Wilderness, A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska

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

ILLUSTRATIONS