Yes, there are stories and stories. I wish I could tell one of my own, but I can’t: the closest I ever got to a live bear in Alaska was when I just missed hitting a black cub with my car on the highway.
When it comes right down to it, what the homesteader is most interested in is small game. Leaving the bears, the moose (except when he’s very hungry for fresh meat), the caribou, the wild sheep and the wild goats—all the record heads and record horns—to the stateside hunter who comes up, shoots his limit and goes home again, he concentrates on snowshoe rabbits, spruce chickens, ptarmigan, ducks and geese: food for his larder.
The snowshoe rabbit is an animal on which, because he’s considered a rodent, there’s no limit, and the law says you can kill one any time and welcome. He’s easy to shoot, too: in the fall he turns white, and before the first snowfall he makes a perfect target for the hunter with a 22.
I’ll never forget my first experience with snowshoes. Red Freimuth and I went up to a burned-off area near Skilac Lake where the thousands of fallen trees would have offered good cover for the rabbits if they hadn’t been so white. After two hours of steady shooting, we had piled up 48 unwary snowshoes weighing from three to five pounds. Another time the Keelers, Red and I hunted around Kasilof Flats, a settlement between Kenai and Homer, and bagged 55. Two days later some of our other neighbors, hearing of our success, hunted on the same spot and killed 104. It sounds like wholesale slaughter, I know. But none of the rabbits was wasted. Some were eaten fresh (fried, of course), some were canned, and many more were taken into the cold locker in Homer and frozen for winter eating. And they made a welcome addition to the usual diet of clams and fish.
Duck and goose hunting is excellent during the fall, when, at the mouth of Stariski Creek, the sloughs and tide flats stop many a bird on its way south. Not owning a shotgun, I never did much of this kind of hunting, but my neighbors all spent morning after morning lying in the tall marsh grass waiting to shoot their limits. They were handicapped, however, by the lack of dogs with which to retrieve the birds they shot: they all owned malamutes, and malamutes, who hate swimming in cold, freezing water and would be apt to tear the birds to bits before returning to their masters, aren’t much good as retrievers. Red Freimuth owned the only bird-retrieving dog in the area—a small dog of the water spaniel type—and the two of them would be invited to come along on every duck-hunting expedition.
Grouse-hunting—spruce hens in the fall, ptarmigan in the winter—is more my meat. Spruce chickens are easy game. Sometimes called “fool hens” because they can be approached with ease and knocked out of a tree with a stick if no other weapon is handy, they remind me of Al Capp’s famous “schmoos,” who were only too happy to be killed and eaten—who would, in fact, die of joy at the very thought of becoming somebody’s dinner. Like the schmoos, spruce chickens are so unwary that a homesteader can decide in advance how many he needs, get up in the early morning, drive up and down the highway until he spots a flock of them pecking at gravel and fire away until his predetermined quota is bagged.
One morning when I was still living in my first shack by the highway, I awoke to a fusillade of shots. Looking out the window, I saw three men pointing 22 rifles at my cabin. I sprang through the door with my rifle cocked, ready to fight back. Then I realized that the men were aiming at my roof—not at me—and in a second a dead spruce chicken fell at my feet. Glancing up, I saw an entire flock of them roosting on the eaves. I pointed my rifle, emptied it of bullets, picked up half a dozen bundles of feathers and re-entered the house. The three men drove off without a word. As for me, I counted my loot, muttering, “Nobody’s gonna shoot my spruce chickens but me.”
The Kenai Peninsula ptarmigan are strictly winter hunting birds. They spend the summer months in the Caribous, a range of low hills running from Homer up past Kasilof; but in the winter, when the snow up there gets so deep that it covers all their usual food, they come down to the homestead country to feed on willow buds. White as snow except for two black tail feathers, they blend in so successfully with their surroundings that they’re hard to see and hunt, and they have an extra advantage in being able to fly great distances when frightened. I have hiked many weary miles after the elusive birds, only to return dead tired and empty-handed. I didn’t mind the dead-tired part—I only hunted ptarmigan when I needed some exercise after sitting in the house too long—but the empty-handed aspect always bothered me. The biggest flock I have ever seen numbered twelve, and that time I was lucky: I bagged eight before they took wing.
During my second winter in Alaska I decided to try a little trapping. I had been told that the Kenai Peninsula had been “almost trapped out” several years before my arrival, but that didn’t make any difference to me. I wasn’t after pelts, anyway: I was after coyotes, on which there was a thirty dollar bounty.
I had a small setback when I learned that it took three years of continuous living in Alaska to become eligible for a resident’s trapping license for the price of a dollar. I solved that problem by paying $50 for a non-resident’s license, figuring that after nabbing two coyotes I would be money ahead. After that I was too stingy to buy myself some traps and borrowed five of them instead.
I started out with high hopes. There were so many coyotes in the area—I could hear them yipping every night and had seen many of them on my land—that I thought it would be easy to trap a great many of them before the winter was over. For this reason I didn’t bother to read a book on the art of trapping, or to ask any questions of my friends. I found the partly-devoured body of a moose in a muskeg some distance across the creek from my house and set my traps around it. Every couple of days I inspected the traps, but there was never anything in them. I moved three of the traps to other locations with the same results. All winter long I worked at it, always hoping, never giving up. Then the spring thaw broke, and it became impossible for me to reach my trap line across the raging river the creek had become. After a week I was able to visit the sets at the moose carcass and found one trap gone and the other sprung. The other three traps, which I had set in various game trails and covered with snow, were now on bare ground in plain sight of any animal who wanted to step around them and continue on its way. At that point I gave up my dream of coyote bounties and turned to saner pursuits.
At hunting coyotes with a rifle I was no more successful than at trapping, my greatest failure occurring on a moose-hunting trip. As I started to cross a big muskeg I came face to face with a coyote pup. He was sitting on the game trail not fifty feet away and watching me with calm but wary yellow eyes. Carefully pointing my rifle at his head, I pulled the trigger. The pup took, off like a rabbit—strange behavior for an animal who should have been stretched on the grass, dead. Another time I shot at a three-legged coyote standing on the highway beside my mailbox, but he was “one of those that got away,” too. I came to be known among my neighbors as the coyotes’ greatest friend and protector.
The two Keeler boys were the most experienced trappers in my vicinity. During the winter when I was making my feeble attempts at coyote-trapping, they started practically at my back door and set their assorted traps and snares for miles up the creek. If I remember correctly, their take was two coyotes, one otter, one beaver, one mink, two mink toes, four otter toes and several ermine. I’ll never forget the day they clumped down into my cellar where I was working and proudly placed a beautiful black mink in my hand. While stroking the fine hair, I suddenly realized that the animal’s heart was still beating. Visions of an enraged mink snarling and gnashing its sharp, wicked teeth in the confines of my small cellar while the three of us battled our way up through the trap door to the kitchen caused me to say, somewhat shakily, “Take this thing out of here—quick. It isn’t dead yet.” The two boys rushed outside and dispatched the mink completely, but for the rest of the day I was unable to work in the cellar: my imagination is too vivid; and besides, there was a heavy odor of musk remaining that I found particularly unpleasant.
Just as fe
rocious as minks are weasels. There’s a saying in Alaska that if weasels were the size of dogs all the people would have to move out. I had an experience with one once that convinced me of the truth of that statement. I had shot one with my 22—at such close quarters that he should have died right away. But he didn’t. Instead he came swarming up the barrel of my gun after me, and he looked so mad—and so formidable—that I dropped the gun and ran.
In the winter, the Alaskan weasel turns white and becomes an ermine. Before I had finished putting the roof on my second house, one of them moved into my cellar and settled down to stay. When I mentioned his presence to a neighbor I was told that I was very lucky to have an ermine as a house guest: he would keep my cellar free of mice. That was fine, but every time I went down to the cellar to collect some canned meat the little mouse-killer would stand over the can I had selected and, with vicious, clicking teeth, dare me to take it away from him. I usually ended up by going back upstairs and cooking up a pot of dried beans I had stored there. When he moved out—as he eventually did—I decided that I much preferred the mice; at least they ran away when I approached.
From the huge brown bear to the tiny mouse is quite a slide down the animal kingdom, but there’s an Alaskan native who is even smaller than the mouse: the shrew. For appetite, this little rodent can beat the biggest and the strongest: it has such a terrific digestive system that it must have food in its stomach at all times or it’s apt to digest itself. Once I set a mouse and shrew trap in my cellar by digging a hole in the ground and placing a five-gallon can in it with the top level with the ground. Three days later when I inspected the trap I found one live shrew and ten shrew tails.
With a cannibal like that at large, who’s afraid of the big bad bear?
Chapter XVI—Without a Wife
ALASKA, land of snow-capped mountains, beautiful green lakes, rushing rivers, endless forests. Alaska, land of scenery galore. I was sick of it. The scenery I yearned for was of a different sort. What I wanted to see was a pretty young wife standing by the back door to call me in from the greenhouse for dinner. What I wanted to take a picture of was that pretty young wife stirring up a pot of moose stew at the kitchen stove, or making some little feminine adjustment to the curtains, or bringing me my pipe and slippers as I relaxed after a hard day’s work. Such scenery would have pleased me more than the sight of a 40-pound salmon at the end of my line or the discovery of a gold mine in my cellar. Such scenery—and I would have given up pinochle for life!
There I sat beside my barrel stove, starting my third winter in Alaska as a bachelor among bachelors, with all my work done for the year and nothing to think about but the things a man will think about when he is cut off from all contact with the opposite sex—or at least from girls of marriageable age. What good did it do to own a fairly good house and a greenhouse almost ready to be put into operation without a wife to share them with?
Staring moodily out over the cold, snowy landscape of my 120-acre domain, I continued my gloomy daydreaming. And I considered my situation: the situation facing every bachelor homesteader on the last frontier....
*****
The bachelor homesteader’s lot (I decided) is a hopeless one. In a land where unmarried women are almost as scarce as snakes—and there are no snakes in Alaska—(I laughed, bitterly, at my own feeble joke) what’s he to do to prevent himself from turning into an embittered old man with housemaid’s knee, dishpan hands and a stomach ruined by his own cooking?
Well, there are six possible courses open to him, and none of them could be considered ideal: he may take a 126 child bride; he may become a squaw-man; he may order a wife through the mail; he may take a prolonged trip to the States in search of a wife; he may shoot one of his married neighbors and take over the widow; or—as a last resort—he can shoot himself.
Child brides are a dime a dozen, if that’s what he wants. But who wants one? If he picks out a homesteader daughter in pigtails as a likely prospect for the future and has the patience to wait the six years or more it takes before she’s old enough to assume even the simplest responsibilities of marriage, he’s likely to find out that his intended has grown up to be taller than he: they seem to grow them big, in Alaska. Besides, marrying a child of sixteen or so would have too many drawbacks. The homesteader bachelor is an independent animal. He knows how to cook, clean house, wash clothes, bake bread—everything a wife should know. Teaching a child bride the fundamentals of housekeeping would consume too many wearisome hours—and she might make the mistake of poisoning him in the process of learning to cook. And this isn’t hard to do because usually, when a girl reaches sixteen, she’s grabbed off by a young male of her own age and carried—off in a manner of speaking—to the hills; the “older” bachelor just hasn’t got a chance.
Becoming a squaw-man isn’t hard. It’s easy enough to lure a squaw to your lair with “squaw candy,” that Alaska confection made of smoked salmon hardened to a point of chewiness which Indian girls love so well. Sometimes it’s almost too easy. I’ll never forget the story about the homesteader who was drinking at a bar in Kenai when he became conscious of the head of a squaw resting heavily on his left shoulder. She was sniffing at the squaw candy in the left breast pocket of his jacket. The homesteader didn’t like her looks—she was old and fat—so he pushed her away. But she kept coming back, hard on the scent. Suddenly everybody began hitting everybody else, and when the homesteader emerged from the fray, his knuckles and nose bleeding and both his eyes blacked, he knew what had caused the fight: that squaw had been somebody else’s squaw.
No, acquiring a squaw isn’t difficult, and keeping one, when it comes right down to it, wouldn’t be too bad. Usually part Russian and often good looking, the native girls make good wives for homesteaders. They were born in the country and brought up in the wilderness way of life, and they have been well trained in all the home arts. And there’s a big point in their favor: not knowing anything better, they aren’t always wanting to run off to the States to cities or yearning for the luxuries and comforts that cities provide. They’re content, as no white girl from “outside” would be, with the homesteader’s primitive lot.
And Indian girls are not averse to helping their husbands with their outside chores. There’s Joe, for instance. He had the good fortune to marry a native girl who, besides being one of the best bakers in the area, turned out to be handy at peeling trap poles, cutting down trees and packing in meat on a packboard. In the social circles she’s a whiz at dancing, and all in all she has the stamina of a young horse. True, she giggles all the time—all the native girls do—but to me she seems a thoroughly jolly, well-adjusted person—a perfect wife for Joe.
But not for me. A native wife might be fine in Alaska, but if I ever took her to the States for a visit, all sorts of complications would arise—complications that would be embarrassing to her. No, marrying a native girl would mean that I would have to resign myself to a never-ending life on the homestead. And then there’s the question of children: native women believe in large families—sixteen or more. Children are Alaska’s biggest crop. A man would have to work awfully hard to support a family like that. Take Carl. He’s a college graduate, and he hoped to find some time to do some writing until he took on the responsibility of a native wife—a widow—and her five children, all in one fell swoop. She’s an attractive woman and I don’t blame him in the least, but now he has six children and there’s probably another on the way. Oh, well. He runs a farm and will need lots of help in the future, no doubt.
As for sending “outside” for a mail-order bride—uh-uh. For one thing, my experience as Henry Gubbins in that great Alaskan epic, “Henry Gubbins’ Mail Order Wife,” is still too fresh in my memory. Second, I hate surprises. Third, when I receive a package of goods from Montgomery Ward’s and I’m not satisfied with it, I can always send it back. Not so with a mail-order bride: when you’ve got her, you’ve got her. And of all the men I’ve known who have sent away for brides, only a small percentage of
them have expressed themselves as “completely satisfied with the merchandise.”
John’s an exception—or so he says. He went so far as to order a bride from Germany, sight unseen. He got the fräulein’s address from his brother, who had spent some time in Germany after the war, and he had corresponded with her for several years, he writing in English, she in German, and somebody doing the translating at both ends. Finally he became so desperate for a wife to share his lonely homestead with him that he sent her the amount of her fare to Alaska and obtained permission, after much entanglement in red tape, to bring her into the country. It cost him around $600 to get her from Germany to New York by boat and from there to Anchorage by plane. It took his last dime, in fact, and when she arrived, though she was no great beauty, there was nothing to do but marry the girl. They made an odd-looking pair: John’s a great big guy and she was only about half his size. Nevertheless the groom was heard to brag, not long after the nuptials, that on the first morning at the homestead, when he had gone outside to chop some firewood, she had followed him, taken the axe away from him and pointed out, in sign language, that that was “woman’s work.”
Gordon Stoddard Page 13
