On the Edge of Nowhere
Page 5
I didn’t think he was. I didn’t think he was coming back at all. I had a feeling that one of these times we’d fall asleep and just not wake up any more, as Mother had done. When I told that to Sidney he said for me to shut up. Dad was coming back, he said. We just had to wait.
One day as I lay there dozing, it seemed to me that I was dreaming of a big boat and the crowd of white men who came barging off it. They were going to hit us for stealing candy from the store. Sidney was trying to tell them how hungry we’d been, but they wouldn’t listen. They were dragging us back to the boat and the boat whistle blew with a terrific shriek—and I sat up on the blanket in a cold sweat.
There had been a boat whistle!
Sidney was already outside the lean-to, crouched down on his hands and knees and staring down at the river. I crawled out beside him, and the whistle blew again, so piercing—loud that my ears hurt. The dogs were all up and howling at the sky. Drifting down in a wide swing toward our landing was the Teddy H.
I was terrified. I said, “Let’s go hide.”
Sidney looked at me, then back at the boat. He was scared, too, I could tell. I suppose we’d both gone a little wild. Still, he was older, and I think he would have been brave enough to stay if I hadn’t run back and started pulling Marion to her feet. I was in a frenzy. Those men were scary enough when Mother or Dad were here. But now there was just us and we’d done so many bad things—taken stuff from the store and got the blankets all dirty. I was sure they’d come to punish us.
“Where’ll we go?” Sidney said. He was still watching the Teddy H. as it nosed into shore. Now one of the men had jumped off the bow and was tying it down.
“Anyplace! In the store! Come on, help me with Marion.” I guess he knew I meant to go, whether he did or not. He jumped up and, between us, we half-dragged, half-carried the baby past the yelping dogs and into the dim-lit store.
We edged deeper into the back, among the crates and cases. Hunkering down low, we found a little trapdoor in the floorboards and crawled under and in as far as we could go, barely able to move, too scared to breathe.
We could hear them wherever they went—they made so much noise. One yelled that the dogs were half crazy and soon another, up by the house, called out, “My God, the squaw’s dead!” Then they said that we kids had to be around here somewhere, and they began looking all over. Before long they were in the store. And as we lay there in the dark, wide-eyed and trembling in our nameless terror, Marion, who hadn’t let out a peep for days, began to cry.
“Shhh!” I begged her, and tried to cover her mouth with my hand.
But it was too late. “Here!” one of them shouted. “They’re over here somewhere, under the damned floor!”
But even when they shone a light through the floorboards and saw us, they couldn’t get us out. They were too big to crawl in after us, and no matter how they pleaded, we huddled as far from their reach as we could get. “We won’t hurt you,” they said. “We’ll take you to your father.” But of course we knew they were lying.
Finally they got a crowbar and pried the boards up. They tried to lift Marion out first and Sidney and I sprang at them like a pair of wolverines, kicking at all the dark legs surrounding us, biting every hand that reached out. “Leave my sister alone!” I screamed. “Get away from my sister!”
But there were too many of them. Our strength gave out, and soon they held us with our arms pinned back. And still they kept saying that they weren’t going to hurt us. “Poor crazy little kids,” one of them said. “I don’t know how they stayed alive.”
They carried us back to the boat, and we were quiet until they tried to take Marion into a separate cabin. “Don’t take her away!” Sidney hollered. “She’s our sister! She’s ours!”
So they took us all into the same cabin and stripped the stinking, filthy clothes off us and gave us a bath. They put some creamy stuff on Marion’s bites and brought us cut-down pants and shirts. And nothing ever tasted so delicious as the warm mush they fed us. Then the captain came in. He was an old Eskimo named David Tobuk, and he said they were ready to bury our mother and we’d better come along.
They had dug a grave on the slope back up by the woods. Mother was all wrapped in canvas now and David Tobuk read a prayer while they lowered her in. Sidney held Marion tightly and we both began to cry because it was all so final. Once they covered Mother with dirt, we would never see her again.
As we walked back to the boat, the captain sent somebody to feed the dogs. He said, “We’re going to turn back downriver and find your dad. He can’t be many days behind us.”
That cheered us up some. We felt foolish now for having been so afraid of these people. In the next days they became our friends, and we told them some of the things that had happened to us and how we had lived.
“Didn’t you know that there was food all over that camp?” one of them said. “Cases of condensed milk and cornmeal in the store. Stacks of dried salmon in the cache.”
“No,” Sidney told him. “We didn’t know.”
Mother had a habit of marking an X on the calendar for every day that went by. The last X she made was on May 27, 1920, and the men from the Teddy H. found us June 10. So it was figured out that we had been alone in the wilderness for fourteen days. Everybody said it was a miracle—that we had survived on candy and a couple of cans of beans; that the bears hadn’t got us, for they are wild with hunger in the spring. Years later, all over Alaska, people who heard my name would ask if I was one of the Huntington kids who had lived through that ordeal.
The real miracle was that the Teddy H. had stopped at our place. They had nothing to leave for us on the return trip, and only the fact that someone had spotted the skiff downriver made them suspicious that something might be wrong. I doubt if we could have held out until Dad got back.
Six days after we’d left our camp, the boat whistle blew and everyone aboard seemed to grow very quiet. We went up on deck and saw Dad’s green riverboat chugging upstream. The Teddy H. swung around, using just enough steam to hold it against the current, and David Tobuk hailed Dad from the starboard side. They talked for a while and Sidney and I hung back in a cabin door—now that Dad was actually here, we were a little jittery. Finally Dad and our sisters, Elsie and Ada, came aboard. The girls were crying, and Dad’s shoulders slumped forward the way they did when he was very tired. Then we heard him call for us and we ran to him, and he put his arms around us real hard. Somebody brought Marion, and he kissed her and held us all. We had been very brave children, he said, very good.
“Dad,” Sidney told him slowly, “we did do something real bad. We stole candy from the store, and a big ham.”
“No, no!” Dad said, shaking his head and pulling us to him all the tighter. “That wasn’t bad. That was. . .”
And then, at last, he began to cry and couldn’t say any more. In a little while, they tied Dad’s boat up behind the Teddy H. and we all went inside the cabin.
We were on our way home again.
Chapter Three
Growing Up
THAT WAS A HARD and lonely summer for all of us, but mostly for Dad. He built a fence around Mother’s grave and made a cross for it with her name printed on. And there he’d sit for long hours, looking empty-eyed at the river. He wouldn’t even unpack supplies for the store. We weren’t going to put in another winter in this place, he said, so unpacking would only be a waste of time. But he didn’t say where we were going.
Early in August, the Episcopal archdeacon, Fred Drane, stopped to see us. He was making his annual mission up the river, holding services and baptizing babies in the villages and fish camps. He said prayers for Mother, and afterward we all sat out in front of the cabin and the Reverend Drane offered to take all five of us kids back to the Anvik mission, where Elsie and Ada had gone to school. You could see that this hurt Dad. He didn’t answer, not even when the Reverend Drane asked how else he could manage, what he was planning to do. He just shrugged and sat there, looking withou
t seeing, not saying a word.
In the late afternoon, my mother’s mother, whom we called Old Mom, came up the river with some Natives in a poling boat. The men from the Teddy H. had brought her the bad news, and now she cried and cried as she held her grandchildren against her and put our hands to her mouth. In a little while, we all went back up to the grave, except for the Reverend Drane, who understood the Native ways. There, Old Mom built a fire and put biscuits and dried fish on it from the bag she was carrying. This was the Indian custom, to feed the spirit of the dead. She gave us some food, too, and while we ate she sang a Native prayer, nodding slowly while the tears ran down her lined old face.
We stayed until the fire went out. Then Old Mom told Dad that he had to get us kids out of this place, that it was bad for children to grow up in the wilderness without a mother. He didn’t answer her, but when we got back to the cabin, he called the Reverend Drane aside and talked to him for a long time, and I knew that we would be going to the mission school.
When we woke in the morning, our clothes were already packed and loaded on the archdeacon’s gas boat. After breakfast, Dad went to the store and got pretty handkerchiefs for each of the girls and two brand new jackknives for Sidney and me. He told us to be good. He said that Mr. Drane had promised to keep us all together, and that he would come to see us whenever he could. He carried the baby, and seemed not able to let her go when we got down to the landing. Mr. Drane had to take her from his arms, and then he just stood there all the time the boat backed into midstream and turned away. He was still standing there when the landing and the camp and the cabin disappeared from our sight behind a bend in the river.
Anvik is on the Yukon River, in the flat muskeg country of western Alaska, not too far from the Bering Sea. I didn’t like it. Everybody there was good to us, but I just wasn’t used to so many people or to the ways of the white man’s world. I’d been born in the bush and lived there all my life, and I felt clumsy and shy among all those new faces and the painted buildings and plank sidewalks. I still do. But I had plenty to eat—although lots of times it was just navy beans—and I learned to read and write.
The best part of all was Dad’s visit each spring. He didn’t have the heart for running a trading post alone, so he’d been moving around the country, trapping some and digging for gold whenever someone told him about a promising streak. Sidney and I always begged him to take us along, but he kept saying that we needed an education. “Someday,” he’d say. “When you’re older.” And so he’d give us each a dollar and leave again, and we’d go looking for something to buy that would last a long time. Usually it was peanut butter, which we’d take back to the dormitory and finish before the day was out.
In the third year I got sick and didn’t get better for a long time. Some said I had TB, and they kept me in bed and fed me cod-liver oil by the bucket. Then I got whooping cough, and they had to send me to the railroad hospital in Anchorage. That was a very bad time. I was all alone and so sick that I was sure I’d cough my life away. One night I woke up hacking and gasping for breath, and when the nurse came I could hardly make her out: I’d ruptured a blood vessel and hemorrhaged into the left eyeball. For three months I was completely blind in that eye, and for a long time after that I had to wear colored glasses.
When I was well enough to go back to Anvik, I’d missed a whole year of school. I was like a stranger there, and the kids took to calling me One-Eye Jack. Naturally this led to some bloody battles, most of which I lost. I did better once I got my strength back. Anyway, they quit calling me One-Eye Jack, which was all I cared about. I didn’t want them for friends.
In the winter of 1927, when I was twelve, my sister Ada came down with an attack of acute appendicitis. They tried to get her to the hospital in Fairbanks, but by the time they could get a plane in, it was too late. Ada died on the operating table. In the spring, when Dad came to see us, the hurt was still on his face. He looked thin and plain worn out.
“I’m going partners with old Charlie Swanson,” he told us. “We got us a big poling boat with a kicker, and we’re going up the Koyukuk to trap next winter.”
Sidney and I had the old question on our minds, but we didn’t ask it because you could see that Dad already had plenty to worry about. We had walked out toward the woods, just the three of us, and now he stopped and dug the heel of his boot into the thawing earth. “I figure it’s time you boys were learning how to live off the country,” he said softly. “Might be that I won’t be around much longer to teach you. Think you’d like to come along with us this trip?”
Sidney and I almost busted open with excitement. We said yes and danced around a little, for our dream had come true. Even better, Dad smiled as he watched us. He looked happier than we’d seen him in a long time.
So that was the end of my education. I’d gone through the third reader—which is more than most kids do in this part of the world—and now I was ready to start the learning that was to keep me going for the rest of my life: how to use what the land has to give you.
Dad stayed at Anvik until the ice was out of the river, then we said good-bye to Elsie and Marion, who were to go on with their schooling, and left for Nulato. Old Charlie was waiting there for us with the gas boat. He was a white man, all grizzled and gray, who never had much to say but sure knew how to tell you where you stood with him: ten minutes after we got there, while Dad was busy checking the boat, he dug around in his duffle bag and pulled out candy bars for Sidney and me.
We laid over a week in Nulato waiting for the steamer with all our winter supplies. We started loading as soon as they came. By the time we climbed aboard— with the seven dogs Dad had bought—that boat really sat down in the water. But there is no other way when you set off for a winter’s trapping. If you forget something, or run out, you’d better be ready to do without because the nearest trading post might be a hundred and fifty miles away.
In a lot of ways, that was the best year of my life. The land was fresh and exciting to me then, the smells sharper, and there was a promise of game around each turn of the river. Everything was a challenge. Nothing came ready-made. And the people in Nulato were the last we were to see until the following spring.
Going upstream, we made twenty or thirty miles a day, tying up to the bank each night and sleeping under the alders. Ducks and their young squatted in the sloughs, and took off in great wheeling clouds when they heard the chug of our motor. I counted thirty-four bears. One day we passed our old trading post, and a big blackie was ambling along on the slope near Mother’s grave. You could only see the roofs of the buildings, at Hogatza, the grass stood that tall around them. We didn’t stop.
On the eighth day we came to a nice sandbar below an open stretch of high ground. Dad said that looked like as good a place as any, so we tied up and pitched a tent on the bluff. I wanted to sit and just look around for a while—this was the place where we were going to spend a whole winter—but Dad said there was no time for sitting. And there wasn’t. While Sidney and I unloaded the boat and staked the dogs out, Dad started clearing the land of brush. Then he took an ax into the woods and went right to work cutting logs for the cabin we’d have to have ready before snow fell. Meanwhile, Old Charlie was setting a couple of fishnets out in the river. The salmon were running now and they might not be tomorrow, and it took a lot of dried fish to feed a team of seven dogs all winter.
There seemed to be something to do every hour of every day. We had to build racks to dry the fish, and a cache ten feet off the ground to store meat. We went into the woods and picked gallons of wild blueberries, which Dad dumped in a big barrel along with a lot of sugar. This would be our fruit for the winter. Our biggest job was raising the cabin. We hauled logs from the woods and chinked them, and when it was tall enough we laid in the roof poles. Naturally we had no sheet iron for the roof, so we peeled spruce bark and laid that across the poles. On top of that went moss, then two feet of dirt, and that roof didn’t leak a bit, not even in the hardest rain or
when the snow thawed. We all worked, Sidney and I as hard as Dad and Old Charlie, and there was no such thing as a kid’s job or a man’s job. They were all the same—work that had to get done before winter—and I must have been the toughest twelve-year-old in the Territory that year.
We moved into the cabin around the middle of September. Our bunks were spruce boughs raised on poles, with lots of good grass for mattresses. Dad had brought a box of magazines, and when the days grew short we’d sit around the gas lamp reading them. Now we spent a lot of time building our sleighs and snowshoes. Dad showed Sidney and me how, once, then we were on our own. We fumbled and argued, but we got it done, and Dad said, “That’s the way. Don’t ever let anything stump you.” The only bad part was that he made us take a bath every two weeks, and that was almost as bad as school.
When the ice began forming along the edges of the river, we ran the boat downstream to a slough and worked some logs under it so it wouldn’t freeze to the ground. That took us all day, and on the way back Old Charlie joked about how we were really stuck here now and that there better be plenty of game for the pot. I fell asleep exhausted, as I did every night, happy as I’d ever been.
Next morning, when Dad called Sidney and me for breakfast, we shivered into our clothes and went to the water bucket to wash up. There, leaning against the cabin wall, stood two brand new .22 single-shot rifles. Our first rifles—our very own! For a second we just stared at them, then we yippeed loud enough to scare a deaf moose, Dad and Old Charlie grinning at us, and we begged for ammunition so we could try them out.
“Breakfast first,” Dad said, and stood over us while we bolted down some mush. Then he gave us five rounds apiece, and out we tore, great and fearless hunters, on the track of a ferocious grizzly with enough meat on his rump to last through the winter. Of course we didn’t have the patience to really look for any game—although there were rabbit tracks all over the place. Instead, we went out on the bank and shot at chunks of ice in the river. We never even came close.