Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

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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.