HOME-MAKING
"I figure that the Kodiak cub the Alaska Fur and Trading Company
brought over here as a pet, is now wandering about the Island a
full-grown grizzly, instead of being in bear heaven, as the people of
Katleean thought," said Boreland, as they all sat about the supper
table. "Confound it, it makes it mighty bad for us, with all that grub
down there at the West Camp! If the beast takes a notion he can go
there and raise the very devil."
"I'll take my blankets down there tomorrow and guard the cache until we
get the provisions transferred," announced Harlan, quickly. "I'd like
to get a shot at a Kodiak bear."
"Son, I ain't a-castin' any asparagus on yore shootin' ability, but I
claims the right to shoot that anamile myself!" spoke up Kayak Bill.
"Funny!" Boreland laughed. "I had the same idea myself."
After supper they discussed the problem of getting the remainder of the
provisions down to the cabin at once. It was decided that each man
should take a turn guarding the cache. Boreland finally left the
conversation to Kayak and Harlan while he sat at the table silent, one
hand clutching his hair, the other drawing queer-looking cart-wheels
and figures on a paper before him. Just before the others started to
leave for the night, he sprang up, with an exclamation.
"By thunder, I've got it!" he announced enthusiastically. "Fellows,
we're going to make a nautical cart and sail her on the beach of Kon
Klayu!"
The nautical cart, when completed, proved to be a hybrid contrivance
with two large wheels. The wheels had a cumbersome appearance, owing
to the double rims, which were tired with barrel-staves cut in two and
mailed crosswise to prevent sinking into the sand. The top of the cart
was a platform eight feet long and four wide, with two handles
projecting at each end. Rising from its middle was a mast for which
Kayak Bill rigged up a sail from a tarpaulin.
Boreland stood off and regarded the finished child of his brain.
Beside him Kayak eyed it for some minutes in admiring silence.
"By--hell!" he drawled at last. "Sired by a whisky barrel, spawned by
a stretcher, and a throw-back to a Chinese sampan!"
Boreland laughed. "I got my idea for this little beauty from something
I read once about the sailing wheelbarrows used by farmers in the
interior of China, Bill! I'll bet you, with a fair wind, we can make
all of five miles an hour with her on the beach!"
The cart exceeded even its builder's expectations. Steered to the West
Camp the next afternoon it was loaded with provisions and the sail
hoisted. With Harlan between the two front handles and Boreland at the
rear, the odd vehicle was headed toward home. The sail, twice as large
as the cart, strained at the mast from the force of the wind behind it,
and to the men between the handles, the load seemed hardly to matter at
all. Bare-footed, with trousers rolled up to their knees as in boyhood
days, the two men found it a new and distinctly pleasant sensation to
be swept along thus before wind. In a few minutes Kayak Bill, smoking
placidly before the provision tent, was left far behind.
Remembering the back-breaking loads he had carried to the cabin, Harlan
grinned back at the bellying sail behind him as he sped along.
"This is child's play, Boreland!" he shouted to his partner. "The
problem of transportation is solved; for if there's one thing we never
lack on Kon Klayu, it's wind!"
And so it came about that, thanks to the nautical cart, which though
the subject of much jesting, did the work, a month from the time of
landing found all that remained of the adventurers' outfit transferred
to the cabin. Not once during this time was the bear seen in the
vicinity of the cache, though sometimes fresh tracks appeared on the
margin of the little lake--now christened Bear Paw Lake--where Loll had
discovered them.
With the boards taken from the tumble-down shack an extra shed had been
built near the cabin, and the porch repaired and strengthened. Harlan
found time to make a much larger cage for the pigeon. As he told
Ellen, the bird, confined in such close quarters, might not thrive.
Harlan noticed that despite Ellen's determination to leave the Island
on the coming of the _Hoonah_ she took a woman's delight in doing her
best to make life comfortable with the few things at her command.
Since it was the dictum of fate--if she would be with the man she
loved--that she must spend so much of her married life in tents along
new trails, floating down rivers in flatboats, or wayfaring in
trappers' cabins, she sooner or later accepted those conditions.
Doubtless, many times she rebelled in her heart. Any woman would.
But, he fancied, she was the kind who would chide herself for the
momentary disloyalty to Shane and with an increased tenderness, set her
capable, feminine touch to perform some new marvel of transformation in
each wild place of the moment.
In the cabin on Kon Klayu she accomplished much. With newspapers and
magazines found in the box of books from Add-'em-up Sam's collection,
she papered the rooms. At the new windows which framed a wide expanse
of ever-changing sea, giving a sense of space and freedom to the
living-room, she hung cheese-cloth curtains. The folds of these draped
a book shelf beside the window, supporting few books but holding in its
empty space the gold-scale, unused as yet on Kon Klayu, and glinting
newly as it caught the light on its polished surface. In a corner of
the room the bed was gay with Indian blankets and bright cushions. The
homely cheer of a red tablecloth was reflected in the bright nickel of
the shaded lamp on the table, and on the white, sand-scoured floor a
long strip of rag carpet from Ellen's old home in the States, made a
note of old-fashioned, comforting cleanliness. On the Yukon stove the
kettle sang cheerily to the pots and pans hanging in a shining row on
the wall behind and the room was pervaded by the faint, clean smell
from the woodbox piled high with newly-split wood that had lain long in
the sea.
Harlan followed Boreland into the house the day Ellen finished her
curtains. He came upon the big prospector standing with his arm across
his wife's shoulders.
"I'm blessed of the saints, entirely," Shane was saying, as he bent to
lay his cheek affectionately against her hair. "God love you, Ellen,
little fellow. . . . you could make a home out of a drygoods box." . . .
After the rescue of Loll and Jean at the bluff, Harlan noticed that
Ellen's silent gratitude found vent in a dozen little ways, though he
was aware also that he never had an opportunity of seeing the girl
alone. Since the _Hoonah_ was expected any day now, Ellen had
suggested that the young man bring his blankets across the Island and
"bunk" with Kayak Bill until their departure. Had it been offered
three weeks earlier, this arrangement would have been eagerly accepted.
But Gregg's attitude toward life on Kon Klayu had changed. It was
still changing.
He was now cooking his own meals at the Hut, clumsily, it is true,
since his unaccustomed hands had never before held a frying-pan. But
he was learning, and he was surprised to find himself taking pleasure
in the experience. He thanked Ellen for her invitation, but refused
it. He would not have been human had he not felt a certain
satisfaction in doing so.
He wondered tentatively if Kayak Bill had suspected the struggle that
was going on within him during his first days on the Island--the fear
of delirium tremens, the fight he was making to conquer the craving for
liquor which continued, intermittently now, to torment him. The old
man said nothing on the subject, but on one pretext or another Harlan
noticed that Kayak managed to spend much of his leisure time at the
Hut. Often, if the night were fine, he would roll up in a blanket
before the fire and stay there until morning.
Kayak Bill's sauntering feet had followed Dame Fortune over every
gold-trail from Dawson to Nome, and there was no trick of Alaskan camp
life that he had not learned. He never tried to force his knowledge on
the younger man, but casually, in the course of his slow, whimsical
monologues, he taught Harlan much that was of inestimable value to him.
Indeed, if it had not been for the old man, Harlan might have been
forced to swallow his pride long before and ask for shelter at the
Boreland cabin, for despite his brave talk of living in the Hut, it was
a shelter of the rudest type, built, probably, as a feeding station by
the experimenting fox-farmers.
Its structure interested him. It was made by standing whale ribs up on
end about two feet apart in a circle. The spaces between were filled
with turf, which abounded all over the island, thus making a wall two
feet thick. Harlan had repaired it, and in the words of Kayak who
helped him, had "rigged" himself up a stove from kerosene cans. It was
the old hootch-maker who showed him how to arrange stones to form a
crude, open-air fireplace in front of his door for use in fine weather.
It was Kayak Bill who taught his blundering hands the trail way of
stirring up a bannock and baking it in a frying-pan propped up before
the blaze.
Harlan now had less time to think about himself. The little can stove
required much finely chopped firewood to keep it going. The open-air
fireplace consumed large quantities of drift which he had to chop with
an axe, since the one saw on the Island was needed at the cabin. After
his day's work with Boreland, he had his meals to prepare. There were
brown beans to clean and cook, and sourdough hotcakes to set for the
morning. Kayak had taught him to prepare his sourdoughs--a resource
which was to become the food mainstay of all on the Island. Harlan
learned from the old man that the sourdough hotcake, or flapjack is as
typical of Alaska as the glacier. The wilderness man carries, always,
a little can filled with a batter of it; with this he starts the
leavening of his bread, or, with the addition of a pinch of soda he
fries it in the form of flapjacks. So typical a feature of Alaska is
the sourdough pot that the old timer in the North is called a
"Sourdough."
Harlan grew to have a real fondness for his Hut--the only home he had
ever made for himself. Its very primitiveness endeared it to him. He
grew also to look forward to the fine evenings when he and Kayak,
stretched before the open fireplace with their backs to a bleached
whale rib, smoked and yarned and sang, while they watched the leaping
driftwood flames.
Strange, picturesque characters of the last frontier stalked through
all Kayak Bill's tales: Reckless Bonanza Kings of Klondyke days, buying
with their new-found gold the love of painted women; simple-hearted,
gentle Aleuts kissing the footprints of skirted, bearded, Russian
priests; pathetic, gay ladies of adventure; half-mad hermits of the
hills; secretive squaw-men, and wistful, emotional half-breeds--all
these Kayak Bill made to live again in the glow of the evening fire.
In his quaint, whimsical way he told of the prospector--that brave
heart who makes gold but an excuse for his going forth to conquer the
wilds. Harlan came to understand them--the lure of gold, and their
slogan: "_This_ time we will strike it." Through Kayak Bill's eyes he
saw them aged, broken by the rigors of many northern winters, but with
the indomitable spirit of youth still in them, a recurrent yearning
that defies age, rheumatism and poverty, and sends them with their
grub-stakes out questing into the hills. He saw them, with picks, and
gold pans wandering happily during the wonderful Alaskan summer and
fall, and when the frost paints the green above timber-line with russet
and gold and the Northern Lights beckon them back to the settlements,
he saw them arrive, tired, penniless, perhaps, but satisfied, and
already planning the next trip into the magnetic golden hills.
And one night, being in a pensive mood, Kayak told of a partner of his,
the Bard of the Kuskokwim, an old northern poet unknown except in the
Valley o' Lies, who had put the prospector's soul hunger into verse:
"We yearned beyond the skyline,
With a wistful wish to know
What was hidden by the high line,
Glist'ning with eternal snow.
And we yearned and wished and wondered
At the secrets there untold,
As the glaciers growled and thundered,
Came the whisper: 'Red, raw gold!'" [1]
As if he feared Harlan might think him sentimental, Kayak Bill finished
his recital with:
"Yas, son, that old cuss partner o' mine was always recitin' them
poetry sayin's o' his. Durned if he wouldn't vocabulate to the trees
or the hills when there warn't another soul nearer to him than a
hundred miles!"
But of Kayak Bill, himself, Harlan noted, there was never a personal
thing. In all his tales the old hootch-maker was ever the spectator,
amused, kindly, philosophical.
Sometimes the two were silent--with the companionable silence that the
camp-fire instills. Leaning back against the whale-rib, while the
embers died in the fireplace and the sea below took on its veil of
twilight, they mused and listened to the universe. It was at such
times that Harlan began to feel, though faintly, the healing, vibrant
energy that comes to those who live close to Mother Earth. Katleean
and the bunkful of liquor that at first had occupied so much of his
thought, occurred to him less frequently. The States--and all that had
happened to him there were becoming a dream. He began to feel as
though he had always lived as he was living now. To his surprise as
the time drew near for the arrival of the _Hoonah_ he found himself
unconcerned, indifferent. Like Kayak Bill, he was learning to face
life serenely, undisturbed as to the morrow, but doing his best today.
[1] From the unpublished poems of Edward C. Cone, Bard of Kuskokwim.