Pete Brown's a guy who gets things done.
The volunteer fire chief for the village of Aniak, he launched an ambulance service with borrowed pickups and snowmachines. He saved lives up and down the Kuskokwim River and trained two decades of village teenagers to do the same.
Most famously, he started the Dragon Slayers, a volunteer fire-rescue squad dominated by high school girls and spotlighted in People magazine and on "Oprah."
So when Brown recently learned he didn't have long to live, he wasn't about to have everyone wait around for the funeral celebration. At the fire chief's request, longtime friends organized a kind of goodbye bash at the high school Saturday night that was expected to draw as many as 500 people.
This in a village where the official population is 494, according to the state.
"My father, he doesn't want folks dwelling over his passing," Brown's son Jeremiah said Friday. "He'd rather see everybody happy. He'd rather be able to see everybody."
At 64, Brown said he's been told he has terminal cancer. "The doctor advised me to do something real quick, as far as the funeral goes," he said. "So this seemed like the way to do it."
SLAYING DRAGONS
Brown moved to Aniak in 1973, he said. "I came up to get away from being Outside, basically. I was a Vietnam vet. I didn't like the way we were treated."
He worked as a fishing guide. He built homes. He was a cop, his son said. A firefighter.
"He's pretty much touched everybody's lives in this area of Alaska," Jeremiah said.
It was a four-wheeler accident in the early 1990s -- someone hit Jeremiah going roughly 45 miles per hour in Aniak, the son said -- that showed Brown how much the village needed ambulance service.
He led the effort to start an emergency medical system. That lead to a training program for teenagers.
The rules: No drinking or drugs. You had to keep your grades up.
Jeremiah was one of the first. The boys gave the team its name -- the Dragon Slayers -- but soon they graduated or quit. Then the girls took over.
After 200 hours of training, the 13- to 16-year-olds began joining the town medics on 911 calls.
Team members responded to suicide attempts. They gave oxygen to elders.
Trooper Sgt. Mike Duxbury worked in Aniak from about 2002 to 2004. He first met the Dragon Slayers when a village parade was interrupted by a call for help. Someone had crashed a four-wheeler.
The girls arrived like a swarm of bees, Duxbury said. "They helped each other out. Gave each other encouragement. They worked as a team."
He later watched the squad give a demonstration to younger students from other Western Alaska villages. Afterward, kids poured from the stands, asking the young medics to sign Dragon Slayer posters.
The girls were heroes.
"They weren't from Anchorage," said Duxbury, who hopes to see the program cloned in villages across Alaska but said funding so far is scarce. "They had similar backgrounds to the other kids. They had similar stories."
PUBLIC NOTICE
In 2001, April Kameroff and Patricia Yaska -- 19 and 15 at the time -- helped with the marathon rescue of two boys who collided on snowmachines near Kalskag. The call took 34 hours, Kameroff said. One of the boys had a broken neck.
The story made the regional Tundra Drums newspaper. Soon Reader's Digest took notice of the team. Then a Chicago TV station. And the A&E network. And Oprah. A major movie studio bought the rights to the story, but never made a film, Jeremiah said.
Meantime, Brown has also launched regular "Kick Ash" camps in Galena and Kotzebue that provide kids with basic emergency trauma training.
"What they mostly learn is teamwork and self-esteem," he said.
Growing up in one of the poorest regions of the state, former Dragon Slayers have become health aides, nurses, paramedics. Jeremiah Brown is now a rescue swimmer for the Navy. His sister Mariah, 25, was a Dragon Slayer too. She's a Navy corpsman stationed in Jacksonville, Fla.
Another Dragon Slayer became an ambulance driver and medic in Afghanistan, Mariah said.
"A couple of them are in nursing school. A couple work in hospices," she said. "The majority of them all stayed in medicine."
Kameroff joined the Dragon Slayers in 1999 and met Michael J. Fox -- "I'm taller than he is" -- at a dinner People magazine held for the team. She can't count how many emergency medical calls she's made since then. She now works at the Aniak clinic.
Kameroff was chosen to replace Brown as the department's new EMS chief. He's the reason she works in medicine, said the young mother, who brings her own 2-year-old daughter to training sessions.
"(Brown) is like a father to me," Kameroff said.
Even today, the Dragon Slayers are mostly girls, Mariah said.
PARTY, NOT TREATMENT
Brown declined treatment in Seattle for his cancer that could have briefly extended his life, said Gwen Brock, a longtime friend who organized Saturday's celebration.
"He chose to come home ... that way he was able to say goodbye to everybody," she said.
For his part, Brown said it wouldn't have been worth it to fly to a hospital outside Alaska. He doesn't have any insurance and the surgery would have been a waste of other people's money, he said.
"The type of cancer and the state and everything that I had -- it may have worked for a week or so and that's all," Brown said.
Thus: the party.
Dancing. Singing. A fiddle band. Trading stories and telling poems. Brown, who loves and teaches poetry, can recite Rudyard Kipling's "Gunga Din" from memory.
"Last night, they gave him a presentation of his burial gear. What he's going to wear into the afterlife, and traveling tools," Mariah Brown said Friday.
"The beadwork has a dragon and a fireman."
Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334.
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com