Free Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit Page A

spawn here in fall.
    Not far from Byers Lake is Kesugi Ridge, one of Southcentral Alaska’s premier backpacking routes. One reason is the view: several of the Alaska Range’s grandest peaks dominate the western horizon, culminating in the snow- and ice-capped throne of 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley.
    â€”Bill Sherwonit
    At the kinked birch my family used as a marker I turn off the main path onto the wide new trail to the cabin. We used to bushwhack to get here, back when we’d come on the weekend or school holidays, before we sold the cabin to the government as it swallowed more land for Denali State Park.
    As I approach the cabin, I come to what once was a small clearing. It is overgrown now with devil’s club, willows, grass, and young trees, but a tall cache used to stand in the clearing, its four thick spruce legs covered with cut-open tin cans, flattened andnailed around the legs to keep bears and squirrels from climbing up. Fox, lynx, and wolverine furs were stored in the cache. Moose meat, too, and big sacks of flour for bread and pies.
    The jagged metal corner of the cabin’s porch sticks out from behind brush and I notice how tall the spruce and birch trees growing from the top of the grassy roof have become and how moss thicker than a down quilt hangs from the top of the sinking cabin.
    I pad slowly around to the front, careful not to lean too close to the sharp-edged porch overhang, the rusty corrugated tin roofing bent down by many wet winter snows. I peek in the side window, the glass long shattered, to see the living room where my parents cooked and ate and sang and skinned pelts and read aloud to each other by Coleman lantern light. Where they built wood fires each frigid morning in December when the day would not brighten until the sun glowed at its zenith behind Curry Ridge at noon. Only remnants of those days remain now. Over the years the cabin has been vandalized, cleaned out. Even the spruce-pole couch frame Dad built is now gone, ashes in a campfire somewhere nearby. The little table he made still sits in the corner, though, and candle wax is still pooled where it dripped so long ago, next to flies twenty years dead.
    I pull my head carefully back from the empty window frame. Out front, I trace with the tip of my index finger the official wood-burned state parks sign that reads in neat loopy letters, Beeman’s Cabin 1959.
    Another sign outside reads Unsafe — Keep Out. Visitors aren’t supposed to crawl inside the cabin, where they might break an ankle jumping over the root cellar built into the middle of the living room floor, collapsed onto itself with rotten planks jutting up from below. Or a person might whack his forehead on the low log over the doorway betweenthe living room and the bedroom, the doorway where my parents stapled a cutout magazine photo of a mallard so they wouldn’t forget to duck. Visitors might squeeze into the bedroom and sit down on the edge of a bunk bed to see more clearly the drawings my brother and I sketched on the ceiling and the frame could crack, injuring them.
    But I’m not a visitor. I crouch through the front entrance and step carefully over the root cellar in the dim light and duck into the bedroom to see the old artwork. Yes, those were my horses. I did lie there thirty years ago, drawing long-backed stallions with squarish legs and foals with perky, pointed ears, laughing and telling stories with my brother as he uttered boy noises in the other bunk, drawing pistols and bullets on his side of the room.
    Now it is time to go, time to pick berries. I’ve seen all I can see at the cabin. I’ve remembered all I can, the memories only hints of what had gone before, more bird track than bird.
    I drive on, through Cantwell, and park just past the Nenana River. Carrying my empty tub, I walk the highway shoulder a few hundred feet. Two huge boulders hug the edge of a tundra field on the left. I drop down the steep side of the