Past and present find a home in small Eskimo fish camps : Yup’iks rely on both their ancestors’ skills and modern conveniences.

Another day at fish camp was winding down. But Nels Alexie wanted to check the net one last time. So he flipped on his cowboy hat, lit a cigar, said goodby to his wife, Katy, and zipped off across the river in his skiff to the place where the salmon are.

Ten minutes later, he was leaning over the side of the boat, plucking a squirming 30-pound king salmon out of the water. He delivered a quick blow to the fish’s head with a metal pipe, heaved it into the boat and resumed the task of pulling giant fish from the net, which extended out from the muddy bank like an underwater volleyball net, snagging fish by the gills as they swam upstream from the Bering Sea.

Nels finished pulling fish from his net and smiled. Another day, another 25 king salmon.

In the Eskimo settlements of southwestern Alaska, where Yup’ik is still the main spoken language in many villages, early summer is kaugun , “the time of clubbing fish.” It’s when many families pack up and move to summer fish camps. They spend the next couple of months catching salmon for food and money, trading one kind of life for another.

The Yup’iks, among the oldest societies in North America, have always been an amphibious people. Contrary to the image of Eskimos in movies--people living in igloos and eking out a bare existence from hunting polar bears across the ice pack--the Yup’iks always had it relatively good. For much of the year, their world consisted of lake-splattered tundra, wide rivers and the shallow coastline of the Bering Sea. It was teeming with wildlife, and they consumed everything from blueberries to caribou to geese to seals to walrus to five species of salmon, moving from camp to camp, depending on the season.

Today, about 20,000 Yup’iks inhabit 70 villages in a region the size of Kansas. They have schools, stores and cable television. Yet most households continue to depend on fishing, hunting and gathering for much of their food. Fish remains the most important staple, and summer is the most important time to harvest it.

Nels and Katy and various combinations of their six children have been coming to this camp on the lower Kuskokwim River since the mid-1970s. Both grew up in nearby villages and didn’t learn English until they went to school. They still talk to each other in Yup’ik. They spend their winters upstream in Bethel, the biggest town in the region with about 2,500 people. Katy is a school cook; Nels is a part-time teacher.

At camp, they live in a three-room cabin, joining 14 other families on a long island in the middle of the table-flat, treeless delta. It’s a blur of ancient and high-tech. The Alexies run a small store that sells everything from Crisco to shotgun shells. They fire up a diesel generator to power a television set on which their teen-age boys watch videotapes of professional wrestling. Outside, working next to the skull of a moose and speaking a language that wasn’t written down until Christian missionaries arrived in the 1800s, their mother prepares salmon as the natives have done here for generations.

The work really starts when Nels brings the fish back. He lugs the salmon to the drying house, an open shed with no walls and beams to hang slabs of fish. Using a crescent-shaped, bone-handled knife, Katy quickly slices the fish into giant fillets, dips them in saltwater and vinegar to keep bugs off, then hangs the slabs to dry. Much of the catch eventually goes into the smokehouse, one of the ways the Yup’iks preserved foods before refrigeration.

“Got to be dried just right or they taste bum,” she said. Fish camp is a vacation from the stresses of life in town, but sometimes it seems like more work, she says. Tonight, her boys are busy rigging up a basketball goal made from a fishing net.

In a typical summer, the family will haul in several hundred salmon and put away most of the catch for the winter back home. A survey by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game found that residents of villages in this region each consumed an average of nearly 600 pounds of wild fish and game per year. In addition, the Alexies will sell several thousand pounds of fresh salmon to commercial buyers.

With the evening light beginning to wane, Nels heads off upriver and down a side channel to a long-abandoned village. He’s burying fish heads to make tepet , or stinkyheads, a Yup’ik delicacy. He digs a hole in the cold dirt, pours a couple dozen heads into a cardboard box, covers them with rye grass from the tundra, then buries them. In a couple of weeks, after the heads have fermented, he will pull them out and take them home, where they will be washed and eaten. Yup’iks talk about fermenting as a form of cooking, although some Yup’ik children think stinkyheads are gross.

Before he leaves the old village, Nels pulls out a fresh cigar and buries it in the grass. “I want to give my landlord something,” he said. Sometimes, he says, he brings tea bags for the souls of the old village.

He gets home past midnight, in the sub-Arctic twilight. He lights a fire in the maqvik , a Yup’ik sauna, and several other men from the camp drop by. They wear dark, wool skullcaps to keep their hair from scorching in the 200-degree heat as they climb naked through a door into the chamber and use a long dipper to pour water on red-hot rocks above the fire. With a beam of yellow light shining into the steamy room, they sit until they can’t stand it, then pile out into a cool outer room. They tell jokes in Yup’ik and laugh wildly. They go in and out for an hour.

Once you’ve taken a steam, a shower doesn’t make you feel very clean, Nels says. After the men go home, Nels and Katy go back to the maqvik for a steam together. Finally, around 3 a.m., they go back to the cabin and off to bed.