CHAPTER XV
THE GIANT BALLS OF STONE
It was not yet five o'clock the following morning when Loll, from his blankets on the floor of the cabin living-room, raised his tousled head and looked cautiously about him. His big, grey eyes were alive with eagerness and expectation. The strangeness of his surroundings thrilled him with possibilities. Through the window the sun-flooded world called him to adventure.
Again he glanced speculatively at the sleeping forms round him and then eased warily out of bed.
With a pudgy finger on his lips and long steps of a stealthiness so exaggerated that his balance was threatened at every move, he tip-toed to the corner where his shoes lay, and without stopping for any further addition to his toilet, slipped out the door in his nightgown.
He avoided the blanket-cocooned figures of Kayak Bill and Harlan on the porch, and continued a short distance down the path to the chopping block where he sat down to pull the shoes on his little bare feet.
Kobuk, returning from some early morning adventure on the beach, espied him, and with a red-mouthed huskie smile, came bounding up the trail, wriggling an extravagant and clumsy welcome. With loud whispers hissed through fiercely protruding lips, Loll tried to shoo him away, but the dog only whirled about, thumping him with a joyously wagging tail and poking a cold damp nose down the neck of his nightgown.
After fastening the top button of his shoes the boy stood up and looked about him. The wonderful sunniness of the world thrilled him. From the blue sky soaring gulls called to one another, and the sunlight poured down on the silver-green ocean and the little lake to the south. Faint breaths of air stirred the scent of green things, and everywhere was that exhilarating freshness of late summer that has in it the hint of autumn frosts.
The youngster waved his arms and danced from sheer joy in living, and with Kobuk at his heels, ran down off the trail through the damp grass toward the lake.
About a hundred yards from the cabin, hidden in a clump of alder bushes, he came upon a low hut built of drift logs. Half the roof was gone and pieces of decaying seal-hide and a ragged red shawl embedded in the dirt floor hinted of the visits of long-ago Indian otter-hunters.
Interested in his discovery, the little fellow was peering cautiously in, when, with a sudden bound, Kobuk dashed by him nearly knocking him over. There was a whirr of wings overhead, sounds of bird alarm, and half a dozen swallows circled wildly about the frantic Kobuk before finding a place of escape through the hole in the roof.
"Gosh, Kobuk, I was pretty near scared," admitted the youthful explorer, looking up at the rafters under which several nests made clay-grey splotches.
Swallowing hard a time or two he buttoned up the neck of his nightgown. Outside the hut again he slanted a discreet glance back in the direction of the cabin to assure himself that everyone still slept, and then with a whispered whoop of invitation to the dog, skipped down toward the beach.
The cabin stood well back on the bank off the center of a small crescent cove, flanked on the north by the bluff around which the party had come the day before. Toward the south the beach curved to what was marked "Sunset Point" on Add-'em-up's map. Loll tucked his nightgown up under his arm and headed for that unexplored territory, talking to Kobuk as he skipped along.
The tide was falling and screaming gulls rose and fell over the rocks feeding on the shellfish among the seaweed. Far out on the water great flocks of black sea-parrots floated, and overhead these stocky little birds flew in hundreds, their huge, crimson beaks thrust determinedly out before them, their round, white-ringed eyes showing plainly, and their wings, seemingly too small for their pudgy bodies, beating the air in a hurried manner, as they attended strictly to the business of feeding their young. Unlike the lazy gulls they took no time to loiter along the way.
The boy, looking up at the busy black workers, little dreamed of the vital and spectacular part both he and they were to play later in the struggle for existence on the Island of Kon Klayu.
The weed-covered boulders of Sunset Point drew him, but though he felt strongly the fascination of the ocean bed now becoming uncovered by the tide, for some indefinable childish reason he hesitated to go down among the rocks in his nightgown. So, whistling with moist tunelessness, he rounded the Point, Kobuk trotting on ahead.
Here the character of the beach changed, and the high-tide line, where the rice-grass began, was piled with a criss-cross confusion of bleached drift-logs thrown up by the mighty surf of storms. Mounds of old kelp lay drying in the sun, and the unforgettable odor of decaying sea-things mingled with the freshness of the morning.
Absorbed in the delights of discovery, Lollie poked about in the tangled masses finding strange, beautiful shells and sea-flowers fragile and delicately colored as the heart of a rose. He gathered his nightgown up into a pocket in front of him in which to carry home some of the damp and none too fresh treasures of the beach.
Sea figs in tan and orange and vermilion made splashes of color among the wet piles of shiny brown kelp brought up by the last tide, and small dead starfish turned pale stomachs to the sun. Grotesque, bulging seaweeds stirred him to laughter, and after untangling one—a head-like growth that seemed to grin sociably at him from a tail twenty feet long, he tied the thin end about his waist. The bulb wriggled along behind him on the sand, alternately piquing and repelling the curiosity of the sniffing Kobuk.
Another point ahead lured him on. Clouds of sand fleas rose in rustling hops as he ran along. Here and there monster jelly-fish glistened in the sun. With his mouth in a continual O of admiration and wonder, the little fellow squatted repeatedly to gaze at the exquisite geometrical designs in their crystal depths; but after one or two half-hearted attempts to pry them apart to see how they were made he contented himself with adding one to his already overburdened nightgown. Even in the thrill of discovery he had an instinctive antipathy against marring a beautiful thing.
Kobuk, running on ahead, had found something which interested him. He stood looking back, woofing impatiently as if urging the boy to hasten and see what it was. As Loll came nearer he shouted in astonishment, increasing his gait with difficulty because of the impeding pocket in front of him. What he saw was a head of some great sea monster, perhaps twelve feet long. The dark skin was streaked with dull red and purple, and where the head had been severed from the body, the sea had whitened it to sand-encrusted tatters. The huge mouth lay open and twisted, and from the lower jaw protruded two rounded tusks, nearly a foot long.
There was a contemplative moment while Loll's eyes opened wide.
"Golly, Kobuk—" reverent awe was in his tones—"I bet-cha that's the whale that swallowed old Jonah!"
There was a singular fascination about the battered remnant, far gone in decay, but the stench from it finally proved so overpowering that, despite his intense desire to linger near his discovery, Loll was obliged to move on.
He turned to the upper beachline for further explorations. Across a narrow strip of tundra-like land lay the small lake visible from the cabin porch. On the edge of the rice-grass he stumbled against a boulder that was as remarkably round as if it had been shaped by human hands. He stopped in delight at the great stone ball and tried to move it with his one free hand. Farther on he saw more of the curious spheres. Some were two feet and more in diameter.
"Maybe—giants played ball with 'em once!" he whispered to himself, with a cautious glance about him.
He headed for the tundra and was startled by coming suddenly upon the skeleton of a whale whitening in the sand where an extra high tide had thrown the creature long ago. Purple wild peas and blue beach forget-me-nots blossomed between the monster ribs, and the huge vertebrae, scattered here and there, were half hidden by the grass. It was from this relic, no doubt, that the Point opposite derived its name—Skeleton Rib.
Afterward Louie's father utilized several of these vertebrae for stools, but seeing them for the first time, the little fellow looked down at them respectfully, hushed into silence by vague, sea-born feelings. Far down the beach to the southward rose the cliff's where thousands of sea-birds swarmed in the sunshine. Their screaming, softened by the distance, came to his ears with an eerie wildness. All at once he felt very small and alone among alien creatures. Kobuk had turned back without him and was bounding out of sight around Skeleton Rib. The giant balls of stone suddenly took on fearsome suggestions from the realms of fairy tales.
The dog had disappeared now. The plaint of a high-flying gull drifted down to the boy. A breath of wind whispered in the grass about the whitening bones. . . . Suddenly he was flooded with a very panic of loneliness. Grasping the folds of the nightgown more tightly before him he set out as fast as his little bare legs would carry him towards home, the trailing kelp attached to his waist bounding wildly along behind him. . . .
It was thus that Ellen, white-faced with anxiety, met her returning son as he rounded Sunset Point. She clasped him frantically to her to assure herself that he was indeed safe and sound, and then held him off at arm's length, surveying the havoc to his nightgown, and preparing for the admonishing that was due. But Loll had already learned to divert many a mild scolding by the relation of some startling discovery. He launched forth now on the subject of the whale's head and the stone balls that giants must have played with, giving embellishments so amazing that his eyes stood out in growing astonishment as he talked.
Out-maneuvered, Ellen led him to breakfast where he took his place still holding forth on the wonders of his adventures. Kayak Bill regarded him with an appreciative eye. Finally he drawled:
"Son, you sure do vocabulate most as well as a sourdough!" [1] He paused to take a long, slow swoop of coffee and wipe his mouth with his red bandana. "The whale's head that et Jonah ain't so bad—but them giant hand balls o' stone sounds phoney. . . . You know there seems to be somethin' about this durned country that just nache'ly makes white men—not lie exactly—but sort o' put trimmin's on the truth. . . . I recollect a couple o' yars back when I'm hibernatin' one winter up on the Kuskokwim River with a bunch o' white trappers and prospectors." With his spoon, Kayak scraped the bottom of his empty coffee-cup to get every unmelted grain of sugar that lay there. "The next summer, I'm a son-of-a-gun, if them Injines up there ain't callin' that place by an Injine name that means 'The Valley o' Lies'. . . . I've sort o' got it figgered out like this: This doggoned Alasky land, bein' so big and magnificent like, a man just feels plumb ashamed to tell of some little meachin' thing a-happenin' in it—he feels downright obliged to fix things up so's they'll match the mountains and the rest o' it."
And drawing his corn-cob from the pocket of his hair-seal waistcoat,
Kayak Bill shuffled off into the cabin to light it from a splinter
thrust into the round draft hole of the Yukon stove, while Boreland and
Harlan made ready to leave for the provision camp at the North end.
For five days after landing the weather continued clear, although the sea never became sufficiently smooth for a trip with the whale-boat. Each day the men of the party went down to the first camp to pack provisions across the Island to what they called the West Camp, the place from which they expected to load them into the whale-boat and take them by water to the cabin. When the entire outfit had been packed across, the whale-boat was also skidded over on small drift logs. By this means they avoided the long shoals which ran so far out into the sea.
"Now for a few days of smooth water," said Boreland, when the job was completed, "and we'll be able to take everything down to the cabin by boat. We must have this grub under cover before the autumn storms set in. The rougher the sea, the better chance for gold, so Silvertip—damn his cowardly hide—told me. Kilbuck said old Add-'em-up used to send his squaw out patrolling the beach after each storm, and she usually found patches of black or ruby sand which carried considerable gold. . . . It seems reasonable enough, Kayak, for it's the same with all placer diggings along the sea."
The three men seated themselves on the upturned boat to eat their lunch. Boreland, whose mind was ever dwelling on the time when he should be free to begin his search for the gold of Kon Klayu, talked on. Harlan listened in silence to the other's eager plans.
"But of course it's the source of the gold we want! Silvertip thinks it is thrown up out of the sea by the action of the waves. Kilbuck imagines it is washed down from the banks, although all the prospecting done by the fox-farmers revealed nothing. But—gold is where you find it, and I mean to leave no stone unturned while I'm here. . . . Speaking of stones," he went on after a moment's silence, "Loll was right about his giant balls of stone. Have either of you noticed here and there along the beach, especially toward the south, small, perfectly round boulders? By thunder, they look exactly like cannon balls!"
Harlan, though he had at first attended the others' speeches had gradually become immersed in his own thoughts. Each day, while his muscles ached and the desire for stinging liquor flamed like fire in his veins, he had worked with Boreland and Kayak Bill at the North end of the Island packing provisions across on his back. Though he still ate his meals with the Borelands at the cabin, almost immediately after supper he took the mile and a half trail across the Island to the hut, which he had found on his landing. Intuitively, he knew Ellen Boreland's opinion of him. He smiled sometimes at the grim humor of the situation: He, who had tried to get away from the society of women found himself now on the mercy and generosity of a woman who did not like him. He was dependent on her, by Jove, for every stitch of clothing on him, for even the soap that he used—for his very toothbrush. Soon, he knew, she would be giving him provisions so that he might cook his own meals on the other side of the Island. She didn't want him around her, or her sister. It piqued him to be felt unwanted—aroused in him a desire to show her——
His innate honesty compelled him to admit that Ellen knew him in no hero's light. Still he could not help a feeling of bitterness at the relieved look that came, unconsciously, to her face each evening when he turned, reluctantly, from the homelike group on the cabin porch, to take the lonely little zig-zag trail up the hillside.
His mind went back now to a scene of the evening before. After supper just as he was preparing to leave. Jean had taken her violin from its case.
"I'm going to play, tonight, Mr. Harlan. Are you too tired to stay a while?" she asked, looking at him with friendly eyes.
Too quickly Ellen had interrupted:
"No, no, Jean. Don't keep this poor, tired fellow from his bed. I'm sure he wants to go to sleep as soon as possible. And here, Mr. Harlan,"—she advanced toward him thrusting into his arms a blanket and a pillow,—"I found this extra bedding for your bunk today. . . . There now, tuck it under your arm, like this. . . . Good-night. . . . Sleep well. . . . Good-night." Her voice was kind as she smiled up into his face, but there was no mistaking her meaning. With shame and resentment in his heart he had turned up the hillside trail.
On the brow of the hill he had stopped and flung the bedding angrily on the ground, himself upon it. Was he a criminal that he should be debarred from an hour's pleasure in the society of the only other human beings on this Island? Suddenly he felt that he hated Ellen Boreland. He hated all women. He hated all the world. The longing for strong liquor swept him, shaking him like a leaf. He could feel his chin under his soft young beard quiver. He despised himself for a weakling and a fool. He tightened the clasped hold of his arms about his knees and dropped his head upon them. The thought that had been tormenting him since the first day he began transferring the provisions, came back now with an added urge. At the West Camp were flour, sugar, cornmeal and dried fruit. With those ingredients he could make himself the stuff that his system craved—make it as the Indians made it, with two kerosene cans and a long piece of hollow kelp. In his hut on the other side of the Island he could, undetected, heat the fermented mash in a can, attach the piece of kelp to the top and immerse it in cold water until the condensed steam came out at the other end in the form of Thlinget hoochinoo.
As he huddled there on the brow of the hill he had cradled the thought in his mind, planning in detail each step of the distilling. With provisions so low it would be impossible to take enough from the cache to make any quantity—but he might make sufficient to ease, just once, the intolerable thirst that possessed him. It might be six weeks before the Hoonah returned—six weeks of torment and loneliness.
Another thing had been troubling him of late. His thoughts had been returning to stories he had heard of Add-'em-up Sam who had died of delirium tremens at Katleean. Silvertip, when in liquor, was fond of detailing the last, violent days of the old bookkeeper. . . . Sometimes, Harlan fancied, he too was beginning to see those fearful shadowy images that dance on the borderland of insanity. How else could he account for that spectre of the tundra which he saw, sometimes, as he went home in the dusk—that dark, almost imperceptible figure far off toward the south cliffs where the lone tree of Kon Klayu stood on the brow of the hill? Was he too going the way of Add-'em-up Sam?
As he sat there he had cursed himself for ever leaving the Hoonah and risking his life to help a woman whose kind, polite aloofness irritated his drink-shattered nerves as an open declaration of hostility could not have done—a woman to whom he was merely a foolish young man who had chosen to get himself marooned, and whose presence forced her to calculate more closely the alarmingly depleted store of provisions left after the wetting of the tide.
Suddenly, in the midst of his bitter reverie, he raised his face from his clasped arms. Up from the cabin below floated the faint, pure harmony of violin strings. So exquisite, so lovely sounded the notes in the wide, wild loneliness of the evening, that Harlan sat for a moment with suspended breath. Gradually, under the spell of the music, he became aware of the beauty of the world about him. The after-sunset sky was a vast expanse of tender rose and blue deepening into violet on the long encircling horizon line. Below lay the wine-dark sea fringing with pale foam the sands of Kon Klayu. The noise of breakers on distant reefs was like the wind in the eucalyptus trees of his California home. . . . A flood of homesickness dissolved the resentment in his heart. . . . Gradually the old fears and haunting troubles faded from his lean young face. The low, vibrant tones of Jean's violin brought him comfort. The soft, rippling notes breathed him confidence, and the silvery chords lured him into the promises of the future. He felt equal to noble and heroic deeds—to fighting and conquering. From a sense of being outcast and alone, he felt a sudden warming kinship with all the world. With his heart expanding he came to his feet, the better to catch the harmony.
The time and air had changed into something vaguely familiar. . . . With a glow of pleasure he recognized it,—the lament of the funeral canoes at Katleean, but with something else added, something that made him feel the mystery and the weirdness and the elemental call of the North. It was almost as if she played to him comforting him with promises of this clean, new land of beginnings.
Abruptly, he remembered, the music had broken off. There was a moment's silence. And then there had drifted up to him Jean's invariable good-night to the deepening twilight. Sweet and clear from a long-drawn singing bow it came—a commingling of love and peace and beauty he had once heard a great contralto sing:
"In the West
Sable night lulls the day on her breast.
Sweet, good-night! . . ."
He had longed to throw back his head and sing these words to Jean's music, but he had shaken himself. No. That was a song for a lover. . .
"Son, are you plumb dead to the world?" Kayak Bill's words roused Harlan from his dreaming. He sprang up and began stacking provisions inside the tent. He realized as he worked, that today no tempting thought had come to him of secretly distilling hootch from stores he might take from this camp. The enormity of such an action struck him for the first time. This food meant life on Kon Klayu—and there was little of it. . . .
A few hours later headed down the long stretch of beach toward the cabin, he squared his shoulders under the heavy pack he bore and joined in with the voices of Kayak Bill and Boreland who, with lusty incongruity were singing the whaling song of the trading-post:
"Up into the Polar seas
Where ice is delivered free,
And a man don't have to hustle
Like a blooming honey-bee!"
Work was hard in this country of the last frontier, but men had more time, more inclination to sing, he thought.
As he swung along the hard sand, in his heart was a sense of expectancy—for what he did not know.
[1] Old-time Alaskan.