ADVENTURE
Oh, I’ve almost forgotten our loss. The poor magpie lay dead on the floor of his cage. So we found him, killed, I believe, by the storm, for Olson neglected to cover him. Rockwell, who straight on landing had run there, wept bitterly but finally found much consolation in giving him a very decent burial and marking the spot with a wooden cross.
Friday, October eighteenth.
The night is beautiful beyond thought. All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself. The full moon is almost straight above us, and shining through the tree tops into our clearing makes the old stumps quite lovely with its quiet light. And the forest around is as black as the abyss. Although it is nearly ten o’clock Rockwell is still awake. It is his birthday—by our choice. His one present, a cheap child’s edition of Wood’s “Natural History,” illustrated, has filled his head with dreams of his beloved wild animals. I began to-night to teach him to sing. We tried Brahms’s “Wiegenlied,” with little success, and then “Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf,” which went better. These songs and many other German songs, all with English words, are in the song book I bought him. I hope I shall have the patience and the time to succeed with Rockwell in this.
Three men are now with Olson in his cabin, for the two who were gone to Seward returned to-day. They are younger men, one of them Emsweiler a well-known guide of this country. I spent an interesting hour with them this evening. Olson told me to-day that his age is seventy-one. The smell of fresh bread is in our cabin, for I baked to-day. Baking, wood-cutting, darning of socks, putting the cabin in order, and the building of a shelf, these, with the other usual chores, were the whole day’s work; a profitless day lies on my conscience. I shall draw a little and then go to bed.
Saturday, October nineteenth.
To-day was raw and cloudy, mild and sunny; in the morning windy, in the afternoon dead calm so that the hills were reflected in the bay. The men have left, I am glad to say, not that they were in themselves at all objectionable, but it somehow did violence to the quiet of this place to have others about. Emsweiler slaughtered one of the goats for Olson, so there’s now one less of us here. I felled a large tree to-day and later sharpened the cross-cut saw preparatory to cutting it up. To-night the sun set in the utmost splendor and left in its wake blazing, fire-red clouds in a sky of luminous green. Not many more days shall we see the sun; it sets now close to the southern headland of our cove.
Rockwell works every day on his wild animal book. To obtain absolutely new and original names for his strange creatures he has devised an interesting method. With eyes closed he prints a name or rather a group of miscellaneous letters. Naturally the result he perceives on opening his eyes is astonishing.