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"It is the same." Kurilla spoke slowly like one half in a dream. "When I go down river, thirty winter back, with the Great Dall, he try buy this off Nicholas's mother. She wear it on string red Russian beads. Oh, it is a thing to remember!"
Peetka made remarks in Ingalik. "Father MacManus, him all right?" asked Kurilla, politely cloaking his cross-examination. "MacManus? Do you mean Wills, or the Superior, Father Brachet?" "Oh yes! MacManus at Tanana." He spoke as though inadvertently he had confused the names. As the strangers gave him the winter's news from Holy Cross, his wonder and astonishment grew.
It had been left practically unexplored ever since the days when the bloodthirsty Koyukons came down out of their fastnesses and perpetrated the great Nulato massacre, doing to death with ghastly barbarity every man, woman, and child at the post, Russian or Indian, except Kurilla, not sparing the unlucky Captain Barnard or his English escort, newly arrived here in their search for the lost Sir John Franklin.
Kurilla limped back to his place, but turned to the Ingaliks before he sat down, and bending painfully over his stick, "Not Kurilla," he said, as though speaking of one absent "not Dall make so great journey, no dogs. Kurilla? Best guide in Yukon forty year. Kurilla say: 'Must have dogs men like that!" He limped back again and solemnly offered his hand to each of the travellers in turn.
I stay with Russians them call Unookuk 'Kurilla. Dall call Unookuk 'Kurilla." "Dall Dall," said the Colonel to the Boy; "was that the name of the explorer fella " Fortunately the Boy was saved from need to answer. "First white man go down Yukon to the sea," said Kurilla with pride. "Me Dall's guide." "Oh, wrote a book, didn't he? Name's familiar somehow," said the Colonel. Kurilla bore him out.
Kurilla gravely verified these facts. "And me, Dall's chief guide. Me with Dall when he make portage from Unalaklik to Kaltag. He see the Yukon first time. He run down to be first on the ice. Dall and the coast natives stare, like so" Kurilla made a wild-eyed, ludicrous face "and they say: 'It is not a river it is another sea!" "No wonder.
The Boy, quite conscious of some subtle change in the hitherto immobile face of the Indian, laid the token in his hand. Standing there in the centre of the semicircle between the assembly and the dog, Kurilla turned the Great Katharine's medal over, examining it closely, every eye in the room upon him. When he lifted his head there was a rustle of expectation and a craning forward.
Then, seeing no electric recognition of the name, he added: "You savvy Kurilla!" The Colonel with much regret admitted that he did not. "But I am Dall's guide Kurilla." "Oh, Dall's guide, are you," said the Boy, without a glimmer of who Dall was, or for what, or to what, he was "guided." "Well, Kurilla, we're pleased and proud to meet you," adding with some presence of mind, "And how's Dall?"
I hear it's ten miles wide up by the flats, and even a little below where we wintered, at Ikogimeut, it's four miles across from bank to bank." Kurilla looked at the Colonel with dignified reproach. Why did he go on lying about his journey like that to an expert? "Even at Holy Cross " the Boy began, but Kurilla struck in: "When you there?" "Oh, about three weeks ago."
"It was good you get to Holy Cross before the big storm," he said, with a faint smile of tolerance for the white man's tall story. But Peetka laughed aloud. "What good English you speak!" said the Boy, determined to make friends with the most intelligent-appearing native he had seen. "Me; I am Kurilla!" said Unookuk, with a quiet magnificence.
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