Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  I was too tired to want to do anything but go to bed, but I took her out to dinner. We had to wait in line an hour before being served, and that didn’t please her too much. Nor did the food. That finished Anchorage for Mother, and we were able to return to the hotel and retire.

  The next day I picked up the jeep and we started back. Driving on the paved portion of the road wasn’t too bad, but when we hit the gravel it was like taking a ride in a concrete mixer. The truck jolted and reared until my mother was shrieking for mercy. To make her feel better, I stopped every few miles to let her rest and take pictures, hoping and praying that the pile of junk I had bought would hold together until we reached home.

  About ten miles from the homestead the truck stopped. The motor was still running, but that was all. The time was midnight and it was so dark I could hardly see Mother sitting beside me on the seat. With no flashlight, it would be impossible to determine the source of the trouble. “Wait here,” I said to Mother.

  Walking half a mile in a direction I knew well, I routed a friend out of his warm bed and borrowed a flashlight, a screwdriver and some baling wire. But back at the truck, with my head under the hood, I still couldn’t locate the trouble. “Well,” I said to Mother. “It looks—”

  “Gordon!” she said. “Here comes a car!”

  As lights approached, I stood in the middle of the road and flagged the car down. I had an idea. Mother, who was freezing in the truck, could get a ride with whoever it was. In a whispered consultation, I explained the plan to her.

  “Go with a strange man in the middle of the night?” she cried in a scandalized voice which I was sure the strange man could hear. “Oh, no, Gordon.”

  “But, Mother,” I pleaded. “I might be all night fixing the truck. In the meantime, the man can drop you off at the homestead and you’ll be home, at least. Please. The man won’t hurt you.”

  After much discussion she agreed, the man agreed, and off they drove. Pretty soon more lights showed. It was a jeep, and I flagged it down. “Let me look at your engine. Maybe I can find out what’s broken in mine,” I said to the driver.

  It didn’t take me long, after that, to find out that there was something missing in my gas feed. I fixed it with a piece of wire and hurried home. Mother was still up and very voluble. She spent the next several hours telling me about the nice man who had driven her home and what an adventure the whole experience had been.

  A few days later I went into Homer and down to the dock to pick up a load of groceries I had ordered from Seattle a month before (buying groceries in quantity that way was a big money-saver, though it did take time) and two drums of gasoline. Mother had wanted to go in with me—she was finding the quiet of the homestead irksome—but I had convinced her that with a big load and an unfamiliar truck it wouldn’t be safe. On the way home I stopped at the Keelers’ and picked up a surprise for her: a malemute puppy, a kitten and two bantam chickens. Mother was delighted with the kitten, tolerably interested in the dog and openly frightened of the bantams with their two-inch spurs. Promptly she named the kitten “Happy” and carried it into the house, barring entrance to the dog, whom I named “Attu,” and to the chickens, who became “Mom” and “Pop.”

  At four o’clock the next morning the rooster crowed—loudly and long—and the puppy joined in with typical malemute howls—which sound, I admit, a little like a wolf. I turned over in my bed, figuring that the noise would soon stop and that I could get back to sleep. But in her cot across the room Mother was wide awake. “How do you expect your poor old mother to sleep through a racket like that?” she said.

  “But, Mom,” I replied. “You live in a city where it’s much noisier than this at all hours of the day and night.”

  “Yes, but here it’s so quiet all the time that any noise at all awakens me. Please, son: can’t you do something about those animals?”

  From then on until my mother left the homestead I shut the puppy and the chickens in the garage each night in lidded boxes, and in the morning, after Mother was fully awake, I let them out. The kitten? Well, the kitten was allowed to sleep in the house: it didn’t make any noise, though it did use the back of my head as a claw-sharpening post every night.

  The Keelers had built a large addition to their house and were holding a square dance for the community in it every other Saturday night, providing “canned” music and plenty of fun for all comers. When Mother heard about the dances, she wanted to go to one: she loved to dance.

  “They’re pretty strenuous,” I told her. “They last all night. Do you think you can take it?”

  “Pooh!” she said, scornfully. “I can outdance anyone there!”

  And she could. She danced until midnight, ate her fill of the midnight supper brought by all the housewives of the area (bachelors were never asked to bring anything but their appetites), then danced some more. “My,” said Lorna Keeler, watching Mother weave in and out among the fifty or sixty dancers on the floor. “Your mother sure has a lot of pep.”

  “More’n I’ve got,” I answered, mopping my brow.

  By 3 o’clock in the morning, after twirling Mother through all the squares, I was so worn out that it was all I could do to hang onto the wheel of the truck during the two-mile drive home. “That was fun!” she said, as we entered the house. “Let’s be sure to go to the next one!”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said as I crawled painfully into bed.

  On the following day she was still full of zip. “Let’s go blueberry picking,” she suggested, gaily. “I’ve seen lots of them out there in the woods, and they look beautifully ripe.”

  A few minutes later, however, after falling down at almost every step in the thick moss carpet that serves for terrain on most of my land, and after picking only a handful of berries, she said, “Let’s go home.”

  I gave her a wicked look. “No,” I said. “Not until we fill all the pails. When we go dancing, we dance; when we go berry-picking, we pick.” At that point it started to rain, but we picked and picked—until, at least, she had filled a little half-gallon pail and I a four-gallon bucket.

  From the day she had arrived Mother had been kidding me about salmon. “Where are all those salmon you wrote me about?” she’d say. “I’m not going to leave Alaska until you catch one for me.”

  I explained to her that the king salmon run was over and the silver salmon run hadn’t begun yet. “I’ll catch you one in a few weeks, when the run begins,” I promised.

  “I certainly would like to have one now,” she said. “You’d better catch me one, or I’ll tell everyone at home that you’ve been telling fibs.”

  To keep Alaska’s fishing legend alive, I devoted a couple of hours each day to fishing fruitlessly at the mouth of the Anchor River. Maybe, I thought, I could catch the first salmon of the season—the advance guard of the run to come.

  The fish I finally caught was a little one—only eight pounds—and I hooked it in Stariski Creek. Carrying it triumphantly into the house, I dumped it into the sink. “Here’s your salmon,” I said to Mother. “Are you happy now?”

  She smile 1, looking at the fish. “You’ll have to clean it,” she said. “I don’t know anything about those things.”

  I ended up cleaning it, frying it and eating it. Mother had found out that she really didn’t like salmon, after all.

  One day Mother decided to give a dinner party. When I had taken her around to call on some of my friends they had usually invited us to dinner, and she felt obligated, she said, to return the favors. Her guest list included Mr. and Mrs. Vern Mutch and Ken Rickly, who was the postmaster at Anchor Point and a good pinochle friend.

  Shortly before the Mutches and Ken arrived, Mother asked me to put on a suit for the occasion. “But, Mother,” I protested. “No one gets dressed up for dinner in a homesteader’s cabin. Nobody wears a suit, up here. You saw how they dressed at the dance the other night.”

  “But you look so terrible in those jeans and that ragged blue work shirt.”

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sp; I went upstairs, found my tweed suit hanging up in the storeroom, found a shirt to go with it, found a tie. “There!” said Mother as I came downstairs. “Now you look civilized.”

  But the party was not a success. I was overdressed and embarrassed about it, Mother was overdressed and embarrassed because the coal cookstove had turned on her again. After the guests had gone, I explained to her that people do not judge other people by the clothes they wear in Alaska—but simply by what they do and accomplish. “I see,” she said in a small voice. But I don’t think she did.

  At the end of five weeks it was time for my mother to return to California. As we stood on the veranda of the Anchor Point store waiting for the bus that was to take her to Seward and a boat heading for the States, we had our last talk. “I think it’s fine, what you’ve achieved on your homestead,” said Mother. “But you’re wasting your life up here. You weren’t brought up for this kind of—of...well, I think you’d be much better off to come back to the city and get a good job. I hate to think of a son of mine living up here in this wild country, wearing dirty clothes, not taking a bath every day, not shaving or brushing his teeth regularly, becoming a sort of savage. Won’t you sell out and come back home?”

  “No, Mother,” I said rather vehemently. “I can never go back to that old life. I might go back for a visit now and then, but I could never live in a city again. I like Alaska. I like the feeling of independence I have up here. I wouldn’t trade it for anything!”

  The bus drove up and we kissed each other goodbye. Then I drove slowly back to the homestead, glad to have my freedom once again. But when I entered the house and saw some of the things Mother had discarded in her packing—pictures of California, pieces of clothing, a heel-less mule under the cot she had used for a bed—and a note she had tacked over the kitchen sink (“Gordon! A reminder! Comb your hair and brush your teeth!”), I felt suddenly lonely. Striding out and slamming the front door, I jumped back into my truck and drove down the road to the nearest bar. Mothers! You can’t live with them, but as soon as they’re gone you find you can’t live without them! What’s a poor homesteader to do?

  Chapter XXII—Pets and Livestock

  I LAID MY BOOK DOWN and chuckled. Then I roared. Watching Attu, the malemute puppy, and Happy, the kitten, as they tussled together on the living room rug was one of my favorite indoor sports—much more entertaining than reading the latest batch of pocket books brought by a neighbor in exchange for some of mine!

  Clumsy, fat Attu, not yet grown-up enough to be entirely sure of his footing but full of determination just the same, would stagger across the floor toward the twitching Happy whining in a brave, high-pitched tenor. The tiny black-and-white kitten would wait until he was almost upon her. Then she’d leap straight up into the air, land in back of Attu and skitter under the bed.

  “Where’d she go? Where’d she go? She was here just a minute ago,” Attu would seem to say as he whirled stupidly around, lost his balance and fell ungracefully on his head. Then, just as he had hauled himself to his feet with his forehead wrinkled as though in concentration on some new course of action, he would be knocked to the floor again by the flying kitten.

  With only a few variations, this game would continue until both dog and cat were exhausted and I was exhausted from laughing. At that point they would curl up on the rug for a nap together—Attu on the bottom and the kitten, lying outstretched across the puppy’s balloon-like stomach, rising and falling with his heavy breathing. What a pair!

  Life was not all play and fun, though: there was serious business to be done. When Happy and Attu were outdoors, they looked upon themselves as hunters, and they spent all their waking hours stalking the two bantam chickens. The chickens would be peacefully pecking the ground for stray bits of grain when suddenly Mom would look up, emit a frightened squawk and run pell-mell for the garage, with Pop, valiantly defending her rear, only a few steps behind. A stumbling, shuffling Attu would follow as far as the garage door, peer into the dark interior, change his mind about pursuing the chickens any further and stumble back into the sunlight to wait further developments. Happy, in the meantime, would have ceased her pre-springing twitching movements and turned her attention to a passing bee. But pretty soon the chickens would be back in the yard again, and the hunting party would start all over. The only thing that bothered me about the whole performance was the fear that the dog and cat might catch the chickens some day—and learn, to their chagrin, that bantams with two-inch spurs are well able to take care of themselves.

  When Keeler had given me the chickens he had told me, frankly, that he wanted to get rid of them. The hen, he said, laid very few eggs, and what eggs she did lay were impossible to collect because the rooster always put up a fight for them. Besides, they were both seven years old and too tough to eat. I took them because they were free, and because I thought they might amuse my mother, but the time very shortly came when I began to feel that I had gotten the worst of a very bad bargain. Although they weren’t expensive to feed, they filled my garage with feathers and covered my tools with droppings, and when the hen stopped laying entirely all I had left was the dubious luxury of a non-winding alarm clock. And even this grew tiresome—especially when daylight began at 3 o’clock in the morning during the period of the midnight sun.

  When I had first introduced Mom and Pop to their new home they had acted like a couple of displaced children. They had perched atop my slab pile through days of wet weather, their feathers dripping, their heads drooping, their eyes closed as though in pain. They looked as though they had lost their last friends—which they had, in the form of the Keelers’ 500 other chickens. And there was worse to come. One day I heard an excited barking and looked out the kitchen window just in time to see the two bantams flying down into the willow-covered creek bottom pursued by a neighbor’s dog. Calling the dog off and sending him home, I waited for the chickens to return. There was no movement in the creek bottom for quite awhile. After two hours, the rooster came trudging tiredly up the bluff, his head down, his feathers in complete disarray. He staggered to the top of the slab pile and started to crow—obviously to call the hen. But no hen appeared, and after crowing himself hoarse the rooster gave up. He was the most dejected chicken I have ever seen. He slumped down on the slab pile, and though I put out the choicest grain for him he ignored it, continuing to gaze forlornly down into the creek valley for some sign of his mate. It was almost dark and I was inside, cooking my dinner, when I heard the rooster crow. And there was a new note in his voice: a note of happiness. Rushing out the door, I beheld the hen staggering wearily up the bluff trail, and when the two chickens met in the yard there was a reunion scene I’ll never forget. With new bursts of energy, the two little birds jumped madly about, actually doing a dance of joy. I had wisely named them “Mom” and “Pop.”

  Life in Alaska can be dangerous for domestic animals. One day I was in my usual position by the barrel stove reading a good book and drinking endless cups of warmed-over coffee when I heard Attu whimpering in pain. The sound seemed to be coming from a long distance away. I dashed outside, but there was no sign of the dog in the yard. I rushed out to the garage. No Attu. I loped back to the house, listened again. Then it came to me: the pup was in the cellar.

  Grabbing a flashlight, I went outside and down through the outside entrance to the cellar, cursing myself for having left the door open that morning. I flashed the light around. Still no Attu. Then I heard the whimpering again. Moving over to the well, I saw that one of its covering boards was missing. I directed the light down the seventeen-foot hole. There, standing in a foot of ice-cold water, was Attu, gazing piteously up at me. Apparently he had been playing in the cellar, stepped on a loose board and plummeted, like a big, heavy rock, to the bottom. It took me only a few seconds to climb down the well, pick up the puppy—who was now wriggling with such excitement that I could hardly hold him—throw him over my shoulder and climb out. He wasn’t hurt: only scared out of the few wits he had. Befo
re I rubbed him down I made the well cover so safe that even a shrew couldn’t have fallen in.

  A few days later I leaned my salmon pole up against the house and went inside to clean my morning’s catch of silvers. Just as I applied my knife to the second fish I heard a series of frightened yelps from Attu. Dropping everything, I rushed outside. Attu, on his belly, was crawling across the yard with the big treble hook I used on salmon affixed to his mouth and the fishing pole trailing behind. Catching him, I broke the line and carried him into the house. No fish had ever been hooked so completely. Two of the hooks were caught in the roof of the poor puppy’s mouth, and the third protruded from his lower lip. He was so trussed up that he could neither open nor close his jaws.

  Rolling him in a blanket to keep him from kicking me while I operated, I took him out to the garage, where I looked for something with which to cut the hooks. The big tin shears I found were clumsy and not too sharp, but I stuck them into the puppy’s mouth and tried to cut off the bottom hook. Each time I put the pressure on, Attu gave a yelp and tried to wriggle out of the blanket, jamming me forcefully in the stomach and addling my aim with every kick. It was awful. Finally, though, I made a lucky snip, and off went the hook. Then, with a pair of pliers, I pulled what was left through the lip and removed the other two hooks from the roof of the mouth. Released, Attu gamboled happily around the yard as though nothing had happened. As for me, I stumbled into the house and collapsed on the bed. After that I was careful to put all fishing gear out of the reach of curious animals.

  Cats, in general, seem to stay out of trouble more than dogs. Whether it’s because they develop faster, or whether the predatory animal in their makeup makes them less clumsy and more cautious I don’t know. At any rate, while Attu was courting disaster at every turn, Happy was spending her time keeping herself immaculate, learning to catch mice and looking more and more like the self-sufficient little animal she would eventually become. But there came a day: