The first of March! If only the dull weather would clear up I could get more done these last days here. Fifteen brand-new canvases hang from my ridge pole waiting for pictures to adorn them. To-day is the only day that work out-of-doors has been quite out of the question. It snows hard. Last Thursday morning Rockwell and I began to take our morning baths in the bay—the snow having become too hard. And now at just seven-fifteen—on cloudy mornings, clothed in sneakers we scamper down the shore and plunge into the waves. Brrrrrrrr! it’s cold, but mighty good. Olson, after predicting for some time a dire end to our morning performances, has at last evinced enough curiosity to drag himself out of bed and come over to see. But he has not yet been early enough to catch us.

The days are lengthening rapidly. It is now after six o’clock in the evening and our lamp’s not lighted!

Last time in Seward Olson bought a lot of odds and ends of molding for picture frames. And now, with my help, all the little things that we have given him are gorgeously framed. On the little picture of himself that I painted he has what he calls a “comoflag” frame; it’s made of different moldings on the four sides. Well, Olson is mighty proud of his pictures. He’s really very fond of us. People in Seward say he talks of us continually. And there it is thought quite remarkable how I have managed with the “crazy” old man. I guess the craziness explains it. I picture with horror having as a constant companion here one of the fine, stalwart, shrewd, honest, wholesome-to-sterility Americans that our country likes to be so proud of.

I told Olson of Kathleen’s amusement over the brusque ending of his letter, “Answer this if you feel like it—and if you don’t it’s all the same to me.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s the way it is here in Alaska; if anyone don’t like the way a man does he can go to Hell!”

I’ve heard an amusing story about Olson and his goats at a little Seward exposition at which they were shown. They put his two goats into narrow packing boxes that their dirt might not fall onto the floor of the building. Olson arrived and seeing the plight of his pets flew into a rage. He lifted them out, hurled the packing boxes out of the door into the street, and denounced the fair-committee for their abuse of animals. And although the whole place tumbled about the old man’s ears, he won, and saw his goats given an honorable amount of freedom in a special enclosure—curtained off, “admission to see the goats ten cents,”—which notice Olson promptly disregarded, letting everyone in—and a big crowd at that—free.

Monday, March third.

Inauguration day passed here without event. In this ideal community of Fox Island we’re so little concerned with law-the only law that bears on us at all we delight in breaking—that one wonders how far no government can be carried. One goes back to first principles in such speculation, endows man again with inalienable rights or at least inalienable desires, and then has simply to wonder how much of the love of order there is in the natural man. The fact that a large proportion of mankind can live and die without any definite knowledge of the laws of the community and without ever running counter to the forces of law is sign enough that most of the law code is but a writing down of what the average man naturally wants to do or keep from doing. There’s a sharp difference between such “common” law and the exceptional law that strikes at the personal liberty of a man, laws concerning morals, temperance, or that conscript unwilling men for war. In all law there is tyranny, in these laws tyranny shows its hand. The man who wants true freedom must escape from the whole thing. If only such souls could gravitate to a common center and build the new community with inherent law and order as its sole guide!—well, we have returned to the problem. A state that was truly interested in progress would dedicate a portion of its territory to such an experiment. But no state is interested in anything but the gain of one class, which means the oppression of the rest. How farcical sound these days “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” “No government without the consent of the governed,” and other old-fashioned principles. But they have still to be reckoned with till the last Bolshevik has been converted into a prosperous tradesman and the last idealist is dead. And now for Fox Island.

The weather is dull and gray—only last evening an hour before sundown the clouds suddenly vanished out of the heavens and the sun shone as warm and beautiful as on the fairest summer day. Then I sat out-of-doors and painted while the snow and ice melted and dripped all about. The mornings are cold, doubly cold it seems when in the half-light of dawn and perhaps a driving snow squall we run naked down the long stretch of beach and plunge into the bay. I work ceaselessly. Time flies like mad and the day of our departure is close.

Tuesday, March fourth.

A day of snow and rain spent by us indoors, Rockwell hard at work upon his chart of “Trobbeabl Island”—a wonderful imaginary land where his own strange species of wild animals live—and I washing and mending. My seaman’s bag, damaged on its way here in the hold of the steamer, is now quite professionally patched, and the knee of my blue overalls shines with a square patch of white canvas.

Olson was welcome and spent much of the day with us. He has reread Kathleen’s letter to him and is charmed with it. He feels authorized by it to keep me here longer and surely does his best to persuade me. He treasures the picture little Kathleen sent him. All these things, the letters and little trifles that we have given him will be stored away in his too empty box of treasures among a very few old letters and a photograph or two of pioneer ladies and gentlemen in the dress-up costumes of thirty years ago. These scant treasures, what a memorial of a very lonely life! He showed me to-day a photograph of Tom Crane, an old associate of his in Idaho, and two large, splendid looking women, Crane’s wife and his wife’s sister. The wife was frozen to death in the snow while on a short journey with her husband. He lost both feet. Olson led the rescue party bringing in with great difficulty the dead woman and then tending Crane through long, painful days until his crippled recovery.

Thursday, March sixth.

It’s mighty hard work, this painting under pressure. I’m too tired to attempt more than the briefest record on this page of two days’ doings. Yesterday it was gray. At sundown it cleared giving us the most splendid and beautiful sunset, the sun sinking behind the purple, snowy mountains and throwing its rays upward into a seething red-hot mass of clouds. I painted most of the afternoon out-of-doors.

To-day we bathed at sunrise, brisk and cold and clear. The morning tide was so exceedingly low that I ran dry shod clear around the north side of the cove until the whole upper bay was visible. Olson had not known it could be done. Returning we put Olson’s boat into the water and Rockwell and I embarked with my painting outfit. I landed on the point I had just visited afoot. Rockwell in jumping ashore with the painter timed it badly, slipped, and fell full length into the surf of the ground swell, the dory almost riding over him. I roared with laughter—to his great fury. He rowed about in the harbor for almost two hours returning to bring me home. In the afternoon we repeated our excursion—all but the water sports—going this time to the south side of the cove. Rockwell’s a good little oarsman and above all to be trusted to do as he’s told to—a vice in grown-ups, a virtue in children.

Friday, March seventh.

That to-day began in snow and cloud matters not,—it ended in a glory. Olson, Rockwell, and I sat that late afternoon far out on the bay basking in the warmth of a summer sun, rocked gently on a blue summer sea. For hours we had explored the island’s western shore, skirting its tumbled reefs, riding through perilous straits right up to where the eddying water seethed at some jagged chasm’s mouth. That’s fine adventuring! flirting with danger, safe enough but close—so close to death. We landed on the beach of Sunny Cove, found in the dark thicket the moldering ruins of an old feed house of the foxes, gruesome with the staring bones of devoured carcasses. And then we younger ones dashed up the sheer, snow-covered eastward ridge—dashed on all fours digging our feet into the snow, clinging with hands as to a ladder. There at the top two or three hundred feet above the bay we overlooked the farthest seaward mountains of Cape Resurrection, then Barwell Island and the open sea.

Ah, to see again that far horizon! Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you. Always the distant land looks fairest, till you are made at last a restless wanderer never reaching home—never—until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.

From our feet the cliff dropped in a V-shaped divide straight down to the green ocean; and at its base the ground swell curled, broke white and eddied. The jagged mountains across shone white against black clouds,—what peaks! huge and sharp like the teeth of the Fenris-Wolf.

We hurried back to Olson who waited in the boat. That side—the cove and the more familiar mountains to the westward—lay half shrouded in fast dissolving mist. The descent was real sport. We just sat down and slid clear to the bottom, going at toboggan pace. Poor Olson, who watched us from below, was aghast. On the shore I found a long, thick bamboo pole, doubtless carried directly here from the orient by the Japanese current. We longed to go across to Bear Glacier that we could now see, a broad, inclined plane, spotless white, with the tallest mountains rising steeply from its borders. But it was too late and we returned home. The wonders of this country, of this one bay in fact, it would take years to know!

Monday, March tenth.

On the eighth it snowed hard all day and both of us worked at our trade indoors. The ninth dawned fresh and clear and cold. It was too windy to go out onto the bay as we had intended, so, not to be entirely cheated out of an excursion, we packed a bag of various supplies and set off for the ridge to the eastward.

It was glorious in the woods. New fallen snow lay upon the tree branches; the sun touched only the tallest tops, the wind rustled them now and then and made it snow again below. We came out upon the summit of the ridge more to the north than we had ever been before and from there beheld again the open sea. Nothing can be more wonderful than to emerge from the dense forest onto such a view! Right on the ridge we built a fire beneath the arched roots of a large tree. Rockwell will long remember that wonderful chimney beneath the roots. I painted on one of the canvases I had brought while Rockwell played about or cut wood for the fire. Presently the can of beans that we’d laid in the ashes went pop!—and we knew that dinner was ready. So we sat down and ate the good beans, bread and peanut butter, and chocolate,—while our backs sizzled and our bellies froze. But we loved it and Rockwell proposed that we spend three or four days there like that. Then after more painting and some play in the snow we came home again.

But the beautiful days must be busy ones for me. I painted out on the lake for an hour or more; after that again-this time the glorious sunset. After supper bread to bake and then, tired out, early to sleep in our great, hard, comfortable bed. Olson would have started to-day had the weather been moderate. But it has blown fiercely from the north—and still it blows. All day I worked packing and now my boxes are made and nearly filled. It is surely true that we are going! All day it has seemed to me to be fall. We had thought of that before during these recent days. We scent it and feel it. I believe that it’s the end of a real summer in our lives that we taste the sadness of.

Tuesday, March eleventh.

It blows incessantly, cold and clear,—blue days. I have painted most of to-day, first indoors, and then outdoors commencing a large picture. Olson has been with us much of the time. He treasures every little memento we can give him. In his pocket-book are snapshots of Kathleen, Clara, and Barbara. He wanted Barbara’s curl that I have—but I couldn’t give him that. It looks as if we should all go to Seward together. This wind is likely to hold until the full moon passes—and that’s still some days off. My trunk is about packed and what remains can be done in a very few hours.

Speaking to Olson to-night about the possibility of a shipwrecked man being able to support life on this coast for any length of time he told of a native boy of Unga, “crazy Simyon,” who lived four years at Nigger Head, a wild part of Unga Island, with no shelter but a hole in a sand bank, no fire, no weapons or clothes, or tools; a first-hand story, long, wild, terrible, beginning with a boy’s theft of sacrificial wine, and ending in madness and murder.

Thursday, March thirteenth.

Last night was bitterly cold. I had to get up repeatedly to attend to the fire. The wind howled and the vapor flew and Rockwell and I hugged close together beneath the blankets. Day dawned still icy cold. By noon it began to snow and the afternoon was calm and mild. And now again the wind blows fiercely from the northeast and we’re freezing cold! The day was spent in packing. The dismantled cabin looks forlorn.

Sunday, March sixteenth.

With the full moon has come the most perfect calm. If it holds through to-morrow we shall leave the island. The past three days have been busy ones. Bitterly cold weather has prevailed with the wind unceasingly from the north—almost the coldest days of the winter. Still I did some painting out-of-doors every day until yesterday, trying hard to pin upon the canvas a little more of the infinite splendors of this place. Meanwhile our packing was carried on. We have made a thoroughly good job of it—I hope! But who can tell what strain a trip of so many thousand miles will put upon our crates and bundles? But for a promise we had made Olson to go with him to Sunny Bay and Humpback Creek—on the eastern mainland—we’d have gone this day to Seward.