Where the Sun Swings North
B >> Barrett Willoughby >> Where the Sun Swings North"But the Russians, Kilbuck, didn't they ever try to find the place?"
The trader, pleased at the interest his story had aroused, lay back
once more against his cushions. "Possibly they did," he went on
easily. "But it's likely they were satisfied with the wealth of furs
their Aleut hunters brought them. Those were great old days for
traffic in furs. The early Russians were, for the most part a lazy,
rum-drinking lot, you know. To them riches meant sea-otter skins, and
they managed by various devilish methods--I can't say more about them
in your presence, Mrs. Boreland--to enslave the entire Aleut nation to
do their hunting. They gave them a little--and a mighty little--trade
goods in return." By the inflections of his voice the agent of the
Alaska Fur and Trading Company sought to convey to his listeners the
impression that the policy of those early companies was against _his_
principles, though the books, so carefully kept by Add-'em-up Sam might
have told a different story.
"And it's possible the Russians thought the yarn to be merely another
native fairy tale," continued Kilbuck, waving a careless hand. "As I
said there may be no other foundation for it. It has come down now for
over two hundred years, and you may be sure when an Indian tells a
story it loses nothing in the telling."
The drowsy crackle of the flaming logs filled a short interval.
Shane Boreland sat lost in meditation, his hand resting quietly on the
dog's head, his eyes adream as with visions of the golden sands of the
Lost Island.
His wife glanced up at him, uneasily, almost apprehensively it seemed
to Kilbuck who was again watching her. Never in all his varied amorous
experiences had a woman's eyes held such a look for the White Chief--a
look in which there was a protecting tenderness, comradeship and
something more.
He settled farther back in his cushions, his eyes narrowing. Love had
yet some new delight to offer him. . . . His virile years were
slipping by--he was surprised and disturbed how often this thought had
been with him of late. Should he grasp the opportunity offered? There
might be a way--up here in Katleean where his word was law. . . .
Perhaps----
Kilbuck brought himself up with a start. Ellen Boreland had dropped
her knitting and had crossed to her husband's chair. Her hand rested
on his broad shoulder and there was a wistful little twist to her smile
as she shook him gently to rouse him.
"He's forever dreaming of the gold that lies beyond the skyline--this
man of mine--and always going to find it," she said fondly. "So
please, Mr. Kilbuck, don't get him interested in any mythical island.
We've been gone from the States six months now, and I want him to go
back for the winter." There was a half-playful, half-earnest note of
pleading in her voice, but the White Chief noticed that her eyes did
not fully meet his.
During all her thirty years, doubtless, Ellen Boreland had looked a
friendly world in the eye. She was that sort. He saw that she was
troubled now at not being able to do this in the case of the trader of
Katleean. Probably he himself was not attractive to her--perhaps he
was even fascinatingly repellant with that electric and disturbing and
promising quality that drew almost irresistibly. There were women who,
under that impulsion, had been moved to come close and gaze into his
pale, black-lashed eyes. It was an impulse akin to that which urges
people to fling themselves from great heights; to peer into abandoned,
stagnant wells. . . . He had an idea that she knew he saw this, for he
had watched her face flush under his glance as though at the thought of
having dishonored herself by sharing with him some guilty secret. He
saw that she was uncomfortable in accepting his hospitality. Twice
during their stay she had entreated her husband to leave Katleean, or
at least go back aboard the schooner for the remainder of their visit.
But Shane Boreland, clean-hearted adventurer, to whom the vagaries of a
woman's mind were a closed book, had only laughed at her request,
retorting that life aboard the _Hoonah_ had made her into a little
sea-dog and a few weeks ashore with such a host as the White Chief
would do her a world of good.
The host now lighted one of his short-lived cigarettes. In his mind
was forming a plan suggested by Ellen Foreland's words. He might
develop it later, and again he might not, but it would not be amiss to
prepare the way.
He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace, slipping without effort
into the part he had assigned himself.
"Dreams are the things that make life worth living, Mrs. Boreland."
His low, vibrant tones sounded pleasantly in the dusky room. "Boreland
here has his dreams of a mine of gold, but I--" he hesitated, his voice
taking on a whimsical softness, "but I, in my Northern solitude, have
my dreams of a heart of gold." His look was designed to leave no doubt
in Ellen Boreland's mind that it was a feminine heart of gold that he
sought.
There was a pause during which the charred logs in the fireplace
dropped down sending up a brighter flame.
"But you mustn't be too sure that the Lost Island is a myth." He spoke
briskly now as it putting aside deliberately his own longings. "In
this part of the country some say that the Lost Island is that of Kon
Klayu."
As Boreland looked up questioningly the White Chief went on:
"Of course, it does in some ways answer the description. It is ninety
miles off the coast here. Cape Katleean is the nearest land. The
Japan current gives it a milder climate and we know that the beach sand
carries gold--a little gold."
"Anyone living there?" interrupted Boreland eagerly.
"Not a soul. The Alaska Fur and Trading Company did send a party out
there some years ago, to start a fox-farm. That's how I got my
information. They were a hootch-drinking, lazy lot and the farm wasn't
a success. But Add-'em-up Sam, a bookkeeper I used to have, spent a
winter there. He told me many things about the place." The White
Chief paused a moment. A new idea had just come to him. "Silvertip,
who used to be on the whaler _Sophie Sutherland_, has stopped there for
water, too."
Boreland, rising from his chair thrust both hands into his pockets and
began to pace up and down the room.
"By thunder, Kilbuck, I'm interested in that island, whether it's the
Lost Island or not! Kon Klayu . . . Kon Klayu . . ." He repeated the
name thoughtfully. "Seems to me that's the Thlinget for ruby sand,
which in itself suggests possibilities. Ruby sand is a gold carrier!"
There was a note of enthusiasm in Boreland's voice, but as he noticed
the look on his wife's face he crossed to her side and put an arm over
her slender shoulders. "But we'll talk that over some other time,
Chief. I don't want to bore Ellen with too much mining----"
A flinging open of the door that led to the store cut short his speech
as an indignant little boy burst in on them.
"Mother! Mother!" he shouted. "That big old Indian, Swimming Wolf,
called my Auntie Jean a squaw!"
"And the wretch put his hand on my foot, Ellen!" Jean following close
on the heels of her nephew, stopped before her sister, her slim hands
clenched at her sides, each outraged shake of her head loosening the
ribbon that bound her hair. "I hate this place, Shane!" she cried,
turning swiftly to her brother-in-law. "I wish we were all back aboard
the _Hoonah_!" Her voice trembled with unshed tears of mortification,
and both her sister and Shane started toward her with exclamations of
sympathy and alarm.
The White Chief regarded the attractively disheveled little figure with
appreciation, but he realized that something had happened which
endangered the stay of his visitors. He rose to place a chair for her.
When he spoke his voice, the voice that had charmed many women, soothed
while it promised.
"There now, Miss Wiley, things may not be so bad as you think. Sit
down and tell me all about it and I'll see what can be done."
Disregarding the proffered chair, the girl launched forth with the
story of her encounter with Swimming Wolf. Her slim hands gestured.
Above her flushed cheeks her eyes flashed and the unruly cloud of hair,
freed at last from its ribbon, fell about her shoulders.
As she told of the slap on Swimming Wolf's ear, the pale eyes of the
White Chief glowed. Truly, as Kayak Bill had said, one could never
tell about a white woman. Here was a situation he would have to handle
with care. Here was a time when his knowledge of Indian nature, gained
during years of association with them, stood him in good stead.
"Miss Jean," he said. "Just a moment. I think I can explain Swimming
Wolf's extraordinary action." The White Chief measured her with an air
of understanding that, he could see, made an impression on the girl in
spite of herself. "An Indian, you know, never really grows up. Even
though he has the body of a man, he still keeps the heart of a child.
Now when you were little, Miss Jean, don't you remember the time you
saw your first negro--a black, strange creature? Didn't you wonder,
while you looked at his face and his hands if he could possibly be
black all over? Be honest now, didn't you?"
Loll who had settled himself on the floor with an arm about Kobuk's
neck, sprang up and stood beside his aunt.
"Yes, _I_ did, Chief," he interrupted, with eager, nodding head, "and I
asked him about it, too. I did!"
Jean's face was clearing. She inclined her head in faint affirmation.
"Just so," the trader went on. "When Swimming Wolf saw his first white
woman no doubt in his simple heart he wondered, too, and so did the
other natives who gathered about you,--children, all of them. Swimming
Wolf, the clumsy siwash, had no English words to ask you about it, so
he took the simplest way to find out whether or not the white came off!"
A shadowy smile began to twitch at the corners of Jean's mouth. Seeing
it, the White Chief was encouraged to go on:
"The inquisitive rascal is really one of our bravest hunters, and a man
of tall totems and many blankets. He would feel astonished and
_kusk-i-a-tu_--very sad--if he knew he had offended you. As a matter
of fact,"--the trader laughed--"the Wolf admires you and in his
primitive way has paid you a great compliment. I wasn't going to
mention it, but since this has come up perhaps it will help explain."
Jean looked up inquiringly.
"Up here in the North, Miss Jean, it is the custom of the young bucks
to buy any little girl who takes his fancy. He pays for her while he
is strong and a good hunter, you see. When the girl grows up he takes
her for his wife."
There was a gasp of astonishment from Ellen and her sister, but Kilbuck
went on:
"One hundred dollars is a mighty good price to pay for a wife,
but Swimming Wolf, my little lady, came to me yesterday with
four black fox skins, which are worth perhaps three thousand
dollars. He wanted to know if I would arrange with the Big White
Man--your brother-in-law--to take them in payment for the _shawut
clate_, the White-Girl-Who-Makes-Singing-Birds-in-the-Little-Brown-Box."
Jean lifted her chin with a laugh in which amusement and embarrassment
were equally mingled. "How quaintly ridiculous, Ellen, to describe my
violin playing in such a way! But mercy," she added, after they had
all laughed over the incident, "I must run away upstairs and put on
some footwear. If I had kept on my shoes and stockings, as I should
have done, Swimming Wolf might not have called me 'little squaw with
white feet'!"
Kilbuck, satisfied with himself, had settled back once more against his
cushions and as she turned to say a parting word to him, was regarding
her with half-closed eyes. The firelight played on her slim, white
ankles and soft little feet. He surveyed her with a look that slowly,
appraisingly, stripped her body of its garments and swept her from her
bare feet to her face and back again. The girl caught it. Conscious,
for the first time of him--his savage reality as other than a
middle-aged man--of her own womanhood, she flushed violently.
Shrinking back she reached for Loll's hand, and stammering an
incoherent excuse, ran from the room.
Ellen, unconscious of what had happened, measured off a row of stitches
in the knitting she had again taken up. "Jean certainly seems to be
tumbling in and out of adventures," she remarked. "Sometimes, Shane, I
wonder if we did right in bringing her with us."
"Nonsense, Ellen. A year up here will make a different girl of
her--help her break away from the cut and dried sameness of school
life. Darned if it doesn't make me tired to see all the young women
turned out of the same mould."
As Boreland spoke the door leading into the store opened slowly, and
into the room sauntered Kayak Bill. He seated himself in silence,
tilting his sombrero to the back of his head--the only concession to
convention he ever made, since Kayak had never been known to remove
that article of apparel until he sought his bunk at night.
"I just been mouchin' round down in the Village, Chief," he drawled,
"seein' if there was anything a-doin' in the way o' local sin, and they
tells me that the funeral canoes is a-comin' in tonight."
CHAPTER V
THE FUNERAL CANOES
Ellen glanced up at the old hootch-maker sitting serenely on the other
side of the fireplace. Some time during the day he had put on high
leather boots but having neglected to lace them, the bellows-tongued
tops stood away from his sturdy legs and the raw-hide laces squirmed
about his feet like live things.
"The funeral canoes?" she echoed, wonderingly.
Kayak Bill turned to her with a sort of slow eagerness, as if he had
been awaiting an excuse to look at her.
"Yas, Lady. They're a-bringin' in the ashes o' their dead kin from up
in the Valley of the Kag-wan-tan."
Ellen's mind reverted to the many strange things she had heard during
her short stay in Katleean, concerning the coming Potlatch of the
Indians. This land and its people were new and mysterious to her.
These primitive Thlingets, descendants of the fiercest and most
intelligent of all the northern tribes were, withal, a fearful people
living in a world of powerful and malignant spirits who frowned from
the rocks, glittered from the cold, white mountains and glaciers,
whispered in the trees and cackled derisively from the campfires; a
world of hostile eyes spying upon them in the hope that some of their
weird and mystic tabus might be broken, and of sly ears listening to
avenge some careless remark. A childlike people they were, who spoke
kindly to the winds and offered bits of fish for its favor; who begged
the capricious sea to give them food, and who spent most of their lives
working for the comfort of the dead--the Restless Ones--who sweep the
winter skies when the day is done, beckoning, whispering. The Northern
Lights the white man calls them, as they leap and play above the frozen
peaks, but the Thlinget knows them to be the spirits of the dead,
homeless in space but hovering confidently overhead until their
relatives on earth can give a Potlatch for their repose.
Running like a black thread through the woof of the spirit tales was
the mention of witch-craft--witchcraft with which Kilbuck was now
preparing to deal; not because he hoped to benefit the natives and free
them from the curse of superstition, but because owing to a belief in
the black art, the Indians of Katleean were not bringing in the amount
of furs expected, and this meant a loss of money to the Alaska Fur and
Trading Company.
Ellen recalled the superior air of amusement with which the White Chief
had told of the dominating belief in demons.
"When one of the beggars wants to cast a spell," he had said, his lip
curling in a sardonic smile, "he takes a bit of cloth from some garment
his enemy has worn and at the hour of midnight slinks into a graveyard
and digs down until he finds a body. If he wants to cripple his
enemy's hand, he puts the cloth in the fingers of the corpse. If he
wishes his enemy to lose his mind he puts it over the skull, and if he
wants him dead, he places the cloth over the heart in the coffin. Oh,
they are a sweet outfit, I tell you!" The Chief had laughed as if
these things were merely amusing. Then he had gone on to explain that
across the Bay of Katleean in the shadow of the great blue glacier
which was discernible on sunny days, there had been a lonely Thlinget
graveyard. Because of its isolation this burial place had been so
riddled with re-opened graves and so much killing, torturing and
fighting had ensued among the Indians in their efforts to detect and
punish so-called witches that he, their White Chief, had been obliged
to interfere. He had put an end to the reign of sorcery in that
particular graveyard rather cleverly, Ellen was forced to admit, by
having all the bodies exhumed and cremated on the spot.
"They'll bring the ashes over here where I can keep an eye on them and
prevent further 'witching,'" the trader had finished. "And after the
Potlatch we'll have a little peace in the country, I hope. I never
interfere with the Potlatches. They make good business for the
Company, for the brown heathens believe the spirits are really feasting
and rejoicing with them." Kilbuck laughed as at some recollection.
"The Company sends in hundreds of blankets every year for dead Indians.
Whenever a Potlatch blanket is given away the name of a dead man is
called and he receives it in the spirit world. Whenever a little food
is put on the Potlatch fire, a dead man's name is mentioned and he gets
a square meal up there in Ghost's Home. Altogether the Alaska Fur and
Trading Company does a lively business with the dead!"
As Ellen thought on these things there crept into her mother-heart a
feeling of pity for these simple, trusting people seeking the
protection and guidance of this white man only to have their beliefs
and superstitions laughed at and exploited for the benefit of his
company. She was beginning to feel, dimly, what every reader of the
history of exploration knows, that drunkenness, fraud and trickery are
among the first teachings the white man's civilization brings to the
tribes of a new country.
A tinge of sadness and foreboding darkened her thoughts.
Kayak Bill, who had been drawing contentedly on his corn-cob pipe, rose
suddenly through a low-hung cloud of tobacco smoke, and taking up an
old almanac from the table, began fanning the air clumsily. His slow
drawl with a suspicion of haste in it, broke in on her meditations:
"By hell, Lady," he apologized earnestly, "excuse me for creatin' of
such a blamed smudge!"
Ellen looked up from her knitting.
"Oh, I don't mind a little smoke, Kayak Bill." She smiled at the
concern in the old man's voice. "You see Shane smokes a good deal,
too." She nodded toward the couch where her husband puffed on his pipe
as he plied Kilbuck with questions about the Island of Kon Klayu. "I
was just thinking about the funeral canoes and the Potlatch."
"The beginnin's of the Potlatch will be pulled off tomorrow, Lady, but
tonight--" Kayak stopped fanning and leaned closer to her. Then with
a glance in the direction of the White Chief he lowered his voice.
"Tonight, when the funeral canoes comes in, I'd aim to gather in the
young sprout, Loll, and that little gal sister o' yourn. . . . We're
purty civilized here in Katleean, but--wall, there ain't no tellin'
what an Injine will do after he's taken on a couple o' snorts o' white
mule,--or a squaw-man, either, for that matter. O' course, I make the
stuff myself, and a mighty hard time I have, too, to keep shut o' these
pesky dudes o' revenue officers that's all the time a-devilin' o' me.
But I don't recommend it none a-tall."
Kayak Bill, with his boot-laces snaking along behind him, shuffled over
to his chair once more and settled himself for conversation, which
Ellen had learned meant a monologue. The edge of his sombrero backed
his busy head and kindly face like a soiled grey halo. His low voice,
never rising, never falling, droned on:
"Yas, I don't drink none myself, bein' weaned, as you might say, when
I'm but a yearlin'. But I make it for those as likes it, and I makes
it good, for it's everybody to his own cemetery, I say. . . . No, I
don't join no Y. W. C. T. U. or nothin,' but one time, when I'm a real
young feller, I'm off on the range for a spell down in Texas, and I
ain't no nature for shavin' or none o' them doo-dads and besides I'd
don't have no razor or no lookin' glass. Wall, six months or so goes
millin' by and finally I comes down into San Antonio one Sataday night.
And right away, havin' at that time what you might call an eddycated
taste for whisky, I makes a charge for the nearest bar and takes on a
dozen or so good snifters, likewise some beverages they calls mint
julips. And durn me, Lady, if in no time everything in that place
ain't a-whizzin' past me like the mill-tails o' hell!
"But I gets my bearin's after while and lays my course for a door to
get some fresh air. Just as I reaches this here door, Lady, a big,
swaggerin' rough-lookin' hombre with a red beard starts to come in.
Wall, I looks him over careful. He likewise gives me a nasty look.
Then polite-like, I steps aside waitin' for him to come through. But
he don't come none, havin' stepped aside too. . . . Wall, by this time
I'm feelin' purty groggy and I makes a bolt for the door again, aimin'
to get through quick; but blamed if that durned son-of-a-gun don't do
identical! Then back I sashays once more and my dander sort o' riz up
in me. 'By the roarin' Jasus,' I yells, 'you lay offen that monkey
business, you consarned whiskery cuss, or I'll fill you so full o'
holes yore own mammy won't know you from a hunk o' cheese. Just one
more crack like that out o' you,' I says, 'and down comes yore
meat-house,' I says. . . . Wall, I got started through the door again,
and by hell, Lady, in spite o' my warnin' o' him, he comes at me again.
So, . . ." Kayak Bill paused the fraction of a second; then his voice
went on with its accustomed languor: "So I just whipped out my little
old .45 and shot him."
Ellen gasped, her big blue eyes opening in horror as she looked into
the serene face of the self-confessed murderer. Kayak Bill, apparently
unconscious of her regard, droned on:
"Yas, I charged full tilt into him shootin' as I went, but instead o'
him a-fallin dead, I finds myself in a shower o' glass, and all the
boys is a-dancin' round me and likin' to die o' laughin' at me. . . .
You see, Lady, that door happens to be one o' them long mirro's saloons
has, and not havin' no acquaintance with myself in a beard a-tall, I
pots my image! Ha! Ha! Ha!" Kayak Bill's laugh gurgled out slowly
like mellow liquor from a wide-mouthed bottle. "Wall, after I got done
a-payin' for the mirro' and a-settin' 'em up for the boys, and a-payin'
for a saw bones to fix me up--me bein' conside-ble carved by glass, I
don't have no more money than a jack-rabbit. So I says to myself:
'Bill, you ol' jackass, you got to reform, that's all there are to it.
We can't have the whole durned world laughin' at you when yore in yore
liquor!', I says. . . . And I did reform, Lady! So help me Hannah, I
did!" Kayak Bill, with an air of conscious virtue, was filling his
pipe again.
While Ellen gathered up her knitting, the corners of her mouth were
twitching with amusement.
"Kayak Bill," she said as she shook her finger at him playfully, "you
surely have an effective way of making a confession. I don't really
know whether to praise you for your sobriety or scold you for
horrifying me a moment ago."
Ellen heard the old man's chuckle as she arose. Her face went sober,
however, the moment her eyes sought the couch where her husband sat
still engrossed with the White Chief. Though she lingered Shane did
not turn her way, and she finally moved toward the door through which
her sister had gone an hour earlier.
"Thank you for telling me about tonight, Kayak," she said as she passed
him. "I'm going up now to warn Jean and Loll, but--" she hesitated, "I
wish more of the men in Katleean had been 'weaned' as you were."
She saw approval in the slow softening of his hazel eyes, and as the
door closed behind her she caught a remark the old hootch-maker
addressed to the dog at his feet.
"By hell, Kobuk," he pronounced earnestly, "that little lady's husband
has sure fell into a bed of four leaf clovers!"
She stored this quaint tribute away in her mind and told it to Jean
that evening after she had repeated for the second time Kayak's warning
regarding the arrival of the funeral canoes. But Jean, determined not
to miss any detail of the strange Thlinget festival, watched till an
opportunity presented itself, and then, disregarding Ellen's advice,
slipped away to the beach to a pile of silvery drift-logs that lay at
the edge of the rice-grass, where she knew she could not be seen except
from the sea. The girl settled herself comfortably among the logs just
as the long day was waning.