A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation
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A Pioneer Alaska Highway Vacation |
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Chapter XII
Throughout the afternoon I basked in the sunshine on a long chair on the porch. At intervals a truck or car drove up, and the occupants, maintenance men: prospectors, hunters or people traveling on business to one of the northern towns, clumped up the steps. Few stopped long just time for coffee or a meal, and out they came, pausing for a moment on the steps to gaze across the Lake before continuing their various journeys. As they came and went I was reminded of the storm blown bird of legend that for a few moments had circled the lighted hall of a Saxon king before vanishing into the darkness again upon its unknown flight. The sound of departing engines lingered for only a few moments before it too faded, and only the light moved across the peaks in the windless afternoon. A man and two women, one carrying a tiny baby, emerged from a baggage-laden car. They told me they were on their way to Fairbanks, six hundred miles farther North. An hour after they had left, a travel stained Dodge with a Washington D.C. number plate bumped to a stop beside the truck belonging to three maintenance men. Its driver, a stout woman in a black and white check lumber jacket, her high heeled shoes peeping incongruously from beneath black slacks shiny from wear, climbed out and lifted the bonnet, murmuring something about a radiator leak. She was on her way to Anchorage to join her husband, who had flown there some weeks earlier. “You still got a tidy piece to go!” observed one of the maintenance young men who had joined in the inspection of the radiator. The stout lady rejoined that having already done some three thousand miles she guessed another seven hundred was nothing, and hobbled stiffly indoors in search of supper and a bed. Five o’clock brought the return of the hunting party from Whitehorse when a taxi, its roof piled with bulky packages drew up and Mike Nolan sprang out and ran up the steps. Two other men followed more slowly. The elder – they were father and son I learned later – a large, heavily built man, moved with stiff clumsiness, his role of hunter proclaimed by several days’ facial stubble and a shirt of almost aggressive check and hairiness. Mike, meanwhile, continued to run lightly up and down the steps assisting the two to carry out the suitcases for which they had returned to the Lodge. Barely glancing about them they departed, intent now only on catching the evening plane south. They had settled the business for which they had spent several weeks in the wilds – the bagging of four bears and a mountain goat – so why linger? Mike’s comments later that evening might have surprised them. It seemed that in all other aspects of camp life or indeed of the trip itself, they had taken no interest – unless to complain and had regarded the hunt as a set of arrangements for which they had paid with the sole object of obtaining suitable trophies.
The presage of frost was chilling the still golden evening in the North when finally I pushed the huskies aside and went indoors. The cook, Wilton, a friendly young man wearing a pink shirt and heavy boots, asked what I would like for supper – Arctic trout or roast beef? I chose the trout, and while he was cooking it, went down again to the Lake where the last sunshine was drawing towards the northern hills, flushing the snow with colour. Slowly the Lake turned to liquid gold beneath a great bar of orange cloud, dipping until sky and water were linked, ringed by the golden forest. Soundless as a leaf, a solitary duck floated past. The lapping of ripples against the boats had ceased, and at my feet the water slept among darkening stones. And still the tide of dazzling orange swelled and deepened. Is it some dim sense of loss that tinges such moments with an indefinable longing, the lingering echo of what once we knew? Is such wordless beauty the faint reflection of ‘forgotten clouds of glory’ momentarily regained? The grape coloured hills turned dark blue, then black and when at last I turned from the still glowing water, the trail was dim beneath the spruce spires and the snow peaks cold beneath the first stars. After supper Mike settled down at his desk, interrupting his writing now and again to twist round and discuss his recent hunt with Mitch, who had finished his labours for the day and now sat dandling his six month’s old baby, whose existence I had discovered at noon when I found him sleeping in his little pram in the bar. Besides the Nolans and Mitch’s family there was Joe, the ‘odd man’. He brought in wood, carpentered, looked after the electric light plant and the pump bringing water from the Lake. Set the fish lines and in general set his hand to anything from cooking to engineering. Mary Nolan had told me he was English, but when or why he had first come to the North, or even if Joe was his real name, no one knew. There were various unconfirmed rumours that he was a member of a well-known family but though willing to recount his experiences garnered during a life spent knocking about the world in an astonishing variety of jobs, of his family or childhood, Joe never spoke and shied away from any enquiry. Everybody liked him – quiet, rather shy, verging on middle age, his manners were invariably courteous! Of all the men frequenting the Lodge he always addressed Mary as Mrs. Nolan. Content to undertake any job, and when Mike was away conducting his frequent hunting trips, he unquestionably accepted her authority. He was very sensitive and could easily be hurt she told me, and suffered from occasional fits of depression when he would go into Whitehorse on a drinking bout from which, several days later, he always returned very normal and subdued, to resume his activities with more than his usual willingness. This evening after finishing supper he had announced his intention of going upstairs to get on with fitting the basin in the second bathroom. Amiably Mitch advised him he’d better not. “That lady who came in this evening’s gone to bed, and she’ll have your blood if you go hammering and wake her up!” Thus forewarned, Joe now sat reading, his feet sprawled out beneath the table, glancing up now and then from the book propped before him to join in the conversation of the others. At about eight o’clock the door opened and two men from the Highway Maintenance camp nearby came in for coffee. Mary finished pottering about in the kitchen and came to sit with us, her husband abandoning his writing to listen to her account of Mrs. Whitehorse Billy’s visit and to try on the moccasins which were an excellent fit. Dark and spare, maybe forty years of age, his vitality and air of lithe, wiry strength, his quick eager speech and light movements reminded me of a coiled spring. On tiptoe with interest in his life as trapper, hunter, fisherman and licensed guide, he was a mine of knowledge in the ways of the wild and the customs and folklore of the Indians gained in fourteen years as a Mountie in the Northern Saskatchewan and the Yukon. If he could be persuaded to set down the story of those years, it would make I thought, reading far stranger and more exciting than any invented tale. For up here, ‘passing the buck’ was not a practice, and whether on the trail of moose or murder, in saving life or avenging death there could be no shelving of responsibility where often there was nobody with whom even to share it. A man only had himself to depend on. The Maintenance men finished their coffee, and now with Joe and Mitch, who had deposited the baby carefully in his wife’s lap, had settled down to a quiet game of cards. How peaceful it was in the warm room! A log sometimes slipped and cracked softly in the stove: the baby slept, and Norma, who never could sit idle, was sweeping the floor. An occasional laugh or some remark made above an undertone by one of the card players brought the warning reminder from someone, “Hush boys!” – don’t forget the lady upstairs”. Carefully Mike tiptoed in his heavy boots to the kitchen for more coffee. About nine o’clock Mary and I went outside. The Northern Lights were dancing behind the spruce carved black and still as ironwork against a glittering, star-filled sky. Across the Lake the mountains had dimmed to shadows and were cold pierced dagger-like! Behind us the lighted windows welcomed at the forest’s door. On my way to bed I paused to read some words of Robert Service’s poem hanging below the wolf skin on the stairs – … “This is the Law of the Yukon, and ever she makes
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