Bo at Ballard Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  “Your sourdoughs are going to kill me, and that’s a fact,” Sandor said to Jack.

  They all said good-bye to Bo and piled their dishes on the table by the big sink for Gitnoo to wash, saying teasing things to her in English. They told her she was getting fat, or that she’d better save a dance for them next time at the roadhouse. Gitnoo laughed at them—she couldn’t understand the words, but she could understand the meaning.

  Then it was Bo’s job to take the butter and syrup and other things on the table back into the pantry. After that, she must scrub the oilcloth that covered the long table.

  Jack kept a spotless kitchen, and by the time she’d finished the table, he’d swept and mopped the floor. He did this after every meal. The miners’ boots were always full of muck, especially now in the spring when the snow was melting. “Dirty floor makes me feel like my face is dirty,” he’d say.

  There was a big stack of dishes for Gitnoo to wash after every meal. Jack kept an eye on her to make sure she did it right. Gitnoo always put in so much soap that the bubbles floated away and fell in clumps on the floor. And sometimes she wouldn’t get the water hot enough. The dishwashing water had to be very, very hot, and cups and silverware must be washed first. Jack had a lot of rules about washing dishes, and Gitnoo pretty much broke them all when he wasn’t looking.

  Gitnoo was singing loudly while she slammed the plates into the dishpan. She was like Jack, she loved to sing while she was working. She sang her special songs, the songs she’d made up. All the Eskimos made up songs—funny songs or sad or happy.

  “What’s that song about?” asked Jack.

  Bo told him that Gitnoo’s were all love songs about old boyfriends.

  “Hmm,” said Jack, looking at Bo suspiciously.

  Bo knew he was worried that Gitnoo’s love songs might not be okay for a little girl to hear. Eskimos talked about everything. They didn’t think there were things they shouldn’t talk about in front of children. The boys and the old-timers never talked about the things that the Eskimos talked about all the time.

  When the table was finished, Bo took off her apron and put on Jack’s big brown jersey gloves from the top of the wood box. It was her job every morning and night to bring in kindling and wood for the big stove and stack it neatly in the wood box.

  Jack was the one who split the wood.

  “Doing kitchen work, easy to get soft,” he said. “If I didn’t split wood every day, that Swede would be able to beat me at arm wrestling. And that’s not a thing I could put up with.”

  Jack was very fussy about his wood. If you wanted a quick hot fire, like the kind you needed for biscuits or piecrust, that was birch, cut small. And for a slow fire, like you needed for beans or a moose roast, that was spruce. That’s why the wood had to be carefully sorted so that he could put his hand on just what he needed.

  Jack always bragged that Bo was a good worker because she filled up every section in the wood box right up to the top. “Bo never does anything halfway,” he said.

  If somebody praised you for doing a good job, you could never do it badly after that. Which Bo thought was kind of hard when she was feeling lazy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE PEOPLE OF BALLARD CREEK

  THE MINING CAMP was on one side of the creek, and on the other side were the cabins where the people of the town lived.

  There was a little bridge over the creek, just past the cookshack, so you could go back and forth from the camp to the town without getting your feet wet.

  Bo waded in the creek to get to town when she had her rubber boots on, and sometimes when she was barefoot. But not so often when she was barefoot because the water was bitterly cold.

  “It wasn’t very long ago,” Arvid told Bo, “not even thirty years, that there wasn’t anything at all here—no town, no mining camp. Just the creek, all lonesome by itself.”

  Thirty years seemed to Bo like a long time, but Arvid said it was just a blink of the eye, really.

  There were six old prospectors who lived in the town all year because they’d quit prospecting—too old to do the work. Everyone called them “the old-timers.”

  Sol was the old-timer who told Bo and Oscar the best stories about the old days in Ballard Creek. He had been there from the beginning, since the stampede.

  “What’s a stampede?” Bo had asked Sol.

  “A stampede is when a whole lot of people rush to someplace to find gold,” Sol told them. “Craziness, really, that’s what a stampede is.”

  Sol and his partner, along with hundreds of other prospectors, came swarming up the Koyukuk because they’d heard there was a big gold strike on the river.

  “A hundred rickety cabins popped up, the kind a couple of men can build in a day or two. And there it was, almost overnight, a new little town right in the middle of the tundra. They built so many cabins that they used up all the spruce trees for miles around. You know how far you and your dad got to go to cut wood, Oscar. Well, back at the beginning, you could have cut wood outside your front door, there was so many trees.”

  “Too bad,” said Oscar when he’d thought that over. “They were too greedy for trees.”

  “Stampeders don’t exactly worry about what they’ll leave behind,” said Sol. “Just one thing on their mind: getting rich.”

  Pictures of that stampede time were pinned up on the roadhouse wall. In the pictures, there were lots of white tents besides the cabins Sol told them about, and stacks and stacks of firewood piled next to every cabin or tent. The tents had signs on them that Milo, the roadhouse man, read for them: LAUNDRY DONE HERE; SMOKEY’S RESTAURANT; HAIRCUTS, TWO BITS.

  Most of the stampeders partnered up so they could look after each other, help each other out. Sol’s partner in those days was Harry Ballard.

  “He was a good partner,” Sol told Bo and Oscar. “Talked all the time, but that was okay. Made up for me. I never have much to say.” Sol looked sadly at his gnarled old hands. “Killed by a bear right there on that creek, Harry, almost on the spot where the bridge is.”

  Bo’s eyes stretched wide, trying to imagine a bear crunching on her bones.

  “Was you with him when the bear got him?” Oscar asked.

  “No, he was prospecting on his own while I was out at our claim, digging a shaft. What we found was big prints and some little ones, mama bear with cubs. Harry, he had real bad eyes. Started out on the Klondike with some glasses, but lost those early. The way I figure it, he didn’t see the bear. Didn’t see she had cubs.

  The stampeders named the creek Ballard Creek to remember him by, and the town was named Ballard Creek as well. “I think Harry would have thought it was something to have a creek and a town named for him,” Sol said.

  “And did the stampeders get rich, Sol?” Bo asked.

  “Nah, like to nearly starved that winter. Couldn’t find the gold they wanted, so as soon as spring came, they rushed up to Nome to the new gold strike there, the whole kit and kaboodle.”

  “Whole kit and kaboodle,” Oscar and Bo said to each other, pleased with the way it sounded. “Kit and kaboodle.”

  “Whoosh, those men were gone! Overnight!” said Sol. “Treading on each other’s heels, afraid someone would beat them to the new strike.”

  Bo could just see them in her head, pushing each other, just like the kids when there was candy at the roadhouse.

  “And almost all the little houses were left empty,” said Sol. “A hundred empty houses is a sight to see.”

  “Why did you stay, Sol?” Oscar asked.

  “I just liked it here, soon as I came. Married me an Eskimo girl. We had a little boy.”

  Bo looked hard at Sol. She knew he lived alone now. Sol nodded at the question she didn’t ask. “Died of the diptheria, both of them,” he said.

  “I know that,” said Oscar. “That was my mama’s aunt you was married to.”

  “Right,” said Sol. “That’s how come they call me uncle, still look after me some. Eskimos is big on family.”


  But the little houses didn’t stay empty. Sol said while the stampeders were coming and going, a lot more Eskimos from the coast by Kotzebue came down the Kobuk River. They wanted a new place to live with better hunting, more room.

  “Right away they settled into the empty cabins and burned the extra ones for firewood. So now we got nine, ten Eskimo families and plenty of kids.”

  “Fifteen kids,” said Oscar. “There’s eleven in school. Me and Bo and Evalina and Kapuk—we’re the only ones not in school. So that’s fifteen.”

  “Lucky for you, Bo,” Sol said. “Most mining camps I ever seen didn’t have any children at all.”

  And it was lucky because of Oscar—smiling, happy, Oscar. Bo and Oscar had played together since they were babies.

  Arvid and Jack used to tease Bo about the way she’d pulled Oscar’s long black shock of hair when she couldn’t even walk yet. Even though Oscar was a little older than Bo, Bo was bigger than he was.

  But Oscar didn’t mind that Bo was bigger. He was too happy-go-lucky to mind anything.

  * * *

  SO NOW THERE WERE about thirty little cabins scattered higgledy-piggledy along the dusty, rutted paths, and all of them had windows that looked out onto the Koyukuk River.

  Milo’s roadhouse was right in the middle of town, and it was the only building with two stories. There was a little school cabin and a tiny house for the wireless, where people sent telegraphs, and next to that was the tall wireless tower. There was a big old building that used to be a dance hall, but the windows were boarded over because they didn’t need a room that big for dances anymore. All the dancing was at the roadhouse.

  And this was who lived in Ballard Creek: the Eskimos and the old-timers, the boys from the mine, Milo at the roadhouse, the good-time girls, Lilly and Yovela, and in the winter, Miss Sylvia, the teacher.

  Bo and Oscar and the other children had a busy time visiting all of them.

  The miners who had claims on the creeks outside the town would walk into town whenever there was something going on, like the Fourth of July or Christmas, or just whenever they got lonesome out at their claims. Sometimes they walked in—ten, twenty, thirty miles—just because they wanted to dance.

  There was always dancing at Ballard Creek. All someone had to do was ring the bell at the roadhouse, and everyone in town would come to dance.

  Jack used to brag about them. “The people of Ballard Creek are the dancingest people I ever heard tell of. And the walkingest,” he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AT OSCAR’S HOUSE

  THE DAYS GREW warmer and warmer. Pools and puddles were everywhere as the winter snow disappeared. When Bo went to visit Oscar, all the snow on the roof of Oscar’s cabin was dripping into the soft tired snow around the house. The snow was grainy and didn’t glitter in the sun. Soon it would be all melted away.

  Oscar’s mother was Clara, and she was always glad to see Bo. “Onee, onee,” she cried happily—come in. Bo thought she was very pretty with her shiny black hair pulled back into a bun.

  “Oscar, he’s getting water,” said Clara. “Be right back.”

  Clara was like Jack, always working. She was sitting on her woven grass sewing mat on the splintery lumber floor, her legs straight out in front of her, the way Eskimo women always sat.

  She was patching Oscar’s winter mukluks. “He can wear them another year if I put a new sole on them,” she said. “Still good. Oscar, he takes good care of his things.”

  Clara talked around the stem of the long pipe she was smoking, little curls of smoke going up into the air in the slant of bright spring sunlight that came in the window.

  Lena, Oscar’s big sister, was playing her favorite record on the Victrola: “Bye-Bye, Blackbird.” She grabbed Bo’s arms and danced her gaily around the room. “Pack up all your cares and woes, here I go, singing low, bye-bye, blackbird,” she sang. Bo laughed at Lena. Lena was the kind of person who always made you laugh.

  “Sit down here, you bad girl,” Clara said to Lena. “You got to twist this sinew for me, not be dancing all the time!” But she wasn’t really cross. Eskimos were never cross with their children.

  Nearly every house in Ballard Creek had a Victrola, and nearly everyone had a good stack of records to play. You had to wind up the little brass handle on the Victrola after you’d put the record on the round turntable and set the arm with the needle down on the first groove of the record. When the winding began to run down, the song would grow lower and slower and start to growl before it quit entirely. Lena dashed to the Victrola and wound it up again as soon as the song started to drag.

  Clara sighed. “Same song, too many times.”

  The walls of Oscar’s house were covered with yellow oilcloth, and Lena had decorated the walls with pictures she’d cut out of magazines. She stuck them on the wall with flour-and-water paste. The pictures were mostly of pretty girls she’d cut from the yellow National Geographics Sol Evans gave her when everyone was finished with them. They were girls from other countries with different kinds of clothes on.

  And there was one picture of a camel. He had an angry face. Lena thought that was very funny and liked to make mean faces back at the camel. “Good thing our moose aren’t so grumpy,” she said.

  There were two spruce-pole bunks against the wall, with fat ticking mattresses full of dried grass from the grass lakes. That was where Lena and Oscar and their brother, Peluk, slept. Peluk had gone hunting that morning with Oxadak, Oscar’s father. Nobody expected them to come back with anything.

  “Bad time, spring,” Clara said. “Hard to find food. No fish, no birds, no game, can’t walk on the rotten snow. Used to be the starving time; people died then. Now we got the store, got clams to make chowder and milk for the babies, but it’s not the same as our meat. We got to have meat, or we don’t feel right.”

  Oscar came in, sloshing water from his bucket onto the floor.

  He threw his mother a sorry look.

  “You’re in too big a hurry. You know Bo is here,” said Clara. Oscar smiled his big smile, the smile that squeezed his black eyes nearly shut.

  “Good you come!” he said. “Nakuchluk’s making akutaq for Sammy’s birthday!”

  Akutaq was everyone’s favorite thing. The boys and the old-timers called it Eskimo ice cream, even if there wasn’t any ice or any cream in it, like the ice cream Jack made sometimes in the winter when there was ice. Akutaq was made from caribou bone marrow and fat all melted together. It was a lot of work, because you had to whip all the marrow and fat with your hands until it was fluffy as a cloud. Then you put in berries, and the akutaq turned a beautiful pink color.

  Bo had asked Jack to make akutaq, but he just raised his eyebrow at her. Akutaq, he said, was the sort of thing you had to be raised with to like. Same as stinkfish. And seal oil.

  “And olives,” Bo had said.

  Bo loved akutaq as much as Oscar did.

  “Let’s go see if it’s ready!” she said.

  “You bring me back a little dish of it,” said Clara.

  “I’m going with you,” said Lena. “I want a big dish!”

  “First you finish that sinew,” said Clara. Oscar wiped up the water he’d spilled and said, “We’ll go just as soon as I get the wood.”

  Oscar had to fill the wood box just like Bo did, but Clara wasn’t as fussy about her wood as Jack was, and Oscar only had to cut a pile of kindling and bring in enough spruce for the day. Oscar had a little ax and was allowed to cut the kindling. Bo wasn’t allowed near an ax. She couldn’t wait until she could cut wood like all the older children.

  Lena sat on the floor with her mother and began twisting the sinew that was used for sewing thread. Sinew made strong, almost invisible stitches and never rotted like the store-bought thread. It came from the hump on the back of the caribou, but the muscle fibers were short. They had to be twisted together into long threads for sewing.

  Bo sat down next to Lena. She didn’t like to stretch her legs out li
ke they did. It made the back of her knees feel funny. So she sat with her legs folded under her.

  Lena took two short pieces of sinew and rubbed the ends together between her palms until the ends were twisted together and it was a long piece. Lena took two more pieces of sinew and gave them to Bo. “You try it.” Bo tried, but her hands were clumsy and the pieces didn’t twist together.

  “Easier if you start with leg sinew—that’s thicker,” said Clara. Bo smiled at her. Clara always made an excuse for you if you made a mistake or couldn’t do something well.

  “This caribou hump makes the thinnest thread—best for fancy sewing, but harder to twist.”

  Clara and all the other Eskimo mamas had sewed for Bo along with all their other sewing—winter mukluks and summer moccasins, caribou parkas for cold, cold winter, big fur mittens.

  Then Arvid would make something on his sewing machine in return, to pay for the things they’d made for Bo—calico parka covers, overalls like Bo’s for the kids. Even the big boys and girls liked Arvid’s overalls. It was a good system, trading work.

  * * *

  WHEN OSCAR had finished with the wood and they were going out the door, Clara called them back.

  “Here, take these to Milo on your way,” she said, handing Oscar a pile of magazines.

  Most of the people who lived in Ballard Creek subscribed to at least one magazine, and when they were finished reading them, they’d take them to the roadhouse for everyone else to read. So there were a lot of magazines to keep up with.

  All the children in Ballard Creek went to the roadhouse nearly every day to read magazines, sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, feet sticking straight out. The good thing for Bo and Oscar was that someone was always there to read the captions of the pictures to them. They were the only children in Ballard Creek besides Evalina and Kapuk, Dishoo’s baby, who couldn’t read.