JULY 13,---After two pages last night, I heard voices, and jumped up with
Jack. Miller and the Professor were landing from the boat. It was bright
eleven o'clock. "The ----- of a time to be traveling," growled King. They
had climbed Yenlo the day before, eating gophers--picket-pins, King calls
them--while the 'skeets ate them....*
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Funny thing......

I've been tying a fly called the picket-pin for nearly 20 years
now.......ever since being introduced to it by the malignant dwarf (I
believe one is illustrated on one of Stan's fly swap pages). Every once in
a while it would occur to me to wonder (however casually) how it came by its
name. I still don't know the answer to that question, but what a lovely bit
of serendipity to encounter it here in an entirely different context!

Um......while we're here.....

JULY 7,---Anywhere
And still no Skwentna ford. Of course, now we're wishing we'd gone down
the Talushalitna, which still eludes us.
The rain stopped at dawn, and we made good time till we hit a swag where
Fred said Brooks got lost last year. Sure, it's the best
lose-yourself-country ever: flat in the large, with tag-ends of benches and
ridges, all hurled together at right angles; one-pond swamps, timber,
cup-like meadows with grass to your shoulder. At three o'clock, after
eating beans poured from the botany tin out of my old bandana, we reached a
longish lake with a gravelly bottom. "Yes, sir, and there's Brook's next
camp," pointed King across a slew. Confound such a memory!
So here by the lake, Fred has a big, yellow cow-lily stuck in his hair.
Simon is mending his overalls with what Jack calls a base-ball stitch.
Jack, in the red diary I gave him, is writing nasty things about all of us,
I'm sure. And NO mosquitoes!--though it's their field-hour, for rain
threatens. Who'll ever write the Alaskan mosquitoad? Why, for instance,
are the small, yellow ones commoner than the big black sons-o'-guns in these
parts? When it blows hard, do they sink into the grass and sneak along
after you, so the same ones attack when the gust's over, or does a new troop
come out? Does the same thirsty cloud follow you for miles, or do the
gratified gluttons drop back, kindly giving 'way to new empty-bellies?
Where are they now? There's good fodder for scientific research, to benefit
Alaskan mankind. And here's mo I saw two little yellow frogs in a swamp
to-day, but held my tongue so Simon wouldn't harpoon them.
A pair of sneakers up here lasts just two days. I sleep in my Scotch
homespuns, and have just learned to keep my pipe and tobacco in their
pockets daytimes, not to have to dry the plug each night by the fire in the
large dough spoon. My overalls are worn through at the knees from puttering
over cook-fires, and all my fingers are a quarter inch too thick and
cracking at the joints....**

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Damn! THAT is good stuff!

Wolfgang
*From "The Shameless Diary of an Explorer: A Story of Failure on Mount
McKinley", by Robert Dunn, Chapter VII, "'Last Straws", originally published
in 1907.
**ditto, ibid, etc., Chapter VI, "The Vanishing Ford".

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