“Oh Lord, what are we going to eat? Store-bought food?’’ thought Steven Mann, who oversees tribal operations in town. The nervousness has waned through the summer, said the 58-year-old ex-Army sergeant, but still, “We don’t joke about what we eat here.’’ Mann’s son, Danny, a lanky 27-year-old who used to work as a bilingual parent liaison for the school, took on the job of bird-flu testing in Kipnuk for the tribal health agency. He gets $15 for every bird he samples.

At the tribal council offices, he was on the phone, checking in with hunters. “Got any birds?’’ he asked Ronnie Peter, who goes hunting just about every day except Sunday. “How many?’’ Danny Mann asked. “Can I come over and check them?’’

Mann climbed up the steps to Peter’s porch and dug into a pile of common eiders, pintail ducks, a shoveler and a Canada goose. He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and started filling out a form on the birds. He inserted it into an eider through its cloaca. Mann put the swab, now covered in a greenish-white goop, into a vial.

Mann repeated the procedure for the other birds. He headed back to his mother’s house, where he crept under the front staircase and lifted the lid of a white canister filled with liquid nitrogen. As cold white vapours curled out, he dropped in his handful of vials, which he would send away for analysis.

Mann said he swabbed as many as 300 birds in the first round of sampling in May. In September, he collected samples on about 50 birds. To get more hunters involved, the health agency raffled off a 55-gallon drum of gasoline for each round of testing. Villagers got one raffle ticket for each bird they turned in.

... contd.