Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  Greasy had planned to serve refreshments both before and after the card game, and I went over to his place early in the day to see if I could be of any help. I found him busily mixing up a batch of doughnut dough. He was using a large washtub for a bowl, and into it he was throwing large handsful of flour and indiscriminate amounts of lard, using a gallon can for a lard scoop.

  “Are you measuring your ingredients?” I asked him.

  “Naw,” he replied. “Never use a recipe. When I make doughnuts I make ‘em big, though, hey?” He added another gallon of lard to prove his point.

  That evening six of us waded through about ten gallons of spaghetti and moose meatballs—Greasy’s specialty—and then proceeded to play cards while our host made doughnuts. The doughnuts started to arrive on the table and Greasy, shoving huge platesful of them at us, boomed out, “Don’t be afraid to eat ‘em all! There’s plenty more!”

  The first doughnut I bit into was so full of grease that most of it dribbled down my chin and cascaded onto my shirt. Gazing around the table, I could see the pained expressions on the faces of the other guests as they, too, tried unsuccessfully to stop the flow of oozing fat. Said Greasy: “Good, huh? Have some more!”

  Being well aware of what could happen to the man who crossed Greasy in his own house, we all pitched in valiantly to get rid of the sinkers. I tried to feed some of mine to Greasy’s dog but he only looked sick and backed as far away from me as the walls would permit. This went on until Greasy was tired of making doughnuts, it was 3 o’clock in the morning and we were all permitted to leave.

  I spent the next two days sitting in my outhouse reading catalogs. On the third day, Greasy caught me and invited me to lunch. It was more of a royal command than an invitation, and I forced my trembling legs to carry me to his house. I was relieved to see that there were no doughnuts in sight; apparently Greasy had been baking pies instead. But when I bit into the pumpkin pie he offered me, I discovered, to my horror, that it tasted just like his doughnuts. “Greasy,” I said, shakily. “What did you make this pie crust of?”

  “Made it out of the doughnut dough, of course. Made some pancakes from it for breakfast, too. You ought to stay for dinner. I’m baking a cake.”

  Another of Greasy’s favorite indoor sports was pinochle. I had never played the game before arriving in Alaska, but soon after meeting Greasy I became an expert: he forced me to learn it, I think, so that he could keep in practice by beating me. Three or four nights a week he would come by my shack and yell, “Let’s go pinochling!” It was useless to refuse: I would climb into his truck and away we’d go. There were only two other families that played the game in the area at that time, so one night we’d drop in on the Baileys, three miles away, the next on the Keelers, two miles away. And since neither family ever received any advance notice of our coming, it was always something of a shock.

  It was the Baileys we shocked most often. After practically splitting their front door with his earthshaking knocks, Greasy would stride in—with me diffidently trailing behind—and start issuing orders. “Get out the cards!” he’d yell. “I’m gonna beat you tonight!” It didn’t matter if the Baileys had already started to bed or made any other plans for the evening: we were guests, and the only way guests could be entertained, as far as Greasy was concerned, was with pinochle. The sessions would last until late in the morning, with Mrs. Bailey keeping us all awake with pots of strong coffee and food. Poor Mrs. Bailey. She was usually Greasy’s partner in the fourhanded game, and she hated it. After she had gotten a bid and played a hand out, Greasy would spend the next five minutes telling her what she had done wrong. She had to be Greasy’s partner: none of the rest of us would have touched him with a ten-foot pew.

  Greasy’s outdoor passion was hunting, especially moose hunting. In the wintertime it was illegal to kill moose, but that didn’t bother him in the least. He was a retired policeman, he told me, and the law didn’t apply to him. After an all-night pinochle session, when he had lost and I had won, he would delight in routing me out of bed just as I had gotten into it and taking me out hunting. Lugging heavy 30-0-6’s, we would snowshoe countless miles through the woods and over the frozen muskegs without seeing so much as a rabbit. But my eyes were better than Greasy’s, and once in awhile I would spot a moose just disappearing behind a tree. “There’s one over there,” I would whisper.

  “Where? Where?” he’d whisper back, loudly enough to have startled a moose wearing a hearing aid. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Over there.” When we would arrive at the tree I had pointed out and there’d be no moose there, Greasy would turn, glare at me and shout, “Stoddard, you’re a————liar!”

  “No, I’m not, Greasy. Look. There’s the fresh tracks.”

  “Fresh tracks? Why you——! Those’re old tracks! Stoddard, I’m never gonna take you moose hunting again. You’re such a——liar!”

  But I never could count on that. If I didn’t hide out in the woods or in the outhouse, I knew I’d be dragged moose-hunting any time Greasy got the idea.

  One day in early winter the overlord of Stariski Creek showed up at my cabin to say he had just shot a moose and wanted my help in packing it out. This was good news: I was about out of canned fish and clams and had a strong urge for fresh meat, and the rule of the country said that anyone who helped butcher an illegal moose and pack it out was entitled to his share—up to half—as “hush money.” My mouth watering with the thought of the good steaks I would eat within the next few days, I said, “Sure.”

  That evening we went over to the Baileys’ to play pinochle until about midnight and then excused ourselves without giving a reason: you can’t trust even your best friends with the news of the shooting of an illegal moose, Greasy had told me.

  We drove up the highway to a point about a mile past my place and parked the truck. Walking back down the road, we entered the woods a half mile away and Greasy led me through a network of trees to where a mammoth bull moose was lying dead in the snow. Using flashlights—but sparingly—we proceeded to the messy job of removing the heavy hide, cleaning the moose and cutting it into quarters. This consumed an hour. Our next task was to carry the meat to the highway. Tying a leg apiece on our packboards, we snowshoed to the birm (a pile of snow-covered dirt and brush left by the road-builders), where we hid the meat and returned for another load. We used our lights as little as possible during our comings and goings so as not to attract the attention of a wandering game warden or anyone else who might happen to come along. This led to frequent fallings and stumblings over stumps and logs, but we didn’t even dare curse out loud. When the meat was all piled near the road Greasy went and got his truck while I stood guard. Presently the truck appeared with no lights showing. Then, while Greasy idled the motor for a quick getaway, I threw the meat in the back of the truck as quickly as possible. We drove like madmen to Greasy’s house, buried the meat under the snow just outside his door and relaxed.

  After a cup of coffee I expressed myself as anxious to get home with my share of the meat.

  “Sure,” said Greasy, magnanimously. “Take a front quarter.”

  I pawed through the already frozen meat until I found what I thought should be a front quarter, tied it to my packboard and walked the half mile back to my shack. Greasy woke me up early the next morning. “You made a mistake, you—-!” he roared. “You took a hind quarter!”

  Hind quarter, front quarter, what difference did it make? Nevertheless, to keep the peace, I waited until after dark and took the quarter back to Greasy’s. As I started to tie another quarter to my packboard Greasy stopped me. “Tell you what,” he said, wheedlingly. “To save you lugging that quarter back half a mile, I’ll can up your share when I can up mine. Then I’ll bring you the cans.”

  I thought it over. Probably, when Greasy brought the cans, he’d bring me some fresh steaks, too. “Okay,” I said.

  Three days later Greasy presented me with ten cans of meat. Ten pounds of meat from a m
oose that dressed out at 800. “Phooey!” I shouted after Greasy’s retreating form—though not so loudly that he could hear me. “That’s the last time I help you bring in an illegal moose!”

  But 790 pounds of meat, apparently, wasn’t enough for Greasy. About a month later I heard two rifle shots in back of my cabin, and an hour after that Greasy snow-shoed in to announce, proudly, that he had just shot two bulls, and did I want to help him pack them out? “Hell, no!” was what I should have said. But I didn’t. Greasy was too big.

  That night Greasy led his son, two neighbor boys and me to his kill. One dead moose, it seems, had gotten up and walked away, because there was only one to be seen. Greasy was furious. So was I—but for different reasons: the moose had only been wounded, I reasoned, and it had undoubtedly dragged itself over the snow to die miles away. What a cruelty—and what a waste!

  It was about midnight when the five of us began the tedious job of skinning. The temperature was about 20 degrees below zero and our cold-stiffened hands were clumsy implements for wielding skinning knives and peeling the heavy hide off an already-frozen carcass. Suddenly I stopped work and stood up. “Listen,” I whispered. The others fell silent.

  From the direction of Stariski Creek, just a short distance away, came a weird, high-pitched moan. Above the moan was a grunting noise, halfway between a cough and a growl. A green light showed above the trees—a shimmering light that filled the whole northern sky, dancing up and down in rolls and waves. Then it seemed as though rifles were cracking all around us. Dropping my knife, I croaked, “Hey, l-let’s get out of here.”

  My companions laughed, Greasy loudest of all. “What a cheechako you are, Stoddard!” he boomed, slapping me so hard on the back that I almost lost my balance. “Don’t you know anything? That moaning you hear is the ice cracking on the creek. It always does that, when it gets this cold. The cold makes the birch trees split, too: that’s what sounds like shots. Don’t worry: there aren’t any game wardens after you!”

  “What about that grunt?”

  “Hell, that’s probably just some old bull moose trying to get this dead one to come out and fight like a man. If I’d brought my gun along I’d go and shoot him now.”

  “But the light. What was that?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen the aurora borealis before?” cut in one of the boys. “Help me with this hind leg.”

  I still didn’t feel easy in my mind. The noises and the ghostly light made the woods an ideal setting, I felt, for a murder. But only a moose had been murdered, and soon, with Greasy barking gruff commands, we had it cut into quarters and ready to pack on our backs to the shack. At this point Greasy returned to the cabin with the butchering tools and no load of meat, leaving the rest of us to do the heavy work,

  I was wearing my skis that night; there weren’t enough snowshoes to go around. I started out with the first piece of meat to beat a trail over the half mile back to my shack, but with a ski pole in each hand I was unable to carry a flashlight and had to move blindly. Arriving at the edge of a gully, I tried to ski slowly down the slope. I ended up flat on my face, with the 100 pounds of meat on my back pressing me deeper into three feet of soft snow.

  I lay there, floundering, until one of the boys found me and helped me to my feet. Then I started to climb the opposite slope. Halfway up I slipped, and there I was on my back at the bottom of the gully again, helpless as a butterfly pinned to a board. After being found by the boys on their return trip from the cabin and propped into an upright position, I removed the treacherous skis. “Hell,” I said. “I’ll never get anywhere this way. I’ll use my own two feet.” But even my feet were traitors. I started to cross a section of muskeg, but with first one foot and then the other breaking through the crust, I managed to make only a hundred feet before giving up and unloading my pack. Leaving the meat behind, I covered the rest of the distance to my shack partly on my hands and knees, partly by leaping lightly from snowshoe track to snowshoe track like a barefoot boy on a stove.

  I found Greasy straining the strength of my one and only chair by giving it the full benefit of his brawny bulk. He looked like a general mapping a campaign as he drank my coffee, ate a huge hunk of my apple pie and issued orders to the boys to pile the meat next to the highway in front of my shack. While I commandeered a pair of snowshoes and went back for the meat I had dropped and another load at the kill, Greasy went over to his house for his truck. After everyone but Greasy had participated in loading the meat—except for my share, a front quarter—the great moose-killer disappeared down the highway with his helpers. And not bothering to clean up the blood on the floor, I climbed into my bag and was instantly asleep.

  The next morning I awoke in the grip of a horrible thought. Rushing outdoors, I found my worst fear an awful actuality. Sure enough, the highway in front of the shack, the snowbank where the meat had been piled and the snowshoe trails from cabin to kill were covered with bright, red blood. And the “camp robbers”—second cousins to the blue jays of the state of my birth—were already gathering for the feast—a sure giveaway to a flying game warden that a moose was dead. It was a cinch that it would be I, not Greasy, who spent the next six months in the Territorial hoosegow in Anchorage.

  Working faster than I had ever worked in my life, I covered the evidence with snow, and for the rest of the day I used the snowshoes Greasy had left behind to make hundreds of false trails leading from my house to nowhere. And until the next snowfall—which would remove any little clues I might have forgotten—I sat in my cabin listening for the sound of planes and the heavy-handed knock of the law. The front quarter I had received for my participation in the crime was left untouched until the danger was over, though I had been dying for a bite of fresh meat. “Never again,” I swore. “Never again.”

  Greasy gave me no more illegal moose trouble that winter, mainly because I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He tried to entice me over to his place with promises of batches of doughnuts and six-handed games of pinochle, but I refused every offer he made: I had had enough. As far as I was concerned, Greasy was a thorn on the side of the country, and the less I saw of him the less the pain would be.

  Besides, I had new problems to worry about.

  Chapter VII—The Actor

  CHRISTMAS HAD COME and gone. It had been a lonely time, but my family in California had come through with a lot of useful presents. My parents and sister had sent me three crates of assorted canned vegetables, canned fruit and pocket books, and my brother had expressed me a radio battery which I didn’t know what to do with until the radio to go with it turned up a couple of weeks later. With plenty of food, reading material and a radio with which to hear what was going on in the outside world—and I could hear everything in the outside world, from China to Scandinavia—I was as snug as a hibernating bear.

  I looked like one, too. One morning after the New Year I examined my face in the broken piece of glass by which, if I had been shaving, I would have shaved. I was a hairy success. My growth of reddish, coarse beard, tangled with hairballs and sticky with egg yolks, was long enough and bushy enough to qualify me for service as an emaciated Man Mountain Dean.

  I was pleased. Not since my Navy days had I achieved such a beard. But alas, this beard was to enmesh me in trouble.

  One night late in January a group of people I had seen in the area but didn’t know by name stampeded into my shack and shoved a sheaf of typewritten pages into my hands. “This is your part in our play!” they yelled. “Read it!”

  Protesting that I couldn’t act, I had lots of work to do and that I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, take a part in a play, I was dragged out of my comfortable chair and held unmoving while they read the play to me. Then they handed me “my” part again and begged me to “read it with us—just for the fun of it.” I gazed around the overcrowded room. People in parkas were everywhere, leaning against the walls, sitting on the floor. They looked like nice people; they were my neighbors—homesteaders and their wives. An
d they were waiting. I obliged.

  The reaction, as I read, was out of all proportion. Every time my cue came up and I spoke a line, cries of “You’re wonderful!” “Great!” and “Bravo!” filled the air. I had never thought of myself as an actor—never wanted to act—but if they thought I was good, well, maybe....

  I was a gone goose. Half unaware of what I was saying, I gave my promise to memorize the 149 speeches of my part in time for a rehearsal at the Anchor Point school on the following night. And as my guests, triumphant, trooped out of the door, one of them, a fifteen-year-old girl who was the only female in the group who wasn’t somebody’s wife, delivered a parting shot; “Don’t you dare shave off your beard. We need that wonderful beard in the play.” The door closed, then opened again. “We need you, too, of course.” said the girl.

  When all was quiet again, I settled down to study my part. Looking over the pages, I found that I was to be the star of a three-act opus called “Henry Gubbins’ Mail Order Wife.” As Henry Gubbins, I was to play the role of a homesteader—that wouldn’t be too difficult—and in general to act the fool, which I had already done by accepting the part. A Mrs. Tucker, “a widder woman” stamped, I gathered, with the imprints of a long, hard life, was to come in answer to my mailed proposal. But there would be obstacles to our achievement of wedded bliss, and a mix-up would occur in which I would marry—not Mrs. Tucker, but a male neighbor disguised as same. In the end, everything would be straightened out to the audience’s satisfaction, with two miserable people condemned to living unhappily ever after. Great drama? Well, hardly. But the play, I told myself, was to be put on in a good cause: to raise money to finish construction on the Anchor Point school. And participating in it would be a good way to get to know my neighbors. So I would do it if it killed me—though I would live, I suspected, to regret it.