Other details of Nina's great adventure followed—how it took her three days to skin the two bears, she having to climb a tree to adjust the block and tackle so as to move the heavy carcases; and how Joe "blubbered" when he got home and saw them, and knew the peril his beloved had encountered.
Nina is an exceptional woman, but still she is truly a type. There is something in "that great, big, broad land, way up yonder," that stiffens the moral fiber, enlarges the spirit and makes the people unafraid. The white settlers of Alaska, while by no means all saints, are as a class the strongest, bravest and most resourceful people I know. I have not heard from my brave little chum for several years. I presume she is still living her joyous, fearless, Christian life in what John Muir used to call my "beautiful, fruitful wilderness." Here's to her; God bless her!
[VIII]
THE ABSURD WALRUS
Lewis Caroll's famous lines about the Walrus and the Carpenter will always hold their place at the very top of humorous poems. For besides being funny they have a quality of truth which the careless reader little suspects:
"The time has come," the walrus said,
"To talk of many things,
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings;
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings."
The very few men who have been acquainted with the walrus in his native haunts know that the author of "Alice in Wonderland" in these verses "hits the nail on the head," and, perhaps unwittingly, gives an insight into the true character of the walrus as the most inconsistent, grotesque and absurd of all beasts.
It was my good fortune the summer of 1913 to be one of a company of six hunters on board the three-masted power schooner, P. J. Abler, which sailed along the Alaskan and Siberian coasts for six thousand miles and pounded its way northward into the Arctic ice-pack to within sixteen degrees of the Pole.