Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  I was delighted: it was my equipment shipment from Montgomery Ward’s. “Back the truck up to the house!” I told him excitedly. The driver tried, but the truck only roared, its wheels spinning madly on ground which had frozen, thawed out a little and was too slick for traction.

  “Well, we’ll have to unload her,” said the driver, resignedly.

  Working the rest of the day, the driver and I unloaded five tons of freight from the truck, my things included, piling them in a heap on the ground. Then we tried again to move the truck. It didn’t budge. It was in there to stay.

  Night came on, and with it a November cold snap. We retired to the house to warm up, and after dinner I split my blankets with the truck driver. We both spent a miserable night. In the morning, when the ground had frozen solid again, the driver backed the truck out of the rut with little or no difficulty. After two hours of backbreaking work, the truck was loaded again, and the driver and I, who were old buddies by now, at last said farewell. Just another incidence of Alaska’s weather and how it controls your life....

  Now I could look at my loot. Dragging the crates from where we had left them the night before, I managed to get them all stacked in my living room. Opening each crate was like opening packages on Christmas morning, and each bright red tractor part, as it came to light, was like finding a shiny new bicycle under the tree. When the last empty crate had been flung outdoors, I gazed with glee at the disorderly scene. Pieces of equipment were spread all over the living room rug, on the bed, and in the kitchen. Now it looked like Christmas day at about 2 p. m., when all that remains is to collect all the fancy wrapping paper and ribbons and build a huge, Yule fire.

  All outside work was forgotten while I hunted up wrenches, hammers and pliers to assemble my new toys. A week later I was still puzzled over instruction books, looking for missing parts and wondering how I would get the assembled tractor out through the front door. A few days after that the shallow well pump was stuck halfway down the cellar stairs and I was searching high and low for the 20-inch circular blade that was essential to the arbor saw attachment for the tractor.

  I finally forced the pump down into the cellar where it belonged and managed to drag the tractor through the front door—but not without the loss of several square inches of skin. As for the saw blade, I never did find it. The only item missing from the shipment—but after all, Montgomery Ward’s, like man, is not infallible—it wasn’t to turn up for at least a month, when somebody in the mail order house, apparently, found it lying around and shipped it out.

  Putting the trans-o-glass on the greenhouse was no one-man job. I recruited a friend, and together we started to tack down the glass, beginning at the roof eave and working up to the peak. We had the first roll all laid out from the garage to the other end of the greenhouse when a big gust of wind whipped it out of our hands. “That stuff’s worth $50 a roll!” I yelled in agony as I watched it go. “Let’s get it!”

  Stumbling, falling, picking ourselves up and stumbling on again, we succeeded in capturing the elusive glass. Then, holding it firmly down, we managed to nail it to the rafters. But we had learned a lesson, and after that we cut the glass into shorter lengths. We had no more trouble with the wind.

  When the structure was entirely covered with trans-o-glass it really looked like a greenhouse. I was proud of it. But there was still work to be done. The benches would have to be filled with soil immediately—before the ground was frozen so hard that I’d have to break it up with a pick. I went outside and began to wield a shovel, and in two days the benches were full. Later on I would process the dirt—screen it, and so on—but it was good enough for now.

  To heat the giant greenhouse I had two 50-gallon drums welded together to form a double-length barrel stove. Sinking it low in the ground at the open end of the house so that only its fire door showed, I hoped it would circulate warmth under the benches and keep the soil in them at the proper temperature. Later on I would collect slabs and cut them into five-foot lengths to feed it.

  There were a few more jobs to be done, and when I had done them—hung the doors, put up a stovepipe and cleared the litter from the floors—I was ready to think about my water system.

  Greenhouses were a subject I knew something about—I had helped to build several of them on my wholesale nursery jobs in California—but plumbing was a field with which I was almost totally unfamiliar. Always before I had lived in houses where the water streamed from the faucets whenever you turned the handles and you never paused to wonder why. Now I had to find out why—and how.

  Reading the instruction book that had come with the pump, I made a list of the materials I would need. On a quick trip to Homer, I bought pipes and fittings and rented a set of pipe dies. My first job—and the hardest—was to sink the well point. This, I discovered, was a specially-made piece of pipe full of small holes and with a screen fitted inside to let the water in but keep all other material out. On one end was a sharp point which had to be driven into the bottom of the well. Attaching another length of pipe to the point and affixing a cap, I was ready to drive it down into the water-saturated gravel. I rigged up a homemade pile driver out of a log and ropes and got to work. Holding the log over the pipe, I would let it drop, then repeat the operation. After three days I had driven the point down three feet. Then, putting a 1¼-inch pipe inside the two-inch point pipe with a suction valve attached to the end, I connected it with the pump, which I had set on a concrete base. From then on it was easy. I ran a pipe upstairs to a storage tank in my second-story storeroom, then ran a line from it down to a faucet over the kitchen sink. Next, I ran a line from the pump to the greenhouse, burying it in the ground below the frost line. The water system was finished. All it lacked was electricity—to make the pump do its job.

  But I had thought of that, too. One of the attachments I had bought with the tractor was a 2000-watt generator which would fit on the front of the tractor and operate off a pulley. A wire running from it to the pump would make the pump do everything I wanted it to do. But just as I began the task I got a better idea. While I was at it, why shouldn’t I wire my entire house for electricity? Why shouldn’t I have lights, as well as running water? It shouldn’t be too much extra work.

  Little did I know. My electrical supplies, ordered through mail order catalogs and through my brother, who was in the electrical appliance business in San Francisco, didn’t take very long to arrive by air mail parcel post, but when they arrived I didn’t know what to do with them: I knew even less about wiring than I had known about plumbing.

  I ran into all sorts of difficulties. It was simple running two wires from the garage, where the tractor and generator were located, to the storeroom in the house, where a fuse box had been installed, but putting in the wiring for all the wall switches, wall plugs, light fixtures and the pump made me tear out the hairs in my beard, one by one. I spent a week fooling around before hiring an electrician—my neighbor, Fred Bailey—to come in and repair the results of my blunders.

  Finally the great day arrived. I was ready to test all the circuits and find out if the pump would pump. Starting up the tractor, I ran to the house. With my hand on a light switch, I hesitated. Would it work? Or would there be a sudden bright flash, an explosion, and the annihilation of a house? My finger flicked the switch. The ceiling light went on. Rushing from room to room, I flicked all the switches. Every light worked. Truly, it was a miracle in the wilderness!

  Now the pump. In the cellar, I pulled another switch. The pump motor started up. Dashing upstairs, I turned on the faucet over the tank. Nothing came out. Something was wrong! What? I clapped my hand to my head. Of course! Now I remembered: the pump had to be primed! Running down to the spring, I filled a pail with water. I climbed breathlessly up the bluff, almost running in my excitement. In the cellar, I carefully poured the water into the prime hole. Gradually the pump began to labor. The needle on the pressure gauge climbed slowly up the dial until it stopped at “40 pounds.” It worked!

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bsp; I turned on all the valves, then went upstairs to turn on the faucet over the storage tank. Water rushed out to fill the barrel. I went back to the kitchen, turned on that faucet. Water rushed out to fill the sink. No more Jack and Jill stuff for me!

  I jumped into my car and drove up and down the road. When I would pass a neighbor’s house, I would lean out the window and yell, “I have running water and lights! I have running water!” And the looks on my neighbors’ faces—looks of astonishment, envy and plain disbelief—warranted all my weeks of work.

  The next day people came from miles around to see my light and water system, some of them bringing along barrels and other containers to be filled with water. In Anchor Point at that time, most homesteaders were still hauling all their water by hand from creeks and rivers. A few had light plants, like mine, but none possessed a water system. And there was certainly no one else who owned a big greenhouse. It was indeed a great day for the Stoddard homestead.

  Chapter XV—The Bear Facts

  ALASKA’S BEARS: everybody always wants to hear about Alaska’s bears. “Oh, yes, there are lots of them,” I had written my family in California when they inquired about them. “I have to take my gun wherever I go; you never know when you might meet a bear.”

  Though this reply always pleased the inquirers—and gave them, I think, a rather pleasurable thrill—it wasn’t quite true. I have tramped the length and breadth of my homestead—and other people’s homesteads—tracking the small black bear (Alaska’s most common bear) without ever seeing one. Either I don’t hunt at the right time of day or I don’t look in the right places. Neither have I the patience to lie on the edge of a damp muskeg for hours at a time waiting for a bear to come out and feed on blueberries.

  My neighbor, Red Freimuth, however, is noted for having shot one of the biggest black bears ever to be seen in the community. He has its skin hanging at one end of his cabin where it almost completely covers the log wall, and he is pointed out to strangers as the “Big Bear Hunter” in our part of the Kenai Peninsula.

  I remember the first blacky he shot. He came to my house late one afternoon and asked me for help in packing it out. “It’s not big, but it weighs a ton—at least 200 pounds,” he said. “I’ve hauled it on my back over a mile of juicy muskeg, and I’m fagged out. How about giving me a hand?”

  We walked two miles across the broken country to where the felled bear lay in the wet muskeg. Tying its legs together, we slung it on a pole and tried to carry it out that way. But that—though I’m sure we looked like a couple of Daniel Boones as we did it—turned out to be a bad idea: at every step we took the carcass swayed violently from side to side, causing us to stagger in every direction but forward. Giving it up at the approach of darkness, we dropped the bear to the ground and butchered it on the spot, cutting the meat into chunks we could carry and leaving the hide for another trip. The next night I ate my first bear steak and had to admit it was far from perfect. We canned up the remainder and only brought it out to impress dinner guests from civilization.

  Actually, bears should only be hunted for food in the fall, when the blueberries, which they love, are ripe enough to give a good flavor to the meat. Which reminds me of something an old sourdough told me early in my stay in Alaska: When you want to can up a year’s supply of blueberries (the sourdough said), all you do is follow a black bear who is stuffing himself with them. When he has eaten all he wants—and before the digestive process begins—you shoot him. Then you remove the berry-filled stomach and take it home, where you have all your pint jars ready....It saves you the trouble of doing all the berry-picking yourself, you see. And if there are a few stems mixed in with the berries in the jars—well, you can’t be too particular when the food is free. Besides, you not only have a year’s supply of berries; you’ve got a year’s supply of bear meat, too.

  There are grizzly bears in Alaska, but luckily they’re not as common as the blacky. I’ve heard of only one being killed in my area, and that was during my second fall in the Territory. Red Freimuth and the Keeler men had been hunting spruce chickens two miles up Stariski Creek. As they approached the creek at one of its narrowest bends they spotted two bears on the opposite bank at the same time as the bears spotted them. Immediately the bears came splashing across the stream in their direction, pausing only to stand up on their hind legs for a better look at genus homo.

  The party was armed with only 22’s, except for one of the Keeler boys, who had an old 30-30. As the bears came closer, everyone opened fire, shooting wildly in an effort to stop them or turn them aside. The air was thick with flying bullets from four guns, but the bears, thick-skinned and thick-skulled as they are, paid no attention: the bullets might have been gnats, for all the impression they made.

  They kept coming, and when they were only a few feet away from the terrified hunters, they circled around them as though by a prearranged plan to divide and conquer. The men whirled around, too, continuing to shoot wildly. Finally a lucky shot from the heaviest gun knocked one of the bears down. This intimidated the other bear, who ran off into the woods.

  Upon examination, the dead bear was found to be a grizzly bear cub, but it was as big as a fully-grown black bear. In its hide were several 22 bullets which had gone just so far and no further—stopped by the layer of fat which is the bear’s almost impregnable armor. And scattered around it on the ground were scores of ejected shells. “Geez,” said one of the Keeler boys, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “It sure takes a lot to kill a bear.”

  As a favored neighbor, I was given a piece of meat from that grizzly bear cub. I canned it up, but whenever I thought of tasting it there always seemed to be something better in the larder. A few months later I had a hunter guest to dinner and as a special treat served him a plate of grizzly bear stew. I learned later that he had been sick in bed for a week after visiting me. That must have been why he never returned to sample my hospitality again.

  Much has been written about the great Alaskan brown, or Kodiak bear, and at the firesides of homesteaders on the Kenai Peninsula on cold winter nights, much is said. They say he’s the largest and most ferocious carnivorous animal on the north American continent, standing nine feet tall—or higher—when erect. They say he lives almost entirely on salmon and moose calves, only feasting on berries in season. They say he’s a most unpredictable animal and very dangerous to hunt, though unlike the polar bear, who will stalk a man and run him down, he will attack only when frightened, cornered or defending cubs—but he seems to be in one of those positions most of the time.

  They say you’d better not leave your cabin door unlocked, because he’s been known to enter, investigate and leave complete havoc behind him. They say that when he’s wounded he’ll head directly for the hunter at a high rate of speed, and that only a man who’s a good shot and possesses an iron nerve can stop him with a rifle at a time like that.

  I don’t know: I never saw one. All I know is that whenever I see the footprints of a brown bear on my homestead—and they’re easy to recognize because they’re usually so big you couldn’t cover them with a homburg hat—I always retire to my house for a time and leave the countryside to him. After all, he was there first.

  And I’m not alone: very few of my friends will hunt a brown bear unless backed up by several guns. A good example of how wary Alaskans are about this species is the story of how the entire village of Ninilchik was once cornered by a trio of brownies. A sow and two big cubs strolled leisurely down the only road into town one day and held the river bridge for several hours against all traffic. The citizens cowered in their cabins until the bears were finally shot down by a well-armed posse.

  Many are the stories told of man versus enraged brown bear. I have talked with people who came through such an experience alive but not, I can tell you, in the same old shape. One of these was a farmer from Kenai. His little dog, who apparently hadn’t heard all the gruesome tales about brown bears, chased one of them one day. Then the bear turned around and cha
sed the dog, who hightailed it back to where the farmer and his wife were standing. The bear went for the woman and the man tried to head it off with a stick. The farmer ended up on the ground with the bear on top, and when the bear departed, it left the man where it had knocked him with several broken bones and considerable less skin. He considers himself very lucky to be alive.

  But there are worse stories than that. A homesteader I knew was hunting moose along the banks of the Kenai River. Suddenly he found himself in a small grassy clearing where two little brown bear cubs were tumbling in play. Knowing that the mother bear must be close by, he started to beat a hasty retreat. Just at that moment he was knocked to the ground by a single blow from a huge brown paw. The old sow bear played with him as a cat plays with a mouse, playfully breaking most of his ribs and mauling his face until one eye was gone and most of his scalp. Then she gathered her cubs around her and left him for dead.

  When he regained consciousness, the homesteader crawled painfully to where his gun was lying and managed to fire three shots—the distress signal of the woods—before passing out again. Several times, upon coming to for a moment, he repeated his call for help, and finally he was found and rushed to the hospital in Anchorage. Later on I heard that he had been flown to the States for special treatment and had died there.

  I was telling this story to a fellow worker on the construction job in Kenai. When. I got to the end, my listener said, “What do you mean he died? That’s him, right over there.” I looked, and sure enough: the man with a black patch over his eye, another fellow worker, was the hero of my story. Just goes to show you don’t know what to believe.

  One of the strangest bear stories I ever heard concerned a fight between a gigantic brownie and a D-6 caterpillar tractor. This battle occurred when the Alaska Road Commission was building that portion of the highway which lies between Moose Pass and Kenai. The cat was clearing some land in the Skilac Lake sector when this brown bear rushed out of the woods to challenge the trespasser. Charging the cat and growling as it came, it swung a mighty paw and dented the heavy metal as easily as a finger can put a dent in a felt hat. Then, seeing that the monster was being operated by a man, it tried to scramble into the driver’s seat. Rapidly manipulating his controls, the operator swung the machine around and knocked the bear to the ground. The bear got groggily to its feet, shook itself and continued the attack. For over an hour the fight went on, with the driver always managing to turn the cat around in time to put the blade of his vehicle between himself and the bruin. He even made several attempts to run over the bear with the powerful treads of the cat, but until the bear was exhausted, the cat was almost battered to a pulp and the driver himself was nearly a candidate for an insane asylum, he was unsuccessful. Only when the bear made a false step and was squashed as flat as a bear rug on the floor of a big game hunter’s room did the battle end. That section of the road is now known—to a few of the old homesteaders—as “Brown Bear Flats.”