July 15, 1914
Rose knelt on the riverbank, swishing water and sand through her pan. They had been in Alaska for over six weeks now, and Rose had to admit that she liked the stark beauty of the wilderness. She wasn’t quite sure where they were, but Robert called the broad, rolling plain the tundra. Most of the land was covered with a variety of grasses and herbs, browsed by herbivores both large and small. These animals’ populations were in turn kept down by the predations of carnivores, particularly birds of prey, foxes, weasels, bears, and wolves.
Rose sat back on her heels, wondering when Robert would be back. He had gone hunting a couple of hours earlier, with Tripper to help search for game. The broad, rolling tundra offered a variety of prey, both large and small.
Setting her pan aside, Rose walked downstream to check the lines she had set up earlier in hopes of catching fish. Parts of the riverbank were clear, with only rocks and sand, but other parts were choked with low-growing brush and trees. Few trees grew very tall there, except for a few very hardy ones sheltered from the elements by cliffs carved out by the river. There was plenty of water, but the wind and cold kept the size of growing things in check.
She was in luck. Two of the three lines she had set up had fish caught on the hooks, still struggling to get free. They had carried two sets of fishing gear with them into the wilderness, but when they made camp for a few days they added to the number of fishing lines available, using sticks, fishing line, and spare hooks. Extra fish was smoked and dried over the fire, and added to their supplies.
Rose pulled the fish from the lines, brained them with a rock, and brought them back to camp. After quickly gutting and scaling them, she buried them in the coals of the fire to cook. Taking another pan from her pack, she wandered down to the river to see what she could find for dinner.
As she took off her boots and rolled up her trouser legs, intending to wade into the water to forage, she saw something glittering at the edge of the water. Curious, she picked it up.
It resembled a sparkly, metallic rock. Rose looked closer, remembering a picture she had seen of a gold nugget. Despite the weeks she and Robert had spent in Alaska, they had yet to find more than a little gold dust—just enough to keep them in supplies at the small frontier outposts they came across. Wondering if it was gold, she bit down on it, remembering that one way to tell gold from iron pyrite was that gold was soft and would show teeth marks if she bit it, while pyrite would either crumble or be too hard to bite down on.
The nugget showed her teeth marks. Excited, Rose tucked it into a pocket and looked around, wondering if there was more.
After a few minutes of searching, she confirmed that they had indeed come across a good spot. Several more nuggets were scattered in a small area, and, when sifting through the sand, Rose found a significant amount of gold dust. She waded upstream a little way, to where she had been working before. Picking up the pan, she traced her footsteps back down to where she had found the gold and tied a piece of ribbon to a branch, marking the spot. They had found some gold dust upstream, but the spot that Rose had discovered had more. Located near a cliff, the bits of gold had been carved out by the elements over time and left in the water to be found. Rose looked across the river at the cliff, wondering if that was the source of the gold nuggets. They appeared to have been washed out and deposited in the river, kept in place by the slow-flowing water. The spot where she had found them was in a small, protected bend, where items that had washed up stayed until a major storm or the spring melt washed them away.
Rose tucked the nuggets into her pocket—she had picked up three—and turned her attention to foraging. The gold wasn’t going anywhere, and she needed to find something for dinner.
Some time later, as Rose pulled on her shoes and carried the pan of roots, greens, and berries up to the camp, she pulled the three nuggets out of her pocket and looked at them. They glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Tucking them away again, she started preparing what she had found, looking forward to telling Robert about her discovery.
*****
Robert returned to camp just as Rose was taking the fish out from under the coals. She piled them on their tin plates, then served up helpings of the stew she had made from the vegetables she had found, along with a little leftover meat and some salt. The berries she divided into two portions and set on the edges of the plates.
"Smells good," Robert told her, setting down the two Arctic hares he had caught. Tripper sniffed at them, and Rose shooed him away. The dog did well enough at hunting for himself that they seldom had to feed the animal more than a few table scraps. Insulted, the dog ran over to where Rose had dumped the entrails from the fish and devoured them. She smiled, watching him. If he didn’t eat the entrails, she would have had to bury them to avoid attracting predators.
Sated, Tripper lay down near Rose, eyeing her plate hopefully. Rose sometimes fed him a particularly tough morsel from her meal. Rose settled down near the fire, handing a plate to Robert.
As they dug into their dinner, Robert told Rose about that day’s hunting trip. Rose listened quietly, almost bursting with her news, but wanting to tell him after he had finished his story.
"We went out to the tundra south of here, following the river," he told her, gesturing to the dog, who watched him sleepily. "Then we went west a ways, following a game trail. I guess that some animals made it coming to the river to drink."
"Did you remember to mark the trail?" Rose asked.
"Yeah, I remembered...this time." Robert grinned, a little sheepishly. About a week earlier, when they had first started out across the tundra, Robert had gone hunting and become lost. Had it not been for the compass he carried, and Rose’s shouts as she looked for him, he wouldn’t have found his way back to camp. There were fewer landmarks on the tundra than in the forest, and now they both made a point of marking their trail when they ventured very far from camp. A handful of hair ribbons and brightly colored pieces of cloth from one of Rose’s old dresses served to lead them back to camp.
"At any rate, there is so much wildlife out here. Birds, rabbits, lemmings—"
"Please don’t tell me you’re trying to hunt lemmings." The small rodents didn’t appear to be anything Rose wanted to eat.
"Of course not. But they are interesting to watch."
"True. They are kind of cute."
"I don’t think they’re so cute when they run off cliffs into sea."
"Do they really do that?"
"Yes, they do. I guess there gets to be too many of them, or something, and they run off looking for new territory. Unfortunately, they don’t last long in the ocean."
"I wouldn’t think so. It would be awfully cold, and no food or fresh water."
"A lot of them drown."
"Charming," Rose replied. "What else did you see?"
"Caribou."
She looked up. "Caribou?" They hadn’t seen any of the herds of reindeer-like animals since coming to Alaska, although it stood to reason that the caribou would probably thrive on the grassy summer tundra.
"A whole herd of them. They didn’t appear to be moving very fast, so they’ll probably be around for a while. Maybe we can hunt a couple of them."
"You can hunt a couple of them. I’ll help you prepare them."
"Maybe, if I can catch any, we can tan the hides." Robert had entertained himself by tanning squirrel and rabbit hides when he was living with his relatives near Cedar Rapids, and had shown Rose how it was done. Rose found the process thoroughly disgusting, but had to admit that the tanned skins of the animals Robert had hunted made warm, soft linings for boots, coats, mittens, hats, and bedrolls.
"Those are pretty big animals, aren’t they?"
"Fairly large, though not as big as some. If I can hunt any, I’ll need help bringing them back."
"I’ll help you. Just don’t expect me to actually stalk them—or kill them."
"I wouldn’t dream of it."
"Oh, Robert." Rose remembered the gold nuggets she had found in the river. "I found something that might interest you."
"What is it?"
Rose reached into her pocket, pulling out the chunks of gold ore. "These."
Robert took one, examining it closely. "Rose, this is gold! Where did you find it?"
"In the river, just a little way downstream from where we were working. I marked the spot. It’s across the river from that cliff."
Robert handed the gold nugget back to her. "You’ll have to show me after dinner." He tossed the fish skeleton, with head and tail still attached, to Tripper, who gobbled it up and then looked at Robert, hoping for more.
*****
The sun never set above the Arctic Circle at that time of year, so Rose had no trouble leading Robert back to where she had found the gold. He sifted through the sand, extracting two tiny chunks of ore, then looked more closely, seeing the shine of gold dust among the grains of sand.
"Do you know what this means, Rose?" he asked.
"We’ve found enough gold to buy all the supplies we need?"
"More than that. This spot is rich—not just in gold, but in everything. There’s a river full of fish, plenty of game, all the berry bushes you could want, a beautiful, rolling plain...this is paradise."
"A cold paradise," Rose replied, but she smiled when she said it. She, too, was growing to love the vast, open expanse of the tundral wilderness.
"Tomorrow, I’ll go to that little town about a day’s walk from here and file our claim. You can stay here while I’m gone, or you can come with me—it’s up to you."
"I think I’ll stay and make sure no one else takes over while you’re gone."
"That’ll work. We should still be able to stay here for another two or three weeks before we have to start back south."
"So soon?"
"Summer is short here, and winter is unpredictable. I wouldn’t want to be caught in a storm without shelter, which could happen if we cut it too close. Of course…" He paused, thinking. "…we could get enough supplies to last us, and winter here."
"Here? In a tent?"
"We could build a sod house."
"What’s that?"
"You cut bricks of sod out of the ground and use them to build a roof and walls. We could build it right over where the sod was cut, giving us additional protection from the elements."
"Have you ever built such a house?"
"No, but I’m sure I can figure it out. Houses like that used to be common in the Midwest in the frontier days, and the winters there can be just as brutal as here."
Rose eyed him skeptically. "Well...all right. If we can figure out how to build one of these houses, we’ll stay." She shrugged, smiling. "It is an adventure, after all."