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"The foxes and the seals care not for it. Go to school with me, Tanana, to-morrow. The teacher wants you." Tanana did not answer. He drew a bottle from out of his skin suit and drank. Anvik looked at his mother. The odor of the liquor spread through the small round house.
The total length of the body is two inches and a quarter; when the wings are closed the insect has an inflated vesicular or bladder-like shape, owing to the great convexity of the thin but firm parchmenty wing-cases, and the colour is wholly pale-green. The instrument by which the Tanana produces its music is curiously contrived out of the ordinary nervures of the wing-cases.
The McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is black as ink with it, and its presence can be detected in the Tanana River itself as far as its junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble in water, and where melting snow drips over it on the glacier walls below were great splotches, for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had been upset.
We had hoped to see the junction of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, one hundred and fifty miles away to the northwest, as we had often and often seen the summit of Denali from that point in the winter, but the haze that almost always qualifies a fine summer day inhibited that stretch of vision.
Much has been written, and cleverly written, about the Alaskan Indian that is preposterously untrue. Arthur, my half-breed boy, had recently been reading a story by Jack London, dealing with the Indians in the vicinity of Tanana, where he was bred and born, and his indignation at the representation of his people in this story was amusing.
So down these rivers we drifted, sometimes in sunshine, sometimes in rain, until early in the morning of the 20th June, we reached Tanana, and our journey was concluded three months and four days after it was begun.
I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid village trader, from most of the whites they would be thrown with, keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the "unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and honour, of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger than mere words of the love of God, which they had learned of her whom they all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and better things in his heart.
There are five such schools on the Yukon between Eagle and Tanana, including these two points, amongst Indians all of whom belong to the Episcopal Church, and five more between Tanana and Anvik, amongst natives divided in allegiance between the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic Churches.
The next night we reached the Coschaket, which, following the Indian rule, means "mouth of the Cosna," and found that our guide, Minchúmina John, had already relayed a load of grub that Walter had previously brought here from Tanana, one day's march upon our journey.
Anvik had not noticed the odor when he came in, being then too excited over his prize to have room in his head for any other idea. But now he felt a great sadness of soul. Tanana and their father were both beginning to learn to drink. The sailors who came to the shore had liquor with them sometimes, and traded it to the natives.
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