Wild Geese Calling

Stewart E. White

Description

Great, heartbreaking tale about a young man and his bride and their journey to Alaska by sea, as well as about many interesting men and women they meet along the way...

Sujets

• Travel
• Polar Regions

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643419
• Langue: English

Extrait

Wild Geese Calling
by Stewart E. White

First published in 1940
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Wild Geese Calling



by STEWART E. WHITE

Foreword
L ATTERLY a number of presumably well-meaning professionalpeople have applied themselves to the job of “debunking” thepioneer. He is, say they, nothing but an escapist. He takes tothe wilderness because he is unable to deal with civilization. So farfrom being the heroic figure of legend, he is basically nothing but alazy bum.
The logic is perfect. To the professional mind civilized life is complex;wilderness life is simple. Simple things are easier to deal withthan complex things. The man who avoids the difficult in favor of theeasy is the lazy man, the inferior man. Q.E.D.
Many essays, and a few novels, have been comfortingly constructedon this logical framework. The only difficulty is that their authorsknow nothing at first hand of what they are talking about. Their factsare accurate, but the yardsticks of their evaluations do not apply.It is as though they tried to measure distance by the quart. Theircriterion of judgment is their own world, the world they say thesepioneers escaped from. They have only a theoretical conception ofthe world he escaped to. A personal venture might do them good. Itwould certainly modify their conception of what is “easy” and whatis “difficult”; and, I suspect, might—in their own case—reverse thedirection of “escape”!
As a matter of fact these coddlers of their own inferiority complex—whichis the basis of most wholesale debunking—do little moredisservice to accurate estimation than the equally inexperiencedglorifier, though the intentions of some of the latter are honorable.Reconstruction through imagination only is chancy at best. It is fatalto claim, even for heroes, deeds and endurances beyond the possibilityof the human physical organism. One who has himself made hardmarches knows it simply cannot be done. The inexperienced readeris miseducated—for a time—but subconsciously he is ripened therebyfor the debunker. An excellent, and historically accurate, recentbest-seller loses its solidity because its author, who has obviouslynever been really up against it in the wilderness, describes in detailan impossible endurance of privation and hardship. Even mild actualexperience would have enabled him to gauge down to the possibilities.
They all miss the point. The pioneer movement is not a matter ofsurface characteristics. Fundamentally it is receptivity to a racialurge. The man who is attuned to that impulse must go. The man whois insulated from it must stay. Whether he is energetic or lazy;integrated or dissolute; able or inept has little to do with it. Thosequalities will determine his career, but not the direction of it.

PART I

THE WOODS
CHAPTER I
BOY AND GIRL
I N THE remote hills of northern Scotland dwelt the clan ofMurdock. Of it, one man, John, the generations bred to attunement,so that he, alone of all his people, felt and must respondto the first faint lift of the wave. Therefore, he took ship and sailedwest, to better his condition, he thought and said, though his conditionwas well enough. He landed on the New England coast. Therehe hewed him a farm from the forest and married and prosperedand in due time raised a family. He became a selectman, and afterwardsan assemblyman in the legislature. He lived to a good old age,content with his establishment. This was in 1731.
To his numerous children he left a prosperous estate, but to one,Luke, he bequeathed, unknown to himself, also certain hormones,so that when, in the ’70s, the rhythm again surged westward Lukewas borne on it over the Alleghanies with Boone into the Dark andBloody Ground, to better his condition, he said, though his condition,too, was well enough to satisfy his brothers.
From his broad acres and the mansion he had built in the foundationof what was to be an ancestral home, set out another Luke, hisson, with his bride, in a covered wagon following Marcus Whitmantoward Oregon; and to them, on the journey, and in the coveredwagon, a son was born who was named Marcus in the leader’shonor. Luke did not follow Whitman all the way, however. In hiscase the wave spent itself near the Dalles, on the Columbia River;and there he took up land and raised a family. His wife died in thebirth of the third boy John. When the latter had reached the age oftwelve Luke was killed by a horse. He had bettered his conditionprecisely to the extent of three sod-and-wattle shacks, a well andwindmill, a corral of greasewood, twenty horses and about six hundredcattle.
His personal accomplishment might have seemed small, but itwas a far cry from the Highlands to the Dalles. And there was John.
John stayed with his two brothers on the ranch near the Dallesfor three years after their father’s death. Then he tied the roll of hisslicker behind his cantle and rode away. He told the brothers hecould not stand them any longer, bossing him around; but the impulseof his forthfaring was a deeper compulsion. Possibly the threefelt this to be so, for at the last the parting was amicable. It wasunderstood John’s share in the patrimony would be intact for hisreturn and claiming.
So he rode forth on his pinto, driving his remuda of four. Hissaddle, a rifle under his leg, a pair of slick-leather chaps, a pair ofsilver-inlaid spurs, a tall slender figure hard as steel wire, a contagiousgrin and a reckless flick of the eye were all his valuables. Hehad in addition a few perishables, such as his age of fifteen and theworn and bleached blue jeans he rode in and the modest blanketroll lashed athwart one of the spare horses.
He entertained no definite ideas, so he headed to the southeast,the ranch country of eastern Oregon. He got a job promptly enough,for he was well grown and strong, and men were scarce. He rodeboundary and chopped wood and peeled potatoes occasionally, whenWong the cook was pressed, and shod horses and pitched alfalfahay and strung wire fence and drove chuck wagon. To all thesethings he was accustomed. He made good at them and at the scoresof other jobs that would naturally be shunted toward a willing andhandy boy of fifteen. Jim Carston wanted to keep him and offeredhim man’s wages to stay. But something stronger than his liking forJim Carston was lifting within him. He tied the roll of his slickerbehind his cantle, waved his old Stetson, flashed his gay smile androde away. He was richer by six months, by some added knowledgeof how to do things, some friendly good wishes and a rather ancientforty-five-caliber frontier-model Colt revolver, astoundingly thrustupon him by Wong at the moment of departure. There was also thematter of a few dollars of wages.
For the next ten years John ranged the great basin between theRockies and the Cascades, seeking, he told himself, to better hiscondition. He punched cattle as a cowboy; he peeled cayuses as abronco buster; he acted as sportsmen’s guide in the game country;he prospected with the desert rats, but half-heartedly, for this typeof mania quickly wore thin for him; he took a look at the southernmines and shot deer for their commissary, which was well enough,for he liked hunting; he rode as express messenger atop a Concordcoach with a sawed-off shotgun across his knees. He was good at allthese things. But always, just as his condition looked well towardsettled betterment, he rode on. Curiously enough the job that heldhim longest would seem to have the least adventurous appeal of thelot. In western Washington he stayed for almost a year on a wheatfarm. Here was something new to him—and to the country, for thatmatter. Its owner had progressive ideas and a little capital, and hehad brought in the first harvesting machinery. John discovered anenormous aptitude for machinery. It fascinated him. He loved torun it and figure it out and repair it, make it obey. But it could nothold him.
“Reckon I’m just a bum, a rolling stone,” he laughed and rodeaway. Sometimes, on rare occasions, when he took more seriousstock of himself, his conscience reproached him. Perhaps he was abum, just a natural hobo. He would settle down. But deep withinhim he knew he would not settle down. He had to find somethingfirst.
In the spring of 1895 he imagined he had found it, or rather them,for the objects of his search must, it seemed, be two—a woman and aplace in work that suited his whole desire. He had no ideals as tothe one, or definite ideas as to the other, but he was certain he wouldknow them when he saw them.
This proved to be the case. Riding early one morning into Siler’sBend, near the Deschutes, he came upon the woman, seated undera cottonwood tree outside the little settlement. This was SarahSlocum, spinster and orphan: age twenty, schoolteacher, native ofBorland, which is west of the Cascades, reduced to penury by thedecease of her father after a disastrous law suit, lineal descendant ofJoshua Slocum, trader, immigrant of ’51, and therefore also possiblyharboring in her life essence the genes and hormones of attunementto the racial urge of which we write. Of these statistics John Murdockremained ignorant until much later. More pressing mattersclaimed his enterprise; and so masterfully did he press them, andperhaps so predestined were they to fulfillment, that he and theschoolteacher rode out from Siler’s Bend that very afternoon as manand wife.
“Where are we going?