Alaska Part 45

In a large and commodious house two of the owners of the mine lived, their wives being with them for the summer. They were gay and charming women, fond of society, and pining for the fleshpots of San Francisco.

The white women living between Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are so few that they may be counted on one hand, and the luxurious furnis.h.i.+ngs of their homes in these out-of-the-way places are almost startling in their unexpectedness. We spent the afternoon at the mine, and the ladies returned to the _Dora_ with us for dinner. The squalls had taken themselves off, and we had a prosaic return in the mine's launch.

"What do we do?" said one of the ladies, in reply to my question. "Oh, we read, walk, write letters, go out on the water, play cards, sew, and do so much fancy work that when we get back to San Francisco we have nothing to do but enjoy ourselves and brag about the good time we have in Alaska. We are all packed now to go camping--"

"_Camping!_" I repeated, too astonished to be polite.

"Yes, camping," replied she, coloring, and speaking somewhat coldly. "We go in the launch to the most beautiful beach about ten miles from Unga.

We stay a month. It is a sheltered beach of white sand. The waves lap on it all day long, blue, sparkling, and warm, and we almost live in them.

The hills above the beach are simply covered with the big blueberries that grow only in Alaska. They are somewhat like the black mountain huckleberry, only more delicious. We can them, preserve them, and dry them, and take them back to San Francisco with us. They are the best things I ever ate--with thick cream on them. I had some in the house; I wish I had thought to offer you some."

She wished she had thought to offer me some!

On the _Dora_ we were rapidly getting down to bacon and fish,--being about two thousand miles from Seattle, with no ice aboard in this land of ice,--and I am not enthusiastic about either.

And she wished that she had thought to offer me some Alaskan blueberries that are more delicious than mountain huckleberries, and thick cream!

CHAPTER x.x.xV

I have heard of steamers that have been built and sent out by missionary or church societies to do good in far and lonely places.

The little _Dora_ is not one of these, nor is religion her cargo; her hold is filled with other things. Yet blessings be on her for the good she does! Her mission is to carry mail, food, freight, and good cheer to the people of these green islands that go drifting out to Siberia, one by one. She is the one link that connects them with the great world outside; through her they obtain their sole touch of society, of which their appreciation is pitiful.

Our captain was a big, violet-eyed Norwegian, about forty years old. He showed a kindness, a courtesy, and a patience to those lonely people that endeared him to us.

He knew them all by name and greeted them cordially as they stood, smiling and eager, on the wharves. All kinds of commissions had been intrusted to him on his last monthly trip. To one he brought a hat; to another a phonograph; to another a box of fruit; dogs, cats, chairs, flowers, books--there seemed to be nothing that he had not personally selected for the people at the various ports. Even a little seven-year-old half-breed girl had travelled in his care from Valdez to join her father on one of the islands.

Wherever there was a woman, native or half-breed, he took us ash.o.r.e to make her acquaintance.

"Come along now," he would say, in a tone of command, "and be nice.

They don't get a chance to talk to many women. Haven't you got some little womanly thing along with you that you can give them? It'll make them happy for months."

We were eager enough to talk to them, heaven knows, and to give them what we could; but the "little womanly things" that we could spare on a two months' voyage in Alaska were distressingly few. When we had nothing more that we could give, the stern disapproval in the captain's eyes went to our hearts. Box after box of bonbons, figs, salted almonds, preserved ginger, oranges, apples, ribbons, belts, pretty bags--one after one they went, until, like Olive Schreiner's woman, I felt that I had given up everything save the one green leaf in my bosom; and that the time would come when the captain would command me to give that up, too.

There seems to be something in those great lonely s.p.a.ces that moves the people to kindness, to patience and consideration--to tenderness, even.

I never before came close to such _humanness_. It shone out of people in whom one would least expect to find it.

Several times while we were at dinner the chief steward, a gay and handsome youth not more than twenty-one years old, rushed through the dining room, crying:--

"Give me your old magazines--_quick_! There's a whaler's boat alongside."

A stampede to our cabins would follow, and a hasty upgathering of such literature as we could lay our hands upon.

The whaling and cod-fis.h.i.+ng schooners cruise these waters for months without a word from the outside until they come close enough to a steamer to send out a boat. The crew of the steamer, discovering the approach of this boat, gather up everything they can throw into it as it flashes for a moment alongside. Frequently the occupants of the boat throw fresh cod aboard, and then there are smiling faces at dinner. It is my opinion, however, that any one who would smile at cod would smile at anything.

The most marvellous voyage ever made in the beautiful and not always peaceful Pacific Ocean was the one upon which the _Dora_ started at an instant's notice, and by no will of her master's, on the first day of January, 1906. Blown from the coast down into the Pacific in a freezing storm, she became disabled and drifted helplessly for more than two months.

During that time the weather was the worst ever known by seafaring men on the coast. The steams.h.i.+p _Santa Ana_ and the United States steams.h.i.+p _Rush_ were sent in search of the _Dora_, and when both had returned without tidings, hope for her safety was abandoned.

Eighty-one days from the time she had sailed from Valdez, she crawled into the harbor of Seattle, two thousand miles off her course. She carried a crew of seven men and three or four pa.s.sengers, one of whom was a young Aleutian lad of Unalaska. As the _Dora_ was on her outward trip when blown to sea, she was well stocked with provisions which she was carrying to the islanders; but there was no fuel and but a scant supply of water aboard.

The physical and mental sufferings of all were ferocious; and it was but a feeble cheer that arose from the little s.h.i.+pwrecked band when the _Dora_ at last crept up beside the Seattle pier. For two months they had expected each day to be their last, and their joy was now too deep for expression.

The welcome they received when they returned to their regular run among the Aleutian Islands is still described by the settlers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by E. A. Hegg, Juneau Courtesy of Webster & Stevens, Seattle

CLOUD EFFECT ON THE YUKON]

The _Dora_ reached Kodiak late on a boisterous night; but her whistle was heard, and the whole town was on the wharf when she docked, to welcome the crew and to congratulate them on their safety. Some greeted their old friends hilariously, and others simply pressed their hands in emotion too deep for expression.

So completely are the people of the smaller places on the route cut off from the world, save for the monthly visits of the _Dora_, that they had not heard of her safety. When, after supposing her to be lost for two months, they beheld her steaming into their harbors, the superst.i.tious believed her to be a spectre-s.h.i.+p.

The greatest demonstration was at Unalaska. A schooner had brought the news of her safety to Dutch Harbor; from there a messenger was despatched to Unalaska, two miles away, to carry the glad tidings to the father of the little lad aboard the _Dora_.

The news flashed wildly through the town. People in bed, or sitting by their firesides, were startled by the flinging open of their door and the shouting of a voice from the darkness outside:--

"The _Dora's_ safe!"--but before they could reach the door, messenger and voice would be gone--fleeing on through the town.

At last he reached the Jessie Lee Missionary Home, at the end of the street, where a prayer-meeting was in progress. Undaunted, he flung wide the door, burst into the room, shouting, "The _Dora's_ safe!"--and was gone. Instantly the meeting broke up, people sprang to their feet, and prayer gave place to a glad thanksgiving service.

When the _Dora_ finally reached Unalaska once more, the whole town was in holiday garb. Flags were flying, and every one that could walk was on the wharf. Children, native and white, carried flags which they joyfully waved. Their welcome was enthusiastic and sincere, and the men on the boat were deeply affected.

The _Dora_ is not a fine steams.h.i.+p, but she is stanch, seaworthy, and comfortable; and the islanders are as attached to her as though she were a thing of flesh and blood.

No steamer could have a twelve-hundred-mile route more fascinating than the one from Valdez to Unalaska. It is intensely lovely. Behind the gray cliffs of the peninsula float the snow-peaks of the Aleutian Range. Here and there a volcano winds its own dark, fleecy turban round its crest, or flings out a scarlet scarf of flame. There are glaciers sweeping everything before them; bold headlands plunging out into the sea, where they pause with a sheer drop of thousands of feet; and flowery vales and dells. There are countless islands--some of them mere bits of green floating upon the blue.

At times a kind of divine blueness seems to swim over everything.

Wherever one turns, the eye is rested and charmed with blue. Sea, sh.o.r.e, islands, atmosphere, and sky--all are blue. A mist of it rests upon the snow mountains and goes drifting down the straits. It is a warm, delicate, luscious blue. It is like the blue of frost-touched grapes when the prisoned wine s.h.i.+nes through.

Sand Point, a trading post on Unga Island, is a wild and picturesque place. It impressed me chiefly, however, by the enormous size of its crabs and starfishes, which I saw in great numbers under the wharf.

Rocks, timbers, and boards were incrusted with rosy-purple starfishes, some measuring three feet from the tip of one ray to the tip of the ray nearly opposite. Smaller ones were wedged in between the rays of the larger ones, so that frequently a piling from the wharf to the sandy bottom of the bay, which we could plainly see, would seem to be solid starfish.

As for the crabs--they were so large that they were positively startling. They were three and four feet from tip to tip; yet their movements, as they floated in the clear green water, were exceedingly graceful.

Sand Point has a wild, weird, and lonely look. It is just the place for the desperate murder that was committed in the house that stands alone across the bay,--a dull and neglected house with open windows and banging doors.

"Does no one live there?" I asked the storekeeper's wife.

"Live there!" she repeated with a quick shudder. "No one could be hired at any price to live there."

The murdered man had purchased a young Aleutian girl, twelve years old, for ten dollars and some tobacco. When she grew older, he lived with her and called her his wife. He abused her shamefully. A Russian half-breed named Gera.s.senoff--the name fits the story--fell in love with the girl, loved her to desperation, and tried to persuade her to run away with him.

She dared not, for fear of the brutal white wretch who owned her, body and soul. Gera.s.senoff, seeing the cruelties and abuse to which she was daily subjected, brooded upon his troubles until he became partially insane. He entered the house when the man was asleep and murdered him--foully, horribly, cold-bloodedly.