On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  She wanted to call out to him at once, to run to him with all the last of her strength. Instead, she forced herself to sit in the lee of the bank and eat whatever scraps of food were left in her pack, for she did not mean to totter into her father’s cabin hungry and exhausted. She would walk up to him straight and strong, and proud.

  Soon she was ready. Holding herself in check, she moved slowly to where the tracks led up the bank, and in the last light saw the cabin, exactly as it had always been, set solidly among the alders, a place of safety and warmth. But as she took a step toward it, the dogs suddenly sensed her presence and came alive with a fierce and fearful howling. Almost at once the cabin door was thrown back and a man came bolting out, rifle up and eyes peering through the dimness for the first sign of an enemy.

  “It is me,” Anna called into the clamor of the barking dogs, the Indian language strange on her tongue after all these months. “I have come home.”

  The shadowed figure by the cabin tried to quiet the dogs. “Who is it?” he shouted. “Who’s out there?”

  “It’s Anna. I have come home.”

  She saw the man’s gun fall as he started toward her. “Anna,” he said softly. “My sister. My little sister!”

  Then he was running, and they came together with a great cry of joy, and clung to each other, Anna and her brother Johnny. They did not speak for a long time, but only held each other and looked at each other. At last Anna asked if her children were well, and Johnny told her they were. He led her to the cabin where Mary, his wife, kissed her in gladness and gave her hot tea from the stove.

  “It has been such a long time,” Johnny said, “a year and two moons. No one—almost no one—believed that you could still be alive. Everyone said you would be lost in that strange land, or killed by the Eskimos. Only our mother kept saying that you would return. She sent us here to stay the winter, to wait. She said that you would come walking up the river one day, and that there must be someone here to meet you.”

  “And our father? Does he believe I am dead, too?”

  Her brother looked away. Anna, weak with happiness and relief, was suddenly cold with fear. “What is it?” she whispered. “What has happened to my father?”

  “He sickened with the fever late in summer,” Johnny said, still not looking at her. “He was dead before the first frost.”

  Anna felt her open hand go to her mouth, and knew she was holding it there to keep from sobbing aloud. She wanted to tell her brother how terribly unfair it was, but could not speak. So she sat crying, and thinking that now her father could never know that she had survived, nor how his Eskimo friend had saved her. There were so many things she had meant to tell him.

  “Until the very last he asked for you,” Johnny was saying. “And when he knew that he had to die, he told us not to be sad because now he would be able to watch over you from heaven.”

  And perhaps he had, Anna suddenly thought. Perhaps he knew she was alive, after all. And in a little while she dried her eyes and began to eat the food Johnny’s wife brought her.

  They talked far into the night. Anna told of her trip, and Johnny told of all that had happened to their family since she went away. It was decided that he would leave for home early in the morning, for walking alone he could bring the good news to their mother in three days. Anna was to rest one full day, then she and Mary would load all the winter supplies on the sled and follow with the dog team.

  But Johnny must have run most of the way. The women had not been on the trail three days when two teams came bounding downriver to meet them. Anna was put on an empty sled and the driver drove those dogs as though chased by a bull moose, reaching the village just before nightfall.

  Though news of Anna’s return had spread like wildfire, the people who stood watching as the team came mushing up from the bank stared at her as they would at a ghost. No hunter, let alone a frail girl, had ever crossed the great reaches of that strange land to the north. To these people, Nome was in another world, and all the thousand miles in between a blizzard-ridden unknown, full of devilish Eskimos and constant danger. That Anna had walked it, alone and unarmed, was to them a miracle.

  When she got off the sled, they fell back to make a path for her. A few called out a welcome, but Anna could not stop. She ran to her mother’s house, calling the names of her children even before she opened the door. They sat by the table with her mother, waiting, wide-eyed and still, and the grandmother held them while tears stood in her eyes and ran down her seamed face as she tried to speak. Ah, she is so old, Anna thought, and fell to her knees at her mother’s feet, and went into her open arms, even as she reached out to grasp her babies and pull them close to her. “I’m home,” she cried softly.

  “I told them you would come back,” the old mother said. “I told them.”

  And so the long journey was over.

  Chapter Two

  My Father

  MY FATHER FIRST CAME to Alaska in 1898. He was one of those thousands of white men who climbed up over the Chilkoot Pass that year of the gold rush, then came rafting down the Yukon from Canada, positive he would find gold in the next creek, or just around that big hill. He never did, but still he was luckier than most. Wandering the land looking for his bonanza, he came to know the country as well as any Native, and when he was really down on his luck he got a job with the Alaska Trading Company, hauling mail and passengers from Fort Gibbon to Louse Point, ninety miles down the river.

  When the snow fell he drove a nine-dog team, and people who lived along the Yukon would wait for him to break trail, for everyone knew the mail had to go through. My father was about twenty-five years old then, tough as the land and afraid of nothing.

  I loved the stories he used to tell about those days. One winter he was hauling a wealthy Easterner all the way to Nome. When they came to the shelter cabin the first night, Dad thought it would be nice to offer his passenger a little something besides fried beans, so he opened a can of fruit for dessert. The Easterner looked at his tin plate with the remains of the beans still on it, then at the fruit, and finally said, “I would like to have a clean dish, please.” Dad didn’t say a word. He just took the plate outside where one of the dogs licked it clean as a whistle. Then he brought it back in and everybody was happy, especially the dog.

  He was a good poker player. Once he cleaned out a game at Fort Gibbon, but the few hundred dollars he won chased him right out of Alaska. It seems the losers decided that they would get even with that Jim Huntington. They fed whiskey to an old Indian, which was against the law, until the poor buck was falling down drunk. Then they called in witnesses and said Dad had done it; they accused him of making a killing selling bootleg whiskey to the Native people. Soon the federal marshal at Fairbanks was on his way up the river with a warrant for Dad’s arrest. He had just enough warning to beat the marshal out of town—and he kept going until he’d reached the coast at Valdez, nearly three hundred miles away, where he boarded a ship and eventually got back to his mother’s house in Buffalo, New York.

  But Alaska was in his blood. After he’d been away for two years, somebody told him that he couldn’t be arrested for something that was supposed to have happened such a long time ago, so he kissed his mother good-bye, went straight back to Seattle, and got on the first boat headed north. This time he heard of a gold strike on the Koyukuk and staked a claim on Black Creek. He had to pack his supplies twenty miles over the mountains from Hughes, and build a giant fire to thaw the ground for his cabin. He never made much of his claim, just enough to keep him thinking that the pay streak was ten feet this side or the other from where he was digging. Whenever he went broke he ran freight up to Wiseman in a horse scow, leading the horse along the riverbank while a steerer tried to keep the scow from being spilled by the uprooted trees that came barreling downstream. Someone had said there was gold around Wiseman, and though it was sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle, the creeks were all staked and there were several saloons and six sporting women in the town.


  By 1908 the country was filling up with miners. They were all over the streams back of Hughes, and it suddenly came to my father that if all these men persisted in digging for gold, he’d do better to supply them with shovels—and coffee and salt and anything else they needed — than he’d ever do working that stubborn land. So one spring morning he just walked off his claim and went into Hughes where, between the few dollars he’d saved and some he borrowed, he built a little trading post. By summer he was open for business.

  That was the year he met my mother. Her Native village was only a hundred miles or so from Hughes, and Dad had been running trap lines through that country. He really liked the little Indian widow, but he did not believe in the Native style of marriage where a man and a woman say, “Okay, we’re married,” and that’s it. So they waited until the Episcopal archdeacon came up the Koyukuk in September and were married properly. They had a happy life together and five children—the older girls, Elsie and Ada, my brother Sidney and myself, and Marion, the baby. We were all born at Hughes, where we lived until 1919.

  That year there was still another gold strike, this one at the mouth of the Hogatza River near my mother’s people. Since the mines around Hughes seemed to be playing out, Dad decided to move his trading post down the Koyukuk to the new fields. With the help of some Indians, he pulled apart our cabin and store and built two big rafts with the logs. When the river was free of ice, we loaded aboard—kids, six dogs, and everything we owned—and drifted downstream. Dad picked out some nice high ground close to where the two rivers came together, and there he pitched the tent that was our home until he finished rebuilding the cabin and the store.

  Those were my earliest memories. I was four years old that summer and trailed my father around like a pup. I remember standing alongside him on the riverbank when the steamer came by to take my two older sisters to the Anvik mission school, six hundred miles down the Yukon, and I tried to wave good-bye in exactly the free and easy way he did it. I remember the people who came to the store—my mother’s brother Johnny, and the trappers with their stacks of furs to trade, and the rivermen who always stopped for what we called a cup of tea but was really a full meal.

  And I remember being awakened one night by a terrific howl of pain. Our cabin had two stories and we kids slept upstairs, and though I was scared as could be, I came bumbling down the steps to see what was the matter. There sat poor Dad, hanging onto a chair with both hands, his mouth wide open. Mother had hold of one of his back teeth with a pair of pliers, pulling away with all the strength of her ninety pounds.

  “Stop!” I yelled, and just then the tooth came out and Mother sailed back against the wall and Dad yelled again and I guess I thought the world was coming to an end.

  Holding his jaw, Dad helped Mother up, then packed me back upstairs under one arm and put me into bed. “I believe you feel worse about this than I do,” he said with a smile. I believe I did, too.

  In the late spring, when the ice went out, Dad climbed into his riverboat with the new three-horsepower engine and set off for the Anvik mission to bring the girls home for the summer. It was lonely then, and my brother Sidney and I often sat on the bank staring down the winding Koyukuk, although it would be weeks before we saw that little green boat again. In the afternoon, Mother would come down to set out her fishnet. Then we’d mind the baby for her, standing on the bank and trying to see the silver flash of the first fish she caught. Sidney was seven then, I was five, and Marion not quite two.

  Early one afternoon, whistle tooting and smoke heaving from her big red stack, the Teddy H., first steamer of the season, came chugging around the bend of the river to tie up at our landing. The men left mail and supplies, then cast off, bound all the way to the mouth of the Yukon at the Bering Sea, with something for almost every post and village between. Sidney and I were glad to see them go; we weren’t used to the tough-talking white men and their big, churning boat, and with Dad away there was something scary about their tromping around in the store.

  That evening after supper it was so warm that we sat outdoors, Mother sipping strong-smelling tea, and all of us watching the greening land. Far away, on the Zane Hills, you could still see winter’s hand, rounded domes covered with snow and, lower down, the trees still skinny and bare. But close to the river here, you could almost reach out and touch summer. There were birds and new leaves on the bush, and the sky was bright blue. Some Native people who’d built cabins across the river from us had already moved down to their fishing camps, so the nearest people were the miners, twenty-five miles overland, and even farther by water. It was very nice.

  Then Mother said she didn’t feel well. She had eaten whitefish intestine for supper, a favorite Native tidbit, except that if it wasn’t really fresh it could give you quite a stomachache. Suddenly her face was pasty white, and perspiration broke out on her forehead. When she got up to go back into the house it took her a long time, and she had to hold onto the wall for support. She lay down on the old bearskin couch, and Sidney brought little Marion in and then we stood there, frightened and not knowing what else to do.

  When the sun started to go down, Mother looked up as though she didn’t know where she was. “Give the baby some milk,” she said. “Then go to sleep, all of you.”

  That made me feel better, hearing her talk and tell us what to do. I figured her stomachache would be gone in the morning. So I helped Sidney heat the condensed milk for Marion’s bottle and fell asleep before he had even finished feeding it to her.

  I was the first one awake in the morning. I remember lying there in the bed with the baby between Sidney and me and thinking that something was funny. I listened to the birds. I could even hear myself breathe. Then I realized that that was it: it was too quiet. Where were the sounds of Mother cooking breakfast downstairs? How come she hadn’t wakened us to wash up?

  I climbed out of bed and started downstairs. Near the bottom of the steps I stopped, for now I could see my mother. She was lying on the floor with just her head outside the partly opened door, as though she’d started for the privy and then gotten too tired to make it. She looked as though she was asleep, except that her face was on the ground and the mosquitoes were buzzing around it.

  I went over to her, calling, “Mama! Mama!” I was positive she’d wake up when she heard me, but she never moved. When I went to shake her, the skin of her arm felt icy cold, though it was nice and warm in the house. I ran to the steps and screamed, “Sidney!” He came to the head of the stairs and I told him that Mother wouldn’t get up. But my shouting had wakened the baby, and she was crying so hard that Sidney couldn’t hear me. “Come down!” I pleaded.

  He went back to get his overalls on and try to quiet the baby. Then he came down. He got to his knees by Mother and tried to call her, then shake her. But all that happened was that her face rolled around on the ground and got dirty, and I made him stop. I suppose I realized then that she was dead—I know Sidney did—but I think we both felt that as long as we didn’t mention it, she might still wake up.

  “Let’s put her in the house before something eats her,” Sidney said.

  But small as she was, we didn’t have the strength between us to budge her. Finally we covered her head and shoulders with a blanket. By now Marion was howling like a baby wildcat, and Sidney sent me to get her bottle while he made a fire to heat the milk. While I was upstairs I got dressed, then I came down to tell Sidney that the baby’s diaper was one big mess. He told me to change it.

  “I don’t know how,” I said.

  He turned around from the stove where he was trying to get a blackened old log burning from a handful of birch-bark kindling. “I don’t know anything about making breakfast,” he said, “but I’m doing it.” He could be awfully tough for seven.

  I went back upstairs and took off the dirty diaper. It took me a long time to clean her up and get a dry one on her, especially since she was still crying for her bottle. Then I tried to lift her, piggyback, the way Sidney di
d, to carry her downstairs, but I wasn’t big enough. “You’ll have to walk down,” I said, and took her hand. But she had never walked down the stairs before and was afraid. She whimpered and hung back. “Come on, Marion,” I begged, near crying myself, “try! Sidney’s trying to make us breakfast.”

  But it wasn’t until Sidney showed her the warm bottle that she took hold of me, and half-sitting on each step, managed to get down. Then she curled up on the couch with the bottle and was happy. She never even noticed Mother laying there in the middle of the floor.

  Sidney was stirring cornmeal in a pot of water, the way he’d seen Mother do. It kept getting thicker and thicker until finally he couldn’t stir it anymore. Then it began to burn, so he said it was done and took it off the stove. It tasted terrible, but we ate it, even Marion. When we were finished we went outside, but we didn’t feel like playing. Soon the dogs began to whine, and I was glad when Sidney said we’d have to water them, for that gave us something to do.

  It took a long time. We had to pack the water up from the river, and all we could manage between us was half a pailful at a time. We kept going back and forth, and we took Marion with us. She kept falling down and crying, but she cried worse when we tried to leave her behind. Afterward, we gave her another bottle and changed her diaper. When she fell asleep, Sidney and I walked back to the bank and stood by the fishing skiff, turned over and drying in the sun.