from Wild Country, The Swede Lake Story, p.105
Dennis and Susan Weston.
The Chickens
Have you ever cut the head off a chicken? It’s not pretty. Blood spurts everywhere and the chicken, headless, will flail around with wings and legs waving and kicking. Such was the action on that late summer day at Weston’s camp.
Weston was Dennis Weston, a 6th grade teacher in Anchorage who was a friend of a friend.
I was invited to Dennis’ camp off the Denali Highway. 40 acres of his wilderness property contained a single building with several small cabins, tent platforms and boats that were located 4 miles from the Denali Highway. One traveled on the Richardson Highway running north from Valdez about 185 miles to Paxon. From this location, at Paxon Lodge, the Denali Highway pointed west, paved for 20 miles, then it became a most scenic dirt-packed road for the next 100 miles. Prior to 1970, this was the only way to get to Denali Park, then called the McKinley Park. Today that highway can be traveled but rental agencies don’t allow their cars on the road due to rocks and damage. In 2014 we did travel it with a rental vehicle, worrying about rocks thrown from cars coming in the opposite direction. We passed 4 very slow moving cars. The rental was safe but dirty.
Dennis’ place was about 25 miles west of Paxon. To get there one would drive west on the Denali Highway to a gravel pit where, if lucky, Dennis would meet visitors with a pickup truck and carry them in through a rough trail over tundra, 4 miles to his place. If one was unlucky and Dennis could not meet them, it was a 4 mile mosquito tornado requiring a head net and copious quarts of DEET. Without the head net, even with the DEET, it was a 4 mile RUN. On one trip, with Patricia and very young son David, I had to pick up David and run to get to the camp.
But I digress.
One August, about 1976, I accompanied Dennis and our mutual friend Leigh to his camp to plan a moose hunt for later in September. Shortly after arrival at his site, Dennis informed us that his chickens were ready to harvest.
It seems Leigh had convinced Dennis that, since he spent the summer at this camp, he should raise chickens there. So Dennis bought 100 chicks and built a coop next to his main building, with three levels of roosts. There the chicks were contained in early June, fed, and mostly grew large. Some pecked others to death and some died of fright from eagles and other raptors hovered overhead.
Those that survived, as they grew larger, were let out during the day. There, they foraged for blueberries and mosquitoes, both in ample quantities. According to Dennis “Every day at exactly the same time, adjusted for shortening days, they lined up in exactly the same order, entered the coop, and roosted in exactly the same place. Every day. Every chicken.”
By the time Leigh and I arrived, those chickens weighed about 3 pounds and were ready to harvest.
Harvesting went like this:
- Place a 50 gallon drum filled with water over a large firepit. Bring the water to a boil.
- Set up a short cut piece of log nearby.
- Grab a chicken by its legs, upside down and lay it over the log.
- Take an axe and chop cleanly across the chicken’s neck.
- Throw the spurting and flapping body upon the hill side.
- As one is dispatched and stops flapping, one person takes the carcass by the legs and dips it into the boiling drum for several minutes.
- The resulting mess is then thrown on the hill to cool a bit
- Another person plucks the feathers
- Someone guts the carcass and cleans it (I forget how)
- The remains are then placed in a plastic bag and sealed.
- This is then transported to a large propane-driven freezer.
After a bit of time, Dennis had a freezer filled with chicken.
And Leigh and I left to return to Anchorage to prepare for our fall teaching assignments.
But the end of the story comes as we returned several weeks later to begin our moose hunt.
According to Dennis, a grizzly bear came into the camp the day following our chicken slaughter to check out the facility. He left some large paw prints, trampled some of the coop wire, and went on his way sans chickens.
As we glassed him rooting for berries across the lake, we were extremely happy he was late to the chicken harvest!