tails of the drakes were sharply pointed. The black-and-white-splashed bodies dove, making rings on the water that scrambled into each other, and then the surface was lonesome without a ripple. Soon it began to dimple again as heads popped up like frogs. The air resounded with their high-pitched Canada goose calls.
While I sipped coffee during a break, I watched an eagle spread against the sky, rocking on the air with stiffened wings, his primaries separated into great dark fingers. He rose lazily, drifted past a cloud, and I saw his shadow slide over the high slope. I was cruising the sky lane with him.
My eyes followed him until he was a speck above a far peak. What was he seeing that I wasn’t? As I squinted after him, I felt my heart beating against my shirt. No one else seemed to have noticed him at all.
Each morning was a repetition of the last. I rolled tiredly out of the blankets, washed up, and trudged to breakfast. One of the waitresses was a woman who always started the long day off right. She stood to one side of the grill, her arms folded across her big breasts, her round, happy face flushed from the heat, barking our orders to the cook.
“Short stack!”
“Fry two!”
“Two in the water four minutes!”
“Fry four on two!” She always had time in between for her bright-eyed comments: “Cheer up, Sam, the first hundred years are the hardest.” “Come on, Andy, get with it. You look like you’re walking around to save funeral expenses.”
Whenever I could, I sat with “The Historian” in the cafeteria. He always wore a perfectly knotted tie. His clean scalp showed through his white hair, and the expression in his bulging, pale eyes gave him the quiet dignity of a basking turtle. With the air of a schoolmaster, he was always ready to dispense his vast knowledge of Alaska and its history.
“The Katmai eruption was back in 1912,” he said, fingering the folds of flesh beneath his chin. “Katmai is just a hundred miles north of here on the Alaska Peninsula. She literally blew her top. They say the first explosion could be heard all over Alaska. It caused a blackout for more than two days and must have seemed like the end of the world. They say the rain stung like acid. You’ll have to see Katmai National Monument and the Valley of the Ten Thousand Smokes. That peninsula still boils and rumbles. I’ve felt earth tremors here. It’s no secret. This country could go berserk.”
This was country I had to see for myself, not just through the eyes of The Historian.
Over the weeks, I slowly made acquaintances other than on the job. Many of the boys had been to other parts of Alaska and had played roles that fired my imagination, like “Skunk Bear.”
Skunk Bear had trapped along the peninsula and on the mainland. I loved to listen to his tales. He had a reddish beard and dark brows. Even though his face cracked and his body shook when he laughed, his eyes held the glitter of a cornered animal’s. He had a violent temper when drunk, and men gave him lots of room.
“I had me a sixty-mile trapline on the mainland with a cabin or lean-to every ten. I used to bring rice, lots of sugar, and Karo syrup to mix with berries. I could live fine on fish and rice every day,” Skunk Bear said, advancing his hard-earned knowledge of trapping.
“You have to be able to read sign. Two fellers trapped an area one winter and caught one mink. They didn’t know mink travel under the ice in winter. What they thought were mink tracks were really marten tracks. They set in the water and you don’t catch marten in the water. Now, you don’t get many wolverine. They’re travelers. They don’t make their own kills. They have to cover lots of country to make a livin’ off the leavings. His problem’s appetite. That’s more powerful than his brains.” When he had run out of trapping advice, Skunk Bear waxed on about the glories of the Far North.
“I been up and down this lonesome land. Seen sunrises and sunsets most as pretty as four ladies in a hand of draw poker.”
Skunk Bear gave me a big bear tooth. I drilled a hole in it, passed a piece of rawhide through it, and wore it as a watch fob.
My stomach was flat and hard again. My hands were ridged with calluses. My fingers felt thick and strong. I wore my red hat, grayed with dust, and the brim turned up in front.
When I pulled out my bear-tooth watch fob, I felt that if I wasn’t fast becoming an Alaskan, I was at least playing the part of one.
September 7, 1952
Dear Dad, Molly, & Mrs. Millet:
I’m anxious to weigh myself to see if I’ve lost any weight. I’m afraid I haven’t. At least what I carry now is solid. My arms are rock hard from the heavy work I’ve been doing and my stomach feels as though it is reinforced by something other than a belt. I eat like a horse. Now that we have a new cook, I’ll probably eat even more. The grub was pretty poor for a while, but this new fellow seems to have awakened quite a few dormant appetites.
So long, love to all,
Sam
CHAPTER 6
Winter Smorgasbord
The paving went on so long that autumn escaped me. I had missed out on the coho run and had to be content with the tales I heard of those leaping silver fish. I began to wonder whether or not I had my priorities properly established. My bank account was growing. Was that why I was really here?
The morning came when Barometer wore a gleaming white crown. I watched the rich blue behind it change to a rosy glow as the sun came up.
The snowline dropped relentlessly down the slopes until the mountains were wrapped in their robes of winter. There was a sharp, refreshing bite to the air as darkness came on earlier.
“Long Gone” was one of the men who was ready to move on with the coming of winter. A chilly-eye cynic, he was tall and blade thin. His face tapered like a wedge. He often misquoted lines from the classics, and he smoked cigarettes out of a silver and ivory holder. He’d been all over Alaska but never in one place for very long. I came upon him folding a canvas tarp in the toolshed.
“Thinking about camping out?” I grinned.
“I’m making a sailboat,” he snapped, “so’s I can sail out of this hole. It’s Southeastern for me. I fell down so hard on the ice yesterday, I didn’t give a damn whether I got up again.”
He was fun to work with and made the hours fly.
When we pulled into the dump with the garbage truck, the gulls were waiting in gray and white ranks. They were much larger than the gulls back home. We had just finished a long garbage run, and the gulls sensed we carried a choice cargo. They wheeled in a cloud around us as the bed of the truck lifted and disgorged its slop.
Long Gone picked up what was left of a slice of prime rib. The bone was easily eight inches long and an inch and a half wide.
“Watch this,” he said, tossing it toward a gull that lurched forward with its bill open. It snatched up the bone, gulped like a sword swallower, and amazingly the whole thing slid out of sight.
Long Gone shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered. “Look at ’em. Look at ’em go at it. See that wide-open beak? That’s the same as a closed fist being shook. There’s the fat cats getting all the gravy. Look at them others just standing around waiting for what’s left. Looks familiar, don’t it? There’s the whole story laid out right there. Greed … stealing from each other … stepping all over each other … the poor devils that get left out. Hell, man, that’s the Outside you’re looking at. See that sorry-looking son of a bitch over there? That’s me.”
I saw something else. As I listened to the whacking of their bills and their shrilling cries, I was taken by the deterioration of a species. They were adjusting to handouts. They didn’t have to get out and scratch anymore. All they had to do is wait. Long Gone saw society in general; I saw an aspect of it in particular.
“You