Where the Sun Swings North
B >> Barrett Willoughby >> Where the Sun Swings NorthWHERE THE SUN SWINGS NORTH
by
BARRETT WILLOUGHBY
A. L. Burt Company
Publishers ------ New York
Published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons
Printed in U. S. A.
Copyright, 1922
by
Florance Willoughby
This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York And London
TO
MY MOTHER
WHO CAN MAKE A TENT IN THE WILDERNESS
SEEM LIKE HOME
In this book I write of my own country and its people as I know
them--not artfully, perhaps, but truthfully.
BARRETT WILLOUGHBY.
Katalla, Alaska.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER
I.--THE WHITE CHIEF OF KATLEEAN
II.--THE CHEECHACO
III.--THE LITTLE SQUAW WITH WHITE FEET
IV.--BAIT
V.--THE FUNERAL CANOES
VI.--THE WHITE CHIEF MAKES MEDICINE
VII.--THE POTLATCH DANCE
VIII.--THE OUTFIT
IX.--HARLAN WAKES UP
X.--THE PIGEON
PART II
XI.--THE ISLAND OF THE RUBY SANDS
XII.--THE LANDING
XIII.--THE CABIN
XIV.--THE CASTAWAY
XV.--THE GIANT BALLS OF STONE
XVI.--THE STORM
XVII.--THE MYSTERIOUS PRESENCE
XVIII.--THE PERIL OF THE SURF
XIX.--HOME MAKING
XX.--GOLD
XXI.--KOBUK
XXII.--AT THE LONE TREE
XXIII.--ELLEN
XXIV.--MAROONED
PART III
XXV.--ON RATIONS
XXVI.--WINTER DAYS
XXVII.--SPRING
XXVIII.--THE CLEFT
XXIX.--THE SECRET OF THE CLIFFS
XXX.--THE PIGEON'S FLIGHT
XXXI.--THE JUSTICE OF THE SEA
XXXII.--BENEATH THE BLOOD-RED SUN
XXXIII.--ANCHORS WEIGHED
WHERE THE SUN SWINGS NORTH
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE WHITE CHIEF OF KATLEEAN
It was quiet in the great store room of the Alaska Fur and Trading
Company's post at Kat-lee-an. The westering sun streaming in through a
side window lighted up shelves of brightly labeled canned goods and a
long, scarred counter piled high with gay blankets and men's rough
clothing. Back of the big, pot-bellied stove--cold now--that stood
near the center of the room, lidless boxes of hard-tack and crackers
yawned in open defiance of germs. An amber, mote-filled ray slanted
toward the moss-chinked log wall where a row of dusty fox and wolverine
skins hung--pelts discarded when the spring shipment of furs had been
made, because of flaws visible only to expert eyes.
At the far end of the room the possessor of those expert eyes sat
before a rough home-made desk. There was a rustle of papers and he
closed the ledger in front of him with an air of relief. He clapped
his hands smartly. Almost on the instant the curtain hanging in the
doorway at the side of the desk was drawn aside and a small, brown
feminine hand materialized.
"My cigarettes, Decitan."
The man's voice was low, with that particular vibrant quality often
found in the voices of men accustomed to command inferior peoples on
the far outposts of civilization.
The curtain wavered again and from behind the folds a brown arm, bare
and softly rounded, accompanied the hand that set down a tray of
smoking materials.
With a careless nod toward his invisible servitor, the man picked up a
cigarette and lighted it. He took one long, deep pull. Tossing it
aside he swung his chair about and faced the open doorway that gave on
a courtyard and the bay beyond.
He readjusted the scarlet band about his narrow hips. Flannel-shirted,
high-booted, he stretched his six-foot length in the tilting chair and
clasped his hands behind his head. The movement loosened a lock of
black hair which fell heavily across his forehead. His eyes, long,
narrow and the color of pale smoke, drowsed beneath brows that met
above his nose. Thin, sharply defined nostrils quivered under the
slightest emotion, and startling against the whiteness of his face, was
a short, pointed beard, black and silky as a woman's hair. When Paul
Kilbuck, the white trader of Katleean, smiled, his thin, red lips
parted over teeth white and perfect, but there was that in the long,
pointed incisors that brought to mind the clean fangs of a wolf-dog.
He closed his pale eyes now and smiled to himself. His work on the
Company's books was finished for the present. He hated the petty
details of account keeping, but since the death of old Add-'em-up Sam,
his helper and accountant, who had departed this world six months
before during a spell of delirium tremens, the trader had been obliged
to do his own.
Queer and clever things had Add-'em-up done to the books. Down in San
Francisco the directors of the Alaska Fur and Trading Company had long
suspected it no doubt, but it was not for nothing that Paul Kilbuck was
known up and down the coast of Alaska as the White Chief. No other man
in the North had such power and influence among the Thlinget tribes.
No other man sent in such quantities of prime pelts; hence the White
Chief of Katleean had never been obliged to give too strict an
accounting of his stewardship. Taking what belongs to a company is
not, in the elastic code of the North, considered stealing. "God is
high above and the Czar is far away," said the plundering, roistering
old Russians of Baranoff's day, and the spirit in the isolated posts
had not changed, though Russian adventurers come no more to rape Alaska
of her riches, and the Stars and Stripes now floats over the old-time
Russian stronghold at Sitka.
For eighteen years Kilbuck had been the agent of the Company. In
trading-posts up and down the coast where the trappers and prospectors
gather to outfit, many tales of the White Chief were afloat: his trips
to the Outside[1]; his lavish spending of money; his hiring of private
cars to take him from Seattle to New York; his princely entertainment
of beautiful women. In every story told of Paul Kilbuck there were
women. Sometimes they were white, but more often they were dusky
beauties of the North.
Among the several dark-eyed Thlinget women who occupied the mysterious
quarters back of the log store, there was always rejoicing when the
White Chief returned from his visits to the States. He was a generous
master, bringing back with him many presents from the land of the white
people--rings, beads, trinkets, and yards of bright colored silks. The
favorites of his household fondled these gifts for a time with soft,
guttural cries of delight and gentle strokings of their slim, brown
hands, and then laid them away in fantastically carved Indian chests of
yellow cedar.
Perhaps the strangest of these gifts had been a pair of homing pigeons,
which had thrived and multiplied under the care of Add-'em-up Sam. A
fluttering of wings now outside the doorway bespoke the presence of
some of them, and Kilbuck stirred in his chair and opened his eyes.
He had been many hours alone in the store, but he had been prepared for
that today. The entire post of Katleean was getting ready for the
Potlatch, an Indian festival scheduled for the near future. For this
occasion Kayak Bill, in his carefully secreted still across the lagoon,
had completed a particularly potent batch of moonshine, known locally
as hootch. The arrival, earlier in the afternoon, of the jocose old
hootch-maker with a canoe-load of his fiery beverage, had been a signal
for a gathering at his cabin across the courtyard. From the sounds
that now floated out on the late afternoon air, he must already have
distributed generous samples of his brew.
The White Chief rose from his chair and reached for another cigarette.
As usual, he tossed it away after one long, deep inhalation. Before
the smoke cleared from his head, he was crossing the store room with
his easy panther tread--the result of former years of moccasin-wearing.
In the open doorway he paused, leaned against the portal and hooked one
thumb beneath his scarlet belt. His narrow eyes swept the scene before
him. Across the bay, between purple hills, a valley lay dreaming in
rose-lavender mist. Blue above the August haze was a glimpse of a
glacier, and farther back, peaks rose tier upon tier in the vague,
amethystine distance.
Suddenly the quiet beauty was shot through with the sound of loud
voices and snatches of song issuing from the cabin of Kayak Bill. The
trader listened with a smile that was half a sneer. He himself never
drank while at the post, deeming that it lessened his influence with
the Indians. But among the secrets of his own experience were memories
of wild days and nights aboard visiting schooners, at the end of which
prone in the captain's bunk, he had lain for hours in alcoholic
oblivion.
The voices from the cabin ceased abruptly. Then like the bellow of a
fog horn on a lonely northern sea came Kayak Bill's deep bass:
"Take me north of old Point Barrow
Where there ain't no East or West;
Where man has a thirst that lingers
And where moonshine tastes the best;
Where the Arctic ice-pack hovers
'Twixt Alaska and the Pole,
And there ain't no bloomin' fashions
To perplex a good man's soul."
There was a momentary pause followed by a hubbub of masculine voices
apparently in a dispute as to how the song should run. High above the
others rose a squeaky Scandinavian protest:
"By yingo, ven ay ban cook on _Soofie Suderlant_ ve sing it so _dis_
vay----"
"Close yore mouth, Silvertip." As a whale would swallow a minnow so
Kayak Bill's drawling tones engulfed the thin, high accents of the
one-time cook of the _Sophie Sutherland_. "I ain't no nature for
Swedes a-devilin' o' me. I been singin' that song for nigh on to ten
yars, and by the roarin' Jasus, I reckon I know how to sing it. Come
on boys--now all together!"
Joining the again raised bass of Kayak Bill, several voices took up the
rollicking strain, among them the high, easily recognizable tenor of
Silvertip, and the voice of another, a baritone of startling mellowness
and purity, having in it a timbre of youth and recklessness:
"Up into the Polar Seas,
Where the Innuit maidens be,
There's a fat, bright-eyed va-hee-ney
A-waitin' there for me.
She's sittin' in her igloo cold,
Chewing on a muckluck sole,
And the sun comes up at midnight
From an ice-pack round the Pole."
At the sound of the baritone, the White Chief hitched his shoulders
with a movement of satisfaction. Add-'em-up Sam's successor, the
bookkeeper, was bidding fair to follow in the sodden footsteps of his
predecessor. Given a little more time and this baritone-singing
_cheechako_[2] would be where the White Chief need have no anxiety as
to the accounts rendered the Company's new president, whom Kilbuck had
never seen. A little more time, a little more hootch, and he would
also have settled the case of Na-lee-nah.
The thought of the Thlinget girl's soft brown eyes brought a momentary
pang. The white plague permitted few native women to become old.
Twice now Naleenah had lost her voice, and only last night he had
noticed behind her soft, her singularly beautiful little ears, the
peculiar drawn look that to his practiced eye spelled tuberculosis.
She would last two years more, perhaps, but in the meantime he must
protect himself--he stirred uneasily. The bookkeeper must be made to
take her off his hands.
His musing was broken into by another burst of song:
"Oh-o-o-o! I am a jolly rover
And I lead a jolly life!
I have my hootch and salmon
And a little squaw to wife."
Simultaneously the door of Kayak Bill's cabin opened and the owner, a
tatterdemalion figure, stood for a moment on the doorstep. Stretching
his arms above his head, he yawned prodigiously, and then, espying
Kilbuck, sauntered across the courtyard toward him.
An old sombrero curved jauntily on red-grey hair that was overly long.
A wavy beard of auburn-grey spread over the front of his blue flannel
shirt. Hanging loosely from his shoulders a hair-seal waistcoat,
brightly trimmed with red flannel, served as a coat above faded blue
overalls, and from the knees down Kayak Bill was finished off with hip
rubber boots, the turned-down tops of which flapped with every step,
lending a swashbuckling air to his rolling gait.
He seated himself leisurely on the steps below the platform in front of
the trading-post door.
"By hell, Chief," he drawled, drawing a huge clasp-knife from his
pocket, "I been grazin' on this here Alasky range nigh on to twenty
yars, and so help me Hannah, I never did find a place so wild or a
bunch o' hombres so tough but what sooner or later all hands starts
a-singin' o' the female sect." With a movement of his thumb Kayak Bill
released the formidable blade of the knife, and nonchalantly,
dexterously, began using it as a toothpick.
"Yas," he said slowly, in answer to the other's silence, "a-talkin' and
a-singin' o' women and love. . . . Now, I hearn tell a heap about love
and women in my time, but neither o' them things has affected my heart
ever, though one time a spell back, tobaccy did. Still, Chief, with
all respects to yore sentiments regardin' them Chocolate Drops what
inhabits yore harem, . . . still, it sort o' roils me up to hear a
white man a-talkin' and a-singin' o' takin' a squaw to wife."
There was an involuntary contraction of the hand that was hooked under
Paul Kilbuck's belt. Not another man from Dixon's Entrance to Point
Barrow would have dared to hint at the White Chief's domestic
arrangements in that gentleman's hearing, but there was something in
the soft twinkle of Kayak Bill's hazel eye, something in the crude,
whimsical philosophy distilled in the old hootch-maker's heart, that
amused, while it piqued the trader at Katleean. He sat down now on the
steps beside his visitor.
"Kayak," he said, almost gently, "when an old fellow like you begins to
talk about squaws I have to smile. A man past sixty--! But how about
twenty-five years ago? . . . What's a man going to do when he finds
himself on the edge of the wilderness and--he wants a woman?"
Kilbuck's voice rose slightly, his black brows drew together over the
pale, unseeing eyes that sought the distant peaks, his thin nostrils
quivered. "It's a wild country up here, Kayak. Makes a man hunger for
something soft and feminine--and where's the pale-faced woman who would
follow a man into this--" He finished his sentence with a wave of his
hand. "That is a woman one would marry," he amended. "The average
female of that country down south has no spirit of adventure in her
make-up."
Kayak Bill closed his clasp-knife, restored it to his pocket and slowly
drew forth an ancient corn-cob pipe.
"Wall, Chief," he drawled presently between puffs, "I ain't a-sayin'
yore not right, seein' as you've had consid'able more experience with
petticoats than me; but one time I hearn a couple o' scientific dudes
a-talkin' about females and they was of the notion that sons gets their
brains and their natures from their mammies." Disregarding the
contemptuous sound uttered by the White Chief, Kayak's slow tones
flowed on: "And I'm purty nigh pursuaded them fellows is right. . . .
Take it down in Texas now, where I was drug up. I'm noticin' a heap o'
times how the meechinest, quietest little old ladies has the rarin'est,
terrin'-est sons, hell-bent on fightin' and adventure. . . . Kinder
seems to me, Chief, that our women has been bottled up so long by us
men folks they just ain't had no chance to strike out that way, except
by givin' o' their natures to their sons. You take any little gal,
Chief, a-fore they get her taken with the notion that it ain't
lady-like to fight, and by hell, she can lick tar outen any boy her
size in the neighborhood. Same way with she-bears, or a huskie bitch.
Durned if they don't beat all get-out when it comes to fightin'
courage!"
Kayak Bill drew once or twice on his pipe with apparently
unsatisfactory results, for he slowly removed his sombrero, drew a
broom-straw from inside the band, extracted the stem of the corn-cob
and ran the straw through it. The immediate vicinity became
impregnated with a violent odor of nicotine. The White Chief, however,
musing close by on the steps, seemed not to notice it. His eyes were
fixed on three Indian canoes being paddled in from the lagoon across
the bay which was now taking on the opalescent tints of the late Alaska
sunset.
"What I been a-sayin' goes for the white women, Chief. As for them
Chocolate Drops--wall, I ain't made up my mind exactly. 'Pears to me
if I ever went a-courtin' though, it would be just like goin'
a-huntin': no fun in it if the end was certain and easy-like. Barrin'
the case of Silvertip and Senott, his squaw, it's like this: you say
'Come,' and they come. You say 'Go,' and they go. Now, a white woman
ain't that way. By the roarin' Jasus, you never can tell which way
she's goin' to jump!" Kayak Bill held the stem of his pipe up to the
light and squinted through it, fitted it again into the bowl and gave
an experimental draw. "But everybody to his own cemetery, says I."
"Bill, you old reprobate, you have an uncanny way of picking the weak
spots in everything. There's some truth in that last. . . . Gad, I'd
like to get into a game of love with a woman of my own blood up here in
the wilderness! . . . There's never been a white woman in Katleean.
It would be great sport to see one up against it here, eh, Kayak?" The
White Chief turned, smiling, and the light in his pale, narrow eyes
matched the wolfish gleam of his sharp teeth.
The face of the old hootch-maker was hidden in a smoke cloud, but his
voice drawled on as calmly as ever: "Wall, from what I hearn tell when
I'm over at the Chilcat Cannery, Chief, you may get a chance to see a
white woman at Katleean purty soon. There's a prospector named
Boreland a-cruisin' up the coast in his own schooner, the _Hoonah_, and
from what I can make out he's got his wife and little boy with him."
The trader turned sharply. Like a hungry wolf scenting quarry he
raised his head. There was a keener look in his eye. His thin
nostrils twitched.
"A _white_ woman, Kayak? Are you sure?"
Before Kayak Bill could answer there came an extra loud burst of song
from the cabin across the courtyard. The door had been flung wide and
in the opening swayed the arresting figure of the leader of the wild
chorus.
[1] Name by which the States is designated in the North.
[2] Newcomer.
CHAPTER II
THE CHEECHAKO
He was young and tall and slight, with a touch of recklessness in his
bearing that was somehow at variance with the clean-cut lines of his
face. He stood unsteadily on the threshold, hands thrust deep in the
pockets of his grey tweed trousers, chin up-tilted from a strong, bare
throat that rose out of his open shirt. As the singing inside the
cabin ceased, he shook back the tumbled mass of his brown hair and
alone his mellow baritone continued the whaler's song:
"Up into the Polar Seas,
Where the greasy whalers be,
There's a strip of open water
Reaching north to eighty-three----"
The White Chief, with his eyes on the singer, spoke to Kayak Bill.
"Our gentleman-bookkeeper takes to your liquid dynamite like an Eskimo
to seal oil, Kayak. He's been at Katleean three months now, and I'll
be damned if he's been sober three times since he landed. Seems to be
hitting it up extra strong now that the Potlatch is due--" Kilbuck
lowered his voice--"I want nothing said to him of the prospector and
his white wife, _understand_?"
At the dictatorial tone flung into the last sentence there came a
narrowing of the old hootch-maker's eyes. It was seldom that Paul
Kilbuck spoke thus to Kayak Bill.
The singer was crossing the courtyard now with steps of exaggerated
carefulness. Suddenly he paused. His dark eyes, in vague, alcoholic
meditation, sought the distant peaks stained with the blush-rose of
sunset. The evening-purple of the hills fringed the bay with mystery.
Gulls floated high on lavender wings, their intermittent plaint
answering the Indian voices that drifted up from the beach where the
canoes were landing.
Kayak Bill moved over on the step, indicating the space beside him.
"Come along side o' me, son, and get yore bearin's!" he called.
"Yes, Harlan, stop your mooning and come here. I want to talk to you."
Gregg Harlan turned, and the smile that parted his lips, though born in
a liquor-fogged brain, was singularly winning.
"Chief," his words came distinctly but with careful deliberation, "an
outsider would think--that I am--a--fellow of rare--judgment and
s-sound phil-os-ophy from the way--you're always--wanting to
talk--to--me."
He advanced and seated himself on the steps near the base of the
flag-pole, leaning heavily against it. The gay recklessness that is
the immediate effect of the fiery native brew of the North was
evidently wearing away, and preceding the oblivion that was fast coming
upon him, stray glimpses of his past, bits of things he had read or
heard, and snatches of poetry flashed on the screen of his mind.
"It doesn't go with me--Chief. Don't--bring on--your--little
forest--maiden--Naleenah--again. Tired--hearing about--her.
Know--what you say: Up here--my people--never know. _Me_--a squaw man!
Lord! What do I want--with--a squaw?" He laughed as at some blurred
vision of his brain. "It's not that--I'm so damned virtuous, Chief.
But I'm--fas-fas-tid-ious. That's it--fastidious----"
Paul Kilbuck's eyes flashed a cold steel grey. "We'll see how
fastidious you'll be a year from now." His lip lifted on one side
exposing a long, pointed tooth. "That'll be enough, now, Harlan."
"Sure, 's enough--for me, Chief," admitted the young man with drowsy
good nature, as his tousled head sought a more comfortable place
against the flagpole. "Pardon--casting aspersions--on your--taste in
women, Chief. Wouldn't do--it--if sober. Hate to be sober. Makes me
feel--re-responsible for so--many things. . . . Hence flowing bowl.
'Member old Omar--unborn Tomorrow and dead--Yesterday. . . . Why fret
'bout it--if--if--today--be--sweet." His voice trailed off in a murmur
and his boyish chin with its look of firmness despite his dejection,
sank slowly on his breast.
The canoes had made a landing. A dozen or more Thlinget women came
straggling up the beach laden with the fruits of their afternoon
labors: gay-colored baskets of wild strawberries, red and fragrant from
the sand-dunes along the lagoon. From the Indian Village, a short
distance down the curve of the beach where the smokes of evening fires
were rising, a welcoming buck or two came to accompany the softly
laughing squaws.
Slightly in advance of the shawled figures moving toward the group on
the steps walked one whose slenderness and grace marked her from the
rest. A scarlet shawl splashed the cream of her garments. Unlike the
other women, she wore no disfiguring handkerchief on her head. Her
face, oval and creamy-brown, was framed by two thick braids that fell
over her shoulders. In the crook of her arm rested a basket of
berries. At her side, rubbing against her now and then, came a
powerful huskie, beautiful with the lean grace of the wolf and
paw-playing as a kitten.
"Mush on,[1] Kobuk! Mush--you!" She laughed, pushing him aside as she
advanced.
When she smiled up at the white men her face was lighted by long-lashed
childish eyes, warm and brown as a sun-shot pool in the forest.
The White Chief rose. With an imperious gesture he motioned the other
Indians back.
"_Ah cgoo_, Naleenah! Come here!" In rapid, guttural Thlinget he
spoke to the girl, pointing from time to time to the now unconscious
Harlan.
As she listened the smile faded from her face. Her smooth brow
puckered. . . . She turned troubled eyes to Kayak Bill, sitting
silent, imperturbable, in a cloud of tobacco smoke, his interest
apparently fixed where the slight breeze was ruffling the evening
radiance of the water.
Still mutely questioning, Naleenah glanced at the figure of the young
white man, slumped in stupor against the flag-pole. . . . A look of
unutterable scorn distorted her face. Then she looked up at the White
Chief shaking her head in quick negation.
At her rebellion Kilbuck's voice shot out stingingly like the lash of a
whip. With a hurt, stunned expression the girl shrank back. Her shawl
shivered into a vivid heap about her feet. The basket of berries
slipped unheeded to the sand, their wild fragrance scenting the air
about her.
While he was still speaking she started forward, her wide, idolatrous
eyes raised to his, her little berry-stained hands held out
beseechingly.
"No--no, Paul!" Anguish and pleading were in her broken English. "No,
no! I can not do! Too mooch, too mooch I loof you, Paul!" Brimming
tears overflowed and rolled slowly down her cheeks.
Kayak Bill rose hastily and stalked across the platform into the store.
The White Chief turned away with tightening lips, but there was no
softening in his smoke-colored eyes. It would be to his interest to
have his bookkeeper a squaw-man. The old Hudson Bay Company factors
had proved the advantage of having their employees take Indian women.
For his own health's sake he must get rid of Naleenah. The tubercular
girl would live longer in the house of a white man than with her own
people, where he would soon be forced to send her. He was, therefore,
doing her a kindness in turning her over to Harlan.