have a bounty on your tail,” I mused. I released him and grinned at my reflection. “Really something … letting a fish go because he’s too big for the pan.”
I tied on a small, orange wet fly. This proved to be more selective, and I began taking trout in the nine- and ten-inch class. I could have filled a bushel basket. I kept three, dressed them out, and wiped them clean and dry with moss.
A pond-like offshoot of the stream glimmered an invitation to camp. There were trails mashed through the grass and slides down the banking and heaps of dung that gleamed with fish scales. Otter sign reminded me of my trapping days in the marshes back home, but I had never seen such a profusion of it. I startled a sheldrake family. A brood of ten surfboarded wildly in the hen’s wake. Aspen limbs gnawed clean of bark betrayed the shadowed tunnel of a bank beaver just beneath the surface.
A made-to-order spring issued a frosty trickle out of some stones. Here I half-filled my tea pail. Then I snapped some dead limbs from the spruce that grew out of the fireweed and lupines, and soon I had a fire crackling. The mosquitoes gathered and whined, so I slopped more repellent on my face, neck, and hands, and dribbled some of it all over my red felt timber cruiser’s hat. I cut a green stick for a crane, jabbed one end of it into the banking, and propped it with stones.
I hung my tea pail over the flames from the notch on its other end. When the water boiled, I swung the pail away from the fire, dropped in several pinches of tea, and let it steep. Next I cut my bacon piece into slices that soon made music in the pan set on the coals. In my plastic bag of flour and cornmeal mix, I shook the trout until they were coated. Then I laid the bacon slices on a shelf of moss to drain and crisp.
The trout dropped with sizzling sounds into the fat. When they were browned, I transferred them to the tin plate, draped the bacon over them, and fried up two slices of bread. I sat by my fire, cross-legged, munching pink-meated trout, bacon, and fried bread, sipping tea, and waving at mosquitoes.
I watched crowds of fingerlings pouncing on larvae that wriggled on the surface film. They moved in close, like curious children, peering up at me with big eyes. I broke up my extra bread slice and tossed in some pieces. The minnows scattered in panic, then regrouped to tear at the bits, punching them about until they disappeared. Salmon cruised in, some of them wagging into the beaver’s entrance and drifting out again. I watched an eagle perched on a cottonwood snag working on his feathers.
“Boy!” I muttered through a mouthful. “Perfect … just perfect.”
I wiped at some mosquitoes around my neck. “Almost, anyway.”
I cut a few green alder branches and tossed them on the coals to make a smudge. The acrid smoke smarted my eyes and drifted wherever I sat.
I scoured my gear in the black sand and rinsed it. As I doused my fire, a wind came up, blowing cool from the mountains, and did a better job on the mosquitoes than the repellent or the smoke.
I wandered upstream to where salmon were dead and dying. Gulls and ravens picked at the carcasses. I saw one eyeless salmon, his hump rotting away, still moving upstream. It must be true that gulls straddled them and picked out their eyes….
I felt I had walked through a generation. I had seen surging youth, savage courtship, the splashing, darting abandon of getting the job done, and finally death. It sobered me. Salmon returned to fresh water to die, but there was a purpose in their pilgrimage. They left precious seeds in their passing. There had to be a purpose in everything. What was mine?
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN I arrived back at the barracks.
“Where’s the fish?” greeted an old man sitting on the outside stairs and squinting at me.
“Still in the creek,” I grinned.
He wrung his hands slowly, looking down at them. There was a trembling about his chin. Strangely, he made me think of the eyeless salmon. “Wish I liked to fish and could get around more,” he said. “Then I could enjoy this country. It’s the spare time that kills me. Them damn days off. Wish I worked every day.”
Days off, I thought. I wish I had more of them. Where did the roads lead from the naval base? What was behind the wall of mountains? I wasn’t going to just sit and look at the scenery. I wasn’t going to see it from the roads either. The smell of the wood smoke in my canvas coat hinted of things to come. Kodiak was spread before me like a great banquet table.
Author’s journal, July 30, 1952
Guys who don’t like the outdoors have no business up in this country. To them, there is nothing to do. To me there is more to do than I seem to have time for.
CHAPTER 5
Local Color
Curiosity rather than need prompted me to take the base bus into town. At the main gate, I casually appraised the marine sentry. He looked lean and unwrinkled in his cut-down shirt, and he had the haughty bearing of one impressed with his role. A braided cord looped from his shoulder and ended in the butt of his sidearm.
He still feels it, I mused. It didn’t last too long for me. I lost it somewhere when I began to feel too owned.
The bus droned along the road, swirling up a thin dust that dissipated into the spruce boughs heavy with cones. In red letters a sign blared SLIDE AREA. Soon we swept along a shelf in the side of a mountain, and the tires spun stones over the guardrail. I looked up. I could imagine boulders toppling from the outcroppings, growing larger until the slope was in motion like a wave. I looked almost straight down at the sea. It flurried white against the brown cliffs. Gulls milled above the kelp patches.
We descended into the clutter and sprawl of buildings that was Kodiak. What caught my eye was the church with its bulbous towers, like spikes growing out of bright onions. The Russians had left their mark. Every other establishment on either side of the muddy main street seemed to be a barroom or a liquor store. Twenty-five cents for a bottle of Coke. Three-fifty for a haircut and shave. That was double the price of back home. There was the smell of fish and salt air, the crying of seabirds, and at the far end I could see the masts of the fishing boats spearing from the harbor.
I wandered out on a pier, stopping now and then to look down at the pilings, at the large sea anemones sprouting big-stalked out of their sides like mushrooms on trees, at mustard-colored growths on a bottom speckled white with shells. Here a starfish … a moonfish; there a flashing of minnows as they chased the teeming organisms I couldn’t see. My eyes swept over the boats, big and small. Where had they been? Had it been a good season? What about commercial fishing next summer? I had a long time to think about it.
I strolled along, peering into shop windows, going inside to browse. One of the heavy woolen shirts in Donnelly and Acheson’s would be something Dad would appreciate. In Kraft’s, I priced a pair of ornate mukluks. Much more than I intended to pay, but I ordered them anyway to be picked up later on. Deena would be in her glory wearing those to school. I saw other things that would complete my Christmas package.
An Alaska Native man rocked unsteadily before me as if trying to decide on the most comfortable place to fall. His black hair stood up like the bristles on a paintbrush. I tried to imagine him in a skin boat, whirling his two-bladed paddle, his eyes glittering in the glare of the sea, but when I saw him suddenly pitch into a sodden heap, my picture vanished.
I felt ashamed of what my race had introduced. He had been better off in his cleaner world. I didn’t linger long in the atmosphere of commercialism.
THE FIRST HOT ROLL IN KODIAK got underway, and I was part of the paving crew. We worked seventy- and eighty-hour weeks to beat the frost. The paychecks were fat, but the days off were lean. I had to content myself with what I heard and saw on the job.
Wrapped in the stink of hot asphalt and the vapor from