Alaska (112 page)

Now the girl's face grew as stern as those of her ancestors who had fought the Russians: 'Throw your damned fish in the river.'

'Nancy!'

'Do you think my father, who owns this river, would allow fish like those in our house? Under such conditions?' When Tom remained at the door with the two salmon in his hands, she reached out, grabbed his package, and smelled it disdainfully.

'You must know that these fish are old, spoiled, caught days ago and now thrown to the Tlingits who watched over them while they were alive in our river.'

When Tom tried to protest, she said bitterly: 'No Bigears would feed those fish to his dogs,' and she ran down to the riverbank, drew back her right arm, and pitched the rancid fish into the stream.

When she returned to the house she washed her hands and offered Tom a cloth to wash his, and then she invited him to sit with her: 'What's going to happen, Tom? Each year your cannery will grow bigger. You'll catch more of our salmon. And pretty soon you'll be placing one of those new traps right across our river. And do you know what'll happen then? There won't be any more salmon, and you will have to burn your handsome cannery.'

Tom rose and moved uneasily about the room: 'What a horrible thing to say! You talk as if we were monsters.'

'You are,' she said, but then she added quickly: 'You're not 681

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to blame, I know that. Let's go up to the waterfall and watch the salmon leaping.'

'I have to get back. Mr. Ross is handing out final orders before he sails for Seattle.'

Then, for some reason he could not explain, he said: 'He's invited me to spend my vacation there, after the season ends up here.'

'And you would be afraid to say no, wouldn't you?' There was such iciness in her voice that Tom said: 'I can do as I please,' and he took her by the hand, led her from the house, and started up the river to the waterfall where the brown bear had chased them and where the last salmon returning to spawn leaped like ballet dancers up the foaming waters, pirouetting on their tails as they gathered strength for the next leap.

'You see them jump,' Tom said. 'You can almost touch them. But you can't believe it,' and in that moment of confession that Alaska contained mysteries he could not fathom, he became precious to Nancy Bigears, who, in these days of confusion, was meeting only those white men who remained blatantly ignorant of her homeland and all it represented. Tom Venn was the kind of white man who could save Alaska, who could pick a sensible path through the tangle that threatened the land, but whenever he uttered the word

Seattle, he did so in a way that revealed his longing for that more exciting world.

'If you go to Seattle with Mr. Ross,' she predicted, 'you'll not come back. I know that.'

Tom did not .protest with specious assurances: 'Maybe it's men like Mr. Ross in Seattle who make the right decisions about Alaska. Look at the miracle he created here. In February he cried ”Let there be a cannery on Taku Inlet,” and in May he had it operating.'

'In all the wrong ways,' she said with such finality that Tom became irritated. 'For a thousand years,' he said, 'the salmon have been swimming up and down this river, doing no one any good. I guess they had baby salmon and then they died, and next year their babies died, and no one on this earth profited. Well, do you know where the salmon we packed last week are going? Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington.

Salmon that used to swim past your front door are heading for all those places to feed people. This year they're not heading up the Pleiades just to d
ie.
'

She had nothing to say to this; if he refused to understand the great swing of nature, in which the going and coming of the salmon was as important as the rising and setting of the moon, she could not instruct him. But she understood, and from the destruction she had watched at the mouth of her 683

river the salmon caught but never canned, the thousands of fish allowed to rot because the gutting shed was swamped she knew instinctively that conditions could only worsen, and it saddened her that men like Ross and the foremen, and yes, even Tom Venn, refused to see the drift of the future.

'We'd better go back,' she said, adding a barb: 'Mr. Ross will be wondering what you've been doing with his two salmon.'

'You're in an ugly mood, Nancy. Maybe we should go back,' but as they started, a pair of sockeye coming home after long travels reached the low waterfall, and with a persistence that had few parallels in nature, they tore into the difficult ascent and almost gleefully leaped and twisted and gained precarious resting places, finally reaching the higher level.

I'm like those salmon, Tom thought. I aspire to higher levels. But it never occurred to him that he could attain those levels in Juneau, or even here along the banks of Taku Inlet.

As they reached the spot where Nancy had spoken to the charging bear, bringing the animal to a halt, they recalled that scene, and both of them began to laugh, and Tom saw her once more as that dauntless fourteen-year-old child who had lectured the bear and perhaps saved both their lives; but now she seemed so much more grown-up and golden and happy in her freedom that he took her in his arms and kissed her.

Now there was no laughter, for she had known that this would happen, and that it was proper for it to happen, but also that it would come to nothing, for they were on different rivers heading in different directions. For a brief spell during the potlatch of the totem raising he had been a Tlingit, appreciative of her people's values, and in the cave at Mendenhall Glacier he had accepted her as a white girl attuned to some new Alaska, but neither moment solidified, and these kisses, which could have been so meaningful, were not a beginning, but a parting.

In near-silence they walked back, feeling none of the elation which should have followed a first kiss, and when they reached the house Nancy called to her father, who had returned with a friend: 'Pop! Mr. Ross said we would be allowed to have a salmon now and then. The first two he sent us were rotten, so I threw them in the river.'

Sam, ignoring the bitter comment, asked Tom: 'Was the season as good as you hoped?'

and Tom said: 'Better.' They left the matter there, but when the two young people walked down to Tom's dory, Nancy said: 'I'm sorry.'

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'I don't know,' and she kissed him farewell.

THE KISS WAS VIEWED BY MR. Ross, WHO HAD Borrowed a pair of binoculars to see why his manager was so long delayed in delivering two fish across the cove, and when Tom anchored his boat and climbed back to the cannery, he was told that Mr. Ross wanted to see him. The Seattle merchant, disturbed by what he had seen, felt that here was a situation that had to be handled immediately.

'Tom, you have a bright future, a very bright future. But young men like you with everything before you, you sometimes stumble and lose it all.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

Mr. Ross hated dissembling and was always willing to speak bluntly when affairs of moment were involved: 'I mean girls. Indian girls. I borrowed these glasses to see what was keeping you, and I suppose you know what I saw.'

'No, I don't.'

'I saw you kissing that Bigears girl. I saw . . .'

Tom heard no more of the charge, for he was thinking: I did not kiss her. She kissed me. And what business is it of his, anyway? And then Mr. Ross explained in forceful terms just why a vagrant kiss was his business: 'Do you think I could let you keep running the Juneau store if you were married to an Indian girl? Do you think Ross & Raglan would ever bring you to headquarters in Seattle if you had an Indian wife?

How could you and your wife meet with the other company officials? Socially, I mean.”On and on he went, repeating stories he had heard of the disastrous consequences which followed such marriages: 'And in our own experience, Tom, in our various stores, that is, we've seen only tragedy when we hired squaw men. It never works, because you can't mix oil and water.'

Tom bristled, and spoke with the same hard sense of integrity that had motivated his employer: 'In Dawson and Nome, I saw quite a few squaw men who led better lives than most of us. In fact, the whole Klondike field was discovered by a squaw man.'

'On a gold frontier there may be a place for such men, Tom, but we're talking about real society, which is what towns like Juneau will soon have. In real society, squaw men are at a terrible disadvantage.' He shook his head in sad recollection, then spoke with extra force: 'And another thing to think about, young man, their half-breed children are doomed from the start.'

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'I think that settlements like Nome and Juneau will soon be filled with half-breed children,' Torn countered. 'They'll run those towns.'

'Don't you believe it.' And Ross was about to cite telling evidence about the total ineptitude of half-breeds he had known in the Northwest when loud shouting was heard from the main shed, and the white foreman bellowed: 'Help! The Chinks are running wild.'

Tom, who had for some time anticipated such an outbreak, leaped for the wooden causeway leading to the main shed, but Mr. Ross had reacted even more quickly, and as Tom ran toward the sound of rioting, he could see his boss plowing ahead like an enraged bear to join in the fray. As the two white men burst into the brawl, Tom thought: God help the Chinks if Mr. Ross gets really mad.

Inside the cavernous building they met total chaos, with scores of Chinese roaring among the tables where that day's catch of salmon was being gutted, and although at first Tom thought that this was merely one more brawl in which two workmen had fallen into a fist fight over jealously guarded positions at the worktable, when he ran toward the center of the fighting he saw to his horror that the Chinese were attacking one another with their sharp gutting knives.

'Stop!' he bellowed, but his order had no effect. Mr. Ross, having been involved in riots before, waded into the midst of the fighting, laying about him vigorously and crying: 'Get back! Get back!' a command which had no more effect than Tom's.

'Ah Ting!' Tom called, hoping to locate the leader of the Chinese. 'Ah Ting! Stop this.'

He could not spot the tough little man, nor did he see any evidence that anyone was trying to halt the melee, but then Mr. Ross, infuriated by this frenzied interruption in the canning process, started to grab one Chinese or another, and at first he was unsuccessful.

'Tom! Give me a hand!' And as Venn ran to assist his boss, who had grabbed the pigtail of one of the more vigorous of the fighters, he shouted: 'I'm here!' But as he did so, he saw to his horror that Mr. Ross had pinioned the arms of the man he held, rendering him unable to defend himself, and in this exposed position the terrified Chinese could only watch impotently as a fellow worker lunged at him with a long fish knife, jabbing it once into the man's heart and then into his stomach, which he ripped apart with a powerful upward thrust.

As Mr. Ross held the captive in his arms he could feel life seeping out of the tense body, and when the wounded man 686

went limp, both Ross and Tom watched helplessly while three of the dead man's friends leaped upon the assassin, stabbing him many times until he, too, fell dead.

'Ah Ting!' Tom began to shout aimlessly, but the man who had been assigned to prevent just such outbursts could still not be found. But now he was not needed, for the shock of the two slayings caught the Chinese off guard, and they backed away, awaiting the restoration of order. Mr. Ross, still clutching the body of the man whose death he had caused, looked about in bewilderment while Tom continued to call for Ah Ting.

And then Tom saw the aggressive leader. He was pinned against a wall, surrounded by three men, all taller than he, holding their knives against his throat and heart.

Some wild dislocation had swept through the cutting shed, something too big to be handled by ordinary procedures, and in its first moments these men, determined to see it to a conclusion, had isolated Ah Ting to prevent him from exercising his authority.

Two murders had resulted, and now when Tom ran up to the men, shouting: 'Let him go!' they obeyed.

'Big fight, boss,' Ah Ting gasped as he shook himself free. 'Could not stop.'

Mr. Ross lumbered up, his hands red with the blood of the man he had been holding.

'Were you in charge here?' he blustered, and Tom interceded: 'This is Ah Ting. Leader.

Good man. These three held him prisoner.'

Mr. Ross's first reaction was to shout 'You three are fired!' but before he could utter the words he realized how stupid they would sound, for there was no way of firing unsatisfactory Chinese working at a summer cannery. The men had come from Shanghai to America on a British boat. They had come from San Francisco to Seattle on an American train. And some Ross & Raglan recruiter had placed them aboard an R&R steamer, which had conveyed them to Taku Inlet, where they had been deposited directly from the ship to the cannery. Supposing that Mr. Ross, in his obstinacy, went ahead and fired the three men, where could they go? They were miles from any settled area, and if they did reach some town like Juneau or Sitka, they would be refused entrance, for Chinese were not allowed. They were supposed to arrive by ship in late” spring, work all summer at some remote outpost, and leave by ship in early autumn, taking their few dollars with them and surviving in some large, impersonal city till the recruiters summoned them again for the next canning season.

So instead of firing the men responsible for neutralizing Ah 687

Ting, Mr. Ross scowled at them and asked Tom: 'What can we do?' and Tom gave the only sensible answer: 'Only thing we can do, trust Ah Ting to get the men back to work.'

'Do we call the police? There are two men dead over there.'

'There are no police,' Tom said, and in this statement he described the extraordinary position in which the District of Alaska found itself. There were men in towns like Juneau who were called policemen, but they had no real authority, for there was still no properly organized system of government, and for such improvised officers to venture into an area like Taku Inlet was unthinkable. Each cannery ran its own system of self-protection, which included drastic measures for handling disturbances, including crimes at the plant. Therefore, the murder of the two Chinese workers became Tom Venn's responsibility, and Mr. Ross was most interested to see how the young man proceeded.

He was favorably impressed by the fearlessness with which Tom moved among the agitated workers, directing them back to their tasks and checking to ensure the maintenance of an orderly flow of salmon from the arriving fishing ships. But when the time came for Tom to discipline the men who were seen to have done the stabbing, Mr. Ross was appalled to see that Venn turned the matter over to Ah Ting, and Ross

was further dismayed when he watched how the leader of the Chinese handled it. Ah Ting reprimanded the guilty men, did nothing to punish the others who had immobilized him in the fracas, and blandly told the men to pick up their gutting knives and get back to work.

But it was what he did afterward that affected Mr. Ross most profoundly, for Ah Ting directed two men to fetch one of the large barrels used for shipping salted fish to Europe, and when the barrel was in position he himself poured in a three-inch layer of coarse rock salt. Then he leaned deep into the barrel to spread the salt evenly over the bottom, after which he drew himself out, brushed off his hands, and directed his two helpers to bring the first of the slain men. When the corpse lay on the floor before him, Ah Ting helped his men strip away all bits of clothing and then hoist the dead body into the barrel, where it was propped into a sitting position.