A thousand deaths by Jack London

sharp rap. He thought it was some one knocking on the cabin door, and

said, “Come in.” He waited for a while, and then said testily, “Stay out,

then, damn you.” But just the same he wished they would come in and tell

him about his illness.

But as he lay there, the past night began to reconstruct itself in his brain.

He hadn’t been sick at all, was his thought; he had merely been drunk, and

it was time for him to get up and go to work. Work suggested his mine,

and he remembered that he had refused ten thousand dollars for it. He sat

up abruptly and squeezed open his eyes. He saw himself in a boat, floating

on the swollen brown flood of the Yukon. The spruce-covered shores and

islands were unfamiliar. He was stunned for a time. He couldn’t make it

out. He could remember the last night’s orgy, but there was no connection

between that and his present situation.

He closed his eyes and held his aching head in his hands. What had

happened? Slowly the dreadful thought arose in his mind. He fought

against it, strove to drive it away, but it persisted: he had killed somebody.

That alone could explain why he was in an open boat drifting down the

Yukon. The law of Red Cow that he had so long administered had now

been administered to him. He had killed some one and been set adrift. But

whom? He racked his aching brain for the answer, but all that came was a

vague memory of bodies falling upon him and of striking out at them.

Who were they? Maybe he had killed more than one. He reached to his

belt. The knife was missing from its sheath. He had done it with that

undoubtedly. But there must have been some reason for the killing. He

opened his eyes and in a panic began to search about Ithe boat. There was

no grub, not an ounce of grub. He sat down with a groan. He had killed

without provocation. The extreme rigor of the law had been visited upon

him.

For half an hour he remained motionless, holding his aching head and

trying to think. Then he cooled his stomach with a drink of water from

LOST FACE

67

overside and felt better. He stood up, and alone on the wide-stretching

Yukon, with naught but the primeval wilderness to hear, he cursed strong

drink. After that he tied up to a huge floating pine that was deeper sunk in

the current than the boat and that consequently . drifted faster. He washed

his face and hands, sat down in the stern-sheets, and did some more

thinking. It was late in June. It was two thousand miles to Bering Sea. The

boat was averaging five miles an hour. There was no darkness in such high

latitudes at that time of thel year, and he could run the river every hour of

the twenty-four. This would mean, daily, a hundred and twenty miles.

Strike out the twenty for accidents, and there remained a hundred miles a

day. In twenty days he would reach Bering Sea. And this would involve

no expenditure of energy; the river did the work. He could lie down in the

bottom of the boat and husband his strength.

For two days he ate nothing. Then, drifting into the Yukon Flats, he went

ashore on the low-lying islands and gathered the eggs of wild geese and

ducks. He had no matches and ate the eggs raw. They were strong, but

they kept him going. When he crossed the Arctic Circle, he found the

Hudson Bay Company’s post. The brigade had not yet arrived from the

Mackenzie, and the post was completely out of grub. He was offered wildduck

eggs, but he informed them that he had a bushel of the same on the

boat. He was also offered a drink of whiskey, which he refused with an

exhibition of violent repugnance. He got matches, however, and after that

he cooked his eggs. Toward the mouth of the river head-winds delayed

him, and he was twenty-four days on the egg diet. Unfortunately, while

asleep, he had drifted by both the missions of St. Paul and Holy Cross.

And he could sincerely say, as he afterward did, that talk about missions

on the Yukon was all humbug. There weren’t any missions, and he was the

man to know.

Once on Bering Sea he exchanged the egg diet for seal diet, and he never

could make up his mind which he liked least. In the fall of the year he was

rescued by a United States revenue cutter, and the following winter he

made quite a hit in San Francisco as a temperance lecturer. In this field he

found his vocation. “Avoid the bottle” is his slogan and battle-cry. He

manages subtly to convey the impression that in his own life a great

disaster was wrought by the bottle. He has even mentioned the loss of a

fortune that was caused by that hell-bait of the devil, but behind that

incident his listeners feel the loom of some terrible and unguessed evil for

which the bottle is responsible. He has made a success in his vocation, and

has grown gray and respected in the crusade against strong drink. But on

the Yukon the passing of Marcus O’Brien remains tradition. It is a mystery

that ranks at par with the disappearance of Sir John Franklin.

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68

THE WIT OF PORPORTUK

(First published in The Times Magazine, Vol. 1, December, 1906)

El-Soo had been a Mission girl. Her mother had died when she was very

small, and Sister Alberta had plucked El-Soo as a brand from the burning,

one summer day, and carried her away to Holy Cross Mission and

dedicated her to God. El-Soo was a full-blooded Indian, yet she exceeded

all the half-breed and quarter-breed girls. Never had the good sisters dealt

with a girl so adaptable and at the same time so spirited.

El-Soo was quick, and deft, and intelligent; but above all she was fire, the

living flame of life, a blaze of personality that was compounded of will,

sweetness, and daring. Her father was a chief, and his blood ran in her

veins. Obedience, on the part of El-Soo, was a matter of terms and

arrangement. She had a passion for equity, and perhaps it was because of

this that she excelled in mathematics.

But she excelled in other things. She learned to read and write English as

no girl had ever learned in the Mission. She led the girls in singing, and

into song she carried her sense of equity. She was an artist, and the fire of

her flowed toward creation. Had she from birth enjoyed a more favorable

environment, she would have made literature or music.

Instead, she was El-Soo, daughter of Klakee-Nah, a chief, and she lived in

the Holy Cross Mission where were no artists, but only pure-souled Sisters

who were interested in cleanliness and righteousness and the welfare of

the spirit in the land of immortality that lay beyond the skies.

The years passed. She was eight years old when she entered the Mission;

she was sixteen, and the Sisters were corresponding with their superiors in

the Order concerning the sending of El-Soo to the United States to

complete her education, when a man of her own tribe arrived at Holy

Cross and had talk with her. El-Soo was somewhat appalled by him. He

was dirty. He was a Caliban-like creature, primitively ugly, with a mop of

hair that had never been combed. He looked at her disapprovingly and

refused to sit down.

“Thy brother is dead,” he said, shortly.

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69

El-Soo was not particularly shocked. She remembered little of her brother.

“Thy father is an old man, and alone,” the messenger went on. “His house

is large and empty, and he would hear thy voice and look upon thee.”

Him she remembered — Klakee-Nah, the head-man of the village, the

friend of the missionaries and the traders, a large man thewed like a giant,

with kindly eyes and masterful ways, and striding with a consciousness of

crude royalty in his carriage.

“Tell him that I will come,” was El-Soo’s answer.

Much to the despair of the Sisters, the brand plucked from the burning

went back to the burning. All pleading with El-Soo was vain. There was

much argument, expostulation, and weeping. Sister Alberta even revealed

to her the project of sending her to the United States. El-Soo stared wideeyed

into the golden vista thus opened up to her, and shook her head. In

her eyes persisted another vista. It was the mighty curve of the Yukon at

Tana-naw Station, with the St. George Mission on one side, and the

trading post on the other, and midway between the Indian village and a

certain large log house where lived an old man tended upon by slaves.