Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  Into every life some rain must fall. Returning to the cabin one day after a short absence, I found Ski tossing a small ball of fur into the air and deftly catching it in her mouth before it could hit the ground. On investigation, the ball proved to be a kitten that one of my friends—or more likely one of my enemies—had left on my doorstep. I took it into the cabin and gave it a bowl of canned milk. From the way it dived into the milk I could tell it was half starved, and when it started chewing busily on my ankle, I was sure of it.

  I took the kitten outside to see what it would do. It rushed over to Ski and jumped onto her back, digging in with all twenty claws. Ski, her big amber eyes pools of astonishment, shook it off, grabbed it, tossed it ten feet into the snow. In an instant the cat was back again, asking for more. Twenty times it attacked, twenty times it landed in a snowbank. “I guess it thinks it’s a dog,” I said to Ski, scratching my head.

  After that, to keep peace in the family, I kept the cat in the house most of the time. But I’m not as fond of cats as I am of dogs, and this one’s nature proved to be almost oppressively affectionate. All night long it fought to make a bed on my face, and all night long I insisted that it would have to sleep on the floor. Finally, in sleepy exasperation, I would open the door and throw it out into the snow. There would be a few seconds of silence, and then the stillness of the night would be shattered by the howls of a cat in the mouth of a loving dog. Two or three hours later the noise would subside. And in the morning I would find the two of them bedded peacefully together, the cat cuddling up to the dog for warmth and neither of them seeming to see anything extraordinary in the arrangement.

  Sunday was bake day for me. Every Sunday morning I would mix up enough dough for four loaves of bread, and every Sunday night I would put them in the oven. On one particular Sunday morning I followed my usual routine. Putting the finished dough in a bowl, I placed it on a shelf over the stove to rise. Then I went outdoors and chopped wood until nightfall. Coming back into the house, I glanced up at the bowl of dough to see if it had risen enough to bake. It had, and besides that, something new had been added. With a shout I flung myself across the room, grabbed the cat and threw it out the door. The next hour was spent in the thoroughly unhumorous job of removing thousands of cat hairs from the mixture.

  One night I put the cat upstairs in the storeroom. I hoped it would go quietly to sleep up there and leave me in peace for a change. Presently I heard a scratching noise on the stove pipe which ran from my cook-stove up through the second story to the roof. I looked up toward the ceiling to see an almost unbelievable sight. The kitten, using the hot stove pipe like a tree, was backing down it toward the still smoking stove. When it reached the range, it walked leisurely across the lids and jumped into my lap, where it proceeded to wash itself with no evidence of pain. “You’re nuts,” I said to it. For answer, the cat jumped down from my lap, crossed to the stove and climbed into the hot oven, where it curled up for sleep. After that, I could usually find it when I was looking for it by following the smell of singed hair. Truly, I had acquired a crazy cat.

  Somehow, no matter how much I fed the cat it never gained an ounce of weight or an inch in size, though it ate as much as Ski—and more. Whenever it smelled food it went berserk, running madly around the shack searching for the source of supply. If I happened to be the one who was doing the eating, the kitten would dash ferociously up my leg, grab the food from my mouth or fingers and dash frantically away with its prize. Sometimes it missed the food and got my fingers instead, but this was according to the rules: fingers were considered legitimate fodder when nothing else was at hand.

  When anything else was at hand, though, the cat got it. One day during the spring thaw I had just baked two pumpkin pies and set them on the table to cool. As I sat reading in front of the stove I heard a couple of peculiar noises behind me. Turning my head, I saw the cat standing knee-deep in the center of one pie while tearing huge chunks of filling from the other. This was too much! Grabbing the cat none too gently, I rushed out of the house, ran a quarter of a mile down the road until I came to the bridge that crossed Stariski Creek. The water was at its highest, and huge ice cakes came tumbling down the rapids. Without looking to see where it fell, I tossed the pie-eater over my shoulder into the torrent below. When I heard a splash, I walked away.

  But as I walked, I regretted. “Poor little cat,” I said to myself. “Ί shouldn’t have done it. He can’t help it if he’s crazy. No, I shouldn’t have done it.”

  At home I carefully cut around the cat prints and bites, and when I got through, the pies looked almost as good as new. I then felt sorrier than ever. Poor little cat...poor little cat....

  Two days later I opened the door to a plaintive mew. There stood the cat—dry as a bone and hungrier than ever. He wasn’t just crazy: he was indestructible!

  I kept the cat for one more day. But the ducking in the creek hadn’t changed any of its bad habits. After almost losing another finger to its voracious appetite, I put it in the car and drove up the highway for ten miles. Knocking on all the doors of the homesteads along the road, I finally found a bachelor who had just moved in. When I offered him “a cute kitten” he thanked me profusely. He had been looking for something like that to keep him company, he said. “Thanks again,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. And I got into my car and hurried home.

  Ski hunted for her playmate for several days, and then, apparently, forgot about it. I did, too. But occasionally I thought about the bachelor to whom I had made a gift of the cat. There was one homesteader who would never think of me as a friend.

  Chapter IX—The Snow Melted and There It Was

  SPRING ON THE KENAI PENINSULA was a noisy event. The frozen creeks and rivers, thawing from the bottom up and the top down, began to flow again, and as they did, they dislodged the remaining chunks of ice and carried them, rumbling and groaning like dyspeptics in pain, toward the sea. When the ice met an obstacle—a fallen log, or a bend in the course of the stream—it jammed. Then, when the water had spread over the whole valley and built up enough pressure to break through the jams, it roared on its way to the inlet, its final home.

  By then, the ground that the snow had covered only a few days before had turned into greasy mud. Underneath, only a few inches down, the earth was still frozen hard, but soon that, too, began to thaw. In a month or two the ground had dried out enough so that it could be worked and traveled, the rivers had quieted down and cleared themselves of a lot of winter debris and the mammoth king salmon had started their long, hard trip to the spawning grounds. The country became green all over, the birds returned from their southern resorts and winter was officially “kaput.”

  It was my first spring in Alaska, and I was financially out of the woods. I had managed to save $30 a month out of my subsistence checks, had received full payment on an old loan in the States, had taken a few odd jobs here and there, had paid all my debts to my family and gotten my car out of hock. Best of all, by building a shack and living in it for seven months, I had “proved up” on my homesteading claim.

  All that remained was to make it official. With two of my neighbors acting as witnesses, I made out the necessary papers. In addition to my final filing papers, I filled out a relinquishment form which returned to the government 40 acres of my land that were too far from the highway to do me any good. This would give me a chance to file on another 40 acres some time in the future.

  I mailed the papers to the Land Office in Anchorage. After my claim was advertised in the Seward newspaper for a month and no one had come forth to contest my right to the land, they would be sent to Washington, D.C., where a patent would be drawn up in my name and sent to me. From then on the 120 acres would be mine to do with as I pleased.

  Anticipating no trouble along legal lines, I felt like an owner already. It was time to look over my domain and see what I had.

  What was left after the 40 acres had been lopped off was in the shape of an “L,” wit
h the top of the “L” lying across the highway and extending to its foot along a north slope of high-ground timber land. The 40 acres that formed the toe of the “L” lay across the creek valley and up to—and I hoped including—the bluff on the other side. This bluff had a south slope which looked like good growing land and I hoped to be able to find the old survey line and prove that it belonged to me. While there was still a little snow on the ground, I spent a day wandering around the bluff. Finally I found the line. If my calculations were correct, I owned a strip of good flat land 250 feet deep and a quarter of a mile long. With a neighbor’s help I measured from the section corner along the line and found my other corners. The strip was mine!

  The first thing I did was to look for a good building location. The one I decided upon had a fine view of Stariski Creek, plus a spring which flowed about five gallons a minute only 20 feet down the side of the bluff. Water and a view! Perfect!

  I was ready to start chopping down trees. Every morning I would leave my shack and walk the half mile to the new location and go to work. First I would notch 50 trees—spruce, birch and cottonwood—with a double-bit axe. Then I would saw the trees down, one by one. Two weeks of this and I had close to 50 large trees and numerous small ones lying crisscrossed on an acre of ground. With another three weeks behind me I had the spruce trees limbed and cut into saw logs and the birch and cottonwood, which were no good for lumber, laid in huge piles ready for the torch.

  Waiting for a day when the ground was wet from a rain of the night before, I started to burn the trees I didn’t want. This involved sprinkling a pile of them generously with kerosene, applying a match and standing back. The pile would blaze up quickly, the flames reaching for the sky. When it had burned down some, I would throw another batch of logs on the fire. At the end of the day I was singed from head to toe and my clothes were charred from flying sparks. The next day I returned to repile the half-burned wood into smaller heaps and burn it to ashes.

  Now the clearing was a field of stumps sticking up four feet above the ground. There was nothing else I could do without a fairly large sum of money. I wanted to build a house I could be proud of, a house considerably larger than my shack, and what I had in mind would take more than a thousand dollars. That meant a job.

  One day in June I took Ski, together with a sack of dog food, to Red Freimuth’s. Red was a new bachelor homesteader who had moved onto the land that bordered me on the south, a veteran of about my own age. He was just starting to raise his own house but he would be glad, he said, to take care of my dog while I was away working. I said goodbye to both of them and headed north, towards Kenai, I had heard rumors that there was a big Army base to be built there, and that there would be work for those who wanted it.

  Arriving in the little settlement of Soldotna, ten miles south of Kenai, I looked up the homestead of Howard Lee, who had worked with me at the cannery the year before. The people occupying his house were strangers, but they told me that Howard had moved to a small cabin up the road, was working on a job in Kenai and would be back that night. I found the cabin and waited.

  At 8 o’clock my friend showed up. Howard was an ex-Navy fighter pilot, but I had often wondered how he had ever managed to cram his six-feet, four-inch frame into a Hell-cat cockpit and still get his hands free to work the controls. Over coffee he gave me all the dope on the job he was working on—the job about which I had heard rumors. “Gordon,” he said, “this job is a cinch. We’re clearing 600 acres of ground for the Army and getting paid a banker’s salary.”

  “I’ve just finished clearing an acre on my homestead,” I said. “That’s no cinch.”

  “Sure it’s a cinch! And it’ll be a cinch to get you on the payroll. You’ve had experience, man!”

  “How many hours do you work?”

  “Just seven elevens.” I considered. Eleven hours a day, seven days a week. It would be tough, but worth it, if the pay was good. “Can you wait a few days while I see if I can get you on?” asked Howard. “You can stay here, if you like.”

  “I can wait all summer, if necessary!”

  Three days later Howard came home and informed me that I was to go to work on the following day. “It was a cinch,” he said, when I thanked him.

  The next morning the alarm went off at 5:00 and we made our breakfast, jumped into my car and drove the ten miles to Kenai. Arriving at a few minutes to 7:00, we climbed into an old Army truck that was waiting with its load of men. Right on the dot of 7:00 the truck started up and took off down the road going north from town. Five miles farther on we stopped and turned off onto a muddy track into the woods. The D-6 Cat that awaited us there hooked onto the front of the truck and hauled us through a mud-hole two miles long.

  Finally we reached what was, apparently, our destination: an immense clearing, with thousands upon thousands of trees pushed into windrows as far as the eye could see. Over the whole hung a blanket of smoke, rising from hundreds of small fires burning in the piles of brush stacked everywhere. I later found out that the clearing was roughly over a square mile in size, and that all of the trees had been knocked down and piled up in just a couple of weeks, with a cable stretched between two Cats doing the monumental job.

  In the center of the clearing was a small encampment of tents—where the contractors lived, Howard informed me. When the truck came to a stop, I jumped out with the rest of the men, found the boss of the job in one of the tents and signed up. “You’re to go to the burning detail today,” said the boss. “That guy over there”—he pointed—“will show you what to do.”

  I was handed a weed burner, five-gallon size, and told to fill it from a 50-gallon drum of stove oil. The weed burner was awkward: when it was full, I had to sit down to work its straps over my shoulders, and then crawl on my hands and knees to a drum to pull myself to a standing position. Cinch? Already this job was no cinch.

  Howard, who was to be my partner that day, led me to a long line of unburned birch and spruce, piled high and mixed with dirt and brush. With a full back sprayer he was to spray oil on the base of a pile while I, following along with my miniature flame thrower, was to ignite it. Within two hours we felt like arsonists and stood back to watch the holocaust we had caused. There were about ten acres of fires going as a result of our efforts, and the wind created by the flames was sweeping through the other heaps of brush and threatening to ignite about forty more. We had been told to set fires and more fires, but this exceeded even our expectations. “This sure ought to make the bosses happy!” I yelled over the crackling of the flames. Howard grinned back at me through the smoke. “When you do a job, you should do it WELL!” he shouted.

  But suddenly something seemed to be going wrong. Howard noticed it first. “The wind has changed!” he hollered. “Let’s get out of here!”

  We had been standing at the edge of the woods well out of the way of the fire, but now the flames were licking hungrily toward us across the fire break. The sparks that shot up from the piles were drifting down into the woods and little spirals of smoke were curling up from the moss under the trees. Howard yelled something about seeing the boss and disappeared through the smoke toward the camp. I turned and ran through the woods, stamping out moss fires as I went while two started for every one I killed. Remembering the tales I had heard about a fire sweeping through a third of the Kenai Peninsula a few years before, I had visions of its happening again—with me—me!—as the firebug.

  Then I was surrounded by men who dashed here and there with shovels and axes beating out the destructive little sparks. Four Cats which had been working at other spots in the clearing were now ranging back and forth between the woods and the fire digging up patches of burning moss. It took the entire crew of fifty men and all the equipment at hand to put out the little fires until the wind changed and the danger was over for awhile.

  The rest of the crew went home that day at 6:30-regular quitting time—but Howard and I were ordered to stay until 11:30 to patrol the woods. This might have been consi
dered punishment to some—16 hours of work on my first working day—but as Howard and I strolled around looking for errant fires we reminded each other that we would be paid for eight hours at regular time and eight hours at time-and-a-half. Since money was what we were after, why should we complain? We even made plans to start a bigger fire on the following day.

  But our plans didn’t go through as scheduled. On the next day I was transferred to the brush-cutting crew. The foreman handed me a heavy, double-bit axe, pointed to a patch of four-foot-high willows that stretched away to the horizon and said, “When you finish those I’ll find something else for you to do.”

  With thirty other men armed with axes, I chopped the willows down. They were no bigger around than my little finger so I didn’t have to swing my axe very hard, but even the slightest swing would make the axe bury itself in the ground. This meant that the axe had to be sharpened with a file after every hundred strokes—which gave me a rest period, at least. But resting was frowned upon. Every time I stopped to light a cigarette or stretch my back the foreman seemed to be standing only a few feet away, staring at me. A ten-minute break at 10:00, another at 3:00 and a half hour for lunch which was spent mostly in slumber was all the surcease we got from that steady chop-chop-chop, rain or shine. I had to keep reminding myself that in only a few weeks more I could return to my homestead, a tired but a very rich old man.

  My first pay day came on a Saturday night. The check was handed to me in the truck and I examined it carefully. My take-home pay for my first full week was $211 out of $265—more than three times the amount I had ever before earned in a week! Gosh! Over a thousand a month for doing the work of a laborer! And if this was what an unskilled worker was paid, what, I wondered, could an experienced man like a Cat operator earn? I stuffed the check into my shirt pocket, unbelieving. It was more than I could cope with at the time. I’d think about it later.