The temperature along the Yukon River approached 35 degrees below zero and the wind was howling when 68-year-old Ignatius Waskey headed out from Mountain Village to search for firewood last week. There are no trees in the community of about 800 on the eastern edge of the broad, windswept Yukon Delta along Alaska's western coast, where residents still burn wood to heat their homes.

They hunt for what drifts down the mighty river and haul it home to the stuff the woodstove.

Other options for survival are not good. The natural gas that conveniently heats the homes of the vast majority of Alaskans huddled around Cook Inlet in Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, and along the Kenai Peninsula, is unavailable. Same for propane. Home heating fuel, at the moment, is going for $7.31 a gallon, "not counting tax," said Mountain Village resident Jeff Andrews.

Andrews has a small, state-of-the-art, high-efficiency, oil heater in his small home. It still burns through 15 gallons a week. It is like burning money -- $110 per week, $440 per month. "It's taking more than half of my check," Andrews said. That $440 per month amounts to a monthly car payment for many Americans, but things are different in Bush Alaska.

In Mountain Village, as in most of rural Alaska, there is little in the way of an economy. Some commercial fishing in the summer and trapping in the winter. A handful of jobs in the public sector: teachers, health aide, city administrator, public-safety officer.

A cold, dark place

Larry George traps. It is cold, hard work and not something destined to make a man rich. "It's a gamble," he said. With skill and a little luck, he can make more off his trapline than he spends on snowmachine fuel. If not, he'll find himself in a losing proposition. Fur prices are not good, but they are better than they were a few years ago. Lynx pelts go for $80 to $200, George said. Mink is worth about $150, marten $100, fox $40 or $50.

A half dozen mink might pay to heat the house with oil for a month after paying for the gas for the snowmachine to run the trapline. Snowmachine gas is running about the same price as home heating fuel, and most of the machines only get 10-15 miles per gallon. A fox skin will barely pay for once around a 50-mile trapline. But a man needs to make money somehow. It's hard to live without home heat when the temperature outside never seems to rise above minus 20.

After days at minus 35, minus 40 or colder, Andrews said, "20 below feels warm." But it's not. This is the real Alaska -- a cold, dark place in winter where for centuries aboriginal peoples have been doing what they needed to do to survive. For the 68-year-old Iggy, as friends call Waskey, this meant heading out on a snowmachine to get wood. The trade offs are good for an old man on a fixed income. Snowmachine gas will pay for significantly more heat from wood than a man would get out of the same amount of money spent on fuel oil.

"Probably three quarters of town are using wood stoves now," Andrews noted. He has yet to buy one himself, but he's looking into it. Finding, harvesting and hauling Yukon driftwood is a lot of work, but it can save a significant amount of money. And it really only becomes life-threateningly dangerous if your snowmachine breaks down somewhere out on the trail, which is exactly what happened to Waskey.

"He was due back at 5 (p.m.)," Andrews said. "His daughter called us at 8. It was cold."

Residents of Mountain Village notified the Alaska State Troopers, which maintains a post in the village of St. Mary's, about 20 miles to the east. Troopers are in charge of search and rescue operations in the 49th state. They were told Waskey had been gone all day and should have been home hours earlier. In the dark of night, though, there was little the lone trooper in St. Mary's could do.