This summer I took my mom on a salmon berry picking trip to a slough called "Cuqartalek", which is right across the river from Pilot Station. We left Marshall on the fourteenth of July with plans to spend four beautiful days with berries, bugs, rain, cold, and relatives. It was sort of like a family bonding experience, and although ninety percent of my time there was boring, the other ten percent was serious fun.

The fun started with the ride there, which was three and a half hours long--one hour to Pilot and two and a half from there to the picking spot. The slough is narrow and has a lot of turns, so at high speeds it is a little dangerous. When we were about half way there we saw a moose and stopped to say "Holy Cow!", then we were on our way. We stopped again at the site of an old village, which is located on a fork where on the right the slough goes all the way out to sea, and on the left it leads to a lake. We took the left fork and rode up the slough for about twenty minutes where we stopped, picked some salmon berries and set up camp there.

The next morning after breakfast we left by boat for other patches of tundra which hopefully had lots of berries. While the women picked, Garrett and I and another cousin stayed in the boats rod and reeling. But there were hardly any fish where we were, so later on we went to a place that was filled with small, very aggressive pike. After we got tired of catching small fish we went exploring and found a lake that none of us knew about. We tried fishing there and I almost caught one out in the middle. When it got late we picked up my mom and the others and headed back to camp.

I woke up late the next day because there was nothing to do but pick berries, and usually I'd rather do nothing than pick berries. In the early afternoon though we did our routine berry hunt until early in the evening. When we got back to camp our parents began to talk about how little food we had. So Garrett and I and a relative ended up going hunting. After we got home with our catch there was no more talk of being hungry.

On our last day of camping, of course we looked for berries again, and this time even I did some picking to help fill my mom's bucket. Finally, around six P.M. our older ones said that they had enough berries and we could go home. We drove pretty fast because we wanted to get home as quickly as possible to relax. We saw a black bear on our way out but didn't stop. It took us a little more than two hours to Pilot and an hour from there to Marshall. When we got home my mom stirred up a batch of akutaq with the berries we picked and all of us enjoyed it very much.

By: Ben Peteroff