Maiden Voyages (29 page)

I was so young he thought I was green. I thanked him and said I would follow his advice. But he gave me no chance to dance with anyone else. He danced with me again and again, and became very confidential.

“Yes,” I agreed to everything he proposed, and then, finally, simply, “Good night.”

He seemed hurt and reproached me angrily, “But you promised!”

“Didn’t you tell me to?” I asked.

How that story traveled!

Oh, it was grand to be free and think up your own line. And up there I wasn’t thought wild and headstrong and naughty.

It was two dollars a dance for a dance of a minute, dancing all night, and we got half, plus fifty cents on every drink we drank with patrons—weighed over the bar in gold dust. What a bonanza! But my mind was on how soon I could earn enough to go the two thousand miles down the Yukon to St. Michaels and Nome. I’ve always tired of places quickly.

Toward the wee small hours, as the liquor began to take its toll of brains, usually a fight would start and likewise finish. Disputes over mining claims and the jumping of claims were often settled in bars and
dance halls where most of the people spent most of their time while in Dawson. I saw two men killed over a mining dispute the first week I was there. One was at the bar, with murder in his heart, by the expression on his face. The other came in to kill him, and both shot each other. One died instantly, the other a few hours later. Shortly before this happened, I had met an elderly woman on the trail whom I admired very much because she had come alone to such a place at her age. She was an artist and was doing very well, painting signs for people. We became good friends and she wished to see the place where I worked. So I had brought her with me on this evening. It was probably the first time in her life she was ever in a bar and to see two men killed ten minutes after she entered was something of a shock.

As soon as the ice broke in June, I went out.

The Yukon River was “new” then. The channel had not been charted and often, during the months of the year that the river was navigable, the boats were stuck on the sandbars until rescued.

In the cabin on one side of me was a very sedate U.S. Marshal from Washington, D.C., bringing a prisoner to Nome. The cabin on my other side was occupied by French “Elise,” a lady from Lousetown.

Lousetown, across the river from Dawson, was given over entirely to a district glowingly lit up in red, and in the hour before the boat started down the river, I watched the jolly French girls coming aboard, making a racket like a brood of cackling hens. This was the first boat out that year.

One passenger had visions of building a toll bridge near Nome. Another, a rich man from New York, had received no news of money he had invested through partners and so was on his way to investigate the mine in person. Whenever we were high and dry on a sandbar, he insisted on panning for gold. One day, a comedian dropped a tiny nugget into his pan while his back was turned. After that, he’d have remained, like Crusoe, on that sandbar if he hadn’t been told it was under water most of the time.

We played ball on one sandbar near Circle City (Arctic Circle) until another river boat came alongside and slid us off by churning the water with its sidewheel for hours until we were free.

At Circle City, the cook threw the garbage into the river near the bank. Indian malamutes swam in after it and you could see those dogs, chewing mouths’ full of bones, while still under the water. Safety first. They were beautiful and the last word in intelligence. Many a tale went around about malamutes stealing food cached in trees miles from nowhere.

One young prospector, named Thiers, told me of having been awakened from sleep one night by a malamute’s jumping down from a tree, so full of purloined bacon that when he landed it knocked a sort of bark out of him. (Malamutes don’t bark.) Later he had to kill the dog. After hunting all day, Thiers only was able to bring back one Arctic ptarmigan, a big bird good to eat. While he was pulling out the feathers, the dog came by on the dead run, snatched the bird from his hands and ran off with it. Loss of supplies could easily mean loss of life, and so the thief had to be killed as a measure of self-defense.

Years afterward, two maiden ladies named Thiers moved into my house in San Francisco. “Did you ever have a brother in the Arctic?” I asked.

“Yes,” they answered, and it turned out that my prospector friend was he. I learned then that he, his half-breed Eskimo wife and their two sons had come to the States to live. Later I spent a very happy week with them on their cattle ranch in Arizona.

At the mouth of the Koyukuk River, above the Circle, two prospectors and a small boatload of supplies were lowered over the side. They were to be in the Arctic, alone, away from every settlement, for a year. A lump rose in my throat as I watched them drift off fearlessly and with such hope into the great unknown, and contrasted them with all the people living at home who, despite their comforts, are full of grouches and aspirin.

At an old Russian settlement near St. Michaels four blighted and withered but undiscouraged men came on board. Having missed the last boat out the season before, by one day, they had been compelled to remain, marooned, in that dark little village for eight months.

It was grand to reach Nome, at long last, but the town couldn’t hold a candle to Dawson. It was like coming into a calm pool after shooting
the rapids. The most fascinating places, of course, were the dance halls, and, as in Dawson, I made the round of them. It was very curious to see the Eskimos standing all night like cigar store Indians inside the entrances of the dance halls, drinking in the passing show while motionlessly offering for sale beautiful carved cribbage boards of walrus tusks. What must the music, the people, the bars and the dancing have seemed to those poor hypnotized fellas, who had never seen the like before and who should have been out gathering supplies of fish and game for the long night? No doubt many of them starved that winter.

Nome was a bad town, wild and crooked, full of thieves and murderers and real lawlessness; while in Dawson people could leave their gold dust in bags outside a door and it would be safe. You couldn’t do anything like that in Nome. Dawson was under Canadian control and Nome under the United States, but the real reason for the better conditions in Dawson wasn’t that—or the Mounties. It was so hard to get to Dawson that you had to have something in you to desire to go there, while Nome was on the direct route from San Francisco and Seattle. Everybody—every kind—that had the price of a ticket, dumped themselves in Nome to live off the hardier ones. But the opportunities were less.

One night in a tough little “theater” (Gawd save the mark for calling it that, but nothing else describes it so well), I got fed up, and homesick. At seventeen, no matter how anxious you are to get away, you long for Ma and Pa and the familiar things. I was playing “Swanee River,” with variations, and “Old Black Joe,” and such. Lots of us got right homesick. We were talking about it to four fine chaps, prospectors off for another gold rush in Patagonia. When they said I could stop off in San Francisco and show my mother and father I was alive and well, I agreed to go along as their mascot. Just like that, on the spur of the moment, I was off from one end of the Americas right down to the other. It was the only way I could have gotten passage. One captain, when asked, said, “Damn the passengers. I’m filling up with freight.” Freight paid profits and didn’t have to eat and sleep. But the four men had made arrangements.

(1900–1957)

from
SPEAK TO THE EARTH
:
WANDERINGS AND REFLECTIONS AMONG ELEPHANTS AND MOUNTAINS

Then, suddenly, toiling upwards through trees and creepers, I came out onto an open crest, and there before me, lifting its head above the forest, was the bare, grey summit. It might have been three hours away
and it might have been thirty: all depended upon what lay between those intervening ridges suffocating under the tangled green barriers of forest. But to the eye it looked attainable, and the more I looked, the more it lured me on. It was no use discussing the possibilities with the men, and I took a high hand.

“The mountain is near enough,” I said, “we’ll follow the crest,” but I dared not meet Mohamed’s eye, nor did I glance at him.

Sometimes one guide led, sometimes the other, and when they flagged, or cast about, I struck ahead. But all at once it was borne in upon me that their resistance and also that of the jungle itself had both given out at the same time. Finding that I was not to be put off they had now cheerfully accepted the position, and put their interest in what lay ahead. As for the jungle, we had left the worst of it behind, and the ridge brought us out into the daylight clear above it. Following one ridge to the next, with occasional drops into the forest, we climbed a straight and broad path which was hemmed in on either side by dense hedges of greenery.

It was paved all the way with the droppings of rhino, buffalo and elephant. I was ahead and walking along with my eyes bent on the spoor, when I came to a grey boulder lying across the path. I was in the act of walking round it when it suddenly heaved itself up beside me with the terrifying snort of a rhino. I recoiled and leapt backwards, while the rhino (who was presumably facing the other way) tore off in the opposite direction. This is only conjecture; for the instant the boulder sprang to life, I did not wait for a second glance but turned and bolted, colliding with the man behind me, who also turned and ran for his life shouting “Faru! faru!” (rhino) and in the twinkling of an eye we had scattered like chaff.

The rhino had disappeared, and the forest gradually settled back into silence. One by one, with hearts still beating with fright, we stole out of our several retreats and back to the path.

I suppose that the boys were now worked up to the adventure, or that they had hopes of finding more ivory, for none of them thought of using this as a pretext for going home before worse befell. Still out of breath, they laughed over the scare as each contributed some detail to our comically expeditious flight. But as I started off again, now a
trifle daunted and very much on the alert, I began to think that losing the way was a minor evil compared with nearly falling over a sleeping rhino. I was trespassing in a sanctuary where no human being (according to the natives) had ever set foot before, and I could not tell but what there might be plenty more rhino ahead. The forest was ominously silent, and everything pointed to its being unusually full of big and possibly dangerous game. If any of them took it into their heads to charge, and casualties resulted, the blame would be mine for exposing my men to undue risk. It was an unpleasant thought and responsibility began to sit so heavily upon my shoulders that I almost wished that I had given in to the boys an hour back, and left the forest alone.

The rhino, very naturally, had been annoyed at having his sleep so rudely disturbed; and since the path was the only place where a rhino could bask in the sun, the path was obviously a dangerous one to walk, and other sleeping rhino, (or buffalo) might be less good-natured.

I was debating within myself whether I was at all justified in going on, when sure enough I detected another grey cumbersome shape above the grass-stalks ahead. It was only a few yards off, but I trained the glasses on it to make certain, and they showed up clearly the grey corrugations of a rhino’s hide. I retreated on tiptoe and held a consultation with the boys. A détour was made impossible by the thickness of the jungle on either hand, but Lembogi, always the resourceful one of the party, said that if we retired to safety down-wind, he would climb a tree, wake the rhino by throwing sticks at him, and try to drive him away.

The reader may well wonder why I did not seize this golden opportunity myself, and (with the wind blowing so true) nothing would have been easier than to have crept up to the sleeping rhino and scratched him behind his ears. He might have loved it (and introduced me to the whole forest as a reward) but on the other hand if he hadn’t, my chances for experiment would have been for ever curtailed. This would always be the difficulty, for when chances came I did not dare.