The Alaskan eBook

James Oliver Curwood
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 301 pages of information about The Alaskan.

The Alaskan eBook

James Oliver Curwood
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 301 pages of information about The Alaskan.

His face was gray and haggard, a face grown suddenly old, and he traveled slowly, for the desire to reach his people was dying within him.  He could not laugh with Keok and Nawadlook, or give the old tundra call to Amuk Toolik and his people, who would be riotous in their happiness at his return.  They loved him.  He knew that.  Their love had been a part of his life, and the knowledge that his response to this love would be at best a poor and broken thing filled him with dread.  A strange sickness crept through his blood; it grew in his head, so that when noon came, he did not trouble himself to eat.

It was late in the afternoon when he saw far ahead of him the clump of cottonwoods near the warm springs, very near his home.  Often he had come to these old cottonwoods, an oasis of timber lost in the great tundras, and he had built himself a little camp among them.  He loved the place.  It had seemed to him that now and then he must visit the forlorn trees to give them cheer and comradeship.  His father’s name was carved in the bole of the greatest of them all, and under it the date and day when the elder Holt had discovered them in a land where no man had gone before.  And under his father’s name was his mother’s, and under that, his own.  He had made of the place a sort of shrine, a green and sweet-flowered tabernacle of memories, and its bird-song and peace in summer and the weird aloneness of it in winter had played their parts in the making of his soul.  Through many months he had anticipated this hour of his home-coming, when in the distance he would see the beckoning welcome of the old cottonwoods, with the rolling foothills and frosted peaks of the Endicott Mountains beyond.  And now he was looking at the trees and the mountains, and something was lacking in the thrill of them.  He came up from the west, between two willow ridges through which ran the little creek from the warm springs, and he was within a quarter of a mile of them when something stopped him in his tracks.

At first he thought the sound was the popping of guns, but in a moment he knew it could not be so, and the truth flashed suddenly upon him.  This day was the Fourth of July, and someone in the cottonwoods was shooting firecrackers!

A smile softened his lips.  He recalled Keok’s mischievous habit of lighting a whole bunch at one time, for which apparent wastefulness Nawadlook never failed to scold her.  They had prepared for his home-coming with a celebration, and Tautuk and Amuk Toolik had probably imported a supply of “bing-bangs” from Allakakat or Tanana.  The oppressive weight inside him lifted, and the smile remained on his lips.  And then as if commanded by a voice, his eyes turned to the dead cottonwood stub which had sentineled the little oasis of trees for many years.  At the very crest of it, floating bravely in the breeze that came with the evening sun, was an American flag!

He laughed softly.  These were the people who loved him, who thought of him, who wanted him back.  His heart beat faster, stirred by the old happiness, and he drew himself quickly into a strip of willows that grew almost up to the cottonwoods.  He would surprise them!  He would walk suddenly in among them, unseen and unheard.  That was the sort of thing that would amaze and delight them.

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Project Gutenberg
The Alaskan from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.