The story of an Eskimo drum, part 1:* When she gets sung to on her birthday, Nannie Rae hears the drumbeat of the bowhead whale

Nannie Rae Kaigelak on her 22nd birthday. Originally, after I posted Friday's preview, I said that I would post this story on Monday, yesterday, but I am running behind.

The last image in my entry of September 15 was this one, of Nuiqsut Iñupiat whalers pulling hard on some ropes as they butchered one of the four whales they had landed on Cross Island. This is what the ropes were attached to - sections of maktak that whalers, such as Brian Nukapigak, were cutting away with flensing knifes.

The Iñupiat have hunted bowhead whales since what is known in these parts as "time immemorial." When Jesus walked the earth, the Iñupiat hunted whales - and they prayed before, during and after each hunt. When Christopher Columbus set sail for India and wound up in the Americas, the Iñupiat hunted whales. When the Russians first sailed along the shores of Alaska... well, you get the picture:

The Iñupiat have been hunting whales for a very long time. Tools and methods have been adapted to the times, but the bowhead remains the most important element in Iñupiat diet, culture and way of life. The Iñupiat teach that a whale gives itself only to a worthy crew, one that will freely share it with his community.

This whale gave itself to the crew of Billy Oyagak, who will keep a relatively small share of it for himself, his family and crew and will give the rest of it away. Other than their physical help in the landing, butchering and distribution of the whale, no one will pay him for their shares. And those who are too old, ill, or incapacitated to help will still receive their shares, just as if they had worked hard.

And all who show up for the feasts of Nalukatak, Thanksgiving and Christmas will also be fed generously and will take home shares, whether they participated in the original hunt or not.

As they worked on the whale, I saw Maniksak Nukapigak, left, begin to cut the skin of the liver away from the meat. Others joined in to help. Soon, the liver skin had been removed from the whale and taken to a safe place.

Eric Leavitt had brought this Eskimo dance drum to Cross Island during last year's hunt, but had forgotten to take it home. Now, it needed a resonant new skin to cover it.

After cutting away a properly sized section of the liver skin and placing it on cardboard, Vernon Elavgak, who came from Barrow to whale with the crew of Edward Nukapigak, Jr., double-checked the fit.

Vernon then scraped the skin with a plastic spatula, so as not to tear holes into the skin. 

Vernon and Eric check out the scraped skin. They decide to scrape it some more. Afterward, Vernon takes the skin out into the darkness of the night to wash it off in the salt water of the Beaufort Sea.

Then Eric molds the skin to the drum frame.

Vernon double-checks the fit.

They bind the liver skin to the frame with twine.

Vernon pulls the bind as tightly as he can.

The drum is nearly done.

Vernon examines the inside of the drum skin in the beam of a flashlight held by Eric.

The drum is skinned. As Eric checks it out, Thomas Nukapigak, brother to Edward Jr, passes through with one of the darting guns used in this year's harvest. Eric Leavitt, Jr, "Sonny Boy" observes.

The drum is hung to dry overnight. Everyone who stays in the Nukapigak cabin is expected to leave their autograph on the wall. I would leave mine in two places.

In the morning, Eric checks the drum. The skin has dried. He is ready to put it into action.

Throughout the hunt, every hunter in every camp, every boat and at the Com Center are linked to each other via radio. Captain Edward Jr. puts out a call to Nannie Rae up in the Oyagak cabin. Everybody wishes her happy birthday - but Eric goes a little further.

He sings the traditional American "Happy birthday to you..." song, but accompanies it with the beat of the newly skinned drum.

So when Nannie got her song, it came in part from the bowhead whale that for so long has supported her people.

Remember this, next time you see the Iñupiat of the Arctic Slope dancing to the beat of drums made in the traditional way - that powerful, powerful, drumbeat that you hear is literally the sound of the bowhead whale.

In the evening, I ate a big meal with the Nukapigak crew and then hiked up to the Oyagak cabin, thinking that it was time for Nannie to blow out her candles. I arrived a little bit early. Everyone had just sat down to dine on caribou soup. Nannie ladles out a bowl.

I ate again, and found a huge piece of delicious caribou tongue in my soup. I do not joke or exaggerate - it tasted so, so, good. I have eaten at some fine restaurants in places like New York City, Washington, DC, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; Bangalore, India and I have enjoyed every bite.

But there is nothing in this world better than Alaska Native food, caught and prepared right. Many people who don't know better shy away from it, but that is just because their palette's have not yet learned. After I finished the first, I downed a second bowl.

When I overeat the kind of food that I generally eat when I hang out down here in Wasilla and elsewhere in the "mainstream" world, I always feel rotten the next day.

On this trip, I overate again and again... whale, caribou, moose, salmon, white fish, polar bear, seal, duck and geese... and not once did it leave me feeling anything but good the next day.

Finally, it was time to light the cake. Nannie joined in the lighting. 

The banner above Nannie's head was hung last year... Cross Island has become the place where she celebrates her birthday. The gentleman standing to the far left is whaling captain Billy Oyagak, who accepted the gift of the 51-foot bowhead that provided the drum skin used on this day to sing "happy birthday" to Nannie Rae.

And then she blows out all of her candles. I wonder what she wished for? I didn't ask, because such wishes are supposed to be kept secret.

*As noted in the title, this is part one of this Eskimo drum story. There might be one more part, maybe two, possibly even three - I am not certain. But for now, I am not going to post them, but will save them for Uiñiq magazine.

One day, well after the next Uiñiq has been published, I will post those parts either here or in whatever this blog has evolved into by then - so, to those who do not have access to Uiñiq, stick with me until then and you will get to see the full series - plus much more that for now I will hold back.

I do plan to put at least two more Cross Island related stories on this blog over the next two or three days.

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Preview of Nannie Rae's Cross Island birthday party; Kalib and Jobe return to the blog

In about one hour, I must leave for an overnight trip to Nikiski, where I will spend the day tomorrow, so I am just plain out of time to put together the Cross Island post that I had planned to do today. The fact is, while I had hoped to have done a complete initial edit of my entire Cross Island/Nuiqsut take by now, so far I have gone through less than one percent of that take.

Once I do go through it, there are huge sections of it that I will not post at all, but will save exclusively for Uiñiq magazine. As for Nannie's birthday, I plan to put it in both the blog and Uiñiq, but in Uiñiq I will probably have to limit it to one or two pictures, whereas here I can post a few.

Here, at least, is a preview of what I plan to post Monday, when I will return this blog to Cross Island/Nuiqsut for two or three more posts:

It is Nannie Rae Kaigelak, with a few of those who gathered in the Cross Island cabin of successful whaling captain Billy Oyagak to celebrate her 22nd birthday.

So I will dedicate my Monday post to a spread that will focus not only on Nannie's birthday, but on a particular Eskimo drum that happened to play a role in that birthday.

If you love Cross Island and you love Nannie Rae - and a great many people do - or even if you have never met Nannie Rae and all that you know of Cross Island is the tiny bit that you have so far seen on this blog, be sure to come back Monday.

In the meantime, come Sunday, I will let Barrow Whaler fans know how the team fared in Nikiski.

So I finally got to see my grandsons and their mom again, yesterday afternoon, when I drove into Anchorage to pick Margie up from this week's babysitting stint.

Here they are, in their driveway.

Little Jobe ALWAYS has a big smile for his grandpa, everytime I see him. 

Martigny was there, too. She never smiles, but she does purr.

As I Margie and I prepared to drive away, Lavina brought Kalib to the window to wave goodbye to us. He did not want us to go. He wanted us to stay. He cried to see us go.

And now, once again, I must go.

That's how my life is. I seldom have time to ever settle down, except for when I was hurt, or Margie was hurt. I am always going.

Go... go... go...

Always.

One day I will be dead and then I will go no more.

I wonder how much I can get done between now and then?

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Cross Island: Young hunters play in the wind; Nanuq family rides in with the ice, takes a stroll down the beach

For days, all the hunters on Cross Island, young and old, male and two females, have been working hard to cut up and prepare the whales. Now it is time for a break. The older hunters retreat to their cabins to get out of the cold wind, to eat, drink coffee, visit and relax.

But the young hunters - their energy is boundless. They eat quickly, then run out to play with the wind. They climb upon a roof, scramble across it and, with the wind at their backs, leap off.

The wind howls in excess of 30 knots. It is the kind of wind that cuts through clothing, skin, fat, blood and meat to chill the bones. 

The young hunters don't care.

To them, the wind is fun. It transforms their coats into sails and pushes them about.

Young hunters, at play with the wind.

For a moment, I worry that the wind will lift him right off the island, hurl him out over the Beaufort Sea and drop him down amongst the icebergs, or perhaps carry him over the top of the North Pole and all the way to Russia.

Won't the Russians be surprised to see a boy from Cross Island drop into their country?

"How did he elude our fighter jets?" Putin will rear his head and grill his military advisers.

It didn't happen that way, though. All the young hunters had fun, but stayed on the ground.

Even as the boys played with the wind, this nanuq family rode in with the ice, then stepped onto the beach and took a stroll.

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Transitions: Wasilla to Cross Island; same state, totally different worlds

I now back up two weeks, to September 1 - a horribly discouraging day for me. It was a day that I contemplated just giving up, to just say the hell with it, to admit that after 35 years of hard, intense, work for which I have accumulated nothing but debt, I'm finished, exhausted, done, wiped out, my career is destroyed - you plunderers at Well's Fargo bank, just take the house and I will take Margie and go live under a bridge somewhere.

But I didn't think Margie would like to live under a bridge, so I decided to rethink the situation.

The thing that had gotten me so down was that I had been planning to cover the Nuiqsut fall bowhead whale hunt based on Cross Island, 79 miles east of the village and about ten miles offshore from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. At the end of each summer, the Nuiqsut hunters load up their boats, drive them down the Kuukpik River into the chilled waters of the Beaufort Sea and then journey to Cross Island, where they move back into their cabins from where they launch their hunts. 

Under the bowhead quota, Nuiqsut had four strikes to land four whales. Typically, the hunt will last into mid-September and it has been known to extend through the entire month. On Thursday night, August 26, I learned that the crew of Edward Nukapigak, Jr. had invited me to join them and they planned to leave for Cross Island on Sunday, August 29. If I could reach Nuiqsut by Saturday, I could hop on the boat and go with them.

But I couldn't get there by Saturday. I was flat broke, all my credit cards were tapped out and I had no way to pay for my plane ticket - plus, most of my good, Arctic cold weather gear had disappeared and I needed to shop for more. Even in late August/early September, one can easily get chilled into hypothermia out on the Arctic Ocean and so one must be properly dressed.

I had an invoice out that I knew would be paid soon and then I could buy my ticket, pick up a bit of gear and go - I figured by the first or second of September.

If the weather turned good, I reasoned that the Nuiqsut hunters might land one or two bowheads right away, but that would still leave two or three for after I arrived.

As it happened, when the hunters reached Cross Island, they were greeted by a rare, three-day stretch of absolutely perfect weather conditions with whales in the water and they took advantage of it. This year's hunt took place in record speed and all four whales were landed in three days - the last one on September 1, the same day that I photographed this school bus, secured my ticket north, and pulled together cold-weather gear sufficient to the task I had hoped to complete.

I was very happy for the hunters, but discouraged for myself and very disgusted with myself as well, for I should have been there. Although I knew it would take them several days yet to take care of and put up the four whales, I had missed the hunt itself and for awhile it seemed pointless for me to still go.

I decided to go anyway and to see what I could make of it.

I am extremely glad that I did, because once I reached Cross Island, I cast off my depression, immersed myself in the experience and had a truly wonderful time. Plus, as I missed the hunt itself, I now have a good excuse to return for another, so that I can round out and complete my photo essay on Nuiqsut/Cross Island bowhead whaling.

Cross Island is a cold, windy, place where, just to take a walk one must either carry a gun or walk in the presence of others who are armed.

But it is a fantastic place and when the time came to leave I was sad and did not want to go.

Anyway, this is how I got there:

On the morning of September 2, I boarded an Era de Havilland Dash 8 at Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport, bound for the Prudhoe Bay airport at Deadhorse, with a brief stop in Fairbanks. The plane was nearly empty, with only six passengers to fill the approximately 40 seats.

We flew past Denali on our way to Fairbanks. So many tourists come here each summer hoping to see this mountain but never get to, as it spends so much of its time shrouded in clouds.

But on this day it was out, and even the murky, plexiglass, window of the Dash 8 could not conceal its magnificence.

One of my five fellow passengers observes the mountain.

As we cross the Tanana River on the approach to Fairbanks International, the pilot has lowered the landing gear. I see a shadow plane coming our way.

It looks to me as though we are on a collision course with the shadow plane.

We are! We are going to collide with the shadow plane! There is no way to avoid it now!

And yet, it is a gentle collision.

We spend 20 minutes on the ground in Fairbanks and then leave for Deadhorse with even fewer passengers than when we landed. I worry about this, because I don't know how an airline can long operate with this kind of passenger load and I want Era to keep this flight going.

"Don't worry," the Stewardess tells me. "We will be full coming out of Deadhorse."

All three of us passengers then pay rapt attention as she delivers the preflight briefing.

When I first got a bike as a young boy living in Missoula, Montana, I hooked up with some friends and we spent the day riding our bikes all over Missoula together. It was one of the most fun days I had yet to experience in my life.

Not long after I first purchased my now crashed airplane, the Citabria that I called Running Dog, I stopped to spend some time in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, located elsewhere down there in these same Brooks Range mountains.

As it happened, there were two other men living in the village who also had Citabrias. One day, we all hooked up together and we went flying in our separate Citabrias all about these mountains, cutting through various valleys.

I felt just like I did on that day when I was a boy and rode my bike with my friends, all about Missoula, Montana. But now it was the Brooks Range Mountains, Alaska.

Do you begin to understand why I miss that airplane so much? Why I dream of it night after night?

Coming in on final to the Deadhorse airport, a pipeline beneath us.

Touch down at Deadhorse - the airport that serves the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.

I catch a ride to the North Slope Borough's Service Area 10, where Dora Leavitt of Nuiqsut operates a radio communications center for the Nuiqsut whalers, as well as for those at Kaktovik, 100 more miles to the east. She radios Edward Jr., who sends a boat to pick me up, along with some needed supplies, at West Dock, a slow, strictly restricted-speed, forty-minute drive by pick-up truck from the Com Center.

West Dock.

It is Eric Leavitt who comes to get me. He has packed some freshly-boiled uunaalik from the Nukapigak whale for Dora into a cooler to keep it hot. He hands me a piece.

Oh, my! I had not eaten fresh uunaalik in a long time. Tender. So good.

We pass under the bridge and then head out into the ocean. The absolutely perfect conditions that allowed the hunters to land their four whales in three days - record time - are gone now. It is windy and the water is rough. The boat bounces hard across the waves. I do not take pictures, because I have to give my full attention to protecting my cameras and laptop computer from being pounded into oblivion. 

I do this by pulling them close to me. I use my body as a schock absorber.

We reach the island just as everyone takes a break. I go into the Nukapigak cabin and make myself at home. That's captain Edward Jr. on the left, his brother, Thomas, and Eric.

Soon, the work of butchering the last of the four whales commences again. I go out and put myself in the middle of it.

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I break my absence with quick and cute: the dog who charged a polar bear cub and then got charged by a polar bear mom; two girls and pups; a special Charlie Brown plane in Nuiqsut

See the dog on the right? That's Ivory. I took this image of Ivory and friends right here in the Arctic Slope village of Nuiqsut, where I am right now, but a few nights ago, on Cross Island, I saw Ivory charge toward a polar bear cub that had wandered about 200 feet from its mom.

Then I saw the mom charge toward Ivory. Ivory then changed his mind and came running back to us.

Yes, I photographed the scene and I will share it, although I should warn you not to get your hopes too high, as the sun had already set, the sky was overcast, I was shooting a 400 mm lens handheld at something like 1/30 of a second.

I have not yet had a chance to look at the downloanded images, but I know they will be blurred. Still, I will share them.

I will comment more then.

Rochelle with cute puppy, right here in Nuiqsut. I might note that a little earlier in the day I had taken a long walk, missing Cross Island but glad that I could walk alone without carrying a gun. On Cross Island, one either carries a gun or walks with someone who is.

Usually, a warning shot will convince the bear to leave one alone.

Rochelle and Elizabeth, right here in Nuiqsut, with puppies.

And this is Lucy Mae, with puppy. Whale shares are being divided in the background.

Rochelle, loving puppy.

Everts Air on the Nuiqsut strip. I will have more on this plane in Uiñiq magazine.

Although it started with an immense personal disappointment, this has been a wonderful and amazing trip and I have shot many, many, pictures for Uiñiq. I have not had a chance to do any editing at all, but within my larger Uiñiq take there are three or four little stories that I plan to share on this blog - and yes, the polar bears are one. And I have what I think is a wonderful little story about an Eskimo drum - and, of course, there was that very brief stop at a haunted house that sits all by itself, right on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.

Something bad has happened to my laptop. The screen image is rapidly vibrating, bouncing up and down. It is extremely annoying to look at it - just putting this blog together has given me a headache and made me dizzy! - and it is impossible to edit and process photos. I can't color balance them at all. I have no idea how the images I have placed here actually appear in terms of color, contrast and all those kind of things that photographers worry about.

I plan to be home Sunday. I may not, or I may, post again before then. It is just too aggravating to work on this malfuncting computer. I may just wait until I get back to my desktop computer.  I don't know, I don't know.

I'm not even going to attempt to proofread this, either. Words are jumping all over the page.

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