A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter IX
That evening a girl wearing breeches and soft leather cowboy boots strolled into the dining room where I was eating roast moose. With her was a tiny boy in blue jeans and a miniature, fur-lined windbreaker with a hood who climbed on a chair and introduced himself as a Big Bear Hunter. His mother laughed. “He was a cowboy when we were in Texas” she told me in a soft drawl. The little boy said he was hungry, and she ordered moose and blueberry pie for him and coffee for herself. They had come from Anchorage, and when I asked how long they had been up North, “Oh, months.” she guessed. She couldn’t remember, she told me with a sort of rueful vagueness, tossing back a clustering mass of dark curls, she said this was her second trip to Alaska this summer. Their home was California, she added and she had brought their truck up by sea when she came the second time. Her husband had been in the North all summer. Why, she scarcely could remember where they had been – all over she guessed, adding she would be thankful to get dried out – the weather up North had been frightful. Her husband sauntered in and I wondered if he was a
film star. He certainly might have been! Casually, in a drawl even more
lethargic than his wife’s, he told me about the night he and the little
boy had recently spent on some remote island when the plane in which
they had flown on a fishing trip had crashed, to sink in a river.
Something had gone wrong with the landing floats. Buck agreed that they had. Nodding his head emphatically, his dark eyes like big raisins as he looked up. He was five he had told me. In the darkness his father continued, against an icy, swift current, the two men had just managed to swim some thirty yards to shore, with Buck clinging round his father’s neck. Without guns - “and you lost your gun too, didn’t you Buck?” When all their food and camping equipment had been swept away when the plane sank, they were in an unenviable situation and Buck had a nasty crack on his skull. There were plenty of bears they knew, on the island, including the giant Kodiak, but throughout the night they had heard only the distant howling of wolves, and Buck had slept. Fortunately the pilot knew the island and the whereabouts of a logging camp and as soon as it was light, he had walked there for help. In reply to a wireless message, another plane had been flown in to pick them up. “An’ I lost my gun” reiterated Buck. His mother gently pushed aside the hair above his forehead to show a dark, scarcely healed gash. “He nearly lost his life” she murmured. Stolidly Buck continued spooning up moose and gravy. “But I di’n’t!” He announced triumphantly. Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
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