Life Below Zero

Hey there, buddy.

Heh, heh, seems like this is becoming an annual thing here.

In Kavik, Sue Aikens has enlisted the help

of a bush pilot to take her to a familiar fishing spot.

She has received a new food supply,

but must continue to stockpile meat and protein

for her survival through the dark winter that lies ahead.

We ready? We got everything in?

Yep. All right.

Kavik 6 fox flight 2 takes off to the east.

We'll be northbound to Kavik.

Why would you take a few hours in an airplane

just to go get some fish?

Well, I don't have any food.

All of the food went bad when I had my injury.

It's possible at that site, in a couple of hours,

I can get a couple of days' worth of food.

I'm starting from ground zero, and when winter hits,

it hits with an iron fist.

And it stays for nine months.

Sue doesn't go down without a fight.

If I'm gonna starve, it's gonna be my own lack of trying.

And that doesn't happen in my world.

I'm gonna try until I can't try, until I can try.

So I've gotta use everything in my arsenal to try and bring

something home.

I'm behind the gun.

I got winter breathing down my neck.

My time is tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

My natural alone time, for nine months I have to supply

for myself.

It's like having a biological clock for a woman

that wants to have a baby.

My biological clock is saying, get food.

Get it now.

I knew I wouldn't have the big tide current,

but I was hoping to have a little more water coming in

than this.

So, I don't know if there's gonna be any good fishing at all

The pilot brought me here. It's a great favor to me.

I've got a fishing pole, and, uh,

I'm gonna give it a whirl 'cause even, you know, one,

goes in the freezer and I'm one ahead.

There.

See the lay of the land.

And then get down to getting on some fish.

I think my wife, maybe even a couple

of my daughters, were born with fish in their hands.

No silver spoons here.

Oh, check this baby out.

Oh, that's fresh.

We gotta eat.

Wow, that's a good one there.

Well, when we're done with these fish,

I'm gonna have to go get poles and some cottonwood

and we'll be able to set a smoke under these guys, and.

Yep, we definitely need

a smoker going on.

Yeah, me and the girls could go pick berries,

and we'll take the dog.

Yeah, if you guys take the dog,

I'll take Qutan.

That way you guys will have someone to watch for bears

while you're bent down looking berries.

I can see that my wife's gonna need the rack extended because

she's gonna need to store those fish once they're dried.

And she's gonna need to make room for other fishes

she's gonna put on there.

Along the Kiwalik River,

the Hailstone family has spent several days fishing for salmon,

a key source of protein in their diet.

Preserving the meat for the long winter is a priority,

and must first be processed and dried.

We're just gonna go down the coast here

and get some smoking wood.

And what we call cottonwood around here,

and I use it to smoke the fish and it keeps the flies off it.

And then I'm gonna build my wife a cold storage over here.

She calls it a sigloak and, um, it's gonna be a place

where she can put her berries and her greens.

You know, we want to not only go out and get these foods,

but we gotta preserve 'em.

We have to keep 'em and, uh, get 'em home,

back to Noorvik and freeze 'em.

And then we'll have 'em all winter to eat.

There we go.

This doesn't cost us much.

It's about two gallons of fuel round trip.

We're just across the lagoon five miles.

And uh, there's a lot of wood here.

This is building material.

If I had to buy it from a store,

it would probably cost me a lot of money.

Take that back to the boat.

There's four good logs.

It's good for smoking when you're making fish.

It has a way of just punking out and smoldering itself.

You don't have to keep lighting it and you don't have to

worry about it, just catching into flame and burning.

It's really good for, uh, flavor.

And I see some pieces over here.

I'm gonna get for my sigloak build.

Some longer pieces.

Here, why don't you give me that?

Got us wood for building a nice cold storage.

Just got wood for fire, wood for the smoke on the salmon.

My wife's, uh, society, they divide things between

men and women.

And women do certain things and men do certain things

in ideal situations.

Our ideal situation is that my wife went off berry picking

with the girls and my youngest daughter didn't want to go

berry picking, so she helped me out.

She got to see where all the wood is

and why I come down here.

She's almost 10, so spend a little time together

with the youngest daughter.

There's no guarantees out here.

The only guarantee is you're gonna have to work hard

for everything.

Well, another beautiful morning.

I'm always a fan of the morning times.

It's time to get a lot of things done.

And dogs, one thing is, they got to do every morning

and that was get woke up by these damn squirrels.

And they're out there stealing my dog food.

I see a squirrel right there eating my dog food.

And these guys tear holes into my 67-dollar bag of dog food.

Every one of those little pellets that they eat

actually costs a lot of money.

I don't like killing things, but you know what?

It goes right in the dog pot.

Turn it into dog food.

Just throw it in the cooker with fish or meat, whatever I got,

what I'm cooking up.

Don't want to let it go to waste.

Resources are resources out here, you know?

A lot of people would probably laugh at me for cooking up

squirrels for my dogs, but I'm not gonna just leave them

rotting in the woods and waste.

Got a little excited there, shot too soon.

I want to kill him, I don't want to leave him to go off

and suffer in the brush, you know?

I got a bunch of dog food here.

You can see these squirrels have eaten away into it.

You know, this here is some super-quality chicken, and beef,

and pork scraps.

This is their base food here.

This is a real high-grade kibble, you know,

keeps these dogs going.

These kind of dogs need a lot of calories,

so I don't want to let squirrels be eating my expensive dog food.

This gun, I wouldn't say it's the most accurate or best gun,

you know? But, uh,

it sure works for blasting squirrels.

Squirrel.

I'm gonna see if he doesn't come in and get this dog food.

I'll take my time with this one.

This is what I call protecting my investment.

He just ran right on off. They're pretty quick like that.

I don't think this gun is actually shooting that straight.

It's kind of old and rickety, been beat around in dog sleds,

and I think I kind of need to sight it in 'cause I'd rather

that they die fast so I can, uh, throw 'em in the dog cooker.

This thing isn't really seeming to be shooting that straight.

I'm gonna take this can and go see what's going on with it.

I love being out here at Iliamna

and experiencing the same stuff that I grew up doing.

I got the day off of clients, and

I'm gonna take Martha upriver to a

place I've never been.

I've heard it's a really good grayling hole

and see if we can't go ahead and find a real honey hole

to slam some grayling next week.

So where's this spot you wanted to go to?

How long of a drive is it?

It's not too far.

I think we'll have some good luck.

It's really nice out there today.

Mountains are shining.

Let's, uh, burn out of here. There's not much daylight.

Good day to catch grayling.

Yeah. I think we're gonna get lucky here.

We have a wide variety of game fish here

in the Iliamna Lake drainage.

But a really neat fish we have here is grayling.

There's an area that I've been looking at out of the air

for a couple years.

It's a really nice riffle.

I want to run upriver a little further than I usually do

with Martha and see if we can't get into a real honey hole

of grayling.

There are some unknowns associated with going

to a new spot, but the reality is the risk part is more

about travel with a boat.

The boat is the bigger obstacle.