Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  But if I didn’t pull the trigger Art and I would go hungry for the rest of the winter. I pulled the trigger.

  Boom! The gun stock jammed into my shoulder, the moose dropped like a rock to the snow, lay still. I had done it. I watched him for a moment, ready with another bullet in case he got to his feet. And I listened, the silence gathering around me. To me, the shot had sounded awfully loud in the clear, still air. Maybe a neighbor had heard it. If he had, he would be at my front door that night, his hand out for his share of illegal meat. But .as soon as he had eaten some of it, he would be as guilty as I. Yes, it was better if a neighbor had heard the shot—better, anyway, than if there was a game warden stalking through the woods, or driving down the highway, or circling above in a plane. But there was no sound of cars on the highway, no sound of a plane engine above. There was no sound at all, except that of my heavy breathing. I was safe—for the moment, at least.

  Suddenly I felt funny. My legs began to shake. The blood rushed from my head. I went cold all over. Things were going black. I started to fall. So this was what they called “shock.” Quickly I stooped, scooped up a handful of snow and plastered it on my forehead. The dizziness receded. I opened my eyes. It was all over. I had better stop worrying and get to work.

  Removing my snowshoes, I walked over to the fallen moose, who was quite dead. It would be better, I knew, to avoid leaving a snowshoe trail around the body: this would be a sure sign of a crime committed to a game warden in a plane. Taking my knife from its sheath, I cut the bull’s throat and drained the blood. Then, retracing my steps, I put the snowshoes back on and carefully followed my previous trail back to the house. Now a game warden wouldn’t be able to tell whether I had been coming or going.

  Stoddard picks up his mail, which arrives only on Mondays and Thursday. Road entrance to his homestead has become part of the Sterling Highway. Notice homemade sign proudly announcing readiness of above cabin.

  Art was waiting for me. “Did you get it?” he asked eagerly.

  “Sure,” I answered. “It was easy.”

  At about 8 o’clock the two of us were ready to sally forth and butcher the moose. Wearing parkas, we collected packboards and butchering tools and started out the door. Suddenly the headlights of a jeep showed up in the driveway. Slamming the door, we shed the parkas, threw the packboards down the cellar and grabbed a magazine apiece. When the visitors—a party of friends looking for a pinochle game—knocked and entered at my shouted “Come in!” they found two innocent men peacefully reading by the stove.

  The pinochle game lasted until midnight. When the tail-lights of our unwelcome guests finally disappeared down the road, we sprang into action. Re-donning our parkas and retrieving the packboards from the cellar, we loaded up the gear and plowed our way to the kill without the aid of snowshoes or flashlights. We worked fast and silently, skinning the moose, cleaning it, and cutting it into quarters. Covering the entrails with the hide and then shoveling snow over all, we stood up, ready to carry the meat back to the house. We made three trips, falling and crawling through the darkness, trying to make tracks like a moose but not succeeding in our efforts. At last the meat was piled in the snow near the house. Putting it into gunny sacks, we carried it over into the thick woods on the north end of my clearing and hung it up in a brushy spruce tree, arranging the branches around it in a very natural way after slicing several pounds of steak meat from a hind leg. Then we returned to the house for a midnight feast. To heck with hanging the meat until tender! We were hungry NOW.

  On the following morning I arose early and returned to the scene of the crime to finish covering up any tell-tale evidence I might have overlooked in the dark. Then I returned to the cabin to sit and worry until the next snowfall. A few days later Attu located the kill and dug up the head. When I got it away from him, I took it to a spot far away in the woods and set coyote traps around it, thinking that I might as well make a little money on coyote bounties on the side. I also set traps under the tree in which the meat was hanging, but this turned out to be a bad idea: Attu followed me one day when I went out to get some meat and almost got caught for a coyote himself.

  After a week a heavy snow fell and I felt a good deal safer. But there was still the problem of keeping the secret of the moose meat from the neighbors. Whenever I brought a hunk of meat into the house to thaw it out I hid it in the basement. When I put the meat on the sink to slice off steaks I kept one ear open for the sounds of approaching visitors. And when my pinochle friends came over for dinner they had to be satisfied with fish chowder: for all they knew, salmon was the only kind of meat I possessed.

  Sometimes a friend would drop in unexpectedly and catch Art and me with moose meat on our plates. “Heh-heh,” I would laugh. “Think you caught us with illegal moose meat, huh? Sorry, friend. This is some meat left over from last season. Someone gave it to me.”

  And so it went. Until the last piece of meat was consumed, until the hide had been torn to bits and scattered to the winds by the coyotes, until the bones had been spread to the far corners of my homestead, I never felt completely at ease. Crime may fill your stomach, but it certainly doesn’t pay off in peace of mind.

  Note: If, by any chance, a game warden has read the foregoing words, I must ask him to check with my neighbors. They will tell him that Gordon Stoddard is the biggest liar and the best storyteller on the whole Kenai Peninsula.

  Chapter XXVIII—Spring, Tenants and Sandy

  THE THAW HAD BEGUN. Each day the snow level around the house was dropping an inch or so, each night freezing temperatures brought the melting process to a stop; but all in all the sun was making headway. And when the ice in the puddles and ditches began to turn to water and start on its journey toward the creek, Art and I began to shake ourselves out of our winter lethargy. We continued to beat each other at pinochle and read our pocket books—but always with one eye apiece trained on the growing patches of uncovered ground. The time was approaching, the time was approaching....

  My plans—insofar as I could make them—were made. Having set a price of around $10,000 for my remaining twenty acres, my house, the new cabin and all my equipment, I had painted a large “For Sale” sign and set it up next to my mailbox on the highway, and I had invested $20 (borrowed) to run an ad in an Anchorage paper. That was fine, but I had also figured out that I would have to take a job. It might take me all summer to get rid of my property, and in the meantime I would have to make enough money to live on and pay off my pressing debts. And if, by any chance, I shouldn’t be able to sell my real estate, I could at least save enough money on a high-paying construction job to pay my way “outside.” That was my only goal: to go “outside.”

  One day I made the decision. “Art,” I said, “today’s the day we go up to Kenai and get squared away with the labor union and see what’s available in jobs.”

  With our pockets filled with just enough borrowed money to pay the labor steward for our yearly dues, we started off in the truck. Arriving in Kenai, we drove out to the steward’s homestead. He wasn’t home. We returned to town to eat and wait and then went to a bar for a beer. After awhile I left Art in the bar and took a walk around town to look up friends and find out what was doing in the construction line. Returning an hour later after hearing “Nothing, right now,” at least twenty times, I found Art surrounded by empty beer cans and in no condition to accompany me on another trip to the labor steward’s homestead. I went alone, found the steward home, paid Art’s back dues and my own and entered our names on the hiring list. Because I had not worked during the previous year and had lost my place, I was, I noted, the sixtieth man on the list. The outlook was black: we were in for a long wait. Maybe we wouldn’t get jobs until late summer. Discouraged, I returned to town, dragged Art out to the truck and drove home.

  By the end of April we had had no word from Kenai and felt like forgotten men. And if something didn’t happen pretty soon we were apt to be starving men. But just before I was about to take some desperate m
easure—I didn’t quite know what—Johnny Hansen, a bachelor neighbor who lived down the creek, offered me a week’s work. “I’m putting in my fish trap and need extra help during the spring tides,” he said.

  I jumped at his offer. The next morning I was up at 4 o’clock and driving the ten miles up the highway to Johnny’s trap site. After climbing up a hill to the edge of the bluff, sliding down 200 steep feet to the beach and walking a mile along the sand to the site, I was ready to call it a day and crawl under Johnny’s beach shack and go to sleep. But it was not to be. Johnny, Red Freimuth and Wayne Jones were waiting for me, ready to go to work.

  Drawing on a pair of hip boots, I followed Johnny and his tractor as they pulled a trailer piled high with 25-foot trap poles down to the water’s edge. The tide was far out and the water lapped gently at the outermost end of the trap, which, I saw, was already in place. Our job was laid out for us. While two of us grabbed a pole and stood it up next to an iron stake sticking up two feet above the sand, Johnny would pound four large spikes into the pole and then bend them around the stake, thus fixing the pole in a vertical position. In an hour the trailer was empty and the tide was snapping at our heels. But there was still a lot to do. Working feverishly against time and tide, all four of us tied the wires hanging from each pole—Red, standing on a step-ladder, had put them up just before—to stakes on either side. When we had finished securing the last pole we were as soaking wet as a cluster of sponges. My job, for the day, was done, but Johnny and Red would have to wait for a high tide so that they could take a skiff out and tie smaller poles to the tops of the verticals for crosspieces and tie on wire to be secured to the iron stakes on the following day.

  Freezing in my dripping clothes, I made my way home, determined not to show up for that miserable kind of work again. Was it worth it, for any amount of money? I thought not. However, after a good rest and an afternoon of foot-warming by the barrel stove, my interest in money got the better of my reluctance to go swimming in Alaska’s icy seas, and I reported for duty on the following day. In five days the job was done. The trap, except for the chicken wire that would be stretched along the lead, the line of poles from beach to pot, was finished. I had worked only two hours a day, but Johnny paid me $100 in nice, crisp five-dollar bills—the usual pay for that type of work. Not bad....

  With a little cash in my pocket, Art and I were able to return to Kenai in the middle of May. We had decided to “wait out” our jobs in Red Freimuth’s old tent—a decision which had meant that I had to find good homes for Attu and Happy so that they would be well cared for in my absence, sad though it made me feel to part with them.

  We stayed for a week. Nothing happened in the job department. We moved back to the homestead. Then we moved back to the tent. Then back to the homestead. Then back to the tent. And so it went. By the time our money ran out we were fifteenth and sixteenth on the labor list, but from the way the list was moving—like a snail undecided as to whether to go backward or forward—it looked as though we wouldn’t be going to work until autumn. At this point I called on my relatives in California for monetary help. It was immediately forthcoming, though not in any great quantity. Art also wrote to relatives, and when he received a little money he decided to use it to go to Anchorage to look for a job. I saw him off on the bus and wished him the best of luck.

  The next thing that happened was that Red let me know that there was a small job waiting for me near my homestead. For about the twentieth time, I packed up and closed the flaps of the tent behind me in Kenai. At the homestead I set up housekeeping again and contacted Red. In a few days I was helping to build a large log cabin for a Mr. Edris from Anchorage. But after a week I quit the job and prepared to return to Kenai. My break had come at last.

  It had all come about through Alaskan hospitality. One Saturday afternoon a car and a pickup truck had driven into my yard and several men had climbed out. “You Stoddard?” one of them said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We noticed your sign out on the highway—about the cabins and property for sale. Want to tell us about it?”

  I gave them my usual sales talk but I saw through their scheme. They were all loaded down with fishing gear, and they just wanted an excuse to fish in my creek. It had happened before. Finally came the question I had expected: “Mind if we wet our lines in the creek while we’re here?”

  “Don’t mind at all,” I answered. “I’ll even show you the best holes.”

  I took the party a half mile upstream to a fishing hole boiling with salmon and left them to have their fun. When they came back past the cabin on their way out, I invited them in for coffee. We talked until midnight. One of the men, as it turned out, was a contractor who was building an addition to the Kenai School; the rest were workers on the job. Feeling friendly, the contractor slapped me on the back as he left and said, “Stoddard, if you need a job, come up to Kenai on Monday. I’ll put you to work.”

  Two days later—it was the last week in June—I began my first real job of the season. It had been a long wait.

  At the Kenai School, however, I found myself in the doubtful position of being the only Indian among an assortment of chiefs: in other words, the only laborer on a job which employed nothing but skilled carpenters besides. This meant that I was given a lot of hard, backbreaking work to do. But I wasn’t unhappy: I was paying off my debts at the rate of $100 a week.

  Returning to the homestead one Saturday night after two weeks of work, I found everything still in order. I felt myself very lucky to have a weekend in the woods in which to relax, and I set about relaxing with a great deal of vigor. Sunday morning I awoke early and went to the creek to catch a salmon for dinner. In the afternoon I was lolling on my bed with a good book when a car drove into the yard. Out of it stepped a man, a woman and three little girls. The man introduced himself as Bob Bertelle of New York City. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said. “We went clear to Kenai to find you.”

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  “We saw your ‘For Sale’ sign on the road and we want to buy the place. Would you take $6000—$5000 in cash and the other thousand in payments?”

  I was speechless. This was my first real offer. What I couldn’t do with $5000 in cash! Wow!

  Just the same, my answer to Mr. Bertelle was, “No. Thanks. But no.” I went on to explain that my price was $8000 for the house plus ten acres and another $3000 for the smaller cabin upstream with its ten acres. I couldn’t go any lower.

  After two hours of talking I had come down to $7000 for the house but Bertelle hadn’t gone up. “It’s too bad you didn’t catch me two weeks ago,” I told him. “I was broke, then, and I would have grabbed at your offer. Now I’m making money again and I can afford to wait for my price.”

  I never saw two people more anxious to buy. Bertelle kept trying to get rid of his $5000 and I kept refusing it—but with greater reluctance, I might say, each time. Finally Mrs. Bertelle asked me if I would rent the homestead. Now there was a solution. If I rented the house to them, possibly Bertelle would find himself a high-paying job like mine and come up to my price. And if I changed my mind about accepting their offer, I would know where to find them. We settled on a token sum of $20 a month, they paid me a month’s rent in advance and said they would move in during the following week. I was a landlord.

  Every other weekend during the summer I drove down from Kenai to see my tenants. While I stayed at the homestead, I slept in my new cabin and ate all my meals at the house, courtesy of the Bertelles. I liked the Bertelles, and it was good to see some life around the place. Their three little girls, who very soon began to consider themselves “real Alaskans”—even to making several skirt-wetting attempts to fish in the creek—were just what a homestead needed.

  One Saturday night I walked into the kitchen and stopped in amazement. Sitting at the kitchen table as though he’d been sitting there for years and it was his own kitchen table was “Sandy” Smith—Alexander Malcom Sm
ith. Sandy, the famous prospector and explorer who had spent most of his long, eventful life in Alaska. Sandy, who had been one of my father’s most treasured friends. But the last I had heard of him he’d been living in southern California.

  “Hey, Sandy!” I shouted, grabbing his hand. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sitting here getting acquainted with your verry nice tenants,” he answered calmly, sounding just as Scottish as ever. “Sit doon, Gordon lad. Have a cup of coffee.”

  I gazed in wonderment at the grizzled little man. Ninety-three years old, he was. I knew: my father had written me about Sandy, again and again. He was a real, honest-to-Pete, 93-year-old sourdough. As a boy, I had read about him in a book on explorers and daring men of modern times, and I remembered that the telling of his adventures had taken two pages to Robert Peary’s one. He had found a mountain of jade, fallen into an Alaskan lake of oil and sold it for an astronomical sum, discovered an island of ivory and had barely escaped with his life after prospecting for gold in Siberia. The last time I had seen him was when my father and I had visited him in Vancouver, B. C., one summer. He had been a young 85 then, had been married for five years to a woman half his age and was the father of a four-year-old son. He had told us while we were there that he had had a physical examination only the week before and the doctor had informed him that he had the constitution of a man of forty.

  Apparently he still had the constitution of a man of forty. As he sat there at my kitchen table he looked and acted like a man of sixty in very good health, at least. His voice was strong, his fist, which he banged on the table to emphasize his points, was like a ball of iron, and there was nothing about him to indicate a man well past his prime who should have been toothless, wizened and feeble.