Bo at Iditarod Creek

by Kirkpatrick Hill

  The boys were all pleased about Renzo, laughed and joked with him the way they did with everyone.

  “Good thing to have a big skookum boy in the family,” said Charlie One-Eye. “Can’t get any work out of babies for a long, long time.”

  “I know all about babies,” said Jack. “Mama Nancy raised a whole passel of them in her kitchen, including me. And what I know is, you don’t want to be trusting babies. Babies is treacherous. All cute and everything, but might turn out to be a pain in the keester. You can’t tell what they’re like till they’re older. After you wasted all that time on them. Babies is a gamble.”

  “That’s true,” Arvid agreed, winking at Bo. “Damned dangerous, taking on babies.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  EERO AND STIG

  THE DAY BEFORE WORK started on the dredges, Eero and Stig came to the house to talk to Arvid and Jack. They came late, after Bo and Graf and Renzo were in bed, a time they’d never visited before.

  Graf and Renzo were asleep, but Bo wasn’t. She peeked out of the curtain over their bedroom door and saw Stig unfold a yellow quadrangle map and spread it out on the table.

  Jack darted his head at the map. “What’s this about?”

  Stig pulled a bottle of Charlie’s hootch out of his pocket, and Eero brought in a jug of homemade beer.

  Arvid laughed at Jack. “God almighty, they mean to talk some serious business here.”

  Stig and Eero had some mining claims near Ruby, a village on the Yukon. Mammoth Creek. Eero showed Jack and Arvid on the map where the claims were.

  “Got these from an old Finn we knew back in the old country. They’re patented, so when he died, he left them to us. We never got around to working them.” Eero and Stig looked at Jack and Arvid. “We’d like to turn them over to you, pass them along.”

  Arvid and Jack sent wondering looks at each other, frowning.

  “Only thirty feet to clear to get down to bedrock,” said Stig. “Got a good house, lots of outbuildings for a shop and suchlike.” Stig pointed to another place on the map. “Got Long City here, you know, some roadhouses, few saloons. And lots of good times in Ruby besides.” He pointed to another place. “Got a road to Ruby—thirty miles, get your things on the barge in the summer. Best people in the world mining out there.”

  Eero looked at the papas and beamed. “No more dredge noise! Course, you’d need some equipment, Cat, dragline maybe.”

  Jack and Arvid shot a worried look at each other. Equipment was expensive. “Don’t worry,” Eero said, “lots of used machinery around, and that’s going to be your main expense. Fuel too, of course. Good mechanics like you, no trouble taking care of your equipment.”

  “You’re giving this away,” Jack said, unbelieving.

  “Yes,” said Stig decidedly. “We don’t need much—we got enough to see us out. But what we would like to have is the little cabin sitting on the edge of the claim, if that wouldn’t inconvenience you.” Stig pointed to a spot on the map, a side creek with no name. “It’s right here. We been wanting to get away from the dredges ourselves. Never meant to end up in the middle of tailing piles. But we were lazy. Just seemed like a lot of work to start over again at a new place at our age.”

  Arvid and Jack were almost expressionless.

  Then Jack said, “What kind of house?” so Bo knew he was interested.

  Stig made a quick drawing on the back of the map. “Two-story log cabin. Big. In good shape. Can’t remember how it was fixed inside,” he said. “Me and Eero was just there for a few days.”

  Jack and Arvid looked at each other.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Jack said. “We’ll talk this over, and all I can say is thank you. It’s the handsomest offer I ever did hear tell of. I’m half afraid I’ll find out I was just dreaming it.”

  “Well, here,” said Stig. He took some glasses off the shelf, set them on the table, and poured whiskey into them. “We’ll drink to you thinking about it. No hurry. It ain’t going nowhere.”

  * * *

  FIRST CHANCE HE GOT, Jack took some time off from work, grabbed a ride with the mail plane, and went with Stig and Eero to look the claims over. He came back looking bigger than when he went away, Bo thought.

  “What’s it like, Papa?” she asked.

  Of course he told them about the house first.

  “Biggest place we’ve ever been in. Bottom half is big as the cookshack in Ballard. Got room enough for anything.” He looked off into space, imagining what he could do with that big space. “Big kitchen, place for a bunch of couches and the gramophone, big woodstove, and maybe could have a carpet on the floor. Big old windows and something beautiful to look at out of every one of them.”

  He looked around at all of them, beaming. “Tall ceilings! Tall doorways, no more ducking to come into a room. Not one of these little piddly cabins. And upstairs, six rooms! Man who built it boarded his mining crew in the house. So not only six rooms upstairs, but the outhouse has three seats!”

  Bo and Graf and Renzo squealed. That was fancy. Three holes!

  “And there’s enough unworked ground to keep us busy till the next century. This here’s where we light. No more moving on,” Jack said. “I like the people here in Iditarod just fine, none better. But the sound of that dredge? Mmm-mm-mmm. Houses that have to move whenever someone takes a notion? And living in tailing piles without trees and animals just ain’t natural.”

  Eero and Stig laughed at him. “All that’s true, miles of pure wilderness and packets of animals in the Ruby country,” Stig said. “But you got to admit, we don’t have many mosquitoes here in Iditarod Creek. We promise you’ll have more than enough mosquitoes in Mammoth Creek to take an edge off that happiness.”

  * * *

  BO AND GRAF were sad to leave everyone, but Arvid showed them on the map how close they’d be. People could easily visit from Iditarod Creek.

  “Not a long trip overland at all. No river to cross, so I’d bet you’ll see plenty of everyone. Winter and summer. Bit longer by boat, but still. Ben said he’d bring Buddy and Will for sure. Don’t forget, we got planes now too. And the mail comes fast. Probably get letters every day!”

  And Stig and Eero were going to move to the little cabin as soon as they could.

  “We’ll gather everyone around us sooner or later,” Arvid said. “Tell you what. When Oscar is big enough to do a man’s work, we’ll send for him, too.”

  “I hope there’s lots of kids around Mammoth Creek,” Bo said.

  Graf was stacking the dishes to be washed. He was precise about this. All the same size dishes together, all the spoons together, all the knives together. Precise and slow.

  “Don’t need any other kids,” he said to the silverware. “There’s three of us,” he said.

  * * *

  SO WHEN THE MINING at Petrovich’s mine was over—after a going-away party at Hardy’s hotel—they were back in the poling boat. A little more crowded this time with Renzo.

  Down the winding and sluggish Iditarod to the Yukon, and then up the Yukon, running their little motor all the way to Ruby, gramophone on the bow again.

  It was late in the fall, just a few yellow leaves on the trees, so there were no mosquitoes and no gnats to drive them crazy.

  And it was more fun with Renzo. Every night when they were squished together in their sleeping bags under the bow, they’d talk about what they’d do in Mammoth Creek.

  Tundra and birds and flowers and a little creek to wade in. Good fishing for grayling a short walk away.

  A place to do their school that wasn’t the kitchen table, so their schoolwork wouldn’t have to be cleared off for every meal.

  And a room for each one of them!

  But after they’d thought about that for a while, they all decided that they didn’t want to sleep in a room by themselves. How could they talk at night like they always did?

  Bo popped her head out from under the bow. “Papas,” she called happily, “just think. If we hadn’t
run out of gold at Ballard, we wouldn’t have gone to Iditarod Creek, and we wouldn’t have lived next to Eero and Stig, and we wouldn’t have a new mining camp of our very own now.

  “And if Miz Eller didn’t get a piano, there wouldn’t have been a piano box, and if Graf didn’t follow that vole, we wouldn’t have Renzo!”

  Arvid and Jack smiled at each other.

  Thinking backwards again, their Bo.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In Alaska the name Eskimo is used, not Inuit. Canadian and Greenland Inuits have opted to call themselves Inuit, the name of their common language, because the word Eskimo had come to be regarded in Canada as pejorative. But two major Eskimo languages are spoken in Alaska, only one of which is Inuit. So the Inupiat and Yup’ik—both members of the Inuit Circumpolar Council—continue to call themselves Eskimo because the term is inclusive and has never been controversial in Alaska.

  Readers may be disturbed by the use of the word nigger. Of course this is an offensive term, but it was a word any child in America would have encountered at that time, or this. My book would be less than honest or historically accurate if I had not included the moment when Bo and Graf first heard the word.

  So many people of that period were clueless. Political correctness had not yet been invented. Well-meaning people were quite comfortable casually using flippant, slighting names for people who were looked upon as different or considered not quite mainstream.

  Bo and Graf didn’t have to encounter toxic racism because it wasn’t part of the world I wrote about, but I was glad to confront the mindless labeling that was so prevalent.

  Kirkpatrick Hill lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. She was an elementary school teacher for more than thirty years, most of that time in the Alaskan bush. In addition to her first book about Bo and her unusual family, Bo at Ballard Creek, she is the author of eight other books for young readers, including the award-winning Toughboy and Sister, Winter Camp, and The Year of Miss Agnes. kirkpatrickhill.com

  LeUyen Pham has illustrated numerous popular books for children, including Bo at Ballard Creek, The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdõs by Deborah Heiligman, and Freckleface Strawberry by Julianne Moore. She is also the author and illustrator of Big Sister, Little Sister and All the Things I Love About You. She lives in San Francisco. leuyenpham.com

  Text copyright © 2014 by Kirkpatrick Hill

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by LeUyen Pham

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Hill, Kirkpatrick.

  Bo at Iditarod Creek / Kirkpatrick Hill; illustrated by LeUyen Pham.

  pages cm

  Sequel to: Bo at Ballard Creek.

  Summary: In 1920s Alaska, when five-year-old Bo and her two adoptive fathers move to Iditarod Creek to work at a new gold mine, Bo feels homesick until she realizes there is friendship to be found everywhere—and Iditarod Creek may hold some surprises for her already unconventional family.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9352-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62779-253-0 (e-book)

  1. Alaska—History—1867–1959—Juvenile fiction. [1. Alaska—History—1867–1959—Fiction. 2. Family life—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Fiction. 4. Moving, Household—Fiction.] I. Pham, LeUyen, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.H55285Bp 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2014027021

  eISBN 978-1-62779-253-0

  First hardcover edition 2014

  eBook edition December 2014