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Chapter XIV
Looking for Moose

I was finishing my coffee after midday dinner when a green truck that had somehow evolved from a jeep rolled up and in came two young men - one with a fine, tawny beard. They pulled up chairs beside me and while eating roast beef, explained they were heading south for the States after several weeks’ vacation in Northern Alaska. Hearing that I too was going south the bearded young man expressed genuine regret that he couldn’t offer me a ride. It was, he said, so much pleasanter than the bus – you could stop to take pictures, or simply to take a look at something – whatever you wanted. And if it hadn’t been for the darndest great dog he’s just bought up at Anchorage, they’d have been glad to have me come along. But with him – well, there just wasn’t room! He pointed through the window. An animal about the size of a fair grown wolf placidly occupied two-thirds of the truck’s seat.

Its owner continued enthusiastically about the Yukon and Alaska. “But next place I’m goin’s Arabia!” he announced.

“Isn’t that a rather difficult country to get into?” I asked. But the young man remained confident. It seemed he had an uncle, who could pull diplomatic strings. But now the sole cloud on his horizon was that he wouldn’t be able to accompany his friend, a somewhat silent youth, who had been concentrating with enthusiasm on his dinner. A job in Washington needed his prompt appearance next Monday – five day’s time! Oh well, he guessed they’d have another couple of days driving together, and then he’d have to fly.

“From where?” I asked.

“Oh, Edmonton or some place,” he replied blithely.

He attacked a large wedge of raisin pie, and Mary enquired if he’d grown this beard while up north.

“Sure I did!” he agreed laughing. “And when my fiancée sees it, my, what she’s goin’ to say - Whee!”

“Well, what d’you expect? Giving the poor girl such a shock!” retorted Mary.
“It’s me that’s goin’ to get the shock.” He replied. “Oh boy! Just wait ‘til she sees me!”

He lugged out a wallet, and after struggling into their coats and woolly caps, thanked Mary, and after reiterating his regret at being unable to offer me a lift, roared off.

Mrs. Whitehorse Billy reappeared, explaining that she was flourless and pending Mike’s return from town, Mary agreed to let her have some from the Lodge, stipulating that she brought a bag to put it in. Mrs. Whitehorse Billy hastened off and it was not long before the an Indian, reputed to be in some tribal way, her relative (possibly her son!), arrived to proffer a dingy sack which Mary, holding as far from her as possible, filled with flour.

It was just after three when she tapped on my door to say that Floyd Graves had come in. Having an hour or two to spare, he was going to drive down the Highway in the hope of getting a shot at a moose. Would I care to go along?

I found Floyd Graves, a merry faced young man wearing a red check lumbar jacket, sitting by the stairs after finishing a late lunch. Picking up his wide brimmed hat, he led the way outside, explaining that he had been so long delayed in a Road Maintenance meeting in Whitehorse the other evening that he had feared it was too late for him to call and bring me out to the Lodge.

Opening the door of a bright yellow truck, he told me proudly of having secured it secondhand just a few weeks ago. Then balancing a rifle between us, we set off. Mrs. Whitehorse Billy, squatting over a small fire near her tent, waved with the delight of a child as we passed up onto the Highway. Through the gleaming woods we went, passing lakes, some mere pools - spoonfuls of water in a marshy hollow - some stretching beyond sight and others like solitary dark jewels in bronze sedge or the carved ebony of spruce. Some had soft sounding Indian names. Others Floyd had named to please himself. One he called Heart Lake – “See, there it is!”, he pointed eagerly towards a tiny pool “Isn’t that just a perfect heart?”

“Guess if they ever come to put it on a map, that’s what they’ll call it!” he told me of moose and bear, fox and beaver, and about his canoe and fishing as he drove leisurely along.

The afternoon was filled with the listening stillness sensed only when the last echo of summer had faded and the earth waits serene, listening for the first winter breath.

Floyd was in charge of this stretch of the Highway, seventy-two miles, and he knew its every turn and twist. Parts where the gravel surface was good, bumpy bits to avoid… There were seven men in his gang, better he said than on some parts where now there were only three or four working. After the War ended the maintenance work had been passed by the Military to the Government to maintain and was not kept in the same state of repair. With modest pride he reckoned that his own stretch had about as good a surface as any, except in Alaska, where the Americans still kept much larger staffs and spent far more on maintenance.

Floyd himself had been ‘inside’ now for five years, two of them working on the Road. Men lived very comfortably, he said, and the married ones had their families with them. Their huts had electricity and running water, and it was easy to get supplies from Whitehorse.

His own bachelor status seemed to weigh on him for he referred to it several times, lamenting that his house, while very nice, was really too large for a single man. In reply to my question, yes he would like to see England. And sometimes he did think of going Outside for a bit – get some job in Vancouver or somewhere. He had a sister living there who’d been to college, and was now a schoolteacher. Or maybe he’d go further North. He couldn’t decide.

“I just think sometimes of having a change, two years is quite a time. But then I’ve got to like it up here – guess I mightn’t like anything else as well now. It’s so kind of free, and I like that – and the work, too. And I can hunt and fish all I want, only it does seem like my house is kind of large – four rooms – just for a single man!” He repeated ruefully.

As he talked, Floyd had been gazing about for signs of game. “That hollow,” he pointed to a leaf carpeted bank dipping steeply through the birches, “he’s seen a fox slip down there last week.” Now he slowed to show me the fresh track of a moose he had marked this morning, crisp cut in the gravel before it had turned into the bush.

“Gee! If only I’d been there when he’d crossed!” Regretfully he shook his head and let in the clutch.

We had come about twenty miles when he pointed up the mountain on our left. He and a friend had scrambled up there very early this morning just for fun, and found about eight inches of snow on its northern ridge. Two hours it had taken them. They then spent half an hour exploring the ridge before taking just over and hour to descend – they had run most of the way!

“Not bad going really – it’s a lot steeper than it looks” he added. I thought it looked a lot steeper than most people would care to climb up and then run down in under four hours!

The lower slopes he told me, were thickly forested, through which they had had to force a way before reaching tangled scrub and rocks, but Floyd was enthusiastic and declared he meant to go again when he had more time and could spend longer. “This morning I just took enough time off from my job to run up there!”

We saw no signs of game, but to me it was a thrill to approach each corner, never knowing what might be beyond, and Floyd was anxious for me to see everything. After we started I had asked if he knew anywhere there might be beavers, for Mike Nolan had told me he knew of only one place, thirty miles back to the north and without ponies that was too far. Floyd however, remembered a little creek he had once been to where there was a beaver dam. Although a bit difficult to get to, he thought he could find the way again. Adding it could only be reached by boat – and his had a hole in it at the moment! He really was regretful, and had it not been for this I think we would have suggested setting out.

He was as eager to show me a moose as I was to see one; that I should miss nothing he thought might add to my enjoyment and if I exclaimed over anything he assured me that there was yet another point I must wait for. There was Squanga Lake, an Indian name meaning ‘round fish’ – the reflections there were really something when the light was right but he did wish the sun was more brilliant – I wasn’t seeing it at its best. But if we went on just up that next hill we’d come to the pool he called Otter Lake because a family of otters lived there in the reeds and I really should see those – we might be lucky. But today the russet shores were deserted, and only a little arrow of ripples broke from the black dot of a swimming moorhen.

Imperceptibly, the miles and the afternoon slipped by until, at no apparent landmark, Floyd drew up and announced that we had reached the southern end of his Road sector – the other half ran northwards from the Lodge to Whitehorse. In the thirty six miles we had come, we had passed only one car drawn up at the roadside. There was no sign of its occupant, but Floyd, who recognized it, said he had probably gone back over the hills to hunt or fish.

He turned the truck asking “Did you ever hear of green snow?” Ahead, a fortress like escarpment of grey and ochre rock, gashed with scarlet, reared above the forest. A rim of snow whitened its crest and Floyd told me that after scanning it earlier this morning through binoculars, his friend had announced that the snow was actually green! Floyd was skeptical until he too had looked with binoculars to find the snow was distinctly green!

“I’ve heard a lot of funny things up here, but never of snow being green.” he continued. “I can’t figure it out, but we both saw it. Maybe it’s something to do with the light. We’ll stop and see if you can see it too.”

Before long he stopped the truck again and producing a pair of binoculars, stared through them in silence. Suddenly he exclaimed, “my gosh yes! It is green – right on the edge – and quite a bright green. You try!”

For a minute or two all I could see was white snow, cold on the black, razor-like rock.

“Move the glass upward – start low down and just follow up gradually”, urged Floyd. And suddenly I saw it – delicate, unmistakable, leaf green.

Floyd suggested it might be some reflection of light thrown up from the spruce on the slopes hundreds of feet below. ”But I certainly would like to know”, he repeated. “Maybe one of these scientific professors could explain it. They come up North sometimes doing survey work and maybe I’ll meet one and be able to find out.”

Fifteen miles from the Lodge, standing at a corner where a rough track led into the western hills an old bundle like figure was standing – Mrs. Whitehorse Billy! She must have begged a lift along the Highway, and, with her possessions in the pack slung across the back of her husky, was on her way to hunt.

Just ahead of us a porcupine suddenly scuffled across the Road. It was the first one I had seen and Floyd stopped and ran to poke a stick beneath the pile of logs under which it had crawled. Squeaking indignantly it climbed out, its tail quills scrabbling over the bark a few inches away from my feet, and scurried off surprisingly fast. Floyd raced after it, his jacket flapping, but before either of us could catch up with it, the porcupine was halfway up a hemlock, clutching and hoisting itself up.

“That’s the first porky I’ve ever watched climb a tree!” Floyd laughed as we left him, twenty feet up and drove back to the camp, where he invited me into his house for a drink. There was a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen and shower – the whole place neat as a pin.

“I try to keep it nice, but sometimes I do think it’s kind of large”, deprecating my host, adding water from the kitchen tap to the whisky he had poured out. He apologized for the path of newspapers placed across the living room floor: “Looks kind of funny, but I didn’t know how else to manage. I can only give it a good clean once in a while and I washed all the floors before I went out this morning – I never know what time I’ll get back at night. I do like to keep things nice”, he repeated when I congratulated him on his house-keeping. “Doesn’t matter where I’m livin’ – I do like to come in and find it sort of a home.” I drank to his successful moose-hunting and he to my journey south.

“Guess I’ll sleep tonight”, he went on laughing, “Gee! I’m feeling stiff after that climb!”

The sunset was fading when we returned to the Lodge. Yesterday’s snow had disappeared from the higher peaks, leaving them black now against the afterglow. Long after dusk it still lingered, a green radiance behind the ramparts of spruce. A wind was rising, driving up dark masses of cloud, as I waved Floyd goodbye.

Mike Nolan had returned, bringing his new hunting party, a father and son from Kansas. They had been farther North and had arrived in Whitehorse the night before I left the Regina. The father, fresh-complexioned and sturdy, had sat in the lobby that evening making friends with the little boy Buck and solemnly discussing bear hunting with him. Now he and his son, immense, fair and smiling whom he had called ‘the Boy’ were a welcome contrast to Mike’s late visitors.

And there was a third arrival, a Czech doctor from Seattle, an ardent fisherman, who followed Mike from one fish photograph to the next in a sort of blissful trance.

“I cannot believe it!” he kept exclaiming ecstatically to me, “If I could catch but one such fish I should be so happy!”

After supper Kansas Père told me about their previous trip and then went on to describe the Columbia River Dam, which he had visited on his way North. It seemed that nothing he had ever seen had so impressed him for he could find no adequate terms in which to speak of its immensity. After recounting statistics of its dimensions, depth and capacity, its giant turbines and the millions of tons of water it controlled, he still shook his head.

“Yes Siree,” he murmured in his slow drawl, “you just can’t take it in!” I enjoyed listening to his intensity.

‘The boy meanwhile was strolling about examining the skins and trophies. As I went to open the door to see if the Northern Lights were showing, I passed him looking at the Indian goods, a pair of tiny moccasins dangling toy-like from one finger that he held it up for me to see.

“I got two little girls.” He explained smilingly and when I asked how old they were he told me one was six and the other four. I told him I was sure those he held and one bigger pair would be just about right.

It was too early yet for the Northern Lights. Mary had told me they had been even more brilliant last night after midnight than when we had looked at them earlier, and I determined now to wait up for them.

The older man said goodnight before long and clumped slowly upstairs. His son sat on for a while reading a magazine about Alaska before he too said goodnight. The Czech doctor had long since disappeared – he was going out at some unearthly hour in the morning with Joe to fish. Mary was in the kitchen ironing, her husband at his desk making out lists of stores for the forthcoming hunt. Mitch and Norma with the baby had gone down to their own little cabin on the Lake shore, and Joe, after hammering for a while in the bathroom, had gone to bed.

The wind scurried hollowly about the walls and I dozed over Mary’s copy of Robert Service’s poems.

More fleets of dark cloud were driving up when I went outside again after midnight. The Northern Lights flickered fitfully and the spruces rocked and dipped against the stars. Curled up on the doorstep the huskies slept oblivious to the wind ruffling their wolf like fur. I wondered where Mrs. Whitehorse Billy was.

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