Educated Natives.
These natives really require very little outside of their own resources, so it is hard to tell what articles would be likely to strike their fancy. Load, powder, tobacco, calico and clothes would be the best things.
The prince or chief of this tribe of Indians was an intelligent young man about twenty-five years old. He could not speak our language, but, strange to say, his wife, who accompanied him, was educated and refined. She had received some schooling at Port Clarence. It was she who interpreted for all of us during our trading hours.
The natives came in families, and the children were not uninteresting. Not a baby was heard to cry, although in the canoe for hours at a time, nor would they try to move. These canoes or kyaks are very strange boats, and prove quite treacherous to the novice. It looks easy rowing in one of them. I had learned the trick during my hunting about Sitka two years ago, and could not be induced to try my hand in a hurry. Not so Casey, who went out by himself in Rivers' new kyak. He started out all right, shouting that it was like riding a bicycle, "very hard to keep balanced in." He was getting along finely, keeping near the vessel, when he grew over-confident, and a misstroke with the paddle set him out of balance, and boat and poor Casey went rolling over together in the water. He struggled and kept to the surface long enough for a rope to be thrown out to him, but he could not get his legs out of the hole in the kyak for several seconds. Seconds are hours in this blistering ice-water, and had he been further from home he could not have survived the chill.
No one has tried kyaking since, but as soon as we reach shallow water I mean to practice until I have revived the lost art.
We are now inside the Arctic Circle, about 67 degrees north latitude. That is pretty well north for Southern Californians who, at home, rub their ears when the frost nips the tomato plants in January.
CHAPTER III.
C
CAPE BLOSSOM, July 13, 1898.—The voyage is behind us. What is floating ice to a ship's crew safe on shore! We can laugh at whales, and unfriendly breezes that whisper tales of shipwreck on barren coasts. And we can walk at all hours of the day and night without holding on to the rail, and we don't have to cook breakfast and supper and dinner in an S x S galley. Oh, the charm of being on land again, a land without visible limit; a land where we are not crowded, and where we are not hindered from our work by newspaper reporters!