ON THE WAY TO NOME

"Well, boys, we're off for a long sail, and I'm afraid you will be rather tired with the steamer before you are done with her," said Mr. Strong.

They had boarded the mail-steamer late the night before, and, going right to bed, had wakened early next day and rushed on deck to find the August sun shining in brilliant beauty, the islands quite out of sight, and nought but sea and sky around and above them.

"Oh, I don't know; we'll find something to do," said Teddy. "You'll have to tell us lots about the places we pa.s.s, and, if there aren't any other boys on board, Kalitan and I will be together. What's the first place we stop?"

"We pa.s.sed the Kenai Peninsula in the night. I wish you could have caught a glimpse of some of the waterfalls, volcanoes, and glaciers. They are as fine as any in Alaska," said Mr. Strong. "Our next stop will be Kadiak Island."

"Kadiak Island was once near the mainland," said Kalitan. "There was only the narrowest pa.s.sage of water, but a great Kenai otter tried to swim the pa.s.s, and was caught fast. He struggled so that he made it wider and wider, and at last pushed Kadiak way out to sea."

"He must have been a whopper," said Ted, "to push it so far away. Is that the island?"

"Yes," said his father. "There are no splendid forests on the island as there are on the mainland, but the gra.s.ses are superb, for the fog and rain here keeps them green as emerald."

"What a queer canoe that Indian has!" exclaimed Ted. "It isn't a bit like yours, Kalitan."

"It is _bidarka_," said Kalitan. "Kadiak people make canoe out of walrus hide. They stretch it over frames of driftwood. It holds two people. They sit in small hatch with ap.r.o.n all around their bodies, and the _bidarka_ goes over the roughest sea and floats like a bladder. Big _bidarka_ called an _oomiak_, and holds whole family."

"Some one has called the _bldarkas_ the 'Cossacks of the sea,'" said Mr.

Strong. "They skim along like swallows, and are as perfectly built as any vessel I ever saw."

"What are those huge buildings on the small island?" asked Ted, as the steamer wound through the shallows.

"Ice-houses," said his father. "Before people learned to manufacture ice, immense cargoes were shipped from here to as far south as San Francisco."

"It was fun to see them go fishing for ice from the steamer when we came up to Skaguay," said Ted. "The sailors went out in a boat, slipped a net around a block of ice and towed it to the side of the ship, then it was. .h.i.tched to a derrick and swung on deck."

"Huh!" said Kalitan. "What people want ice for stored up? Think they'd store sunshine!"

"If you could invent a way to do that, you could make a fortune, my boy," said Mr. Strong, laughing. "The next place of any interest is Karluk. It's around on the other side of the island in Shelikoff Strait, and is famous for its salmon canneries. Nearly half of the entire salmon pack of Alaska comes from Kadiak Island, most of the fish coming from the Karluk River."

"Very bad for Indians," said Kalitan. "Used to have plenty fish. Tyee Klake said salmon used to come up this river in shoal sixteen miles long, and now Boston men take them all."

"It does seem a pity that the Indians don't even have a chance to earn their living in the canneries," said Mr. Strong. "The largest cannery in the world is at Karluk. There are thousands of men employed, and in one year over three million salmon were packed, yet with all this work for busy hands to do, the canneries employ Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, and American workmen in preference to the Indians, bringing them by the shipload from San Francisco."

"What other places do we pa.s.s?" asked Ted.

"A lot of very interesting ones, and I wish we could coast along, stopping wherever we felt like it," said Mr. Strong. "The Shumagin Islands are where Bering, the great discoverer and explorer, landed in 1741 to bury one of his crew. Codfish were found there, and Captain Cook, in his 'Voyages and Discoveries,' speaks of the same fish. There is a famous fishery there now called the Davidson Banks, and the codfishing fleet has its headquarters on Popoff Island. Millions of codfish are caught here every year. These islands are also a favourite haunt of the sea otter, Belofsky, at the foot of Mt. Pavloff, is the centre of the trade."

"What kind of fur is otter?" asked Ted, whose mind was so inquiring that his father often called him the "living catechism."

"It is the court fur of China and Russia, and at one time the common people were forbidden by law to wear it," said Mr. Strong. "It is a rich, purplish brown sprinkled with silver-tipped hairs, and the skins are very costly."

"At one time any one could have otter," said Kalitan. "We hunted them with spears and bows and arrows. Now they are very few, and we find them only in dangerous spots, hiding on rocks or floating kelp. Sometimes the hunters have to lie in hiding for days watching them. Only Indians can kill the otter. Boston men can if they marry Indian women. That makes them Indian."

"Rather puts otter at a discount and women at a premium," laughed Mr.

Strong. "Now we pa.s.s along near the Alaska peninsula, past countless isles and islets, through the Fox Islands to Unalaska, and then into the Bering Sea. One of the most interesting things in this region is called the 'Pacific Ring of Fire,' a chain of volcanoes which stretches along the coast. Often the pa.s.sengers can see from the ships at night a strange red glow over the sky, and know that the fire mountains are burning. The most beautiful of these volcanoes is Mt. Shishaldin, nearly nine thousand feet high, and almost as perfect a cone in shape as Fuji Yama, which the j.a.panese love so much and call 'the Honourable Mountain.' At Unalaska or Ilinlink, the 'curving beach,' we stop. If we could stay over for awhile, there are a great many interesting things we could see; an old Greek church and the government school are in the town, and Bogoslov's volcano and the sea-lion rookeries are on the island of St. John, which rose right up out of the sea in 1796 after a day's roaring and rumbling and thundering. In 1815 there was a similar performance, and from time to time the island has grown larger ever since. One fine day in 1883 there was a great shower of ashes, and, when the clouds had rolled away, two peaks were seen where only one had been, separated by a sandy isthmus.

This last was reduced to a fine thread by the earthquake of 1891, and I don't know what new freaks it may have developed by now. I know some friends of mine landed there not long ago and cooked eggs over the jets of steam which gush out of the mountainside. Did you ever hear of using a volcano for a cook-stove?"

"Well, I should say not," said Ted, amused. "These Alaskan volcanoes are great things."

"The one called Makushin has a crater filled with snow in a part of which there is always a cloud of sulphurous smoke. That's making extremes meet, isn't it?"

"Yehl[13] made many strange things," said Kalitan, who had been taking in all this information even more eagerly than Teddy. "He first dwelt on Na.s.s River, and turned two blades of gra.s.s into the first man and woman.

Then the Thlinkits grew and prospered, till darkness fell upon the earth.

A Thlinkit stole the sun and hid it in a box, but Yehl found it and set it so high in the heavens that none could touch it. Then the Thlinkits grew and spread abroad. But a great flood came, and all were swept away save two, who tossed long upon the flood on a raft of logs until Yehl pitied, and carried them to Mt. Edgecomb, where they dwelt until the waters fell."

[Footnote 13: Yehl, embodied in the raven, is the Thlinkit Great Spirit]

"Old Kala-kash tells this story, and he says that one of these people, when very old, went down through the crater of the mountain, and, given long life by Yehl, stays there always to hold up the earth out of the water. But the other lives in the crater as the Thunder Bird, Hahtla, whose wing-flap is the thunder and whose glance is the lightning. The osprey is his totem, and his face glares in our blankets and totems."

"I've wondered what that fierce bird was," said Teddy, who was always quite carried away with Kalitan's strange legends.

"Well, what else do we see on the way to Nome, father?"

"The most remarkable thing happening in the Bering Sea is the seal industry, but I do not think we pa.s.s near enough to the islands to see any of that. You'd better run about and see the ship now," and the boys needed no second permission.

It was not many days before they knew everybody on board, from captain to deck hands, and were prime favourites with them all. Ted and Kalitan enjoyed every moment. There was always something new to see or hear, and ere they reached their journey's end, they had heard all about seals and sealing, although the famous Pribylov Islands were too far to the west of the vessel's route for them to see them. They sighted the United States revenue cutter which plies about the seal islands to keep off poachers, for no one is allowed to kill seals or to land on this government reservation except from government vessels. The scent of the rookeries, where millions of seals have been killed in the last hundred years, is noticed far out at sea, and often the barking of the animals can be heard by pa.s.sing vessels.

"Why is sealskin so valuable, father?" asked Ted.

"It has always been admired because it is so warm and soft," replied Mr.

Strong. "All the ladies fancy it, and it never seems to go out of fashion. There was a time, when the Pribylov Islands were first discovered, that sealskins were so plentiful that they sold in Alaska for a dollar apiece. Hunters killed so many, killing old and young that soon there were scarcely any left, so a law was pa.s.sed by the Russian government forbidding any killing for five years. Since the Americans have owned Alaska they have protected the seals, allowing them to be killed only at certain times, and only male seals from two to four years old are killed. The Indians are always the killers, and are wonderfully swift and clever, never missing a blow and always killing instantly, so that there is almost no suffering."

"How do they know where to find the seals?" asked Ted.

"For half the year the seals swim about the sea, but in May they return to their favourite haunts. In these rookeries families of them herd on the rocks, the male staying at home with his funny little black puppies, while the mother swims about seeking food. The seals are very timid, and will rush into the water at the least strange noise. A story is told that the barking of a little pet dog belonging to a Russian at one of the rookeries lost him a hundred thousand dollars, for the seals took fright and scurried away before any one could say 'Jack Robinson!'"

"Rather an expensive pup!" commented Ted. "But what about the seals, daddy?"

"You seem to think I am an encyclopedia on the seal question," said his father. "There is not much else to tell you."

"How can they manage always to kill the right ones?" demanded Ted.

"The gay bachelor seals herd together away from the rest and sleep at night on the rocks. Early in the morning the Aleuts slip in between them and the herd and drive them slowly to the killing-ground, where they are quickly killed and skinned and the skins taken to the salting-house. The Indians use the flesh and blubber, and the climate is such that before another year the hollow bones are lost in the gra.s.s and earth."

"What becomes of the skins after they are salted?"

"They are usually sent to London, where they are prepared for market.

The work is all done by hand, which is one reason that they are so expensive. They are first worked in saw-dust; cleaned, sc.r.a.ped, washed, shaved, plucked, dyed with a hand-brush from eight to twelve times, washed again and freed from the least speck of grease by a last bath in hot sawdust or sand."

"I don't wonder a sealskin coat costs so much," said Ted? "if they have got to go through all that performance. I wish we could have seen the islands, but I'd hate to see the seals killed. It doesn't seem like hunting just to knock them on the head. It's too much like the stock-yards at home."

"Yes, but it's a satisfaction to know that it's done in the easiest possible way for the animals.

"What a lot you are learning way up here in Alaska, aren't you, son?

To-morrow we'll be at Nome, and then your head will be so stuffed with mines and mining that you will forget all about everything else."