I had not been in Sitka since the days when I ran
barefooted with Russian playmates in the winding
streets — streets paved with gravel brought from Cali-
fornia as ballast in the ‘ ice-ships ‘ which returned South
with frigid cargoes that cooled the drinks of bibulous
forty-niners before the invention of the ice-machine.
I was wondering how the quaint old village would
look to my grown-up eyes, when the steamer entered a
narrow channel where the shining water was paved
with reflections from the shore. We were so close it
seemed as though I might reach out and touch the
green lacery of ferns and alders on either side. After
the dusty blooming of the South, the vegetation here
appeared exquisitely fresh and clean. I smelled the
elderberry bushes flowering in the shadows of the
yellow cedars.
A hermit thrush poised on the tip of a sapling, raised
his little head as we slipped by him and filled the forest
with liquid melody.
Back in a clearing the log
cabin of a fox rancher showed a moment and was
gone. His anchored launch left off mirroring itself in
the water to rock in the swells from our prow. A
raven, flapping up from the beach, perched on the
weathered ruin of a hut that crowned the point ahead,
and marked our passing with side-turned head and a
solemn, questioning croak.
We swung on again into silence and another twilit
waterway — and suddenly I thrilled to an old, para-
doxical delight that was compounded of mystery and
wonder and fear. Ahead was what the Indian play-
mates of my childhood had taught me to believe was
the spirit of a Shaman, a witch-doctor, journeying in
his spirit-canoe through the serene Alaskan night !
To be sure, the prosaic night watchman saw only a
lone sea-gull afloat on a log, but I — could L help it if
I believed, just a little, that an old Thlinget medicine-
man was coming out to welcome me home? At the
sight, my long exile in civilization dropped away from
me. I was a child again, and I belonged wholly to
Alaska Alaska, wild young mother of many moods,
very young as a mother, very careless, barbarian,
perhaps, yet always beautiful, always alluring.