Original subtitles

ERIK SALITAN: There's nothing that prepares you for this way of life.

You're either into it or you're not.

SUE AIKENS: I don't want them to eat me.

They want to eat me.

You know, life is on life's terms, not mine.

CHIP HAILSTONE: Everything I need to make a living is out there.

I can build my house, I can feed my kids.

SUE: I've got to always be prepared that every day may be your last.

ANDY BASSICH: Being free means being able to carve out a life on your own terms.

You gotta remember, the country can eat you,

just as quick as you can eat anything from the country.

(GUNSHOT)

Anytime you can dance with the devil and come out on top,

it's not a bad feeling.

ERIK: What you need, what you want, it's all subjective.

This is, like, a plush life.

CHIP: Can't be scared of death, just scared of the pain it takes to get dead.

(LAUGHING)

I am the last frontier.

SUE: You let your guard down once and you end up going home in a body bag.

(DOGS BARKING)

CHIP HAILSTONE: I'm Chip Hailstone. I've been living in this region

for 25 years now.

I met my wife, Agnes, and I've just stayed with her and she stayed with me.

I love this place.

I'm gonna have my bones picked clean by the birds here someday.

AGNES: I'm Agnes Hailstone, and I'm an Inupiaq Eskimo.

I was born and raised around the Kobuk River area.

Right now we're catching the whitefish and the mud sharks.

CHIP: Today we're setting nets. We're hoping for quite a few fish.

It's just, when you want to make a good living

and you want to do it from the country, you gotta remember,

the country can eat you just as quick as you can eat anything from the country.

(ENGINE REVVING)

I fish the Inupiaq way, and we go to the same place where my wife and her family

and her mother and her mother's mother have been fishing.

And it's possible it's been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years there.

(SNOWMOBILE APPROACHING)

Where I live, beyond the end of the road,

before the Earth stops going north,

food is pretty important.

Late fall is one of the last chances to get a large bunch of whitefish,

and setting the nets on thin ice is probably one of the more dangerous things

that we do during the year.

But death is a big part of our life.

It's kind of our doings. This is... Hunting and fishing is dealing death.

The changing seasons, the changing conditions,

that all keeps me kind of apprehensive.

But as long as you're paranoid, then you're worried,

and as long as you're worried, that's the first step to protecting yourself.

Well, the far side is one-inch ice.

One-inch ice we don't put our weight on.

But this is highly dangerous.

This killed my wife's mother, this killed my wife's brother,

this killed my wife's brother's girlfriend.

A lot of people every year, so we just gotta be careful.

It's pretty risky.

Nobody will grab you, 'cause you'll go under the ice and the current will take you.

This is a strong, fast-running river.

There's no coming back.

Every day, I kiss my kids, if I don't see them again.

Yep. It's kind of scary sometimes. (CHUCKLES)

We're hoping for quite a few fish.

We're trying to be as safe as possible.

We've only got a couple inches of ice underneath us.

(CRACKING)

Two-inch rule.

AGNES: I lost my mother, my brother and his girlfriend to the ice.

Ever since then, I'm real cautious of where I step.

When I pass away, I would like to go to the Happy Hunting Grounds

where my ancestors are.

(CRACKING)

CHIP: That's over one inch. AGNES: Okay.

-That's as far as we go. -(CHIP LAUGHS)

That's as far as we go.

ERIK: Being a registered guide outfitter in Alaska is something really special.

My guide licence number is 1,273.

Ever since I was a little kid, I always was really into the outdoors.

It was something that was just born into me.

My name is Erik Salitan, and I've lived in Alaska for 10 years.

I'm a registered guide outfitter here

and I live in the Brooks Range above the Arctic Circle.

I buy absolutely no meat whatsoever from the store.

Every bit of the meat that I eat is harvested by myself.

(SNOW CRUNCHING)

Here's another wolf track.

I'm gonna say that this wolf track is probably a week old.

This wilderness is the last true wilderness left in North America.

There is no other true wilderness left

but right here in the Arctic of Alaska. That's it.

This is a hindfoot,

the track somewhat obscured by the frost coming up out of the ground.

But you can see the five toes here and the claw marks here.

It's bigger than my hand is across.

We're probably looking at a pretty big bear.

Let's follow them and see where he goes.

(WHISPERING) There they are.

We're gonna move along slowly and see if we can get in good range here to get a shot.

We've spotted a medium-sized herd of caribou.

They're mainly comprised of cows.

We're gonna target a dry cow, a cow without a calf.

That's the best meat at this time of year.

That's the fattest animal, and the meat is what's important to us.

(CLICKS)

Another dud.

We had a gun malfunction here, you can see the bolt.

It's just, like, slow motion here, I gotta use my forward assist to close it.

It's all frozen up.

I had one chance with these caribou here. (COUGHS)

They've taken off now, it's cold,

my gun malfunctioned.

Better luck next time.

(SNOW CRUNCHING)

I came to Alaska the day that I graduated from high school,

and I've lived here ever since.

There's nothing that prepares you for this way of life.

You're either into it or you're not.

There's no school that you can go to, there's no training that you can take

to come live out here and do things like this.

Some people take a job in a factory.

I rolled out and came here.

I was crazy to begin with, so it wasn't a problem.

SUE: I've always craved extreme isolation.

I don't wanna be in town. I wanna go home.

Nobody wants to get attacked by a bear.

I mean, it's not what most people think about,

what most people have to worry about.

But I do.

I live at Kavik River Camp, which is a camp up on the North Slope,

and I am its sole caretaker.

My address is a GPS coordinate,

69.4 North, 146.54 West.

My closest neighbour would be,

I don't know, 300, 350 miles south.

I live at the top of nowhere, in a tent,

have no desire to change that,

and my closest neighbours might be a bear right outside the door.

Back in June of 2011,

I was rewiring the camp up at Kavik,

fell, and I broke my leg.

I needed surgery to fix it, ended up having to come to town.

So, I just had the surgery

and getting better.

The doctor just gave me the green light to go home,

so I am packing my shit and getting the hell out of Dodge.

I don't know the conditions I'm gonna be walking into,

but I've gotta be prepared for them.

This is your basic .44 Ruger.

This is, uh... If I'm going to the bathroom,

if I'm cleaning up around camp, whatever I'm doing,

this is what you wear to protect yourself.

You come around the corner, a wolverine meets you and charges you,

you want something you can grab quick that's got a little bit of boom.

You undo these and tie them around your legs,

so you can walk around like John Wayne going, "Fuck with me, man."

(LAUGHS)

This little baby right here is longer range.

I get a lot of bear activity, 83 grizzes within 10 miles of camp.

If you have a dangerous predator charging you,

I have 10 of his friends that are right in here that say, "You're gonna stop."

I got caught with my panties down once before,

laid there 10 days before I got found.

This helps me to feel that that won't happen twice.

ANDY: I moved out here to live my dream of living in the woods,

to be as self-sufficient as I can be.

I just love the isolation and I love the quiet.

Yukon River is a really powerful river.

When it decides it wants to do something, you better get out of the way.

There's no way of stopping it.

My name's Andy Bassich. I've been living in Eagle for 30 years,

I met my wife, Kate, in Dawson City in the Yukon Territory.

Every year, the river freezes up sometime in November or December,

we never know when.

We're kind of landlocked in until it's safe to get across and we can put trails in.

I'd say we live about 14 miles from the nearest point of civilisation here.

Every year when the river freezes,

the ice packs in and blocks our path to town.

In order to get out, we literally have to cut a trail

to create a path for our sleds.

We don't have roads.

In Alaska, most of the rivers are the highways for people.

Putting a trail across a river takes me sometimes two days to do it.

And this opens up all the areas where I cut wood,

where I get logs for building,

and almost more importantly than that, it opens up all downriver for me.

Iceberg, Gilligan, sit.

KATE RORKE: My name is Kate.

I first came to Alaska as a tourist 10 years ago.

I love it here.

I wake up every morning and I think I'm the luckiest woman in the world.

I met Andy in Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory.

He brought me to Eagle during that time.

I fell in love with the place, I fell in love with him.

My life is perfect. It's a life everybody should lead.

Everybody should have this kind of peace.

ANDY: What I love about living out here is the freedom to develop the life I wanna live,

and then living that life.

(ICE SHATTERING)

KATE: Okay.

ANDY: I gotta go check this ice, though,

this could be hollow up here.

You have to be careful 'cause you never know when you're gonna hit bad ice

on the Yukon River here, especially early on.

There's soft spots, there's weak spots,

and it's real easy to go through.

If you go through, that's it, you're gone.

-(THUMPING) -Sounds pretty solid here so far.

See what happens here.

I have to say, I'm just a wee bit nervous standing right here right now.

There's dangers everywhere and I don't know how I put them out of my mind,

but I guess I'm a little insane that way.

If you disappear under the ice in the Yukon,

you can't swim up against the current

and you basically just get swept away.

(THUMPING)

Every time I go out on that river, even when I know it's safe ice,

in the back of my mind I'm thinking, you know,

"What happens if I go through now?"

All right, I think we made it!

-Yeah! -It's good?

-Yeah, we're good. -All right, we're almost done.

This is kind of a big day, you know, to open up the river,

to start feeling like we have the world kind of opening up around us.

Big day.

ANDY: Come on, Kru, get her!

-Get her, Kru! -(KATE LAUGHING)

Get her, Kru! Come on, Kru, get her!

(KATE LAUGHING)

SUE: I've accepted I'm a food group,

and that's the way I live my life.

It's a gamble, it's a risk. Are you gonna make it?

Toss the coin, heads or tails.

(DOG BARKING)

The doctor just gave me the green light,

so I can pack my shit and leave Fairbanks.

Next stop, Deadhorse, grab a bush plane.

-(ENGINE STARTING) -One hour to the right, and I am home.

I've been in the Fairbanks area now

for roughly three months.

I had to come in and have surgery.

You know, about two years ago,

I took a nasty fall out at camp,

broke the leg in three places.

And a few years back,

I got attacked by a grizzly,

tore up the hips, the spine, um...

Created some problems for me, you know, healthwise.

The break of the leg and the subsequent healing of it exacerbates that.

So, between the bear injury and the breaking of the leg,

you know, I wasn't walking correctly,

haven't been walking correctly.

All the top predators, they cull the injured animals.

They look for something

that's slower, not right,

and that's the first thing they pursue.

It's very difficult to have something

put its jaws on your head,

you know, it's like the teeth marks here,

you feel it go into your scalp,

you feel the skull being compromised,

you're hoping he doesn't crush it.

Um, I try not to think about it too much.

In the first person, I don't mind

talking about it a little,

but I don't like bringing it all back up.

Laying there, you know,

for so many days,

you don't know, "Am I gonna get out of this one?"

You don't know if this is gonna be the year

your kids are gonna get the call that says,

"You know, your mom was a tough bastard,

"but she's not here no more."

The word that I've gotten is,

looks like I have a bear denned up in my cubby that I live in.

I may have to walk 500, 600 yards through the snowdrifts

to get to my building, dig in to the door,

only to deal with a bear.

CHIP: This is just being a man. It's an ancient way of doing things.

This is actually wealth without money.

You can feed your family with subsistence.

(SCRAPING)

CHIP: 'Cause if that's the river right there,

and over here is the other half of the river,

then the fish travel up this way,

so we put our net there.

We do our work and get our reward.

Just like payday.

(SAW BUZZING)

CHIP: The fish that we're trying to catch are valuable to us

because we can eat them ourselves, we can feed them to dogs,

we can trade them to people,

and we could sell them outright if we wanted to.

And this is an important time of year,

because it's the one time of year that they have eggs,

and the eggs make them so nutritious,

they make the caloric value in them so much better.

And they're tasty. (CHUCKLES) They just taste good.

There's my wife, there's my son,

there's my oldest daughter, and my wife's cousin.

We all fish together all the time.

It's never a safe deal.

Should be safe in another month, though, when she's a foot thicker.

(LAUGHS)

AGNES: I don't think my mother would like it if I gave up fishing

because she taught me and my sisters to fish,

and, I don't know, I just don't think I'd give that up.

I bring the kids out most of the time.

They always know never to go by the ice holes,

and they always travel in pairs.

We're gonna take this yellow line here and we're gonna pass it under

from hole to hole to hole to hole,

until we've got this dozen holes or so

all the way to the rope there.

Then we're gonna feed it in and use the rope and pull it back.

CHIP: I thought you pulled the rope.

-You really pulled... -TINMIAQ: (GIGGLES) You got it, Dad.

TINMIAQ: Got the rope. CHIP: Pull it, pull it.

CHIP: Oh, it just came off again.

See you can't stop and give it slack, it's like a fish.

CHIP: Today, we're setting nets. We're trying to get our adjustments right

to where we get to where the fish are.

And we're just keeping our wits about us as best we can

to where we can get this set and still do it safely.

CHIP: There you go, pull it, Ag, pull it. Pull it, Ag, pull it.

Keep pulling it, Ag. Keep pulling it before you lose it.

AGNES: I was looking at it.

CHIP: I know, I can see it, too. I can see it right from here.

AGNES: Now. CHIP: Did I go through the iron?

AGNES: Now, now. CHIP: Pull it out.

Finally! Put one through the eye of this dang thing.

(EXHALES)

CHIP: We're hoping to get a couple hundred fish a day.

This is an important time of year,

because it's the one time of year that they have eggs.

Our preference right now, while they're here,

are the egg-laden whitefish.

And that's why we use such a large mesh on our nets.

It's because we want the smaller, skinnier ones to pass through

and the big, fat ones to get caught.

Grab that corner, son.

(STRAINING)

TINMIAQ: Oh, that one that was rolling...

CHIP: That one... Yeah, that was real timid?

Look, he's on the inside of the net, Agnes.

CHIP: I do this the way that folks around here do it,

because the way the folks around here do it is the right way to do it.

So, of course I copy them. I learn from them, I emulate 'em

and I teach it to my kids.

CHIP: We got one around here somewhere.

I see eggs on the ice.

Right now, we'll be eating the fish,

and someday they'll come for theirs.

We're all gonna die. Can't be scared of death,

you just gotta be scared of the pain it takes to get dead.

(LAUGHING)

(TINMIAQ MURMURING)

CHIP: Yep. That's good, huh?

KATE: The river will take us someday.

I always say that we'll die on the river.

ANDY: You have to think ahead.

If we just go blindly doing things,

it'll bite you real quick.

(DOGS HOWLING)

Hey, I just checked the river ice

and I think it's probably good enough.

I can try and make it to town.

So, I think what I'd like to do is, I'm gonna hook up a relatively small team

and see how far I can make it up to town today.

Every time he leaves to go on the snow machine or with the dogs,

something can always go wrong. I mean, you can...

Lose your sled, fall, hit jumble ice,

crack your head open.

Okay, well, just don't do anything stupid.

-Yep. This time. -You can wait a day or two...

-(ANDY CHUCKLING) -No, I'm serious.

You know, you always gotta be the first person on the river when it's ice or water.

You're the first one on and the last one off.

Yeah, but it's where we live, and you know how I love the river.

-I do, I know that, but... -I can't stay off of it.

-(CHUCKLING) -It's gonna get you one of these days.

Well, if it does, it does.

(DOGS WHINING AND BARKING)

ANDY: You know, the river's our highway, both in the summer and the winter,

so in the winter, if we can't access the Yukon River,

we can't get to town. If we can't get to town,

then we can't get mail, we can't get supplies.

No, you can't go over there.

(BARKING AND HOWLING)

I depend on my dogs 100%

to get me safely from point A to point B.

I currently have 24 adults and one puppy.

They're good companions,

they can travel through just about any terrain there is.

Dogs and living in the bush, man, that's the only way to go.

All right, let's go!

Hoo-hoo, on by!

Attaboy, straight ahead. Straight ahead, on by, let's go!

I want him to be kept safe, I mean, you know,

I've had him come home soaking wet, the dogs wet,

from going in the river and almost dying, so

those things enter your mind.

ANDY: Gee! Gee!

You have to be really careful, because you never know when you're gonna hit bad ice

on the Yukon River here, especially early on.

There's soft spots, there's weak spots,

'cause the current's still flowing four miles an hour underneath this ice.

It's real easy to go through. If you go through, that's it, you're gone.

ERIK: If you're living out in the bush

you never know when something's gonna come through,

and so, you know, there's a certain sense of security

in having a firearm in your home.

(FIRING)

(FIRING)

Hopefully it won't freeze again.

Yesterday was a pretty cold day. I had a gun malfunction.

My firing pin froze.

I took it home last night, took it apart.

We had to modify it a little bit

and use some grease that doesn't freeze so easily.

I think the gun's gonna work well,

and hopefully we'll have some success to avenge yesterday's failure.

It's about negative four here.

Could be as cold as negative 20 once we get out of the trees.

I'm gonna go ahead and cache my pack and my sled right here by this tree.

Hopefully we'll be back soon and dragging a caribou home tonight.

I'm a subsistence hunter.

A rifle or a pistol to me is no different

than a hammer is to a carpenter.

I don't think I'd do too well working in a cubicle.

My office is 100 million acres of wilderness.

We're on a fresh track here.

I expect it'll be over the next rise.

We'll catch up with it.

Pretty deep snow here, hard walking.

Hopefully I'll be headed home with some fresh meat tonight.

I've spotted a good caribou over this way.

It's a dry cow, a lone cow. It'll be the fattest meat that we can get

at this time of year.

(FIRING)

I eat meat every single meal, every single day.

I buy absolutely no meat whatsoever from the store.

Every bit of the meat that I eat is harvested by myself.

I love it.

Well, luck paid off.

I caught a caribou.

It's a yearling here.

Should be some tender meat.

There's no ego involved in subsistence hunting,

it's all about getting some good-quality meat to feed myself.

We'll be eating fresh caribou meat tonight.

Let's get to work.

If you don't gut these animals immediately,

they start to purge, so it's very important to take care of your meat.

We freed up the stomach,

and now we're gonna cut the diaphragm,

reach inside and free up the internal organs here.

Kind of pull it all out.

Here's my favourite part of any game animal here in Alaska,

the heart.

Fresh blood, good heart blood,

warm your hands up on a day like this when it's 28 below.

And that is my supper tonight.

Nobody's taking this away from me, this is my favourite.

Beautiful piece of meat there.

We're gonna flop it back up inside.

You gotta keep your exposed skin covered here.

And, like I say, it's 28 below,

about to get dark, the temperature's dropping.

Meat is of the utmost importance here in Northern Alaska.

Load it up in our sled.

CHIP: I'm still learning.

Got lots to do, lots to learn,

lots of new stuff yet, and I ain't dead yet.

We can keep catching whitefish till the ice is too thick,

but once that happens, whitefishing is over till spring.

So, no matter what I do,

I have to get out there and catch what I have to catch.

Are you slack?

(BREATHING HEAVILY)

CHIP: Where's the net stop?

Here, you guys start here, I'm gonna check the net.

(GRUNTING)

CHIP: It's not moving? Can you move it at all?

There's a float stuck here.

It might be stuck in a crevice in the ice.

It might be stuck where it cracked.

What bullshit, man.

I hate it when this happens and you have something perfectly set up.

We're gonna open up a hole here and free our ice net and check our net.

I dressed for being next to the village,

not for being gone for an extended amount of time.

I anticipated a couple hours, I anticipated getting wet on the outside,

but I don't anticipate swinging an axe for an hour to get through this ice.

The top of our net's float is frozen, right there, you can see the white float.

CHIP: Pull it, Jeff.

(ROPE CREAKING)

(AXE CHIPPING AT ICE)

-(ROPE SCRAPING) -(CHEERING)

Hey, about time, huh?

I'm so happy, I could shit.

Whoa, salmon!

You don't need money to be rich.

You gotta have a good attitude, work hard.

Persistence is the key to subsistence.

SUE: I need to get home way too much.

You know, people get afraid of break-ins.

My break-in involves teeth, claws and a hell of a lot of bad weather.

I'm in Deadhorse right now, got this far up the road.

It's 500 miles so far, now I got about another 100 to go.

I've been away from home for three months, and I can't take it a minute longer.

For me, it's very exciting.

I'm very nervous getting ready to go wheels-up.

This is the last leg of civilisation

before I get back to my world.

We don't know what the conditions at Kavik are.

My best guesstimate, I may be looking at anywhere 70, 75 below zero, wind-chill factor.

There's no electricity. The only light is right here, what's on my head.

You know, it's a no-man's-land.

Whatever you leave laying around,

it's either the wind, the snowdrifts, the animals...

Nature will take over.

You know, my buildings, they'll get 22-foot snowdrifts that cover them,

so I've gotta go dig inch by inch, foot by foot, reclaiming everything.

Brand new ankle, brand new surgery, only a couple of months.

It's gonna be a challenge from the time I hit the ground,

it's gonna be a running challenge. That's what life is for me.

When I get off the aeroplane, I'm not gonna know if there's something

with fur, claws and teeth sleepin' in my bed.

So, there is a concern whether or not there's a bear waiting for me.

So, I've gotta have my guns ready.

-When we do go out... -BOB GILL: Yeah?

...if we can, if you can fly over low and slow,

let me at least view the material

on the tent and the big dining hall.

-Yeah. -If it's been compromised by that bear at all,

then I'm gonna be able to see all the ribs.

It's gonna look like something got into it, it won't be taut.

And that way I know I at least gotta have something in my hands when I'm going in.

-Okay. We can do that. -All right, thanks.

When I get out of the aeroplane and he takes off,

there is no turnaround. I'm there by myself and that's it.

(ENGINE STARTING)

My world will be survival at that point.

But, being able to go out there

with no help, no light and no anything,

get everything turned over and be successful at living in a tent,

it's what I'm good at. It's what I do well.

(BANG)

(SUE OVER RADIO)

(BOB OVER RADIO)

(SUE AGREES OVER RADIO)

(SUE OVER RADIO)

BOB: Uh...

(BOB OVER RADIO)

SUE: I've got to get home. I have to get home.

I can't stay here any longer.

-It doesn't smell good. -Doesn't smell good.

Doesn't smell good.

Things break, things, you know, things happen.

Yeah, that's not how I scripted it to go.

You know, it's just I get my hopes up, I get my hopes up.

You know, I mean, I've travelled 500 miles to get here, now I'm waiting.

There's still that chick side of me that wants to cry 'cause I can't get home.

My little foxies are waiting for me,

I need to... I got work to do, I got things to do,

and they don't involve being in Deadhorse.

It's time to go home.

But tomorrow's a new day.

ERIK: I don't even view it that I work or that I have a job.

I just have a good time, and I get up every day and do what I need to do,

eat a big meal and hit the sack.

We're gonna skin this caribou,

take the hide off of it

and expose the real trophy here, which is the meat.

This animal here represents about two and a half, three weeks of food.

I butcher animals inside my house in the wintertime.

The number one reason is because it's cold outside.

If the only meat that you're eating is the game that you're killing,

it's actually surprising how not far it goes.

It's, uh... You eat it up pretty quick.

Wild game meat has many advantages.

There's a lot of people that don't understand how healthy the meat is,

it's very lean.

You don't have that luxury, that peace of mind, with store-bought meat

or, as I like to call it, "government meat".

Gonna finish getting the hide off,

and then we're gonna separate all the muscle groups,

lay the meat on the table and get it processed into meal-sized portions.

This is the tongue of the caribou.

It's one of the fattest parts of the caribou,

and it's my personal favourite part to eat.

Everybody in nature recognises its goodness.

I'm gonna get that going.

Now that you have a whole quarter here,

what you're gonna do is you're gonna go ahead and separate the muscle groups.

This first one I'm gonna pull here is the ham roast.

And that's a nice roast.

Perfect roast.

What I need, what I want, what you need, what you want...

What people think they need or want, it's all subjective.

Comfort is subjective.

This is, like, a plush life, in my mind.

This is, like, really plush.

ANDY: You know, if you fall through that ice,

you don't have a lot of time to react before you're pretty hypothermic, so, uh...

Just don't take chances.

ANDY: You know, without access to the river, we can't get to town.

If we can't get to town, then we can't get mail, we can't get supplies,

which means that if we can't access the river,

we're just totally isolated here.

Gee, gee! Atta-boy, gee, gee!

Gee, gee!

Little more gee! Attaboy, attaboy.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Whoa! Whoa!

(ANDY SHOUTS)

The only places on the river that are gonna be unsafe right now

are the places where it froze up

and there was open water in between the pack ice.

Oh, man, looks like it jams up in there pretty good.

This is pretty big ice right here, and, uh,

I don't wanna get in the middle of it and then have to turn around in it,

so I'm gonna take a few minutes, walk up,

just kind of scout it out a little bit to make sure it's safe to go up this way.

ANDY: You know, the main problem with getting to Eagle

is jumble ice and thin ice.

The Yukon is a contained river valley

and it's not very wide. If the water level comes up to a certain height,

it can jam that jumble ice right up to the bank into the willows,

and it creates a barrier to try and get around.

(THUMPING)

Yup, look at that.

That ice is only about two inches thick or so right there, two and a half.

You look right over here, you can see there's open water bubbling up.

That ice is just a quarter-inch thick or so,

and you can see that dark colour.

That's deep water, so we're definitely not going out on the ice around here.

It's just not safe.

Kate, Kate, you copy Andy?

KATE OVER RADIO: Yep, I copy you now.

Okay, I'm down at the end of the overland trail.

The ice just doesn't look safe right now,

so I'm gonna turn around and come home now.

So, I'll be home in about an hour. I'll be home before dark.

KATE: All right, take care and come on home. I got some soup ready for ya.

ANDY: Gee, gee!

Atta-boy. Gee, gee!

Gee, gee!

Just stay along the shore there, Iceberg.

Attaboys. Looking good.

(DOGS BARKING)

I'm gonna have to work pretty hard

to put a trail into Eagle, it looks like, this year.

But I don't trust this ice right now,

and I'm just gonna have to come back another day

and explore trying to get to Eagle.

-Hey. -Hey.

So, pretty rough trail.

Tried going up on the river, and it's...

I mean, we'll be able to do it later in the winter,

but it's not good right now.

Anyway, it is what it is.

-(CHUCKLES) -KATE: I know. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Mother Nature does her thing.

KATE: The river's a precarious thing.

You can't predict what's going to happen.

If you live anywhere like this,

sometime I think Mother Nature is going to win.

(HOWLING AND BARKING)

SUE: All that's on my mind is, "I got to get home."

SUE: You know, yesterday, we tried to make it to Kavik.

A lot of things happened. A magneto went out on the plane,

then we ran out of light, so today we're gonna take a stab at it again.

I do know that the plane is fixed.

What we're fighting is a big 80-mile-an-hour storm coming in tomorrow,

and it's going to last a week.

Next storm coming in, it's gonna be balls-out bad.

So, this is my window. Today. I gotta get out today.

You know, once I approach Kavik, circle around,

see if I can pick out if anything's destroyed my buildings,

if it's still living in there.

Don't have any idea of the condition of the runway,

I could get dropped off as far away as a mile.

The ankle, you know, that I had surgery on,

I mean, there's been some pain associated with the cold,

but this is gonna be the big test.

(ENGINE STARTING)

(BOB OVER RADIO)

(CONTROL OVER RADIO)

SUE: You're landing into the twilight zone, the unknown.

I know I probably have 22-, 30-foot drifts covering my doors.

I may have somebody sleeping in my bed.

I'm looking, trying to beat an 80-mile-an-hour, five-day blow.

This storm, the reality is,

if it's 60 below zero and you put a 100-mile-an-hour wind with that,

you're looking at almost 200 degrees below zero on your skin.

I mean, that's the importance of getting in today.

Getting dug out today. Getting the heat on today.

(SUE OVER RADIO)

(BOB OVER RADIO)

Yeah.

(SUE OVER RADIO)

(BOB OVER RADIO)

SUE: All right.

(BOB OVER RADIO)

(SUE OVER RADIO)

CHIP: Where I live, beyond the end of the road,

where the Earth stops going north,

food is pretty important.

We're hoping to get a couple hundred fish a day.

We've started out with 57 today.

You know, we're thankful for what we can catch,

and when we catch it and what we catch we'll be really thankful for.

But being a provider is really what it's all about.

I'm more happy to be a provider in a direct way, this,

than I ever would be with money.

'Cause money can be so misspent. It's crazy.

You can't misspend fish.

I love this place because people won't give me any trouble.

They look at me for what I do and how I contribute,

and they always honour a provider.

That's all that matters to them.

Dinner.

(WIND WHISTLING)