time we returned on our first visit from Liberia, she was gone. She had become nearly blind and been hit by a car on Thornapple River Drive.

Bland

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The summer of 1977 I headed north, as far as the road would take me. The road stopped at the Yukon River, in Circle, Alaska. There I met another visitor, Bill, camping in his station wagon, but he had not come by road. He came in an aluminum canoe from upstream; the car was his home in Circle while he waited for a check to arrive from Seattle, where he had sent his annual take of furs.

Bill was talkative and friendly when he wanted to be, though perfectly satisfied with silence. He and I got along. He beat me at pool and I beat him at ping-pong at the local store/tavern. I told him that a friend and I had come from Michigan with plans to build a cabin in the woods and live there for a year. But the BLM told us they might come by when we were gone and blow up the cabin; we were not allowed to squat on government land. Bill laughed, "You want to live in the woods?" He pointed. "There's the woods."

A day or two after I arrived, a barge stopped in Circle. The barge owner/operator offered to hire Bill as a deckhand, but he wasn't interested, so I took the job. Richard, the other deckhand and sometime pilot, said Bill had a reputation for being a little crazy. He lived in a tiny cabin where he could barely stand up at the ridge line. Someone gave him a couple dogs once to help with his trap line. Bill ate the dogs.

A few weeks later, with the barge stuck on a gravel bar in the Black River north of Fort Yukon, I was back in Circle. Bill had gotten a check for about $1500, driven to Fairbanks to get supplies, and was getting ready to head back upstream to his cabin.

There's an excerpt in John McPhee's Coming into the Country that might refer to Bill:

I was in the Yukon Trading Post in Circle one time when a man about forty came up over the riverbank and bought six bottles of Worcestershire sauce, twelve packets of yeast, a case of matches, some Spam, sardines, hot dogs, three pounds of tea, a hundred and fifty pounds of cornmeal, and two cigars. He counted out three hundred and forty-four dollars cash, laid it on the counter, and went back to the river without so much as a word about the weather. Frank Warren—pilot, trapper, keeper of the Trading Post—remarked that he had happened by that man's cabin one day and had thought to pay a visit. It was a small cabin, eight by ten, without windows. As Warren approached, he heard a voice. The man was telling himself a joke. Reaching the punch line, he erupted in laughter. Warren tiptoed away.

If it was Bill, I think he would have appreciated a visit. Unless, perhaps, he and Frank were not on good terms.

I gave Bill a 3-lb. can of coffee in exchange for his stories and his appreciation. He talked about food. Beaver tail was especially good, he said, "really bland." Any meat he liked he referred to as bland, as if there were no higher praise. Compared to pine martin, lynx, and huskies, I guess bland would be welcome. (Not that I would know.)

For Christmas this year, my son and daughter-in-law gave us some thin slices of Iberico ham. We shared them at a post-Christmas get-together. We didn't know what to expect other than that we should be impressed, given the price. We agreed it was surprisingly bland.

Bill would have approved.