"I figure that the Kodiak cub the Alaska Fur and Trading Company brought over here as a pet, is now wandering about the Island a full-grown grizzly, instead of being in bear heaven, as the people of Katleean thought," said Boreland, as they all sat about the supper table. "Confound it, it makes it mighty bad for us, with all that grub down there at the West Camp! If the beast takes a notion he can go there and raise the very devil."

"I'll take my blankets down there tomorrow and guard the cache until we get the provisions transferred," announced Harlan, quickly. "I'd like to get a shot at a Kodiak bear."

"Son, I ain't a-castin' any asparagus on yore shootin' ability, but I claims the right to shoot that anamile myself!" spoke up Kayak Bill.

"Funny!" Boreland laughed. "I had the same idea myself."

After supper they discussed the problem of getting the remainder of the provisions down to the cabin at once. It was decided that each man should take a turn guarding the cache. Boreland finally left the conversation to Kayak and Harlan while he sat at the table silent, one hand clutching his hair, the other drawing queer-looking cart-wheels and figures on a paper before him. Just before the others started to leave for the night, he sprang up, with an exclamation.

"By thunder, I've got it!" he announced enthusiastically. "Fellows, we're going to make a nautical cart and sail her on the beach of Kon Klayu!"

The nautical cart, when completed, proved to be a hybrid contrivance with two large wheels. The wheels had a cumbersome appearance, owing to the double rims, which were tired with barrel-staves cut in two and mailed crosswise to prevent sinking into the sand. The top of the cart was a platform eight feet long and four wide, with two handles projecting at each end. Rising from its middle was a mast for which Kayak Bill rigged up a sail from a tarpaulin.

Boreland stood off and regarded the finished child of his brain.
Beside him Kayak eyed it for some minutes in admiring silence.

"By—hell!" he drawled at last. "Sired by a whisky barrel, spawned by a stretcher, and a throw-back to a Chinese sampan!"

Boreland laughed. "I got my idea for this little beauty from something I read once about the sailing wheelbarrows used by farmers in the interior of China, Bill! I'll bet you, with a fair wind, we can make all of five miles an hour with her on the beach!"

The cart exceeded even its builder's expectations. Steered to the West Camp the next afternoon it was loaded with provisions and the sail hoisted. With Harlan between the two front handles and Boreland at the rear, the odd vehicle was headed toward home. The sail, twice as large as the cart, strained at the mast from the force of the wind behind it, and to the men between the handles, the load seemed hardly to matter at all. Bare-footed, with trousers rolled up to their knees as in boyhood days, the two men found it a new and distinctly pleasant sensation to be swept along thus before wind. In a few minutes Kayak Bill, smoking placidly before the provision tent, was left far behind.

Remembering the back-breaking loads he had carried to the cabin, Harlan grinned back at the bellying sail behind him as he sped along.

"This is child's play, Boreland!" he shouted to his partner. "The problem of transportation is solved; for if there's one thing we never lack on Kon Klayu, it's wind!"

And so it came about that, thanks to the nautical cart, which though the subject of much jesting, did the work, a month from the time of landing found all that remained of the adventurers' outfit transferred to the cabin. Not once during this time was the bear seen in the vicinity of the cache, though sometimes fresh tracks appeared on the margin of the little lake—now christened Bear Paw Lake—where Loll had discovered them.

With the boards taken from the tumble-down shack an extra shed had been built near the cabin, and the porch repaired and strengthened. Harlan found time to make a much larger cage for the pigeon. As he told Ellen, the bird, confined in such close quarters, might not thrive.

Harlan noticed that despite Ellen's determination to leave the Island on the coming of the Hoonah she took a woman's delight in doing her best to make life comfortable with the few things at her command. Since it was the dictum of fate—if she would be with the man she loved—that she must spend so much of her married life in tents along new trails, floating down rivers in flatboats, or wayfaring in trappers' cabins, she sooner or later accepted those conditions. Doubtless, many times she rebelled in her heart. Any woman would. But, he fancied, she was the kind who would chide herself for the momentary disloyalty to Shane and with an increased tenderness, set her capable, feminine touch to perform some new marvel of transformation in each wild place of the moment.

In the cabin on Kon Klayu she accomplished much. With newspapers and magazines found in the box of books from Add-'em-up Sam's collection, she papered the rooms. At the new windows which framed a wide expanse of ever-changing sea, giving a sense of space and freedom to the living-room, she hung cheese-cloth curtains. The folds of these draped a book shelf beside the window, supporting few books but holding in its empty space the gold-scale, unused as yet on Kon Klayu, and glinting newly as it caught the light on its polished surface. In a corner of the room the bed was gay with Indian blankets and bright cushions. The homely cheer of a red tablecloth was reflected in the bright nickel of the shaded lamp on the table, and on the white, sand-scoured floor a long strip of rag carpet from Ellen's old home in the States, made a note of old-fashioned, comforting cleanliness. On the Yukon stove the kettle sang cheerily to the pots and pans hanging in a shining row on the wall behind and the room was pervaded by the faint, clean smell from the woodbox piled high with newly-split wood that had lain long in the sea.

Harlan followed Boreland into the house the day Ellen finished her curtains. He came upon the big prospector standing with his arm across his wife's shoulders.

"I'm blessed of the saints, entirely," Shane was saying, as he bent to lay his cheek affectionately against her hair. "God love you, Ellen, little fellow. . . . you could make a home out of a drygoods box." . . .

After the rescue of Loll and Jean at the bluff, Harlan noticed that Ellen's silent gratitude found vent in a dozen little ways, though he was aware also that he never had an opportunity of seeing the girl alone. Since the Hoonah was expected any day now, Ellen had suggested that the young man bring his blankets across the Island and "bunk" with Kayak Bill until their departure. Had it been offered three weeks earlier, this arrangement would have been eagerly accepted. But Gregg's attitude toward life on Kon Klayu had changed. It was still changing.

He was now cooking his own meals at the Hut, clumsily, it is true, since his unaccustomed hands had never before held a frying-pan. But he was learning, and he was surprised to find himself taking pleasure in the experience. He thanked Ellen for her invitation, but refused it. He would not have been human had he not felt a certain satisfaction in doing so.

He wondered tentatively if Kayak Bill had suspected the struggle that was going on within him during his first days on the Island—the fear of delirium tremens, the fight he was making to conquer the craving for liquor which continued, intermittently now, to torment him. The old man said nothing on the subject, but on one pretext or another Harlan noticed that Kayak managed to spend much of his leisure time at the Hut. Often, if the night were fine, he would roll up in a blanket before the fire and stay there until morning.

Kayak Bill's sauntering feet had followed Dame Fortune over every gold-trail from Dawson to Nome, and there was no trick of Alaskan camp life that he had not learned. He never tried to force his knowledge on the younger man, but casually, in the course of his slow, whimsical monologues, he taught Harlan much that was of inestimable value to him. Indeed, if it had not been for the old man, Harlan might have been forced to swallow his pride long before and ask for shelter at the Boreland cabin, for despite his brave talk of living in the Hut, it was a shelter of the rudest type, built, probably, as a feeding station by the experimenting fox-farmers.

Its structure interested him. It was made by standing whale ribs up on end about two feet apart in a circle. The spaces between were filled with turf, which abounded all over the island, thus making a wall two feet thick. Harlan had repaired it, and in the words of Kayak who helped him, had "rigged" himself up a stove from kerosene cans. It was the old hootch-maker who showed him how to arrange stones to form a crude, open-air fireplace in front of his door for use in fine weather. It was Kayak Bill who taught his blundering hands the trail way of stirring up a bannock and baking it in a frying-pan propped up before the blaze.

Harlan now had less time to think about himself. The little can stove required much finely chopped firewood to keep it going. The open-air fireplace consumed large quantities of drift which he had to chop with an axe, since the one saw on the Island was needed at the cabin. After his day's work with Boreland, he had his meals to prepare. There were brown beans to clean and cook, and sourdough hotcakes to set for the morning. Kayak had taught him to prepare his sourdoughs—a resource which was to become the food mainstay of all on the Island. Harlan learned from the old man that the sourdough hotcake, or flapjack is as typical of Alaska as the glacier. The wilderness man carries, always, a little can filled with a batter of it; with this he starts the leavening of his bread, or, with the addition of a pinch of soda he fries it in the form of flapjacks. So typical a feature of Alaska is the sourdough pot that the old timer in the North is called a "Sourdough."

Harlan grew to have a real fondness for his Hut—the only home he had ever made for himself. Its very primitiveness endeared it to him. He grew also to look forward to the fine evenings when he and Kayak, stretched before the open fireplace with their backs to a bleached whale rib, smoked and yarned and sang, while they watched the leaping driftwood flames.

Strange, picturesque characters of the last frontier stalked through all Kayak Bill's tales: Reckless Bonanza Kings of Klondyke days, buying with their new-found gold the love of painted women; simple-hearted, gentle Aleuts kissing the footprints of skirted, bearded, Russian priests; pathetic, gay ladies of adventure; half-mad hermits of the hills; secretive squaw-men, and wistful, emotional half-breeds—all these Kayak Bill made to live again in the glow of the evening fire.

In his quaint, whimsical way he told of the prospector—that brave heart who makes gold but an excuse for his going forth to conquer the wilds. Harlan came to understand them—the lure of gold, and their slogan: "This time we will strike it." Through Kayak Bill's eyes he saw them aged, broken by the rigors of many northern winters, but with the indomitable spirit of youth still in them, a recurrent yearning that defies age, rheumatism and poverty, and sends them with their grub-stakes out questing into the hills. He saw them, with picks, and gold pans wandering happily during the wonderful Alaskan summer and fall, and when the frost paints the green above timber-line with russet and gold and the Northern Lights beckon them back to the settlements, he saw them arrive, tired, penniless, perhaps, but satisfied, and already planning the next trip into the magnetic golden hills.

And one night, being in a pensive mood, Kayak told of a partner of his, the Bard of the Kuskokwim, an old northern poet unknown except in the Valley o' Lies, who had put the prospector's soul hunger into verse:

"We yearned beyond the skyline,
With a wistful wish to know
What was hidden by the high line,
Glist'ning with eternal snow.
And we yearned and wished and wondered
At the secrets there untold,
As the glaciers growled and thundered,
Came the whisper: 'Red, raw gold!'" [1]

As if he feared Harlan might think him sentimental, Kayak Bill finished his recital with:

"Yas, son, that old cuss partner o' mine was always recitin' them poetry sayin's o' his. Durned if he wouldn't vocabulate to the trees or the hills when there warn't another soul nearer to him than a hundred miles!"

But of Kayak Bill, himself, Harlan noted, there was never a personal thing. In all his tales the old hootch-maker was ever the spectator, amused, kindly, philosophical.

Sometimes the two were silent—with the companionable silence that the camp-fire instills. Leaning back against the whale-rib, while the embers died in the fireplace and the sea below took on its veil of twilight, they mused and listened to the universe. It was at such times that Harlan began to feel, though faintly, the healing, vibrant energy that comes to those who live close to Mother Earth. Katleean and the bunkful of liquor that at first had occupied so much of his thought, occurred to him less frequently. The States—and all that had happened to him there were becoming a dream. He began to feel as though he had always lived as he was living now. To his surprise as the time drew near for the arrival of the Hoonah he found himself unconcerned, indifferent. Like Kayak Bill, he was learning to face life serenely, undisturbed as to the morrow, but doing his best today.

[1] From the unpublished poems of Edward C. Cone, Bard of Kuskokwim.