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Updated: September 12, 2025
A great wave came in toward them, but just before it broke Skookie gave a shout and they all fell to their oars, going in just with the crest of this wave and keeping just ahead of where it broke. Thus their boat was carried high up the beach. At the right instant overboard went Skookie waist deep in the surging white water. In an instant Rob was out on the other side.
Skookie smiled and walked on a little farther and showed them several other such places a few yards apart. He held up the fingers of one hand. "Five klipsie," he said, and then swept an arm around toward the face of the mountains, remarking: "My peoples come here." "Oh," said Rob; "he means that here is where his family come to set their klipsie traps for foxes.
Get all the rope you can, too, fellows, because we may have to go down the face of the rock to get at the nests." "I have seen pictures of that," said Jesse "how the egg-gatherers go down in a rope handled by other men up above them on the rocks. Do you suppose that three of us could pull the other fellow up and down? Skookie here looks pretty strong."
They nicknamed the Aleut boy Skookie a shortening of the Chinook word skookum, which means strong, or good, or all right. Their young companion, used as he was to life in the open, solved simply and easily all their little problems of camp-keeping.
After locating a big flock of geese which were sunning themselves on the mud flats close to the grass, he led his companions far back from the water, making a wide détour. At length he began to approach the fowl from a point where they would be concealed by the heavy grass. It seemed an age to the white boys, but Skookie was in no hurry.
Before them stretched a wilderness of upstanding mountain peaks into which there wound the narrow end of a new valley, widening but slightly so far as their eyes could trace it. "Eagle Harbor that way, Skookie?" asked Rob, leaning on his rifle and looking out over the wild sea which lay before him. "I dinno," said Skookie. "How far do you think it is?" "I dinno."
Rob was wise enough to ask counsel of Skookie in this matter, when at last they could see the rim of white water breaking madly along the shingle. The young Aleut did not seem much concerned. He told them to stop rowing when they approached the first long ridge of breaking water, and with his own oars he held the boat for a minute, looking astern and waiting for the right instant.
So saying, soberly he began to sharpen his knife on a near-by stone, as he had seen Skookie do, and, taking a piece of goose breast in one hand, he partly filled his mouth and undertook to cut it off at the proper length. At once he uttered a wild cry, and dropped both knife and morsel to the ground.
A moment later the fish was back in the pool, the line back on the reel, and John, perspiring and flushed, was still master of the situation. After that matters were simpler. The fish was more tired, and its leaps into the air were shorter and more feeble. Without advice from any one, Skookie now ran out into the grass and found his long salmon gaff.
The Aleut lad was truthful, for neither he nor any of his family had ever crossed the island here, and he knew nothing of what lay ahead. Plainly uneasy now, Skookie had had enough of travel away from camp. "Maybe go back now?" he asked Rob, inquiringly. "I suppose so," replied the latter, "although I'd jolly well like to go over in here a little farther.
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