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 ifthe 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.
PageIntroductionviiPrefacexiChapterIDiscovery1IIArrival10IIIChores41IVWinter67VWaiting84VIExcursion102VIIHome109VIIIChristmas134IXNew Year150XOlson182XITwilight200
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”2Unknown Waters6Home Building12Fire Wood16The Sleeper20The Windlass24The Snow Queen28Fox Island, Resurrection Bay, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska32Rain Torrents36Day42Night46Wilderness50One of Rockwell’s Drawings54Sunrise56Adventure60On the Height68The Day’s Work72Meal Time76Day’s End80The Cabin Window90“Go to Bed”94Driftwood98The Whittler104“Get Up!”110Man114Woman118Foreboding124Lone Man128Cain136Superman140The North Wind146Another of Rockwell’s Drawings152Weltschmerz154Victory158Zarathustra and His Playmates164Frozen Fall168The Hermit172Ecstasy176Pelagic Reverie184Prison Bars188Running Water192Immanence196The Vision202The Imperishable206The Star-Lighter210