FAIRBANKS - Athabascan storyteller Bill Williams lives in the small community of Hughes on the Koyukuk River. He grew up there, moving from seasonal camp to seasonal camp and packing his correspondence school books along the way.

The 73-year-old elder has many stories to share — traditional animal stories, k’edonts’ednee (belief stories) and family stories, among others.

Williams also has a rapt audience of young listeners from many villages along the Yukon, Koyukuk and Tanana rivers.

Every Wednesday afternoon, Williams tells a new story via the Yukon-Koyukuk School District’s video conference system, headquartered in Fairbanks.

The system, which covers every school in the district, can broadcast activities from one school and transmit them to any or all of the other schools. It can be used for anything from language instruction to multimedia lessons — as long as the Internet is working.

On Wednesday, Williams spoke slowly and clearly from Hughes, pausing between sentences for his listeners to absorb the story’s content.

In the session, he told a family story handed down by his mother, Susie Williams. He related, in extraordinary detail, a trip his mother and grandmother, Ida Leon, took on foot more than 90 years ago.

Williams’ mother was just 14 years old when she and his grandmother embarked on the 300-mile round trip journey in 1919. They walked the entire distance with three dogs pulling their sled packed with provisions and the hunting bounty they procured along the way.

They followed a winding trapping trail, Williams said, staying at some of the cabins on the route, and visiting some remote relatives.

They started their journey on the Koyukuk River after freezeup in Hughes and went downriver and over to the Melozi River near Ruby all the way to the South Fork of the Koyukuk River and Fish Creek, 24 miles above Allakaket, before heading home again in early spring.

En route, the women made numerous camps while fishing with handmade fish traps and hunting caribou and moose. The caribou leg fur and moose skin is prized for making winter boots, he said.

“Some people used to go long ways to get this material to last for a year or so,” Williams explained. “They were real careful with the hides, not to make holes in it. They cleaned the hides and dried them too.”

The two women dried moose and caribou meat while following the marked trapping trail, and they cached some of the caribou meat out in the flats.

From time to time, the mother/daughter team was welcomed at a remote cabin for a day or two of rest and visiting.

As Williams elaborated on his mother and grandmother’s epic walkabout, the village school children, scattered throughout the Yukon-Koyukuk school district, listened quietly, each bent over their desks drawing a scene from the story.

The long trip was necessary, Williams explained, because his mother’s father had died six years earlier.

By March 20, the mother/ daughter team started working their way back home to Hughes.

“They’d stop here and there and snare a few rabbits for a change of diet. They also snared spruce chickens and ptarmigan and trapped some beaver too,” Williams said.

The trip back was slow, he said, since the women and their dogs were hauling food, hides and furs from their long gathering journey.

By April, they only were only able to travel in the very early morning cold when the sled runners didn’t stick as much on the crusted snow.

In Fairbanks, Susan Paskvan, YKSD Native language coordinator and organizer of the broadcast, took the opportunity to insert Athabascan words gleaned from the story.

“Oonyeeyh is blackfish,” she said.

Earlier in the afternoon, Paskvan was teaching counting numbers 1 to 10 in two different Koyukon methods. At the end of Williams’ story, students from each distant classroom walked up to the camera in their classroom to show Williams the pictures they drew while listening to him. They also spoke a few words about their artwork.

Edward Bifelt, a Huslia student, said, “The stories are interesting because they are about our culture … because we have to hunt rather than go to the store.”

Natasha Ambrose from Hughes embellished her drawing a bit.

“There’s a river and there’s a sasquatch,” she pointed out.

The storytelling hour is repeated each Wednesday at 2 p.m. People interested in listening to the broadcasts are invited to visit the Yukon-Koyukuk School District offices at 4762 Old Airport Way in Fairbanks.

Contact staff writer Mary Beth Smetzer at 459-7546.