Alaska (107 page)

After he had been in town for only a few days, Tom selected the location for his store, a lot on Franklin Street near the corner of Front. It had the advantage of facing the waterfront, so that he could have easy access to the ships that docked there. But it also had a disadvantage, because a small hut already occupied it, and he would have to buy the shack if he wanted the land. In the long interests of his company, he decided to do so.

When the time came to close the deal, he learned that the land and the building had different owners. The land belonged to a gentleman from Seattle, the building to a local Tlingit who worked along the waterfront. So, after paying for the land, Tom found himself in negotiation with a fine-looking, dark-skinned Indian in his late thirties. An able fellow according to reports along the docks, he bore the unusual name of Sam Bigears, and as soon as Tom saw him he supposed that he was going to have trouble with this taciturn fellow. But that was not the case.

'You want house, I glad to sell.'

'Where will you go?'

'I have land, fine spot Taku Inlet. Pleiades River.'

'So you're leaving Juneau?'

'No. One day canoe trip, tassall.' Tom was to learn that Sam Bigears used this comprehensive word to dismiss a world of worries: 'Fish broke the line, got away, tassall,' or 'Rain seven days, tassall.'

Within fifteen minutes Tom and Bigears agreed upon a price for the shacksixty dollarsand when Venn handed over the check, Bigears chuckled: 'Thank you. Maybe house worth nothing. Maybe belong Mr. Harris, along with ground.'

'Well, it was your house. You were living in it. And I'd be very happy if you stayed around to help me build the store.'

'I like that,' and the informal partnership was formed, with Sam Bigears assuming control of materials and the time sheets of the other workmen. He proved himself to be an

653

intelligent, clever craftsman with a positive genius for devising new ways of performing old tasks. Since he was good at woodworking, he took charge of the doors and stairs.

'Where did you learn how to build a stair?' Tom asked one day. 'That's not easy.'

'Many buildings,' Sam said, pointing to Front and Franklin streets where stores and warehouses clustered. 'I work with good German carpenter. I like wood, trees, everything.'

One morning when Tom reported for work, having had a spacious breakfast in his hotel, he was astounded to find that a gigantic iceberg, much larger than his entire store and three stories high, had been driven into the channel by a westerly storm, and there it rested, right at his worksite, towering over the men hammering nails.

'What do we do about this?' Tom wanted to know, and Bigears replied: 'We wait till somebody tow it away,' and before noon a surprisingly small boat with a puffing steam engine hurried up, threw a lasso and chain around a projection from the iceberg, and slowly towed it out of the channel. Tom was amazed that such a small boat could dictate to such a monstrous berg, but as Bigears said: 'Boat knows what it's doing.

Iceberg just drifting, tassall,' and that was the difference. Once the berg started slowly moving away from shore, the little boat had no trouble keeping it headed in the right direction, and by midafternoon the berg was gone.

'Where did it come from?' Tom asked, and Bigears said: 'Glaciers. Maybe our glacier.

You ever see Mendenhall?' When Tom said 'No,' Sam punched him in the arm: 'Sunday we make picnic. I like picnics.'

So on Sunday, after Tom had attended the Presbyterian church and surveyed with satisfaction the progress of his building, he waited for Bigears to fetch him for the trip to the glacier, and to his surprise the Tlingit appeared in a two horse carriage rented from a man for whom he had worked and driven by an attractive young Indian girl of about fourteen whom he introduced as his daughter: 'This Nancy Bigears. Her mother see glacier many times, stay home.'

'I'm Nancy,' she said, extending her hand, and Tom felt both that she was very young, and that she was quite mature in her solid posture toward the world, for she looked at him without embarrassment and handled the horses with confidence.

Bowing to the girl, Tom asked: 'Why Nancy? Why not a Tlingit name?' and Sam said: 'She got Tlingit name too. But she live with white people in Juneau. She have name of missionary's wife. Fine name, tassall.'

Nancy was an Indian, no doubt about that, with an even dark skin, black eyes and hair, and that saucy air of freedom 654

which came from living in close association with the land. She wore Western clothes, but with a touch of piping or fur here and there to retain the Indian look, but the two things which typed her as Tlingit were the handsome dark braids which hung below her shoulders and the big decorated boots that covered her feet. They gave her otherwise slender body a heavy pinned-to-earth look which matched her pragmatic approach.

The ride to the glacier was extremely pleasant, with Bigears explaining where he lived, now that his shack had disappeared, and Nancy telling of her days in school.

She was attending not a mission school for Indians but the regular white school, and apparently she was doing well, for she could converse easily on subjects like music and geography: 'I'd like to see Seattle. Girls tell me it's a fine place.'

'It is,' Tom assured her.

'Did you live in Seattle?' she asked as they approached the turn to the north which would take them to the glacier.

'Yes.'

'You born there?'

'No, Chicago. But I lived in Seattle half a year.'

'Many ships? Many people?'

'Just like your friends said.'

'I would like to see, but I would never want to leave Alaska.' She turned to face Tom: 'Which do you like, Seattle or Juneau?' and he replied truthfully: 'I long to get back to that city. Maybe with R&R, after my apprenticeship . . .'

'What's that?'

'The years when you learn how to work. When I know all about stores and ships and other parts of Alaska, maybe I'll be allowed to work in Seattle.'

'There she is!' Bigears cried as they reached a crest from which the great glacier first became visible, and it was both bigger and more impressive than Tom had imagined from the many photographs he had seen. It was not green-blue, as so many said, but a rather dirty white as centuries of snow, tight-packed, reached the breaking-off1

point where the crawling glacier died.

He was surprised that Nancy was able to drive the carriage almost to the entrance to a cave in the ice. Here Bigears stayed with the horses while Nancy led Tom inside to a deep cavern. As he stood there, looking about, he saw in the ceiling a spot thinner than the rest where the sun shone through the crystal ice, showing it to be the green-blue he had expected. It was radiant, a glorious touch of nature that not many would ever see, this splendid, vibrating cavern in which sun and ice met.

655

'My people say the raven was born in this cave,' she told Tom, and in his ignorance he asked: 'Is the raven something special . . . with you, I mean?' and she said proudly: 'I'm a raven,' and there deep within the birth-cavern of her totem he learned of how the world was divided between the eagles and the ravens, and he said, reflecting on his study of American history: 'I suppose I would be an eagle,' and she nodded: 'Ravens are more clever. They win the rope games, but eagles are necessary too.'

They did not, on Tom's first visit to the glacier, see any icebergs calve; Nancy thought that happened more frequently at other glaciers to the north, but when they left the cave and Tom threw rocks at the snout he could see fragments of ice break away, and he understood the mechanism of how the iceberg which had visited his store had formed and broken away.

Bigears had additional information, gathered by his people over many centuries: 'You didn't see no glaciers in Nome, did you? I tell you why. Not so much rain up there in summer, not so much snow in winter. North of Yukon, even north of Kuskokwim, no glaciers. Not enough snow. But down here, much rain, much snow, it fall, it fall, and never melt.'

'Where does the ice come from?'

'You pack snow down, this year, next year, many years, it cannot melt. Snow get hard, make ice. Hundred years, thick ice. Thousand years, very thick.'

'But how does it crawl along the valleys?'

Tee comes, it stays, it says like the salmon: ”I got to get to the ocean,”and down it crawls, little bit each year, many years many big icebergs break off, but always crawling to the sea.'

'Next year, will that cave still be there?'

'Next week, maybe gone. Always crawling toward the sea.'

In the days following the trip to the glacier, Tom was distressed by the fact that Sam Bigears did not report for work, nor was there any word from him, and Tom had to proceed without him. One of the white carpenters, who had come to depend on Bigears for much of the important woodwork, said: 'You can't never rely on them Tlingits.

Good people for the most part, but when you really need 'em they're never on hand.'

'What do you suppose has happened?' Tom asked with real concern, for he missed Bigears, and the carpenter said: 'Any one of fifty reasons. His aunt is ill, bad cold, and he feels he must be with her. Pollock have come into the area and he feels he must fish while they're here. Or most likely, he felt 656

that he needed a walk in the woods. He'll probably come sauntering back, Tlingit style, one of these days.'

That was a fair prediction, because after two weeks' absence Bigears did come drifting back to resume his carpentering, and when he reported to work as if he had never been absent, he explained to Tom: 'I got to get things ready.' That was all he volunteered, and when Tom asked: 'What things? Where?' he said cryptically: 'Store look pretty good. Be finish soon. Then you, me, we go my home.'

'But we tore that shack down.'

'I mean my real home. Pleiades River.'

Tom noticed that he had not brought his daughter back with him, and this vaguely disappointed him, but he supposed that she had been left at the other home, and when the time came, in late August, that the store was, as Bigears had pointed out, in good shape, with only a few refinements left to be finished, Tom judged that he could with safety take a couple days off, so he told Bigears: 'We could leave tomorrow, if you can get your canoe ready,' and on a bright morning, with the sun rising over the great ice fields back of Juneau, the two set forth for the easy paddle to Taku Inlet.

But anyone in Juneau who took a sunny day for granted was a fool, and they had not progressed far down Gastineau Channel before rain began to fall. For some hours they traveled through it without complaint, for a Juneau rain was not like that of other places: it did not fall in big drops, or any drops at all, but came down as a kind of benevolent mist which permeated everything without getting any particular item really wet.

The canoe ride was a fresh experience for Tom, a trip of unusual beauty. Bigears was a strong paddler who kept the canoe thrusting forward and Tom added youthful vigor from the prow, from where he studied the changing landscape. Prior to entering the inlet, he saw about him the hills that protected Juneau on all sides, making its waterways alluring channels, but when they turned into the inlet the scene changed dramatically. Now they faced that chain of high peaks which crowned the Alaska-Canada border, and for the first time Tom felt as if he were entering one of the fjords he had read about as a boy. But most of all, he was aware that he was heading into a primitive wilderness, with not a sign of human occupancy anywhere, and his stroke grew stronger as they glided silently up the inlet.

They had not progressed far when Tom spied a sight so lovely and balanced that its parts seemed to have been placed where they were by an artist. From the west came down a small glacier, sparkling blue in color, in what seemed an 657

attempt to meet a large rock which barely emerged from the middle of the inlet, while beyond rose the great mountains of Canada. 'This is something!' Tom called back, and Bigears said: 'Low water like now, we see the Walrus, high water no see.' When Tom asked what the Walrus was, Sam pointed to a half-submerged rock which did indeed resemble a walrus rising from the sea to catch a breath.

As they passed the face of the glacier Tom cried: 'This is a fine trip, Sam,' but to paddle nearly thirty miles, even when the water was relatively smooth, took time, and when sunset approached, Tom called back: 'Will we get there tonight?' and Bigears replied as he gave the canoe an extra thrust forward: 'Pretty soon dark come, we see lights,' and just as dusk appeared ready to encompass the inlet, straight ahead on the left bank Tom saw the last rays of sunlight striking the face of a glacier whose ice glistened like a waterfall of emeralds, while atop a headland on the right bank glowed the light coming from the windows of a log cabin.

'Halloo there! Halloo!' Bigears shouted, and on the headland Tom could see movement, but they were now at the southern end of the estuary formed by the entry of the Pleiades River, and they had to do some stiff paddling before they crossed it. As they did, Tom saw an Indian woman and a young girl coming down to the water's edge to greet them.

'This my wife,' Bigears said as his powerful hands dragged the canoe well onshore.

'You know Nancy.'

Mrs. Bigears was shorter than her husband and rounder. She was a taciturn woman who was never surprised at what her enterprising husband did; her task was to supervise whatever house they occupied, and it was clear that she had done a good job at this cabin, for the grounds about it were neat and the interior a model of traditional Tlingit habitation. She spoke no English, but with her right hand indicated that her husband's young guest would occupy a kind of alcove; Nancy, apparently, would have her own corner, while mother and father would take the large spruce-needled bed.

On the iron stove which Sam had purchased some years before in Juneau, various pots were producing an aroma which augured well, but Tom was exhausted from that long day's paddling and fell asleep long before the Bigears family was prepared to eat.