Chapter II: Preface

Most of this book was written on Fox Island in Alaska, a journal added to from day to day. It was not meant for publication but merely that we who were living there that year might have always an unfailing memory of a wonderfully happy time. There's a ring of truth to all freshly written records of experience that, whatever their shortcomings, makes them at least inviolable. Besides the journal, a few letters to friends have been drawn upon. All are given unchanged but for the flux of a new paragraph or chapter here and there to form a kind of narrative, the only possible literary accompaniment to the drawings of that period herein published. The whole is a picture of quiet adventure in the wilderness, above all an adventure of the spirit.

What one would look for in a story of the wild Northwest is lacking in these pages. To have been further from a settled town might have brought not more but less excitement. The wonder of the wilderness was its tranquillity. It seemed that there both men and the wild beasts pursued their own paths freely and, as if conscious of the wide freedom of their world, molested one another not at all. It was the bitter philosophy of the old trapper who was our companion that of all animals Man was the most terrible; for if the beasts fought and killed for some good cause Man slew for none.

Deliberately I have begun this happy story far out in Resurrection Bay;--and again dropped its peaceful thread on the forlorn threshold of the town. We found Fox Island on Sunday, August twenty-fifth, 1918, and left there finally on the seventeenth of the following March.

R. K.

Arlington, Vermont,
December, 1919.

CONTENTS

Page
Introduction vii
Preface xi
Chapter
I.--Discovery 1
II.--Arrival 10
III.--Chores 41
IV.--Winter 67
V.--Waiting 84
VI.--Excursion 102
VII.--Home 109
VIII.--Christmas 134
IX.--New Year 150
X.--Olson 182
XI.--Twilight 200

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing Page

"Zarathustra Himself Led the Ugliest Man by the Hand, in Order
to Show Him His Night-World and the Great Round Moon and the
Silvery Waterfalls Nigh Unto His Cave" 2

Unknown Waters 6

Home Building 12

Fire Wood 16

The Sleeper 20

The Windlass 24

The Snow Queen 28

Fox Island, Resurrection Bay, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska 32

Rain Torrents 36

Day 42

Night 46

Wilderness 50

One of Rockwell's Drawings 54

Sunrise 56

Adventure 60

On the Height 68

The Day's Work 72

Meal Time 76

Day's End 80

The Cabin Window 90

"Go to Bed" 94

Driftwood 98

The Whittler 104

"Get Up!" 110

Man 114

Woman 118

Foreboding 124

Lone Man 128

Cain 136

Superman 140

The North Wind 146

Another of Rockwell's Drawings 152

Weltschmerz 154

Victory 158

Zarathustra and His Playmates 164

Frozen Fall 168

The Hermit 172

Ecstasy 176

Pelagic Reverie 184

Prison Bars 188

Running Water 192

Immanence 196

The Vision 202

The Imperishable 206

The Star-Lighter 210