Bo at Ballard Creek Read online

  Charlie Sickik hadn’t seen the talkies, because they hadn’t come to Fairbanks yet.

  “But I went to the movies at the Empress Theater. Had a guy there who played the piano and one guy who read what the words said on the big screen. It was all about these robbers getting away from the cops. Pretty good, those movies.”

  Charlie had seen automobiles in Fairbanks, but he didn’t think much of them.

  “Lot of noise and got to wind it up, and it goes a little bit—bump, bump—then it tips over in a hole or something, got to start it all over again. Bump, bump. No good,” he said.

  He and Karl had gone together to see the new train that came to Fairbanks, and they’d gone to the ball field and looked at all the airplanes. They both thought Fairbanks was way too noisy. For one thing there was this siren that blew from the Northern Commercial Company every noon.

  “Every dog in town, hundreds of dogs—more than people—they howl when the noon siren goes off. And then they howl some more when the train whistle blows. Howlingest place I ever saw. Couldn’t hear yourself think. Don’t know how they stand it, them people,” Karl said.

  Johnny Schmidt didn’t come back. He sent a wire to the boss to say he’d have to stay at home to help the old folks. The boys were quiet when the boss read them that wire, and Bo’s throat closed up with rough, hard tears.

  Arvid saw how she looked, and he said quickly, “Thing to do is write to Johnny. You tell me what you want to say, I’ll write it out. Send him a letter and tell him all about everything. And he’ll write back, and that way you won’t miss him so much.”

  Bo looked down at her plate, but right away she started thinking about what she’d tell Johnny in her letter, and she felt a little better.

  Nels Niemi came back on the last scow, and he brought his sister with him.

  She was a little gray-haired lady dressed in men’s overalls and boots, who smiled all the time. Bo was so excited that she pushed through the crowd around the scow and took the little woman’s hand. Bo couldn’t say anything, she was so happy to see Nels’s sister.

  “This here is Bo,” Nels said. “And these are her papas. Meet my sister Asa,” he said. Asa looked a little startled when she shook hands with Arvid and Jack.

  Asa got a big greeting from everyone, just like Bo did when she came to town. Asa’d never been anywhere in her life besides her hometown.

  The boys couldn’t get over her. “Imagine that little woman being so skookum. Just jumped up and come to the middle of nowhere, six days on the scow, gnats driving everyone nuts, walking all the way out to the creek with Nels. Don’t find little old ladies like that just anywhere.”

  “Not letting Nels out of her sight this time,” Alex said.

  “He’s going to have it good now,” Sandor said. “Got a partner who can cook. Can’t beat that.”

  Miss Sylvia, the teacher, missed the last scow when she was coming back from her summer vacation. She sent a wire to Budu and Dinuk and so they went to Bettles to pick her up. They brought her up the Koyukuk in their poling boat. The water was so low, Budu and Dinuk had to neck it most of the way. Necking was when you waded through the water or along the bank, pulling the boat with two long ropes. They were proud it took them only six days to come from Bettles.

  Miss Sylvia was a jolly, round-faced woman with short graying hair like women in the Montgomery Ward catalog. She had round glasses that made her blue eyes look very big. She’d taught at Ballard Creek since before Bo came, but she’d taught in lots of other places, too. She said she never had such smart students, ever, as her students in Ballard Creek.

  Everyone liked her very much. Some of the grown-ups had gone to the mission school when they were children, but they said Miss Sylvia’s school was much better. At the mission school, they had learned nothing but the catechism and the Bible verses, which they didn’t think were very useful.

  Bo asked Jack what the catechism was, but he said he didn’t know. Some church thing, he thought.

  Miss Sylvia never taught the catechism or the Bible verses.

  School would start soon, and all the children would be going except Bo, Kapuk, who was just a baby, and Evalina.

  Even Oscar would be going. There would be no Oscar to play with in the bright fall sun or to go with to the roadhouse to read magazines. Arvid and Jack tried to get her used to the idea, but Bo couldn’t even imagine what it would be like not to have Oscar with her all the time.

  “It’s not that long,” Jack said. “He goes in the morning, be home for lunch. You could visit him then. And he’ll be out in the afternoon. Not too late. Three o’clock, I think. You’ll have all day after that to see Oscar.”

  But Bo said that it would be dark when Oscar got out of school, and he’d have chores to do. “Well, there’s Saturday and Sunday, too,” they pointed out.

  Everything in her life had been the same, year after year. And now it was going to change.

  * * *

  ON THE DAY SCHOOL started, Bo and Evalina went inside with the other children, just to visit for a bit. They were both feeling left out. Oscar was sitting in the front row with the youngest children. He looked so happy to be there, his face scrubbed and shiny. He was wearing the new overalls that Arvid had made him.

  There were fourteen students in the school—and not just kids. Atok’s grandma was starting the second grade, and Dinuk was in the third grade, just like his son Jonas. The grown-ups were happy to be learning. They’d never had a chance to go to school when they were young.

  The little school was pretty crowded. Everyone sat on benches facing the teacher’s desk. And they all looked shiny like Oscar.

  There was a blackboard and an American flag at the front of the room, and all over the room there were pictures of wonderful things.

  Above the blackboard there was a long row of the alphabet, big letters and little ones, and under the alphabet were all the numbers to one hundred. That was one thing she was glad about. She didn’t have to learn all those numbers yet.

  They began with a song, and then they stood up to say something to the flag on the wall, their hands on their chests. They all seemed to know it by heart. Except Oscar. Bo could see Oscar was just pretending to say it because he’d never heard it before. Bo didn’t know what the words meant.

  Bo and Evalina stayed until that was over, and then they knew it was time for them to go. Bo threw a look at Oscar, and then she took Evalina’s hand, and they walked out of the school together, feeling very sad.

  Miss Sylvia called after them. “Here,” she said, smiling. She gave each girl a new box of crayons. Bo could tell that Miss Sylvia knew they were sad, so she smiled back at her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you too much,” said Evalina.

  But still. A box of new crayons didn’t really make up for Oscar.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE CAT

  ONE SATURDAY in early winter, Bo and Oscar and most of the other children were in the roadhouse. They were waiting for Gus Ostnes to bring his Cat to Ballard Creek.

  They were so jittery and restless that Milo threatened to throw them out in the snow if they didn’t settle down. They wouldn’t take their parkas off because they wanted to be able to run out the door without waiting a minute.

  A Cat was what they called a big Caterpillar tractor, which was a very new thing. It ran on gas just like airplanes and automobiles. Jack showed Bo a picture of one in a magazine and told her how it crawled along like a caterpillar on big rubber treads. “That’s why a Cat can go places a thing with wheels can never go,” Jack said.

  Gus Ostnes had bought his Cat last year in Fairbanks and shipped it to Bettles. He was going to be a freighter. He’d bring the things people needed over the old winter trail to Ballard Creek. Now the only way to move goods in the winter was by dog team, and the sleds couldn’t carry anything heavy. The Cat could haul more than twenty sleds could carry in one trip. Everyone’s lives would change when they could get freight
in the winter.

  But the Cat kept breaking down, and Gus had to keep ordering parts for it. The men of Ballard Creek and Bettles had worried about that all last winter. This year was better, though. There wasn’t too much snow, and the Cat seemed to be running fine. So Gus had wired ahead that he was coming and to look for him if he didn’t show up in two days.

  The children had come to the roadhouse way too early. Milo said it would be ages before the Cat came. He said they’d be able to hear it from far, far away, it was so rackety.

  Every once in a while, Oscar or Jonas would jump up and poke his head out the door of the roadhouse to see if he could hear it. In the meantime, they sat on the floor with their backs against the bar, legs stretched out, reading magazines.

  Bo and Oscar were together reading the same magazine, as usual. Bo started whistling.

  Oscar had been teaching Bo how to whistle, and she practiced a lot. She practiced so much that she didn’t even know she was doing it anymore.

  Oscar punched her with his elbow. “Stop,” he growled.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Bo. “Jack says he’ll go crazy if I don’t stop whistling. He says I should at least whistle a tune. But I don’t know how to make it go into a tune.”

  Oscar gave her a look but didn’t offer to teach her about whistling tunes.

  They were reading a National Geographic magazine, their favorite because it had the best pictures. Oscar liked to see the naked people because they were so different from the naked people he saw all the time. Bo too, because she’d never seen any naked people except in the National Geographic.

  Suddenly they could hear someone’s feet pounding up the porch stairs and then Manuluk jerked open the door.

  “Cat coming! Cat coming!”

  All the children dropped their magazines and scrambled out the door with Milo right after them.

  They could hear the Cat as soon as they got out the door. Nothing else sounded like that. It was different from the airplane. Growlier.

  “Bet he’s at Marion Creek,” said Milo. That was seven miles away.

  All the kids in town were running, heading for the trail. “Let’s go!” yelled Sammy. He was the biggest boy, and he bossed everyone around.

  Bo and Oscar were in the back of the pack of children. Bo thought they all looked like swallows swooping across the river.

  The winter trail was firmly packed and perfect. The sun was shining, and the sky was a hard blue. It was nice to run with her new mukluks down the trail, the dry snow crunching at each step. The rabbits that ran from them were nearly all white, and so were the ptarmigan they surprised, pecking for pebbles under the light snow cover.

  They ran for a long time. They only stopped to grab some snow to eat because they were thirsty, or they’d stop a second to listen for the Cat.

  It got closer and closer, louder and louder. They had reached Dry Gulch, where Ollie Deglar mined a little in the summer. Dry Gulch was three miles from Ballard Creek.

  Suddenly the Cat sounded so loud, so close, that they were terrified to stay on the trail. Maybe it would run over them. They all darted into the bushes by the side of the trail as Gus and the Cat came over the top of a little hill.

  Bo screamed and screamed—they all did. She didn’t know if she was happy or afraid. Gus stopped the big monster and climbed down, laughing and shaking his head.

  “All the way to Dry Gulch,” he said. “I bet you could run to Bettles no problem, you bunch of savages.” He took off his wool hat and tied the flaps on top to be out of the way. “It’s warm up there on top of that engine,” he said. Then he swept his arm back. “Climb aboard.”

  They all stood still for a moment. They hadn’t known for sure that Gus would give them a ride. The littlest ones, he said, could sit up with him in the driver’s seat. He showed Bo and Oscar where to put their feet on those big bands and gave them a boost up to the seat. Ekok and Jonas had a bit of a wrestle to decide who would sit next to Gus and the big stick with a knob on top.

  The older kids could ride on the go-devil. That’s what he called the big sled that he pulled behind. It was piled with boxes of freight for the roadhouse store. Della, Manuluk, Sammy, Lena, Annie, Betty, and the rest arranged themselves on the go-devil, sitting on boxes and barrels or between them. Gus looked at Sammy seriously.

  “You’re the oldest. Anything goes wrong back there, you let me know.” Sammy looked very proud.

  And then they bumped and bounced three miles over the winter trail back to Ballard Creek. They couldn’t talk or they’d bite their tongues, so they just looked at each other with shining faces.

  Gus drove the Cat all the way to the roadhouse, where everyone in town was waiting for him. They all helped unload the go-devil and bring the boxes into the roadhouse while Milo fed Gus a big plate of stew and dumplings. Gus was to stay overnight at the roadhouse and start back to Bettles in the morning.

  The kids were all so wild and noisy that Milo had to threaten again that he’d throw them in the snowbank if they didn’t quiet down. So they ran outside and climbed all over the Cat, taking turns pretending they were driving until they were greasy and covered with filthy slush from the big treads and their mamas sent them home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WINTER

  AFTER THE CAT had gone, the children were wishing for a heavy snow to fall because they wanted to go sliding on the riverbank. But the bad cold set in then—thirty and forty below—and it wouldn’t snow again until it warmed up.

  Nearly everyone liked winter best. You couldn’t walk around the country in the summer very easily, not with the tundra and grass lakes and sedge tussocks. In the summer, you had to travel by boat unless there was a really good trail.

  In the winter, you could go everywhere—on the frozen rivers, on the trails, across country. At least until the snow got so deep you’d be swimming in it. Deep snow was not good for walking or for dog teams, but you could walk on the deep snow with snowshoes.

  When it was cold, you could freeze your meat and anything else outdoors—loaves of extra bread, cakes, cookies. And anytime you wanted, you could make ice cream.

  Of course the cold was good for drift mining.

  The boys were back underground, this time making some new tunnels off the shaft, trying to find some richer ground than they’d had the last few years.

  * * *

  JACK GOT ALL their heavy winter clothes out of the storage shed. He and Arvid both wore size-fifteen boots, great heavy leather shoe packs. Bo loved to put on their boots and try to lift her feet off the floor. They came up to her thighs and couldn’t be budged. She couldn’t even scoot them, they were so heavy, and when she tried, she just fell over.

  Frost spread up the windows of the cookshack in beautiful lacy patterns. She mustn’t touch the frost or breathe on it, or the lace would be ruined.

  The beautiful frost pictures didn’t last long. It got colder—forty, fifty below on the cookshack thermometer—and the frost patterns became thick stubborn lumps of ice. Too cold to snow.

  Jack lit the extra stove in the cookshack, the one he’d made from an oil drum. The cookshack needed two stoves going when it got that cold. At night, he’d fill the stove with birch because it would burn longer than spruce and he wouldn’t have to get up at night to put in more wood.

  Bo liked to hear the stove crackling first thing in the morning while she and Bear were still warm in her bed. Jack would tap on the stovepipe to knock down the creosote, then scrape the red coals from back to front. She knew just what he would do next—lay the kindling on top of those coals, and then the split spruce, and then she’d hear the scree of the damper as he turned it to just the right opening. When she could hear the fire roaring, he’d call.

  “Nice and warm now! Get your clothes and get dressed by the stove.”

  The dark lasted a long time now and came earlier in the afternoon. Every day after she did the dishes, Gitnoo washed the soot from the lamp chimneys, trimmed the wicks, and filled the bowls with
coal oil.

  The northern lights were out every night, a cold white curtain tumbling and sliding across the starry black sky. Sometimes they would be a little pink or green as well.

  “Once, long time ago, I saw the red northern lights,” Arvid told Bo. “Not just a little red, but really red, just as red as blood. Prettiest thing I ever saw.” Bo longed to see red northern lights.

  Big Annie would hook up her dog team every other day to go check her traplines. Sometimes she’d take Bo and Evalina, too, because they were the only two big children not in school and Annie felt sorry for them.

  Big Annie would dress Evalina in her warmest clothes, and then she’d drive the dogs over the bridge to the cookshack to get Bo. Then Jack would dress Bo in her warmest clothes: long wool underwear, wool overall pants with a bib, and canvas pants on top so that the snow wouldn’t stick to the wool. Then a parka with the fur turned inside, and sometimes, in the worst cold, a parka cover to go over that.

  Gracie, Jonas’s mother, had made Bo’s parka out of siksikpuk, the marmots that lived in the hills. It took a lot of them to make a parka, even a little one like Bo’s. Unakserak was too old to go hunting for caribou, but in the spring he always snared siksikpuk for parkas.

  Bo’s parka had a wolverine and wolf fur ruff to keep the wind from her face.

  And last was a pair of moose-hide mitts with a long harness to keep them from getting lost and a pair of moose-hide boots with caribou socks inside and her thick wool socks that Lilly had knitted for her.

  You needed a lot of clothes in the winter.

  Bo hated getting dressed in her cold-weather clothes, because before she was half finished, she’d be so hot she could hardly stand it. She’d have to dash outdoors for a minute to cool off and then come back in for another layer.

  Jack was very careful about dressing her properly. “Nearly froze to death when I first came into the country. I’ll never forget what that felt like. I was so young and so dumb, didn’t know anything about the cold, being from Louisiana.”