I was working out in the cauliflower patch, cutting the over-ripe heads down so that they would rot more quickly. The kitten had accompanied me to the field and was having a fine time stalking me from cauliflower to cauliflower. I didn’t pay much attention to her: I was working steadily, swinging my butcher knife from right to left in measured rhythm. Suddenly, as I took a mighty swing at an unusually big head, I saw another head—a little, furry head—peering out at me from between the leaves. It was too late to arrest the force of my arm. The cat leaped high into the air, then landed and shot down the rows, her life’s blood spurting in all directions.
I was petrified. What had I done? And what should I now do—now that I had almost murdered a trusting pet? I ran into the house and grabbed my loaded 22 rifle. At least I could put the poor little cat out of its misery.
I found Happy sitting on the edge of the bluff. Her head still seemed to be intact, but when she shook it, the blood spattered the ground around her. I put the rifle to my shoulder and took a bead on her. Then I lowered the gun. I couldn’t do it. Even if she was suffering, I couldn’t do it. And maybe...
Apparently unaware of the imminence of death, Happy had begun to apply her tongue to her coat. Where had I heard that when a sick cat begins to wash it can be considered on its way to recovery? An old wives’ tale, maybe. But then there was that one about a sick cat’s eating. When a cat eats, they said, it can’t be very badly off. I made a resolution: “If Happy eats,” I told myself, “I won’t shoot her. I’ll wait and see what happens.”
Returning to the house, I filled a bowl with canned milk. When I placed it before the kitten, she gave me a dirty look. “I know,” I said. ‘I’m a dirty, stinking murderer. But do you want some milk?”
She lowered her little half-severed head to the bowl and began to lap. When she had licked the bowl clean, I carried her into the house, wrapped a clean cloth around her neck, and padded a box with a sweater of mine which she had always seemed to like. For the next two weeks her every mew was my command. And in that period, she washed the two-inch wound in her neck and shoulder until it was completely closed, and very soon hair began to cover the scar. Cats are amazing creatures.
As Attu grew he gained in appetite. I had bought a 100-pound sack of mink and fox food and was feeding it to both the dog and chickens: it was much cheaper than regular dog food and just as cheap as the grain the chickens liked. But Attu wasn’t satisfied with his rations. After he had wolfed his own meal, stolen the cat’s dinner and rifled the garbage can, he would head for the garage to see what the chickens had left. Day after day I would see the chickens flying out of the garage to leave Attu in complete possession, and I wondered, as I watched, just how long it would be before the worm started turning.
One day Attu disappeared into the garage as usual, only to erupt a second later howling in terror. Riding like a bronco buster on his back was Mom, her beak affixed to the back of his neck and her two-inch spurs driving through his fur toward his flesh. Behind came Pop, flying through the air and aiming his spurs at the enemy’s rear. I never saw a dog run so fast. Putting on an immense surge of speed, he dived down into the cellar, and his persecutors, almost visibly dusting off their hands in triumph, strutted back to their unfinished dinner.
The puppy cowered in the cellar for the rest of the day, refusing to come out until dark. And ever after that, when he stuck his inquisitive head into the garage, a single indignant squawk would send him—yipping, scrambling, tail between legs—to the cellar. Not only that: the bantams became so brave as a result of their vanquishment of a dog that they seemed to feel that even a man wasn’t too big for them to tackle, and I had a hard time getting my tools from the garage from then on.
Attu’s growth was something Happy never learned to accept. When they had been a puppy and kitten together, just a few weeks before, she had always been able to knock him down with one of her flying tackles. But as he became bigger and heavier and steadier on his feet, she would charge and charge and nothing would happen. It was like throwing herself against a stone wall, and every time she picked herself up and prepared to try again, there was a look of puzzlement on her face.
That was one of the new games that filled my evenings with entertainment. The other was played when Attu, with a huge, capacious maw full of sharp, curved teeth, would pick the kitten up, drop her at my command, pick her up again. “What’s going on here?” Happy would seem to say—but she would always come back for more.
I chuckled, I laughed, I roared. It’s good for a man to have pets, on a homestead.
Chapter XXIII—The Season’s Work
It WAS EARLY AUGUST. The garden looked good. Standing in their neat, cultivated rows, the cabbages were green and plump. The white cauliflower heads were fairly bursting from their coverings of leaves. The potatoes were in full bloom, their white blossoms tossing in the breeze and forecasting a good crop. The carrot tops were thick and sturdy, and underneath them, the carrots themselves bulged impatiently through the soil. The broccoli had sent out new flower shoots and would have to be cut again and taken to market.
In the greenhouse, too, there was abundance. The cucumbers and squash were ripe and the tomatoes were losing the last of the green on their skins.
Yes, I had a good crop: all I had to do now was turn it into profit. And this, I had found out, was more easily said than done. My greenhouse produce, without any competition to speak of, would always have a ready sale, the demand still far exceeding the supply. But the truck garden vegetables? Well, they were a different matter. My closest market was the town of Homer, my main customer the one grocery store out of four which specialized in fresh vegetables. But the vegetables this store bought from me were hardly enough to pay for the gasoline it took to take them into town. The other stores in Homer either imported their vegetables from the States by boat or plane or didn’t handle them at all. The restaurants dealt, mainly, with regular suppliers in Anchorage. I had realized that I would have to seek other markets or go broke.
For awhile I had sold to a store in Ninilchik. Then I had made the rounds of the stores in Kenai—but with little success. I had thought of contacting the “city” markets in Seward and Anchorage but had discarded the thought as quickly as it had come: there was the transportation problem, and the fact that I couldn’t leave the greenhouse long enough to call on the markets there. I had thought of the Army bases with their thousands of soldiers to feed, but I knew that that was out, too: I was too small an operator to supply them regularly in the quantities they would require.
I sat down and mulled the matter over. Truck farming, without a market—and what had ever made me think there would be one, in this land of scattered homesteads and sparsely-settled communities?—was plainly a losing proposition. At least now it was. But what if I stored some of my vegetables during the winter and sold them in Homer and Ninilchik when no one else could supply them—and when I could ask a higher price?
Yes, that was it: storage. Proper storage. By rough estimate, I figured that I would have three tons of cabbage, two tons of potatoes and half a ton of carrots to store. The cellar of my house would take care of the potatoes, but the cabbages would require a much bigger place. I had heard of a thing called a root cellar...
Driving into Homer, I went in to the Farm Extension office and asked for a government pamphlet on building a root cellar. They had one, and they gave it to me.
In America’s pioneer days, I suppose the farmers used shovels and the muscles of their arms and backs for the kind of job I had to do. I was luckier: I could hire a caterpillar tractor to dig me a deep pit. When that was done, and when I had figured that my root cellar would be 30 feet long and 14 feet wide, I peeled 35 six-inch spruce poles, set them upright in five-foot rows 3½, feet apart and imbedded them in a gravel base at the bottom of the pit.
My next job was to get some planks with which to make the walls and roof. With my jeep truck I hauled some 200 of the saw logs from my extra acre clearing to the Kee
lers’ sawmill, where I had quite a few of them cut into two-inch planks. I used 6″x6″ timbers on my upright poles to hold up the roof, and when I had finished nailing the planks to them I had a very solid and substantial building, strong enough to bear the three feet of dirt that would cover it and keep its contents from freezing. The roof I finished off with a layer of 90-pound roofing paper; I would need a good roof, one that would neither leak nor rot. But I would need ventilation, too: I cut two holes in the roof and stuck lengths of stovepipe through them.
When I had built an entranceway with two doors and had had the Keelers, with their tractor, cover the roof with dirt, I stood back to examine my handiwork. My root cellar was a structure six feet high in the middle and five feet high at the sides—big enough to stand up in and large enough to store all the vegetables I might harvest. I was all set.
It was fair time in Alaska, and all the little towns on the Kenai Peninsula were sprucing themselves up for the yearly occasion. I selected the little fishing and homesteading village of Ninilchik, which had been a Russian penal colony in the days of the czar, as the best place in which to show off my garden products. It was the closest to my homestead; and besides, the fair officials had invited me to enter. “Bring as much as you like,” they had said. “We need plenty of entries.”
On the opening day of the three-day fair—the day of judging—I unloaded my truck at the schoolhouse where the event was to be held. I placed three cabbages—in reality big ones which I had peeled down to a manageable size—on a table beside several gigantic cabbages weighing 30 and 40 pounds apiece. Seeing the other heads, I changed my mind and started to snatch my puny entries away. But I was too late. Before I could go into action, an attendant had asked me my name and given me my exhibitor’s number: my cabbages were there to stay.
I wandered over to another table and dumped the rest of my vegetables. Sizing up the competition, I decided that my only chance to win lay in my cucumbers and tomatoes, since hardly anyone else—mine was the only homesteader greenhouse for miles around—would be entering anything like them.
I went back to the truck and got out a box of canned goods I had brought along, placed them on a table labeled “Home Canning Displays.” I didn’t have much hope for my assortment of jars, though. How could I compete with the woman canners of the district?
That afternoon, when I was told that the judges had awarded all the ribbons they were going to award, I entered the produce display room with a trembling heart. Surely I had received at least one ribbon—one ribbon, for all the entries I had made. I saw my cabbages first. On one lay a first prize ribbon. On another, a second prize ribbon. On the third, a third prize ribbon. Boy! My cabbages had beat out all the 40-pounders!
I moved over to the tomato table. Here I was in for a shock: my entries had received only a second and a third prize ribbon. The blue ribbon had been awarded to a native woman who had raised one tomato plant in a sunny window in her house. I had spent hundreds of dollars building an expensive greenhouse, hundreds of hours of labor. I had fertilized my plants with the best fertilizer and chosen my tomato entries from thousands of beautiful examples—only to be beaten by one little plant with half a dozen tomatoes on it, a plant grown in a dishpan in a window, Phooey!
But my disappointment was assuaged somewhat when I looked at my canned clams, salmon, vegetables and berries. On half of my jars lay ribbons of various colors—blue, red and white. I had won out over a bevy of homesteader wives who had spent weeks in the preparation of their exhibits. Won, with a few jars I had canned up in a hurry!
Loaded down with my many ribbons and cash from vegetables I had sold on the spot, plus a few prizes I had won in games of chance at the fair, I drove proudly back to the homestead. The Stoddard honor was intact. And maybe next year I would win ALL the prizes!
With still a month to go before I would have to put my crops into storage, Ï decided to start another building project. When I had borrowed money from the bank, I had set aside some of it to use for building a cabin for sale at some future date. I had even figured on dividing up the ten acres of woodland up the creek from the clearing into four pieces and building a cabin on each lot. But that would have to come later: now I would concentrate on just one cabin—the model for the rest.
The site I had selected—a piece of the ground on the bluff point which had been cleared by a cat just before my mother’s arrival—commanded a wonderful view of Stariski Creek, almost better than that from my home. And the road leading to it—made by the cat at the same time—would facilitate the transportation of materials. I plunged cheerfully into my task.
After drawing up plans for a cabin 16 by 20 feet, I gave Mr. Keeler a list of the dimensions I required, and within a few days he had cut all the lumber I would need (from the saw logs left over from the root cellar project) and I had hauled it to the site.
To form my foundations, I buried wooden pilings four feet deep, setting them on solid gravel and surrounding them with gravel on all sides so as to prevent them from being forced up out of the ground during the winter freeze-up. There were twelve of these pilings altogether: four along each length of the cabin and four through the middle.
Next came the plate and the floor joists, which ran crossways. Then I was ready to lay my first round of eight-inch house logs. This cabin would differ from my house in that I would only lay the logs horizontally up to window level, making the top half of the cabin of frame—boards nailed on 2×4’s. It would be what was called a “half and half” cabin. In discussing building problems with my neighbors, I had learned that “half and half” cabins were much easier to build when you were using green wood—which I always did—since you didn’t have to allow for log shrinkage over the windows as you did with a “whole log” cabin. True, each of the logs beneath the windows would shrink a quarter of an inch or more in thickness as it settled, but the 2×4’s on the upper frame wouldn’t shrink in length and the window frames could be nailed in permanently at the outset. My big house had given, me lots of window trouble and I wasn’t anxious to go through it again.
The frame walls went up in a hurry and I was soon working on the roof and ceiling joists. When I had covered the roof with boards and completed the walls I began putting the windows in. And there were lots of windows: almost the entire south wall (facing the creek) was solid with them, there was a window on the east end which actually opened—an oddity in Alaska, where windows are for light and seeing through, not for ventilation or for letting in the icy winter blasts—and there was a window in the front door.
For the floor I had had some of my best boards planed and sized, and, being almost identical as they were, they were fairly easy to lay. The roof I covered with the usual 90-pound roofing tarpaper, leaving a hole for a tin smokestack.
To finish up the exterior of the cabin and to make it as good-looking as possible, I nailed on hundreds of vertical peeled, edged slabs, cutting each one separately to make it fit between the top layer of logs and the gables. Then I applied a generous amount of linseed oil to the whole to protect the wood from the weather and give it a glossy mahogany color. Finally I painted the window frames.
Next job: the interior. I covered the walls and ceiling with sheets of celotex—expensive material in Alaska but a lot cheaper than plywood, which I would have preferred to use. I crossed the ceiling with imitation beams made from peeled, varnished slabs. I made mop board and other molding for around the windows from planed spruce, nailed it down and varnished it. Then, as an added feature (this house was getting to be too fancy!)
I made a sink with drawers underneath and cupboards above. Finally, I moved in a little airtight Montgomery Ward wood stove. The cabin was done: all it lacked was furniture. Furniture, and a buyer.
The project had taken me a month and cost me close to $700, and the result, to my way of thinking, was a perfect little Alaskan wilderness cabin. Set on the bluff in a patch of birch and spruce as it was with its ideal view—from the south windows you could look d
own the creek for half a mile—it had many features which could be considered unusual in a country where the main thing was to get a roof over your head. I liked it so much that I was almost tempted to move into it myself. No, my big house had all the conveniences. But one thing I knew: anyone who wanted to buy my new cabin would have to pay a fairly large price—a price that I would figure out later.
Stariski Creek from the kitchen window of the homestead. It furnishes plenty of backyard fishing for this lucky Alaska homesteader.
By this time the first frosts of the season had made their appearance, and the ground had begun to freeze an inch each night, thawing out in the heat of the day. The first hard frost had done my cabbages no harm—they were cracking and splitting, but only because they had grown so fast—but it had killed my potato vines, which lay back black and dead on the ground. It was time to harvest my crops.
I made a series of bins in the root cellar out of six-inch boards and left an air space on each side and underneath. Then, after cutting the cabbages and carting them from the fields in the truck, I used a washtub as a carrier and threw load after load of the firm heads down into the bins. Finally I had the last cabbage under cover.
The potatoes were next. Using a hay fork for digging, I laboriously worked down the long rows, lifting the spuds clear of the dirt and letting them lie awhile in the air to dry off before putting them into gunny sacks. Then, loading the sacks into the truck, I took them down into my house cellar and dumped them into two bins I had built in a hurry. When I was finished I had two huge piles—enough to last me through the winter and enough, besides, to sell. Later on I would sort them, keeping the smallest for my own use.
My next step was to build some shelves in the house cellar to hold all the quart jars of vegetables I had canned up during the summer—broccoli, cauliflower and Swiss chard which I had been unable to sell. When potatoes and jars were all in place, the cellar was so crammed from top to bottom that I felt like a squirrel surveying his winter hoard of nuts.
Gordon Stoddard Page 19
