Blogging A Punt, Part 2, Joe's Story, Part 3

Delicious dinner with Lee, then poker night with the boys. Ahhhh …

Makes up for the great pumpkin fiasco of yesterday. *shudder*

Ok, time to wrap up this saga. This time without blatant political digs:




When last we left our hero, Joe had been busted for bustin’ caps in some hairy moose ass. Three days later, he was out and married.

Apparently, when you’re a woman from Gap Tooth, Alaska, you have nothing better to do than sit in a jail and wait for a strapping young man to come along. Your mission: seduce and marry.

Joe was one of the chosen ones. He was thrown into the clink, where he met his beautiful wife. They were married right there in the jail cell, and Joe was set free.

The newlyweds bought a pick-up truck for $250 and headed … it’s just getting outrageous now … NORTH. According to the wife, Joe simply saw a spot he liked, ran the truck off the road, and said, “This looks like a good spot!”

He then proceeded to build them a cabin in three days’ time.

At this, I utterly scoffed. But Dr. Waite explained the details to me. A “cabin" by Alaskan standards is little more than a lean-to. You build one end higher than the other, so that the roof has a slant. Ta-da! Instant cabin. Just add occupants.

This particular cabin was about 4 ½ ft. high at one end, and a little over three ft. at the other. Joe could not even stand upright.

So, Joe spent most of his time out of the house. He found you can make a solid living trapping wolves for French fur companies. Somehow, Joe managed to acquire a team of sled dogs, and he would travel hundreds of miles setting and checking traps. These endeavors kept him away for six weeks at a time, but Joe and his wife had found a niche they were both comfortable with.




Meanwhile, Dr. Waite had earned his doctorate traveling all over Canada watching birds. He became a fairly well-known behaviorist, and was instrumental in one of the most famous studies done on wolves – a genetics study on an island that is rich in wolf and moose populations. The island is perfect for a standard predator-prey relationship study, as well as inbreeding research.

Eventually, Dr. Waite’s studies led him to Alaska (the bird studies, not the inbreeding studies). He ventured to the same small town year after year, still studying birds. Every year, Dr. Waite heard stories about Joe and his wife, and eventually, curiosity overwhelmed him. When he met Joe, he started asking all sorts of questions, and they formed a strange friendship.
Dr. Waite was fascinated by Joe – a man who had lived a life so radically different from his own. And yet, both men had arrived in the same place, at roughly the same age. In fact, they were both, in a broad sense, animal behaviorists.

Joe’s standard plan was to set his traps just outside wildlife preserves, where wolves – who don’t understand arbitrary human boundary markings – would sometimes wander too far. Dr. Waite realized he and Joe used very similar methods of studying animal movement along this trail. The only difference was the end result: Joe would shoot his animals, whereas Dr. Waite would diligently record their path in a little notebook.




Now, before going on the expedition, Joe insisted on waiting until the temperature was -35 Fahrenheit or lower.

One day the temperature actually hit -32 F, and an impatient Dr. Waite said, “Let’s just go out now.”

Joe scowled at the good doctor.

“You can’t run dogs in heat like this!” he barked.

So they waited, and to pass the time, Dr. Waite learned as much as he could about Joe. One evening, he noticed that Joe had a long, deep scar running down his leg.

Naturally, the story behind the scar is amazing. Joe was out on the trapping trail and cut his leg with a knife. He began losing blood a rapid rate, but couldn’t spare the clothes to make a tourniquet, which would have only been a temporary solution anyway. Joe was a weeks' travel from his home, and he had to act fast. He picked a twig off the ground, and used his knife to sharpen the end of the twig into a crude needle. Then he yanked out a fiber from the lining of his parka. He tied this around the end of the twig, and began methodically stitching his own leg shut.

No anesthetic, mind you.

The fibers from the parka are barely more than two inches in length – enough for a single stitch. Also, the sharpened twig would be dull after every stab through his flesh. So Joe would yank out another fiber, sharpen another stick and repeat the process, until he had given himself enough stitches to get back to his home.

Dr. Waite looked stunned. Then Joe’s wife spoke up:

“That’s nothing. Show him your elbow, dear.”

Joe rolled back his sleeve, and indeed, there was an even more grotesque scar across his elbow. Nearly two inches of scar tissue had built up around the original wound.

Dr. Waite HAD to hear this story.

Joe shrugged and said he had been outside their home and cut his arm on a piece of sheet metal.

“Well … yeah …” Dr. Waite stuttered. “But, it’s so BAD. I mean, I can understand the leg – it was a matter of saving your own life. But why doesn’t your elbow look better? Didn’t you go to a doctor?”

Joe shook his head. He’d entered the cabin and shown his bleeding arm to his wife. Mrs. Joe took one look at the cut, got out her sewing kit, and lined up 10 shots of whisky in front of her.

Now, 10 shots of whisky might sound like a lot, but to an Alaskan, you may as well be drinking melted snow.

But the story isn’t that simple. What Dr. Waite eventually pieced together is that Joe’s wife had already BEEN drinking – heavily – when Joe entered with his injury. She was fairly drunk before she even started.

Needless to say, 10 shots of whisky and about as many stitches later, Joe’s arm was probably worse off than it had started.

Now, many of the finer details in these stories came from Joe’s wife. Joe, as you might imagine, is a man of few words. Which is why Dr. Waite was surprised when he spoke up at this point in the tale.

“You know,” Joe said, gruffly, “All these years, and it just occurred to me that I should have been the one taking shots of whisky.”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Joe sat there, completely sober, while his drunk wife gouged at his arm with a needle and some sewing thread.

Makes The Rock look like a kitten, don’t he?




Every summer after that, when Dr. Waite would return to Alaska, he would visit Joe and his wife. When Dr. Waite was back in school for the winter, they would keep in touch via letters. Dr. Waite described a typical letter from the family as “a long, chatty note from Mrs. Joe, followed by a scribble at the bottom reading, ‘See you next summer – Joe.’”

One day, Dr. Waite received one of their letters, and was shocked – although by this point you’d think he’d be over this sort of surprise – to learn that Joe had been in a Disney movie.

Ok, when he told me this story, I was shocked, too.

Apparently, the good folks at Disney were gearing up to film White Fang (which, for time reference, was released in 1991). Obviously, they were in a great need for many sled dogs, so they began calling teams of people who regularly won the Iditarod, Alaska’s annual dog-sled race (http://www.iditarod.com/). One man had won two-years in a row, and Disney showed a keen interest in using his dogs in the film.

But when the set designers saw the dogs (or, more likely, photos of the dogs) they were a bit disappointed. Every dog was a fit, lean husky. You might think this makes sense; in the words of Dr. Waite, “You won’t find a 300-pound track star.”

But the Disney people wanted White Fang to feel authentic, and in Jack London’s days, that meant dogs of just about every imaginable shape and size tied to a rickety wooden sled. When they explained their predicament to the Iditarod champ, he simply smiled and said, “I know exactly who you need.”

So Disney went to Joe, who shrugged and said he would be happy to lend his dogs to their movie. They paid him as an animal trainer (uncredited, of course) and invited him and his dogs to the set. Once in awhile, the script would call for more people in the background, so Joe stepped in.

Dr. Waite went to see White Fang, and sure enough, there was his ol’ buddy Joe, right there on the big screen.



Eventually, Dr. Waite was unable to make his yearly trips to Alaska, as his scientific efforts leaned away from behaviorism toward his current position as a conservation biologist. But he still keeps in touch with his old friends. The last he heard, Joe and his wife had started their own eco tourism business.

And he showed me the website to prove it.



That's the story. And every word of it is true.

As Dr. Waite finished his tale, I sat back, trying to soak up every last detail, every last absurd mental image, from enormous Joe skin-diving for lobsters to his appearance on the silver screen. But Dr. Waite, being a master of storytelling, seized the moment.

“Of course,” he said, interrupting my thoughts with a sly look, “Joe is considered tame by Alaska standards. Let me tell you about Trapper Rick …”