Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  The Eve arrived, cold and clear. The house was ablaze with lights, and in the living room there was the usual spruce Christmas tree with its usual trimming of cotton and soap chips. Everything looked pretty festive.

  First to show up were Rickly and Tony, with Rickly carrying a basket of food and Tony clinking two bottles together over his head. Then came Red Freimuth, bearing two pies and a case of beer. Finally arrived Chuck Randall, a one-armed veteran who had a place on the beach, with his contribution of beer and beans. The party was complete.

  Art and I were ready for our guests. The kitchen table was piled high with food, with a turkey occupying the seat of honor. I buried the beer in a snow bank by the front door and broke off a three-foot icicle from the eave of the roof for highballs. The festivities could begin.

  Tony had brought along the makings of a Christmas punch, the rather alarming recipe calling for adding two baked oranges with cloves to a quart of flaming brandy, the fire to be put out with a gallon of burgundy wine. We couldn’t seem to get the cookstove hot enough to bake the oranges, so we abandoned that plan entirely, simply mixing all the ingredients together and bringing them to a boil on the Coleman stove.

  As host, I was awarded first chance at the punch. “Just wait until you taste this, Gordon,” said Tony, smacking his lips as he proudly handed me a cup. I lifted the cup carefully to my mouth, took a small sip, and dislocated my jaw. The mixture was bitter and the fumes were as deadly as a dangerous poison gas.

  “Whatsa matter, Gordon?” asked someone.

  “I dislocated ma jaw,” I answered, pointing to my distorted face.

  I made another unintelligible remark. Finally the guests caught on, and there was a rush toward the steaming bowl. “Boy, what a powerful punch! Guy takes a sip and dislocates his jaw! Lemme at it!” they yelled.

  During the rest of the evening I was unable to talk, but I managed to drink enough of the lethal mixture to deaden the pain in my jaw. When the first pot of punch was gone, we mixed up another, using Spanish brandy and port wine this time. This tasted much better, but by the time we got to it nobody cared.

  Art, being the oldest bachelor there, beat the rest of us to immobility. He had spent the evening sitting on the floor with several half-full beer cans arranged in a semicircle around him. In one hand was a highball, in the other a cup of punch, and he had developed quite a talent for mixing his drinks. Presently he stood up, bent on restocking his supply. Staggering toward the punch bowl, he stumbled, fell, knocking himself out on the edge of the bookcase. When he had been quietly laid away in his bed upstairs, we finished the party off on a sentimental note by singing Christmas carols to which we all remembered the words only too well, trying not to remember, as we sang, the Christmas Eves of better—or at least childhood—days.

  The guests departed at 4 a. m. on Christmas morning. In the afternoon, when I awoke, I discovered that there was enough liquid refreshment left over for another party, and I collected Red, Rick and Tony for a pinochle game. The game lasted until the last drop was gone, and the holiday season was over for another year. Art’s season didn’t end until two days later, however—when he was sober enough to come downstairs.

  Winter dragged on. One cold January night Art and I were driving home in the jeep from an all-night pinochle game in Anchor Point, Four miles from the homestead the jeep stopped: all the water had boiled out of the radiator. The temperature was 30 degrees below, it was five o’clock in the morning and it was obvious that we would freeze if we lingered to do anything about restarting the truck. There was nothing for it but to walk home. Two hours later we arrived at the house half frozen and almost collapsing from fatigue.

  Awaking at noon, I had breakfast and then walked out to the mailbox. Sorting the letters, I came across one from my older brother in California. There were special delivery stamps plastered next to airmail stamps. It looked ominous. I tore it open with trembling fingers. “Dear Gordon,” I read. “Take hold of yourself, kid. It happens to us all. Dad passed away in his sleep——”

  With tears running down my cheeks and freezing as they ran, I walked slowly back to the house. “I’ve got to go,” I muttered. “I’ve got to go down there.” But how could I? I was broke—too broke to attend my father’s funeral, thousands of miles away. Looking again at my brother’s letter, I read further: “We know that you’re broke and can’t come down. If I had the money I would send it to you, but I haven’t just now. Don’t try to come down if it means you’ll have to go further into debt to do it. Knowing how fond you were of Dad, we’re all thinking of you and hope——” Go into debt? Why shouldn’t I go into debt to pay my last respects to my father, the father who had been so hopeful for my success in Alaska, Sure! I could borrow the money!

  Then I looked at the postmark on the envelope of the letter and lost all hope again: my father had died over a week before. Because there wasn’t any special delivery service in my part of Alaska, the special delivery letter had taken a week to reach me. It would be no use to go now. My father had already been buried, the funeral was over. Darn Alaska! The hell with the whole Territory! How was I to get through the rest of the winter without Dad’s letters to give me the encouragement I needed? Why had I ever left California? If I had never come to Alaska, I wouldn’t be in this fix right now. Poor Dad!

  In the house, I threw myself on my bed to think of the good times, the good talks my father and I had had together, to feel sorry for myself, to curse the country that had kept me from being with my father in his last days and with my family at a time when we should have all been together. “I know one thing,” I said to Art, who was hovering, embarrassed, over the barrel stove. “Now, for sure, I’m getting out of this rotten, lonely country.”

  During the next two weeks I tried to throw myself into work—good, hard, physical work. I spent hours sawing up logs into two-foot lengths and splitting the lengths into cords of firewood. Then I decided to drive into Homer and up to Ninilchik to try and sell my stored cabbages and potatoes—to raise money with which to buy cigarettes and a few supplies, and to keep myself busy.

  And I kept busy, all right. On examining the cabbages in the root cellar, I found that most of their outside leaves were rotting, and Art and I labored several days and nights under the light of a Coleman lantern to peel the thousands of heads and reset them in the bins. Next, we washed and sacked my surplus of potatoes. Finally, we turned into salesmen. The potatoes we were able to unload on other homesteaders who hadn’t grown any during the previous summer, but the cabbage sales, which started out fairly briskly, slowed, dwindled and finally came to a standstill. By this time the remaining heads were starting to rot again, and in desperation I contacted a neighbor up the road who had some hungry cows to feed and delivered two and a half tons of cabbages to him free of charge. Thus ended the fiasco of Stoddard the Truck Farmer. With the root cellar empty, I figured up my gross take for the summer. In the entire year—counting set plants, greenhouse produce and truck crops—I had taken in a total of only $450. It had certainly been a bad year. My only consolation was that I wouldn’t have to go through it all again.

  But the winter wasn’t over yet: there were still a few more disasters to come. A couple of days after getting rid of the cabbages, I got careless one particularly cold night and left my house cellar trap door open. Result: all the remaining potatoes froze, to rot later on when the cellar was warm again. Result No. 2: the pump froze solid and all the pipes burst, and it took me three days with a blow torch to thaw the ice in the pressure tank and put in new pipe. It seemed that even the forces of nature were against me.

  And even food was becoming a problem. There were still a lot of vegetables on hand, but the canned fruit was all gone, the canned clams had long since been eaten up and there were only a few jars of salmon left in the larder. And there was no money with which to buy meat or other supplies.

  “Fresh meat,” as a matter of fact, had become our sole topic of conversation.

  Chapter XXVI
I—The Moose and Me

  MY HERD of wild livestock had returned from the Caribou Hills. Everywhere we looked we could see the dark brown forms silhouetted against the white of the snow, standing, hip-deep, in poses of profound rumination, as they cropped the tender green shoots of the brush willows. Everywhere we looked, our mouths watered, our stomachs growled and visions of thick, juicy steaks swam before our meat-starved eyes. Now was our chance to restock the larder, to forget, for a time (and over a large moose filet) the mishaps of the previous weeks!

  Seated on a Blazo box beside the barrel stove with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pair of powerful binoculars in the other, I watched the movements of the moose for hours at a time. It was difficult to pick out the one to shoot and the moment to shoot him. What I had in mind was a young, tender bull, but these were few and far between, and the one I chose would have to be separated from the rest of the herd and far enough from the house so that no suspicious neighbor would witness the deed.

  The younger bulls were easy to single out—their horns were still intact—but the huge old bulls, who had shed their cumbersome racks weeks before, were indistinguishable from the cows except by the horn marks on their heads. Every morning Art would come down from his sleeping quarters above and tell me how many moose he had counted from his window, and we would discuss at great length the age of each young bull and the sex of the larger animals. One day, in order to get a closer look, I cut down all the birch trees surrounding the house. The next day the herd had moved to within a hundred feet of the window and was feeding with obvious delight on the birch twigs scattered about on the snow. Another morning I opened the front door to find five moose standing within forty feet. They looked, as they turned hastily away, as though they had been about to knock on the door. Another day I was reading by the kitchen window when a shadow fell across my book. Glancing up, I saw a big cow staring in at me. Before she disappeared, the two of us exchanged a long look, our noses within inches of each other.

  None of these experiences could be considered unusual. Apparently more curious than afraid, the Alaskan moose descend from the hills and back country every winter to congregate close to human habitation. Every homesteader has his “own,” private herd, and it is only when dogs are running loose or the homesteader gets too aggressive for comfort that a herd will leave the vicinity of the cabin of its choice.

  It is in the wintertime, too, that the moose are almost as harmless—as docile, as friendly, as skittish, as dumb—as domestic cattle. It’s only in the rutting season, in the fall, that a bull will attack a man or vehicle without provocation, or in the early spring, when a cow, always ready to make a stand to protect her newborn calf, is really dangerous. I have come face to face with a bull in the winter and watched the bull, abashed, walk away, but I have tried to take a picture of a bull during the rutting season and had to run for my life.

  The one real danger from moose during the winter is the possibility of hitting one on the highway. Headlights blind them and send them into a panic of confusion, and they’ll often run ahead of a car for miles before turning off into the woods. However, I had had an experience two winters before that had proved the exception to all the rules. Red Freimuth and I, in his big truck, were taking a ton of a neighbor’s potatoes to Seward when we encountered one of the biggest bull moose I have ever seen on the road. He was trotting along the highway a few yards ahead of us and didn’t seem to be aware of our approach. Suddenly he turned around and lowered his head to charge. The hair stood up on his back, his eyes flashed, and we could see that he was really mad.

  “Guess I’d better stop,” said Red, slamming on the brakes. The moose stopped, too, but he stood in the center of the road just in front of us, his head towering so far above the truck, that it was out of sight in the windshield.

  It was 40 below zero that night and we had to get the potatoes to Seward before they (and we) froze. “Come on. Come on. Let’s stop playing games,” said Red, leaning on his horn.

  The noise startled the moose into moving up the road. But every few feet he would turn and charge, and every few feet Red would slam on the brakes. If we had hit the moose, or he had hit us, our trip would have been over: the moose would have made mashed potatoes of the truck and we would have made steaks of the moose. Eventually, though, in a sudden burst of speed, we passed him, leaving him still angry, still looking for trouble far behind.

  But as I said, that was an exception to the rule. On the whole, the winter moose is a very tame animal, and shooting one, I had always thought, would be like going out to the barn and slaughtering your favorite milk cow. For that reason I had never shot one—up to now. But this winter it was different. Fresh meat was not only a necessity: it was an obsession, I would have to turn big game hunter for awhile.

  There was only one drawback: the illegality of killing a moose in the wintertime. But there was also a loophole: the law of the wilderness states that anyone who is hungry and without sufficient provisions can shoot game anywhere, any time. There was the case of the woman at Anchor Point whose husband was away and whose four children, if not starving, were at least very hungry. A moose happened to pass through her front yard and she went out and shot it. Word got around and the game warden hopped right over. Upon learning the facts, he patted the woman on the shoulder. “Look,” he told her. “If you ever find yourself in a fix like this again, just let me know. I’ll shoot you a moose and bring it to you. We can’t let kids go hungry.”

  Similarly, homesteaders in my area who shot winter moose were never bothered too much by the authorities—mainly because it was known that they never wasted the meat (and because, perhaps, they took such elaborate precautions to avoid being caught in the act). The main culprits, according to both the game warden and the homesteaders, were the city dwellers who traveled the highways looking for game. These types would shoot a moose alongside the road regardless of sex, and then, afraid of being caught, would leave the meat to rot. One early spring, I remember, a cow met her death in this way about a mile from my place. Inside her were twin unborn calves. Incensed at the waste of three good moose, all the homesteaders in the area were up in arms to find the man who had committed the crime.

  But in spite of what looks like a look-the-other-way-while-the-deed-is-done policy the game laws are very strict in the Territory. A person who is caught with illegal meat in his possession is liable to a $500 fine, six months in jail and the confiscation of his rifle and the vehicle in which he is transporting the meat. I remember the case of the two men who were apprehended with illegal moose meat in their small plane: they lost the plane, their guns, considerable cash and their liberty for several months.

  Though some of the natives of the Territory—Indians, or half-breeds, as a rule—allowed themselves to be caught by the game warden in order to enjoy the comforts of a nice, warm jail during the long, cold winter, every homesteader went to great pains to avoid incarceration. This involved keeping an illegal kill an absolute secret from all but the other homesteader who helped him pack it in and got his share of the carcasses as hush money. If word of the kill came to the ears of a neighbor who was flat broke and just a little bit “dishonest,” the moose killer was apt to find himself turned in for the $100 standing reward for such information. The traitor’s name, in such cases, was never revealed by the authorities, but somehow he was always found out. And when he was, it behooved him to pick up and leave the country: he was through, as far as his neighbors were concerned....

  Art and I grew hungrier day by day. And practically every day Art would point out a young bull about a hundred feet away and say, “Let’s get that one.”

  “No,” I’d say. “He’s too close to the house. Besides, he’s standing out in the open and the game warden could spot the remains from the air. We can’t take a chance like that, Art.”

  But finally I made up my mind. There was a small bull feeding on the willows in the creek bottom and he looked just right for eating. “This is it.” I said to Art. �
��You circle around and come up below the moose and drive him upstream into the woods. I’ll be waiting for him. We’ll be eating steak tonight if we’re lucky.”

  I left first. Wearing our only pair of snowshoes and carrying my heavy rifle, I mushed up the bluff and crossed the ice-bound creek a half mile up the valley. Using the trees as cover, I slipped down into position in a clump of spruce where I could see the bull still calmly feeding 300 yards away. I waited nervously, hoping I would have the guts to shoot him when he came into range. Suddenly Art appeared down the creek from the moose. Without benefit of snowshoes, he was having a hard time of it. Struggling through the deep snow covering the ice, he was falling down every time he made a move. The bull raised his head to observe the clumsy approach, then returned to his meal as Art passed within 30 feet of him without seeing him in the tall willows and climbed the hill to the house. Damn! Our strategy hadn’t worked!

  Gradually the bull started moving in my direction, pausing every few feet to feed. Then he disappeared behind some trees. Damn again! I arose from my cramped position, began creeping cautiously forward. I hadn’t taken three steps before the bull appeared from behind a spruce not fifty feet away. We stood watching each other, the moose with his body turned sideways to me but with his head swiveled toward me for a better look. Slowly I lifted my heavy rifle to my shoulder and took aim at his left ear. Should I shoot him? Or should I let him live? If I pulled the trigger I would be killing an animal over five times my weight, but a peaceful animal, who had never done me any harm. If I pulled the trigger I would be guilty of killing an animal out of season, and my nights and days would be filled with worry over being caught. Every time there came a knock on my door I would be afraid to answer it. I would be a fugitive from justice, if I pulled that trigger.