On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  I kept going. But now no matter which way I turned, nothing looked familiar. I began to worry about the dogs.

  What would happen to them if I couldn’t find my way back? I also began to get dizzy with hunger—it was past ten o’clock now—and when I came to a place where I could look through the window and see some people sitting at a counter and eating, I stopped. I was just standing there staring in when a man came out and looked me over. “Hungry, pal?” he asked.

  I said I hadn’t eaten since the morning, and he tried to give me some money. I told him I had money. I just didn’t know what to do in a place like that.

  He almost fell down laughing and I had my fist all clenched to lay him out on the sidewalk when he caught hold of himself and said, “First time in from the bush, huh? Well, just go right in there and tell the waitress what you want—steak or ham and eggs or anything—and they’ll cook it up for you.”

  I told him thanks and went in and sat up to the counter. I felt like all knees and elbows. The waitress put a glass of water in front of me, so I drank it. Then she gave me a two page book but I couldn’t make much sense out of it, so when she came back and asked me what I wanted I said steak.

  “What kind?” she said.

  “Any kind.”

  She sure gave me a dirty look. She was a real pretty girl, all dressed in white, and I hated to have her mad at me.

  “What do you mean, ‘Any kind’?” she said. “We have rib steak, sirloin. . .”

  “Yeah, that kind—rib steak.”

  “Rare, medium, or well-done?”

  “Medium.” I was sure glad I got that right, whatever it meant.

  Pretty soon she came back with a plateful of potatoes and vegetables and a little piece of meat. Not only was it little, but it didn’t seem hardly dead, there was that much blood running off it. She must have thought I wanted it raw. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I ate it. Actually, once I got the hang of eating without looking at my plate, it wasn’t half bad. She asked if I wanted some pie and I said okay. Then I put a five-dollar bill down and she took it away and brought me change, ten cents. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—I could have lived off the store shelf in Cutoff for a week on what I’d just spent!

  I went out and tried to figure out a way to find the hotel. Finally I decided to do the same thing a man does in the bush when he’s lost: walk in a widening circle until he sees something familiar. I went all the way around one block, then another and another. After a while I came to the main street and there, way down, was the HOTEL sign. I was sure relieved to see it. Then I came to that store with the naked women in it. I was still too bashful to walk past them, so I had to go back to the corner and cross over. I couldn’t figure out what in the world those women were doing there. I’d heard there were places like that in Fairbanks, but you wouldn’t think they’d let them stand right in front of a big lighted window.

  It was mighty lonesome going up to that room alone. I fiddled around for a while, then decided I’d walk out and see my dogs. I went down and asked the old lady how to get out to the airport. She said it was five miles but I didn’t care. I started out and found it without too much trouble. The dogs were sure glad to see me. I guess they felt as strange in that place as I did. I wished I had some feed for them, but I hadn’t brought any and there was no place to buy it at that hour of the night. Anyhow, they were all right, so I fooled with them for a while, then went back and went to bed. I’d sure learned a lot that first day. I remember thinking: well, I’ve paid for my first meal and my first bed and one thing was for sure—I wasn’t going to eat steak very darned often.

  Next morning, I moved the dogs down by some willows along the Chena River. That was a lot closer to town and I could run them on the ice. Then I went back out to the airport and helped the pilot clean the plane. I showed him the letter from the mining company and he said he would drive me there in his automobile. On the way into town I asked him if he knew what those women were doing in that store window on the main street.

  “What women?” he said.

  “Well, they just stand there in that window and they — oh, never mind.”

  The mining outfit was in another one of those big buildings but the people seemed glad to see me. They brought out a whole bundle of papers for me to sign, and I made believe I was reading them but the truth is I couldn’t make head or tail out of what they were supposed to say. I just asked if I got the thousand dollars when I signed and they said yes, so I signed.

  They counted out the bills—man, they felt good piling up in my palm—and then one of them asked if I was reporting to the Internal Revenue department. I said I didn’t know what that was, so they told me it was the outfit that collects taxes for the government, and that I had to go right over there. “Lucky for you their office is right in this building,” they said.

  Very lucky. At this Internal Revenue place they asked me a swarm of questions about how much money I had and how much I’d made on my freighting operation. They had me sign another batch of papers and then it was their turn to hold out a palm. I said how come, and they told me that Uncle Sam took part of the money that everybody made. That was taxes. I said that Uncle Sam had a pretty good deal there and I wished I’d thought of it first. When I left, there was a serious dent in my thousand dollars.

  Outside, the pilot was waiting for his hundred and a quarter. By the time I got back to my room and counted what I had left, I figured I might be eating dried fish and sleeping with the dogs before I got out of Fairbanks. There was only one good thing. On the way back I’d sneaked a look across the street at those women. They were still there but at least now they had some clothes on.

  In the next few days some of the other mushers came in from the bush so I had somebody to talk to besides the dogs. I didn’t spend too much time with the mushers because they liked to go out drinking and looking for women, and I figured I’d already wasted enough money. By day I was out on the river ice—running my dogs, and by night I was getting my thirty-dollars-a-week’s worth at that hotel. I was usually asleep by eight-thirty. In between, I ate hotcakes and hash, and watched my pile of dollars get smaller and smaller.

  One afternoon, though, when we’d all been out on the trail and were sitting around on the bank of the Chena and they were talking about their favorite subject—women —I said that I knew where there were some women who were available. The way they looked at me reminded me of the time I’d brought the white mule to Cutoff. Then they all jumped up and said, “Let’s go!” So I tied up my dogs and led them back to town. “They’re right up in the middle of this street,” I said when we got to the corner.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Not me.”

  I watched them trying to keep from running. I saw them look where I’d told them, then at each other, then back at me. Then they started walking toward the corner again. They sure looked disgusted. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they let you in?”

  One of them said, “What are you—funny or crazy?”

  Another one spoke up: “I say crazy.” And they all walked off.

  I stood there for a minute, as mixed up as I’ve ever been. People kept walking by all the time, and it didn’t seem to bother them any. Finally I got up my nerve and went right up there without stopping. The women were there, all right; in the window. At first I thought that they were dead and just propped up there. Then I looked closer and saw that they were just dummies, wooden models, long skinny things with paint on their faces and fake hair. Don’t think I didn’t feel a real long way from my little cabin on the Hogatza at that minute. Crazy was right.

  By the time the day of the race rolled around, I was sure ready to go home. All I wanted was to take a piece of that prize money and get back on the trail. I still felt confident. Some of the boys from the Yukon villages were pretty good mushers but there was prize money for the first five places and only fifteen teams entered. Even if I finished fifth I’d collect two hundred and fi
fty dollars.

  I knew it was a rough course before I started—nearly ninety miles north over an unbroken trail to the mining camp at Livengood, an overnight layover, then back— but not until I was actually out on the trail did I realize what I was in for. We went down into ravines and up out again, over mountains and through brush that tried to snag you on every turn and often did. It was the toughest race I’ve ever been in, before or since, and by the time I was ten miles out I figured I’d be lucky to get my team back to Fairbanks, let alone win anything. Four of my dogs had gone lame on me during training so I only had ten pulling. It wasn’t near enough for that country.

  But I wasn’t about to quit. I’d come too far and spent too much to give up without an honest try. I pushed those dogs for all they were worth and I hardly ever set foot on the runners. Then, practically into Livengood, we came down a slope so steep that the brakes wouldn’t hold and the sled went smashing into the two dogs on the end of the team. Their hind paws were so banged up that they could hardly walk. They surely wouldn’t be pulling for a while, so I undid the harness and packed them into the sled. Before I could get going again, another team passed me.

  Still, when we got to the roadhouse in Livengood, I found out I was in fifth place. That perked me up: maybe by morning the tail-enders would be able to run again. I saw to the dogs, then went over to have something to eat. There hadn’t been so much excitement around Livengood since they found the gold. Three times the town’s normal population of one hundred was squirming around to find breathing room in that roadhouse, a radio announcer was telling all about the race—that was the first time that a dogsled race was ever broadcast on the radio, so you can see what a big deal it was—and everybody was trying to buy the mushers a drink. The only thing I had to say to them was, “No, thanks.” I finally managed to get a hamburger and some tea, but I had to fight my way outside to eat it. I checked the dogs one more time, then went up to a big barn of a room above the roadhouse where the mushers were supposed to sleep. I should have stayed with the dogs. The drunks made such a racket downstairs that even when I dozed off it seemed as though the carrying-on was happening inside my head.

  Then it was two a.m. and time to get up for the run back. I didn’t want to go back down to that drunken jamboree so I went right out to the dogs without breakfast or coffee or anything. I didn’t have too much time: we were to leave at two-minute intervals and my team would be fifth out of the starting chute. The hurt dogs were still limping badly so I packed them in the sled and we rode out into the cold pitch-dark, the dogs following the trail and running hard.

  By the time the sky began to lighten off to the left, I was beginning to think that maybe I had that fifth-place finish clinched. There was no sign of anybody behind me and even with the extra load in the sled the team was still strong and eager. And once, from the top of a long hill, I saw the musher up ahead. He was only a mile or so away.

  But we ran into trouble. We were better than halfway home now and the strain was beginning to tell. The dogs stumbled and every time I stopped yelling at them they looked back to see if it was time to stop. Then we came to a steep killer of a hill, and hard as I pushed on the sled they just couldn’t make it up. Their paws skittered out from under them and they yipped and pulled but just weren’t getting anywhere. That’s when I made my big decision: I chased the two lame dogs out of the sled and made them walk up the hill. If they took off somewhere I’d be disqualified. But if they stuck with us, we were okay, for without that extra 180 pounds of weight, the team could get the sled up. At the top of the hill I held my breath and looked back. And there came the cripples, limping along after us as hard as they could. I gave them each a big squeeze and put them back in the sled, and away we went downhill. And that’s how we managed to get back to Fairbanks.

  Coming down into the flats, not five miles from the finish line, I realized that we were closing in on the team ahead. I pushed those dogs for all I was worth, coaxing and hollering: there was a five-hundred-dollar prize for the fourth-place team, and suddenly five hundred dollars seemed like all the money in the world to me. “Come on! Come on! Run!” I called. And they ran. Little by little we crawled up on them. We came as close as a hundred yards—but that was it. The musher up there had ten healthy dogs pulling and I could hear him giving them what-for as we ran into the edge of the town. Now we were on the main street, not ten blocks from the finish line and I figured, well, that was a nice dream, but I’d just have to be satisfied with two hundred and fifty. It would pay for an airplane to take us home and leave me a little something for all the weeks of work.

  Then a funny thing happened. We went by a gasoline station, and the dogs up ahead took a sudden shine to a bright red pump. With the poor driver cursing and threatening them every inch of the way, they galloped right up to the gas station, circled the pump once, twice, three times, and were still hopelessly tangled as I ran by with the fourth place sewed up.

  Everybody made a big fuss over the winners. They wanted to buy us drinks and dinner, and a radio announcer kept calling us over to his microphone. All I wanted was to take a shower and go to bed. I eased myself out of the crowd, tied the dogs and fed them, and went back to the hotel. I didn’t wake up until eleven the following morning. When I went to the Chena to see my dogs I found out that half the teams weren’t in yet.

  I didn’t plan to stay in Fairbanks an hour more than I had to. I went right over to the manager’s tent and told him I’d come for my prize money. You never saw a sadder-looking creep. “Jimmy,” he said, “there is no money.”

  I figured I hadn’t heard him right. I said, “I won fourth place. I got five hundred dollars coming. . .”

  “There was barely enough to pay off the first three teams. The rest of the money never came in. We’re broke.”

  “But you let all of us run. We ran all that way. . .”

  All of a sudden I felt more played out than when I’d finished the race. The thousand for my gold claims was almost all gone and that five hundred dollars meant everything to me. Maybe I could still start the store with that much, or save it until I could lay my hands on some more. And now . . .

  “We thought the sponsors would come through,” he was saying. “We thought with the race on and all the excitement, they’d put up the rest of the money they’d promised and we could pay everybody off.” He shook his head from side to side. “But they didn’t.”

  For a white-hot minute I figured I had to take it out of his hide. A man ought to have some way to unload the raging disappointment I felt. But I guess there isn’t enough white man in me. The Indian, you see, only knows how to suffer in silence. So I turned around and walked out of there. The dogs were waiting, all harnessed and ready to go. We had a long, hard six hundred miles ahead of us. I wondered if it was long enough for me to get the stink of Fairbanks out of my system.

  There was a lot of excitement in Cutoff on December 7, 1941. Somebody had one of those battery radios, and it kept telling how the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Everyone said they’d be heading for Alaska next, right up the Aleutian chain. Some of the younger fellows even went out on the bank and stood there looking west into the sky.

  I didn’t pay much attention. My wife was sick, very sick, and there just didn’t seem to be room in my head to worry about anything else. The Jap navy could have come sailing up the Koyukuk River and, the way I felt that afternoon, if they didn’t bother Cecelia I wouldn’t have bothered them.

  She had got sick after freeze-up and a doctor came and said she had TB. There was nothing much to do, he said, just hope. Well, hoping didn’t help either. She got worse and worse, and that night—December 7, 1941—she died. I sat with her for a long time. My Uncle Johnny had the baby, and I’d shooed everyone else out. So I just sat there, trying to figure out what I was going to do now and wondering if Cecelia was watching me from somewhere, happier maybe.

  As soon as she was buried, I took off for the winter cabin at Hogatza. Uncle Johnny and
his wife were looking after Christine so there was nothing to keep me, and all at once I felt a deep-down urge to be a long way from people. I worked very hard. Every day that a creature could move I was out on the trap line or hunting bear for Cecelia’s potlatch. But it was all different now. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be lonely.

  It seemed to be better when I came in from the bush in the spring. I spent a lot of time with Christine, and there was plenty to keep me busy—getting ready for the potlatch, whipsawing lumber to fix up Cecilia’s grave. But when all that was done the same loneliness took hold of me, and a kind of restlessness that pushed me from place to place and made me dissatisfied with everyplace. Then I heard that the Army was looking for men to raft gasoline from the railhead at Nenana down the Tanana and Yukon to a new air base at Galena. I got my scow in shape and signed up, and all that summer and every summer until the war was over I hauled gasoline to Galena. One more time I started to build up a stake. One more time I took to daydreaming about running my own trading post.

  In the autumn of 1943, 1 began going with a girl named Dorothy Frank. Quite a few of the girls in Cutoff had been making up to me and it wasn’t because I was rich or handsome. My attraction was being single and not spoken for. But Dorothy seemed different. She always made a big fuss over Christine, and said right out that a little girl like that should have a mother. Still, I wasn’t about to rush out and buy the cow when milk was so cheap, so when the time came I said I’d see her in the spring and went off to trap.

  Well, there’s nothing like being alone in the bush for six months to start a man thinking. I came to believe that it wasn’t fair to leave Christine with friends or relatives every winter. She did need a mother. And maybe I needed a woman to settle me down again. And there wasn’t anything wrong with Dorothy Frank. So when spring came we were married and lived together for twelve years and had seven children. She was a good wife all that time, and a good mother—to Christine, too, who was part of our family—and to this day I can’t find it in my heart to say anything bad about her. Why did she walk out on us? I wish I really knew. But anyway, that’s getting ahead of the story.