DELTA JUNCTION - In making a life in the Lower 48, children raised in Bush Alaska often feel different than children raised Outside. The contrast for an Alaska child has been called “feeling like a speckled bird.”

When asked about her transition to her current home in Oklahoma, our daughter, Sarah, recently remarked, “I felt more like a magpie with big splotches than like a speckled bird!” However not long after her move to Tulsa in 2000, when a dog fight broke out in a park, Sarah, a former dog musher, alone knew what to do. Rural Alaska children can often easily and directly solve practical problems. Growing up with significant personal and cultural handicaps, today Sarah is a four-year graduate, Registered Nurse at Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

In 2008, Sarah brought her California-born fiance, Timothy Spurek, to her home in Alaska. Intending to marry, they decided to wed on our snowy Tanana River bank where Sarah was given away by her father Reb. The groom wore Reb’s moosehide parka and the bride, her father’s white canvas anorak, draped in a black wolf robe.

To celebrate their second anniversary, Sarah and Tim returned to Alaska in February 2010, to visit Sarah’s upriver childhood home, only accessible by dogsled or riverboat, and do it — hopefully, before breakup. Thankfully, February 25, the Tanana was still frozen enough to make the trek. Once we were safely inside, seated by the fire with hot cocoa, I began reading the family the story of Sarah’s trapline adventure, 14 years earlier.

Trapline Partners

After Sarah graduated from high school in 1996, Reb popped a proposal to Sarah, “If you’ll go trapping with me, I’ll split the profits with you.” Before Sarah could protest, she was signed on, packed up and ready to go. Knowing what Sarah would face, it was with some trepidation that I said goodbye to her and to Reb. Despite a lingering cold, she was eager to hitch up her dogs and speed off with her dad over the horizon.

Sarah learned to mush across wobbly muskeg, ramming into bare tussocks. Going downhill, Sarah frequently missed a curve. The sled would plow into the wrong side of a big tree into deep snow while the screaming dogs pulled forward, working against her. She pushed until her wrists ached. She learned the technique of righting the sled: hoisting it, edging the outside runner onto the hard packed trail, balancing with one foot, while pushing with the other, shoving, while pleading with the dogs to help.

As she went uphill, the dogs’ tongues dripped saliva as she pushed her sled up a 3,500-foot mountain, pausing for short breathers. The trail steepened to a 60-degree pitch and narrowed into a deep moose rut. The dogs abruptly stopped. They were at the end of their strength. The load was too heavy and they were not yet hardened. It was up to Sarah. Dad was too far ahead. Sarah shoved the heavy sled forward and cried, “Let’s go!” The reward came when she was finally on top, when the valley below opened up, ringed by mountains, blue in the distant haze.

That night, as Sarah lay on her spruce pole bed in the cabin, she stared at the ceiling with her joints groaning from all she had endured. Underneath Reb’s bed, in his trapping box, he had packed a surprise package, waiting for the next cabin and Dec. 5, Sarah’s birthday. As he drifted toward sleep in the heat of the cabin, his mind began to recall Sarah’s fifth birthday at Gilles Creek Creek cabin, 14 years earlier.

In 1982 Sarah’s feet had dangled over the rough bench where she sat in the cabin, watching her mother make her birthday cake. Mom had found some cocoa, sugar and biscuit mix in the cache barrel. Even though it tasted like musty long johns, those were the basics of Sarah’s fifth birthday celebration. The cake was “baked” on top of the barrel stove under an overturned skillet.

As Reb’s memories gave way to sleep, and Sarah slept on the other bunk, the outside temperature quietly dropped to minus 40 degrees. The next morning, the dogs moved stiffly as they shifted from their cozy, melted nests. Once the dogs were harnessed to the sled, Reb and Sarah trudged deeper into the wilderness, pausing at the top of Gilles Mountain. Before plunging downward, Dad taught Sarah to wrap ropes around her toboggan runners, rough locking, to help control her descent.

As Sarah flew down the mountainside, she watched a plume of snow shooting out from Reb’s brake as he zigged and zagged all the way down. Arriving at the bottom, they mushed over a frozen beaver dam, sledded up a little hill and stopped at Gilles Creek cabin.  

As Sarah rested in camp the next morning, Reb checked traps. To celebrate that evening, Reb broke open the rum cake. From under his bed, Reb brought out his secret stash, the mysterious package. Smiling curiously at her father, Sarah opened the bright, little boxes. Sarah fingered the cappuccino candy, tea and chocolate caramels.

She and her dad mushed toward home a few days later. When the furs were stretched and dried, they went into Delta to see fur buyer, Dean Wilson. Sarah watched Dean grade the furs, judging their size and color. True to his word, Dad shared the rewards.

Many years later, Sarah is thousands of miles away from the trapline, studying nursing in Oklahoma. But she is still taking fur orders for Dad. Oklahoma friends see and want some of Dad’s red fox, marten and wolverine. Sarah has become Dad’s long distance fur handler, still his trapline partner.”

As I finished reading by the fire, Sarah slipped on her parka to show her new husband her Alaska childhood home.

Judy Ferguson is a 42-year, Big Delta resident and the author of six Alaska books, the most recent, “Bridges to Statehood, the Alaska Yugoslav Connection,” available at www.alaska-highway.org/delta/outpost.