Also there were a heavy trunk containing books, paints, etc., one duffel bag, one suit case, and a few other things. And when these were stowed away in the dory there was little room for ourselves. However, at ten o’clock we cast off and started for Fox Island with the little motor running beautifully.

It lasted for three miles when at once, with a bang and a whir, the motor raced, and the boat stood motionless on the calm gray water. Through the fog we could just discern the cabin of a fisherman on the nearest point of shore—perhaps a mile distant. We rowed there as best we could, seated somehow atop our household goods; we unloaded our useless motor, our gasoline, and our batteries, cleared a little space in the boat for ourselves to man the oars, and in a miserable drizzling rain, pushed off for a long, long pull to the island. By too literal a following of directions I lengthened the remainder of the course to twelve miles, and that we rowed, I don’t know how, in four hours and a half. Fortunately the water was as calm as could be. Rockwell was a revelation to me. With scarcely a rest he pulled at the heavy oars that at first he had hardly understood to manage; and when we reached the island he was hilarious with good spirits.

We unloaded with the help of Olson—whom by the way we must introduce at some length—and stowed our goods in his house and shed. We cooked our supper on his stove and slept that night and the next on his floor; and then, having our own quarters by that time in passable shape, quit his friendly roof for the most hospitable, kindly, and altogether comfortable roof in the world—our own.

Olson is about sixty-five years of age. He’s a pioneer of Alaska and knows the country from one end to the other. He has prospected for gold on the Yukon, he was at Nome with the first rush there, he has trapped along a thousand miles of coast; and now, ever unsuccessful and still enterprising, he is the proprietor of two pairs of blue foxes—in corrals—and four goats. He’s a kind-hearted, genial old man with a vast store of knowledge and true wisdom.

The map shows our Fox Island estate. Our cabin was built as a shelter for Angora goats somewhat over a year ago. It is a roughly built log structure of about fourteen by seventeen feet, inside dimensions, and was quite dark but for the small door and a two by two feet opening on the western side. We went to work upon it the morning following our arrival and in two days, as has been told, made it a fit place to live in but by no means the luxurious home that it was in our mind to make. Our cabin to-day is the product of weeks’ more labor. To describe it is to account for our time almost to the beginning of the detailed days of this diary.

HOME BUILDING

Tread first upon a broad, plank doorstep the hatch of some ill-fated vessel—the sea’s gift to us of a front veranda; stoop your head to four feet six inches and, drawing the latchstring, enter. Before you at the south end of the sombre, log interior is a mullioned window willing to admit more light than can penetrate the forest beyond. Before it is a fixed work table littered with papers, pencils, paints, and brushes. On each long side of the cabin is a shelf the eaves’ height, five feet from the floor. The right-hand one is packed with foods in sacks and tins and boxes, the left-hand shelf holds clothes and toys, paints and a flute, and at the far corner built to the floor in orthodox bookcase fashion, a library.

We may glance at the books. There are: