And then, and then! Unbelievably, this magnificent example of Arctic culinary pluck had to chop off his own foot to free himself from a bear trap... Then, in his struggle back to civilization, this Iron Man of the Arctic stumbled across the Lost British Expedition. Compounding their agony, the Brits had run out of tea. Touched by their uncivilized plight, this tough miracle-man struggled eighty miles through a raging blizzard to get the tea, then returned to the starving British and cooked them a walrus underground. Wrapped in puff paste!
"Hell," says Sourdough Jack modestly, "I knew they couldn't make it out there without no tea! And I only had one match to cook that walrus, too!"
I promised myself one thing for sure: I was not gonna go out on a camp job without a whole pocketful of matches!
Next morning, just like I knew what I was doing, I caught the two-engine prop job at Anchorage and flew out to Nome. The Nome Airport was twenty-five below and I was still shivering in cowboy boots and a thin jacket. carrying one small suitcase.
I met the pilot of the single-engine Cessna at the strip. He looked me over doubtfully and noted my thin boots. I think he could see right off I wasn't the sole survivor of the 1908 English Disaster.
"I'm Bubba," he told me, "Dead Stick Bubba." (I knew his name wouldn't be Theodore the Timid) "You the cook for Granite Mountain?"
Shivering badly in the wind, I managed to silence my chattering teeth long enough to admit it.
"By God, if this don't look like it's gonna be another short trip. Where's your gear?" I held up the small suitcase. He shrugged his shoulders. "I guess you know what you're doin'. Climb aboard then."
ANOTHER WHIPPED DOG!
When we got in the air, Bubba said, "They're sure gonna be glad to see you - if you know what you're doing, that is. I'm gettin' tired flying cooks out there and havin' to go pick "em up again next week. Every one of "em lookin' like a whipped dog, too."
This cheery news just about finished off whatever confidence I had left. What kind of crafty old veteran of the Frozen North were they expecting? And what did they do with impostors out there in the bush? I hoped the flight would be a long one. I'd brought along my cookbooks and wanted plenty of time to look them over.
I concentrated on a chapter called THE GREAT NOME MASSACRE OF 1804, a tragedy about a cook who made the mistake of serving baking powder biscuits to a one-legged trapper called Sourdough Jim.
I made a mental note never to bake anything with baking powder.
After an hour in the air the plane glided in low over an airstrip with one deserted wooden building. No control tower. The strip was just a cleared space in the snow. The pilot banked low over the strip so he could get a close look at the snow. I looked around and saw nothing for miles in every direction. Not a tree, just the vast expanse of the tundra surrounded by low mountains.
"We're gonna land here?" I asked. "Where's town at?"
"This is it," the pilot said. "I'm looking for holes in the runway, snow drifts or maybe a dead moose." Satisfied that a landing appeared possible without cracking up, he banked in a long circling glide and whooshed down on the strip. We taxied over to the one deserted wooden building and got out.
What a well-dressed cook should wear.
In minutes my toes were frozen, my ears were brittle appendages that threatened to drop off any minute. I was in pain. A person could die out here. Shivering in the wind, I looked enviously at what Bubba the pilot was wearing: Arctic boots made of caribou tops with waterproof rubber soles; a knee-length parka insulated with goose down; and over his head a hood lined with wolverine fur.
I asked Bubba where everybody was and where the site was and he waved vaguely in the direction of the nearest mountain.
Alone in a vast empty land!
"Well, wasn't somebody supposed to meet me here and tell me which way to walk?"
"I dunno," he said calmly and warmly as he climbed back in the cockpit.
Alarmed, I said, "You're not gonna leave me out here, are you?" I was terribly afraid that this bush pilot figured a man was on his own out here and ought to know how to take care of himself. I wondered if I could break into the building and start a fire. Would they find me in the spring?
