The Alaskan

by James Oliver Curwood

From Shelton, Alan and his companion visited the eighty or ninety people at Candle, and thence continued down the Keewalik River to Keewalik, on Kotzebue Sound. A Lomen power-boat, run by Lapps, carried them to Choris Peninsula, where for a week Alan remained with Lomen and his huge herd of fifteen thousand reindeer. He was eager to go on, but tried to hide his impatience. Something was urging him, whipping him on to greater haste. For the first time in months he heard the crackling thunder of reindeer hoofs, and the music of it was like a wild call from his own herds hurrying him home. He was glad when the week-end came and his business was done. The power-boat took him to Kotzebue. It was night, as his watch went, when Paul Davidovich started up the delta of the Kobuk River with him in a lighterage company’s boat. But there was no darkness. In the afternoon of the fourth day they came to the Redstone, two hundred miles above the mouth of the Kobuk as the river winds. They had supper together on the shore. After that Paul Davidovich turned back with the slow sweep of the current, waving his hand until he was out of sight.

Not until the sound of the Russian’s motor-boat was lost in distance did Alan sense fully the immensity of the freedom that swept upon him. At last, after months that had seemed like so many years, he was alone. North and eastward stretched the unmarked trail which he knew so well, a hundred and fifty miles straight as a bird might fly, almost unmapped, unpeopled, right up to the doors of his range in the slopes of the Endicott Mountains. A little cry from his own lips gave him a start. It was as if he had called out aloud to Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, and to Keok and Nawadlook, telling them he was on his way home and would soon be there. Never had this hidden land which he had found for himself seemed so desirable as it did in this hour. There was something about it that was all-mothering, all-good, all-sweetly-comforting to that other thing which had become a part of him now. It was holding out its arms to him, understanding, welcoming, inspiring him to travel strongly and swiftly the space between. And he was ready to answer its call.

He looked at his watch. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. He had spent a long day with the Russian, but he felt no desire for rest or sleep. The musk-tang of the tundras, coming to him through the thin timber of the river-courses, worked like an intoxicant in his blood. It was the tundra he wanted, before he lay down upon his back with his face to the stars. He was eager to get away from timber and to feel the immeasurable space of the big country, the open country, about him. What fool had given to it the name of Barren Lands? What idiots people were to lie about it in that way on the maps! He strapped his pack over his shoulders and seized his rifle. Barren Lands!

He set out, walking like a man in a race. And long before the twilight hours of sleep they were sweeping out ahead of him in all their glory—the Barren Lands of the map-makers, his paradise. On a knoll he stood in the golden sun and looked about him. He set his pack down and stood with bared head, a whispering of cool wind in his hair. If Mary Standish could have lived to see this! He stretched out his arms, as if pointing for her eyes to follow, and her name was in his heart and whispering on his silent lips. Immeasurable the tundras reached ahead of him—rolling, sweeping, treeless, green and golden and a glory of flowers, athrill with a life no forest land had ever known. Under his feet was a crush of forget-me-nots and of white and purple violets, their sweet perfume filling his lungs as he breathed. Ahead of him lay a white sea of yellow-eyed daisies, with purple iris high as his knees in between, and as far as he could see, waving softly in the breeze, was the cotton-tufted sedge he loved. The pods were green. In a few days they would be opening, and the tundras would be white carpets.

He listened to the call of life. It was about him everywhere, a melody of bird-life subdued and sleepy even though the sun was still warmly aglow in the sky. A hundred times he had watched this miracle of bird instinct, the going-to-bed of feathered creatures in the weeks and months when there was no real night. He picked up his pack and went on. From a pool hidden in the lush grasses of a distant hollow came to him the twilight honking of nesting geese and the quacking content of wild ducks. He heard the reed-like, musical notes of a lone “organ-duck” and the plaintive cries of plover, and farther out, where the shadows seemed deepening against the rim of the horizon, rose the harsh, rolling notes of cranes and the raucous cries of the loons. And then, from a clump of willows near him, came the chirping twitter of a thrush whose throat was tired for the day, and the sweet, sleepy evening song of a robin. Night! Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face. Bedtime! He looked at his watch.

It was nine o’clock. Nine o’clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there—in the States—called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. It was humorous. And it was tragic.

At last he came to a shining pool between two tufted ridges, and in this velvety hollow the twilight was gathering like a shadow in a cup. A little creek ran out of the pool, and here Alan gathered soft grass and spread out his blankets. A great stillness drew in about him, broken only by the old squaws and the loons. At eleven o’clock he could still see clearly the sleeping water-fowl on the surface of the pool. But the stars were appearing. It grew duskier, and the rose-tint of the sun faded into purple gloom as pale night drew near—four hours of rest that was neither darkness nor day. With a pillow of sedge and grass under his head he slept.

The song and cry of bird-life wakened him, and at dawn he bathed in the pool, with dozens of fluffy, new-born ducks dodging away from him among the grasses and reeds. That day, and the next, and the day after that he traveled steadily into the heart of the tundra country, swiftly and almost without rest. It seemed to him, at last, that he must be in that country where all the bird-life of the world was born, for wherever there was water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound. Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had God created this land of twenty-hour day and four-hour twilight. In it, in these days of summer, was no abiding place for gloom; yet in his own heart, as he drew nearer to his home, was a place of darkness which its light could not quite enter.

The tundras had made Mary Standish more real to him. In the treeless spaces, in the vast reaches with only the sky shutting out his vision, she seemed to be walking nearer to him, almost with her hand in his. At times it was like a torture inflicted upon him for his folly, and when he visioned what might have been, and recalled too vividly that it was he who had stilled with death that living glory which dwelt with him in spirit now, a crying sob of which he was not ashamed came from his lips. For when he thought too deeply, he knew that Mary Standish would have lived if he had said other things to her that night aboard the ship. She had died, not for him, but because of him—because, in his failure to live up to what she believed she had found in him, he had broken down what must have been her last hope and her final faith. If he had been less blind, and God had given him the inspiration of a greater wisdom, she would have been walking with him now, laughing in the rose-tinted dawn, growing tired amid the flowers, sleeping under the clear stars—happy and unafraid, and looking to him for all things. At least so he dreamed, in his immeasurable loneliness.

He did not tolerate the thought that other forces might have called her even had she lived, and that she might not have been his to hold and to fight for. He did not question the possibility of shackles and chains that might have bound her, or other inclinations that might have led her. He claimed her, now that she was dead, and knew that living he would have possessed her. Nothing could have kept him from that. But she was gone. And for that he was accountable, and the fifth night he lay sleepless under the stars, and like a boy he cried for her with his face upon his arm, and when morning came, and he went on, never had the world seemed so vast and empty.