If Miss Ruth Ryder could have seen her fastidious nephew at that moment, seated on the earthen floor of a ruinous Aleutian barrabkie, and tearing with knife and fingers at a smoky half-cooked salmon, while in the glow of a drift-wood fire his honest freckled face shone with a complete satisfaction, she would have marvelled at him. Could she also have heard his unstinted praise of this rudely served meal, and his extraordinary comparing of her own dainty cooking with the rough-and-ready methods of the uncouth sailor-man who sat beside him in favor of the latter, she would have mourned over him as over one who had lost his mind, and knew not whereof he spoke.
Could she, however, have known how very, very hungry this same nephew had been but a few minutes before, and realized the wonderful properties of the sauce named appetite, she would have rejoiced with him both in his possession of it and his present opportunity for ridding himself of it. She might have been shocked at his apparent forgetfulness of all her teachings in the matter of table manners, but she would have been comforted by his appearance of perfect content with his situation and its surroundings.
“I say, isn’t this jolly?” he cried, as, having performed his share of clearing up by wiping his knife on a wisp of grass, he lay back luxuriously on his yielding couch of moss and basked in the fireglow. “I’m sure I don’t know what a fellow could want in the way of camping out any better than this. We’ve a good shelter, comfortable beds, plenty to eat, an interesting country to explore, no one to bother us, the best fishing I ever heard of, and good shooting. You said there was plenty of game here, didn’t you, Serge?”
“I don’t know that I did,” answered the young Alaskan, “but there is. I found fresh caribou tracks to-day, and wherever there are caribou there are big brown bears as well—in fact, I saw what I am sure must be a bear road.”
“What do you mean?” asked Phil, showing his interest by rising into a sitting posture and gazing at the speaker.
“I mean what I said. A regular bear and caribou road. I never saw one before, but I have often heard hunters describe the well-beaten trail that starts away off on the mainland somewhere beyond the head of Cook Inlet and follows the Kenai peninsula for two or three hundred miles down to this very Strait of Krenitzin, and so to this island. Every summer many caribou follow it and come to Oonimak for the sake of the moss and lichens that grow here more luxuriantly than anywhere else. Wherever caribou go the bears follow, so I expect there are plenty of both on the island now.”
“Oh, if I only had a rifle!” sighed Phil. “Is there anything else in the way of game?”
“Not much; only sea-lions, and hair-seals, and foxes, and any quantity of sea-fowl, including ducks and geese, and now and then a sea-otter.”
“I call that a pretty fair list. By-the-way, what is a sea-otter? I don’t remember ever to have seen one.”