Part 7 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+pped from here to as far south as San Francisco.”
”It was fun to see them go fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 suns.h.i.+ne!”
”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 s.h.i.+pload 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 codfis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ps 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. s.h.i.+shaldin, 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.”