Sean C. Morgan
When Sweet Home schools Supt. Tom Yahraes was a teen, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life.
Yahraes was a guest speaker Thursday, Nov. 21, at Sweet Home High School’s Natural Resources Program’s Wildlife Class. He shared the story of an Alaskan hunting trip with the students, whose curriculum includes sections on hunting and taxidermy.
As a teen growing up in northern Minnesota, Yahraes said, he made a list to help him figure out what to do, and high up on that list was to have some adventures. After serving in the U.S. Army, driving tanks and guarding the border in Cold War Germany, he returned home.
The Army paid for his education. He became a teacher and decided to take a position in northern Alaska, landing a job in the Bering School District on St. Michael Island off the west coast of Alaska, where he stayed from 1996 to 1999.
He remembers talking to his dad about taking the job and moving to the small village in Alaska. His father told him to essentially go native and get the most out of his time there, and Yahraes took that advice.
“I forgot everything I learned,” he said, and he adapted to life at St. Michael. It was a place where wildlife lived and locals hunted caribou on the frozen ocean. In December, the sun would rise just a finger length above the horizon before dropping out of the sky.
“You have to know where you are,” Yahraes said. One mistake, “you’re dead.”
The stars were his guide, but a rudimentary GPS helped, Yahraes said. A gallon of milk cost $10, so everyone lived off the land, subsistence living.
“Whatever you catch, you use all of it,” Yahraes said. Hunters need to make their shots count, or they’re wasting ammunition. And game taken is used for everything, from clothing to food.
Hunters there were allowed to take up to four caribou per day, four wolves per year and one Alaska brown bear every four years.
Yahraes said he learned to hunt from the Alaskans and became more independent over time, hunting on his own after awhile. During his third year in Alaska, after making a lot of mistakes along the way, he bagged an Alaskan wolf on a solo hunting trip.
Following a stretch of whiteout conditions, the sun rose one day. Riding his snowmobile, Yahraes crossed two to three miles of ocean to the mainland, looking for caribou to share with his host family and for community dinners. The weather wasn’t stable, and he realized he’d made a mistake being out that day.
He knew of a hunting cabin owned by a friend, Jerry Austin, an Iditarod dog sled competitor who had once finished third in the race.
Yahraes said he knew he could safely survive in the cabin and call back to town to let everyone know he was OK. It was about 40 miles from the village, near the Golsovia River.
He holed up there and called home.
“When I got off the radio, I go out to the porch,” Yahraes told the class. “The sky lifted. It’s (the land) peppered with caribou standing in a weird way. I saw this wolf slinking through. The town hadn’t seen a wolf in years.”
Yahraes headed back out into the unstable weather chasing the wolf on his snowmobile.
“I looked at the sky, and thought, ‘This might not be too smart,” he said, but he followed the animal. When he was within 100 yards, he shut down the machine, stood up, aimed his rifle and “squeezed the trigger. It dropped. It got up.”
Hunters must be respectful to the animal, the meat and the fur, he said. They cannot leave behind a wounded animal on a bad shot. He took another shot, and the wolf went down for good.
Then Yahraes took a couple of caribou, he said. While butchering one, “I could see the weather coming back. I thought this is going to be the wolf’s revenge.”
Knowing what was coming, he pointed the skis back at the cabin and quickly finished butchering the caribou.
“By the time I’m done, it was a complete whiteout,” Yahraes said, but he made it safely back to the cabin where he waited out the storm.
Returning to St. Michael, a trapper and his wife helped Yahraes prepare the wolf hide for shipment to Anchorage and then a taxidermist in Montana, which cost about $1,500 at the time.
Yahraes brought the pelt to show the high school students, who had spent class time the previous day boiling and cleaning elk skulls for European-style trophy mounting.
While telling the story, Yahraes connected the idea of the importance of fur to Eskimo traditions and trade.
“Interior Indians would trade fur to coastal Eskimos, who traded with Russians and eventually westerns, for tools, mostly metals,” Yahraes said.
He wanted to encourage the students to be adventurous, he told The New Era.
“If they have dreams, to go for it, even if they are unsure of exactly what they want to do. Experience life. They have all the skills they need to take a leap of faith and put themselves in unique environments where they can learn and live with intention. We’ve got one shot at existence. Make the most of it.”