My Major Miner Teacher

I have this teacher. She loves spruce hens out of her mind. That is, she loves to eat them. But I still think she’s cool. Let me tell you a little bit about her. Her name is Senorita Caterina and she is my Spanish teacher. She grew up in a small Alaskan town and spent her summers mining with her family in a bush town called Flat. Her family has been doing this for years.

Her grandpa came from Russia because he wanted to be rich. When he was sixteen, he walked from Anchorage to Flat on the Iditarod trail. He worked for every money company until he saved enough to buy his claim on Prince creek. Once he got it, he and his Russian partner started hand mining. They worked with shovels, wheelbarrows and sluice boxes. They found a little gold every year and would buy more equipment for mining. He married the local schoolteacher and they had three kids, one of whom was Senorita Caterina's father. Their little family lived in a one-room cabin, sixty miles from town! In summer they walked to town, but in the winter they had a dog team to take them.

When her dad was sixteen, he built a two-story cabin, which is still her family home today. They have always mined in the summer and in the winter, her grandma taught school. The men would track animals and cut wood for the market. They hunted or grew or fished for their food. Her family has always worked really hard to live in the bush. Even though my teacher and her sister weren’t dependent on hunting and growing and fishing for their food, they still had to do it! She and her sister had their own gardens, could bake bread and shoot and prepare spruce hens by the time they were seven! They spent their days playing in the mud of their Placer mine.

My teacher was working full-time in the mines by the time she was twelve. They called it “the cut” instead of “the mine.” She loves working outdoors. She can make and eat white fish eggs fried in butter. She can eat every part of a moose because she doesn’t like to waste it. She also eats fried bread. The things she eats that are store bought are Spam, Pilot Bread, Tang, powdered milk, canned milk, Jell-O and powdered eggs. These are things that don’t spoil easily. These things don’t sound too appetizing to me, but I guess a miner has different tastes. She and her family grow all their veggies and in the fall get all their fruit from berries, they pick blueberries, high arid low bush cranberries, black berries, bearberries black currants, red currants, raspberries, salmon berries and thimbleberries. “We get gallons and gallons and gallons of berries to store for the winter,” she tells me. She also likes to eat spruce hen, ptarmigan, willow grouse, geese, and ducks. "I've eaten porcupine soup and beaver tail, but I sure didn’t enjoy it,” she told me.

Once when she was riding her 4-wheeler to town, she had her safety glasses on and was going fast. A spruce hen was flying ahead of her and she thought it would just get out of the way. But while she was riding, the spruce hen flew up and broke her safety glasses and her nose and made her drive so erratically that her back tire blew out. After she fixed her tire in town, she planned her revenge. She was going to make soup out of that pesky spruce hen but it lived and had flown away.

During the gold rush, there were nine thousand people in the FIat area. That was more people than Anchorage at the time. Now, there are only six in the summer and no one in the winter. She knows everyone in town! She grew up calling everyone Auntie and Uncle. I guess it’s a small world after all. "As far as I can see to the horizons, there’s not anyone but us.” My teacher has an airfield in her front yard. People from surrounding villages fly over and visit and bring gifts, like fresh fruit and store bought stuff.

Her tamed pets include three dogs for bear protection, one cat to keep away mice and 13 chickens for eggs. She has raised baby rabbits, baby kingfishers, baby bears, and a baby weasel. She doesn’t eat orphan babies.

“I always wanted to be like my grandma, teach in the winter and mine in the summer.” Her wish came true because she is now a fantastic Spanish teacher who is a major influence on me because she is patient, understanding and kind. It’s almost summer, and she will leave soon for the bush. She’s going to look for the gold, but I’ve already found it -- my major miner teacher.



I dedicate this biography to Senorita Caterina because she is dedicated to me.