The man who brought me said, “Now you tell us about my son, how you sewed him up.”
Then I understood: this was Henry’s house, his family.
The man was his father—that was why he looked familiar and I was brought here last because theirs was to be the honor of having me spend the night with them. Little did I know what that was going to lead to.
I cleared my throat and told them the story of Henry and the bear, stretching it out and trying to make their son look less foolish than he had been, and as brave as possible. I was positive that they had heard the story before— Henry and the boy must have told them something about it. But they were pretending as hard as I was, oohing and aahing in all the right places and bending toward me as though they couldn’t wait for the next words out of my mouth.
Meanwhile, more and more people came crawling through the tunnel into the igloo to hear the story. It was packed from wall to wall, and the heat was suffocating and the smell from the seal-oil lamp was enough to knock you out. Every once in a while the girl who had taken care of my mukluks bent over and mopped the sweat from my forehead with a towel. Finally the story was over and the father shooed all the visitors out. “Now we drink some tea and eat,” he said, and I did my best not to look sick. While the women were putting the food on a canvas table, he drew me aside and said, “You were good to my son, and I give you my thanks.” I tried to tell him that anyone would have tried to help but he shushed me: “It is not only that you saved his life. It is that you made him seem manly to our people. I was his father and I know that he was otherwise. But he is dead now. It is good that people think well of him.” He took my hand and said, “Anything I have is yours.”
It seemed as though that damned Henry was never going to quit making trouble for me!
I nibbled at the food, and the girl brought me tea. She put sugar in it. She asked me if I wanted anything else and I said no, I was fine. Pretty soon I realized that the old man had turned the lamp down and that everyone was going off to a different corner to sleep. I went out to the tunnel and took my slippers off—and there was the girl. She took the slippers and set them down beside my parka. I crawled into the bedroll and she blew the lamp out and crawled in with me.
I said, “Listen—what’s your name?”
“Kitty.”
“Yes. Well, listen, Kitty, don’t you have a bed?”
“Yes, this.”
“You mean you’re going to sleep with me?”
“No, you sleep with me. This is my place.” Suddenly she hiked herself up on one elbow and said, “You not like me? You like one of my sisters?”
“No, no! I like you fine. Only—I already have a wife.”
“She not here. I here.” There was no arguing with that kind of logic. While I was trying to think of something else to say, she put her head back down beside me. I could feel her smiling in the dark. “Now we sleep together. You be mine as long as you stay. No other girl even talk to you.”
I thought that one over for a while. Then I decided that there really wasn’t so much to think about. I was in Eskimo country and I’d just have to, by God, put up with their customs.
She was already up and stirring when I woke in the morning. I stretched. I felt real good. She brought me a washbasin and towel and, when I was all cleaned up, a steaming cup of coffee. Later, I dressed and went down to the bank where the dogs were tied. The rest of my buddies were there, and all I needed was one look at their faces to know that they had decided to go along with the Eskimo customs, too.
“Hey, Jimmy,” one of them yelled, “how’d you sleep?” And they all burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay,” I told them, “you’re very funny. Now let’s take those furs up to the store and get what we came for and get out of here. Otherwise we’ll all be hauling Eskimo wives home. That’d be something to laugh about, too, wouldn’t it?”
That quieted them down pretty quick. The old man started us up a hard trail to the trading post, and we made it in good time. The trader was a white man married to an Eskimo woman, and he gave us a fair price for our skins. He had milk and just about everything else we needed. I bought a fancy bandanna for Cecelia, but after we had the sleds loaded, I got to thinking and I went back and bought a second bandanna. Then we started back.
We had meant to stop in Kobuk only long enough to say good-bye to our new friends. But before we even got to the town, a group of them came mushing up the trail to meet us, Henry’s father in the lead. “You no leave today,” he said. “Big storm coming from south.”
I looked out over that empty land and, sure enough, rolling up on the horizon was a line of dark gray clouds. You could see that they were loaded with snow.
“By morning nothing move here,” he said. “You better stay until storm past. Now we go tie dogs down good.”
Well, there wasn’t a thing I could do about that. We saw to the dogs, then let some boys talk us into playing in a kind of wild football game. There must have been a hundred people in it—boys and girls, men and women, all fighting for one beat-up caribou-hide ball. In the excitement, I noticed Kitty running along beside me. She said, “Too bad storm make you stay here.” She was laughing.
When I quit the game she did, too, and we walked back to the igloo together. I could see that she didn’t mean to let me get too far away. Inside, she brushed my mukluks and hung my parka. Then she made me a fine rabbit soup. A man could sure get used to that kind of thing.
“I brought a present for you,” I told her. “It’s in my parka.”
Her eyes went all wide and her face lit up like five candles. She ran to the parka and came back admiring the bandanna, trying it on this way and that way.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “Gee, that’s good you like me.”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do so I crawled back in the bedroll and went to sleep. When I woke up, the girl was sleeping alongside me, as though we’d been married for years and years.
The storm hit during the night, and by morning there was nearly six feet of fresh snow on the ground, and it was still coming down. The old man rigged a line to the igloo, and we managed to get out one last time to make sure the dogs were tied loosely enough so the snow couldn’t drift up and smother them. You couldn’t see two yards ahead. Without the line, I’d have wandered around all day trying to find my way back. Struggling toward the igloo, I wondered how long we cheechakos from the Indian country would have lasted in this blizzard out on the open tundra.
For five days the wind blew a gale and the snow piled up twice as high as a man’s head and, where it drifted, to the size of a mountain. I had never seen anything like that storm, although I guess the Eskimos saw it all the time.
There was nothing to do but stay in the igloo and eat and sleep and tell stories. I told of my mother’s long trip through the Eskimo country, and some of them said they remembered hearing about that. I told stories about my hunting trips and about the Yukon River country, and the old man said it was good for the young ones to hear about the Indian’s life. He told about how his people lived long ago, and it wasn’t very different from the old Indian stories.
Whenever I wanted something—sometimes even before I knew I wanted it—Kitty had it for me. I got to like her real well so it wasn’t a bad time. I sure didn’t want for anything. If it weren't for worrying about Cecelia and Christine and the people in Cutoff I wouldn’t have been in any hurry to get back.
On the sixth day the storm blew itself out. That night I went around and told the other men that we were pulling out first thing in the morning. Some of them weren’t any too anxious, but I said that if we stayed any longer we’d all have to go to Fairbanks and get divorces. I said good-bye to the family the night before, but Kitty walked out to the team with me in the pitch-dark dawn.
“I won’t forget about you,” she said. “If you come back, I be your woman again.”
I said I wouldn’t forget about her either, and I meant it. The sled moved off and I
kept looking back, waving to her. I saw her wave, too. Then she was lost in the darkness.
We really made tracks on the way home. We had been gone two weeks on a trip that should have taken six days, and there is nothing like a guilty conscience to make a man take it out on his dogs. We came mushing into Cutoff the next night. The people were sure glad to see us. We passed out the food and things even before we said hello to our families, so it was real late by the time Cecelia and I had a chance to be alone. Then I gave her the bandanna and she thought that that was just the best present.
She was full of questions. “Was it a good trip? Did anything happen?”
“Not much,” I told her, “except for the storm. Hardly anything at all.”
Chapter Five
Dogsled Racing
I KEPT WORKING to build up a stake. Some years I cleared a few dollars trapping; other years I could barely pay for my outfit. One summer I bought an old scow and an older kicker and went freighting along the Koyukuk for a couple of trading posts. But the best I could do going upriver was maybe four miles an hour, and nobody gets rich at that speed. I paid for my gas. That was about it.
Around this time, 1938 and 1939, the people got all interested in dogsled racing again. It had been a big thing around Nome during gold rush days—25,000 people locked into a tarpaper town from October to the June breakup with nothing much else to do for a pastime—but when the gold played out, so did the dog derbies. Now, though, the Natives began taking it up: everybody had dogs, and most of us bragged about them, and pretty soon there was more gambling on the races than there was at poker.
It was no sport for weaklings. Endurance was more important than speed. The trails were a hundred miles and more long and laid out across the toughest terrain we could find to test a team’s staying power. You didn’t get into the sled unless you were near dead. You ran alongside it the whole way, sometimes sneaking a downhill ride on the runners. But then, going uphill, you had to be ready to push. The rules made it tougher yet. If you started out with twelve dogs, you had to come back with twelve, and many a man packed a lame husky home in the sled. Once a driver left the starting line, he was the only man allowed to lay a hand on his team. I’ve seen a musher chased up a tree by bears or moose, his dogs scattered to the four winds, and all he ever got was a wave of the hand as the next team went by.
I did pretty well in the races around home. Soon I was competing against the best teams of the other villages, and the men in Cutoff let me take my pick of their dogs. I even won a few big races. But I never thought any more about it than as a way to have fun and maybe pick up fifteen or twenty dollars betting.
Then, in the autumn of 1939, the last mail boat brought real news to Cutoff: some people were setting up a big dogsled race in Fairbanks for the following March. There was to be more than ten thousand dollars in prizes. I was still thinking about that when they handed me a letter from a gold mining outfit. It said that they were willing to pay a thousand dollars for my claims up at Clear Creek, and could I come to Fairbanks and sign the papers?
Could I? I put those two little nuggets of news together and suddenly they sounded like the answer to all my prayers. If I could add some prize money to my thousand for the claims, I’d have a store ready to open for business in the spring!
I never worked so hard as I did that winter. I borrowed a whole gang of dogs and checked them out and narrowed the bunch down to the best fourteen. Then I got down to some serious training. Day after day I’d hook them to the biggest log I could find and make them pull until their tongues were hanging out. Then it was time to take them out on the flat and build up their speed, and I ran behind that sled until my tongue was hanging out. I shifted the dogs from spot to spot, testing them, getting them used to each other. Back home I pampered them with gruel and milk and the best dried salmon.
All in all, I don’t think I got six weeks of trapping in that year. But when February rolled around I was ready to take off for Fairbanks. Most of the people, including Cecelia, thought I was crazy. None of us had ever been to Fairbanks before. It was six hundred miles away, a long way to drive a dog team, and though there were only three thousand people there then, to us it was the big city. What business did a Koyukuk Native have in the big city? Tell the company to send you the papers, they said.
But my heart was set on that race. I thought I had as good a chance of winning as any musher around, and I set off with high hopes. When I got to Ruby on the Yukon, I made camp for a few days. They had fast training trails around there, and I raced those dogs hour after hour. One morning the mail plane came in on the river, an old gull-wing Stinson, and it set me to thinking. I was still five hundred miles from Fairbanks. If I could fly my dogs the rest of the way, they were bound to get there in better shape than if they had to haul the sled overland that distance. And with all the money I had coming, I could surely spare a couple of hundred dollars for the fare.
I walked over and asked the pilot how much he would charge to haul my team and me into Fairbanks. That took him by surprise. These days they fly dog teams everywhere, but the planes were a lot smaller then and I don’t think any of them had ever carried that much weight before, and certainly not divided among fourteen dogs. Finally, after counting them three times, he said it would cost a hundred and twenty-five dollars—“if we can get off the ground.”
I said if he didn’t mind waiting a day or so for the money, it was a deal, and we started right in loading the dogs. Don’t think that didn’t take a lot of coaxing. They yipped and moaned, and you could just see that old bird settle low on her skis as I chased them aboard, one after another. At the last, we had to take the sled apart to fit it in. Then the pilot cranked her up and we turned out on the ice.
It took a mile before we ever lifted off—and a mile was exactly all the straight Yukon River we had. The trees came rushing up on us and we banked away at the last second. Then we just hung over the ice, with barely enough clearance to follow the bends and turns. We were almost to Kokrines, thirty miles away, before the pilot dared pull back on the stick and lift us up over the trees. And of course once we gained altitude the ride got a little rough and the plane started to bounce and in no time at all we had fourteen dogs being sick along the whole length of the fuselage. The air was so ripe you could have peeled it. The pilot shoved his door open and I did the same, and only that whipping wind in our faces saved the day.
We flew along the river until we were past Tanana, then turned southeast. When we picked up the railroad tracks, just before dark, we followed them right in over a great big ocean of lights. They stretched for miles in every direction, straight strings of them and colored ones, and some that moved along the ground almost as fast as we were moving through the air. This was Fairbanks, and my first look at it left me goggle-eyed. How was a person supposed to find his way in that maze?
We came bumping down to a landing on past the edge of the town. The pilot jumped out even before the propeller stopped turning. He just stood there in the cold dark, breathing deeply. After a while he asked me where I was headed and I said I didn’t know. “Well, get your dogs out of there and I’ll take you into town. And you better be back out here in the morning to help me clean up that airplane!” He sure sounded mad.
I fumbled around in the dark and finally found a fence and tied the dogs down. No one was happier to be back on the ground than they were. Then I got into an automobile with the pilot and he drove on into the town. I did my best to pick out a landmark or two so I’d know how to get back, but every street looked exactly like the last one: full of big buildings and people scurrying around as though this was their last day on earth. Finally we stopped in front of a place with a big lighted sign hanging off the front of it. The lights spelled out HOTEL. Then they went off. Then they went on again. The pilot said they’d fix me up with a place to stay there. Nervous as a cat, I went in and told the old lady behind the counter what I wanted.
She looked me up and down. I guess I was a sight, still
wearing my old bush clothes, and the smell of the dogs all over me. She said, “I don’t allow liquor nor women in the rooms after nine o’clock.
Man, that really embarrassed me. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t either.”
She asked me for ten dollars for the night or thirty dollars for the week—in advance. I poked around in my pants and pulled out my stake. The whole thing came to less than fifty dollars, and the race was still nearly a month off. But what could I do? I handed over the thirty dollars and said a little prayer that those mining people had my thousand dollars ready.
The room had a nice soft bed, and if you climbed some steps there was a shower with warm water. Once I was cleaned up, I went back again and asked the lady where I could get something to eat—I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She said in any cafe, so I started down the street, making sure I didn’t lose sight of that big blinking HOTEL sign. I passed two places that said RESTAURANT and one that said EATS, but I figured I had to find a cafe. Cars went by this way and that way, and I took no chances. Whenever I came to a corner, I would make sure that there wasn’t a car in sight, and I’d run across the street as though something were after me.
Then I came to a store with two naked women in the window. I just looked up and there they were—naked as the day they were born!—and I got so flustered I ran right out among the cars and almost got myself killed. Horns honked and people yelled at me, and I ran all the faster, my head hung in shame and my poor brain twirling from the struggle to figure out what the hell was going on in this town. I even forgot about the blinking HOTEL sign and turned a corner, trying to get as far from those women as I could. When I finally got the nerve to look up again, I was hopelessly lost.
On the Edge of Nowhere Page 11