Nowadays you rarely saw these ancient Jasons on the streets of Baranof. In the long winter days, with the thermometer at twenty—forty—sixty below zero, they snugly stayed in their log cabins listening to the radio’s news and music as they serviced their guns and fishing gear in preparation for a milder day. Their energy was hoarded for the effort of keeping warm and fed. Their rifle, gleaming like platinum, was their most treasured possession. It might be the means of food for the entire winter, that moose or caribou safely frozen in the rickety lean-to off the cabin.

Occasionally, in the late spring after the ice had gone out, a few of the spryest of them actually set out for the creeks and the hills with their old simple implements of the placer miner. Some succeeded in panning a few dollars’ worth of gold in the bright-flecked pebbles. As these oldsters displayed their crumbs of treasure—their tiny poke—to their more lethargic contemporaries at the Sockeye Tobacco Store, their faces took on, for a moment, the look of vitality and purpose they had worn a half century ago.

The old sporting blood still coursed sluggishly in the veins of a select group who had known the delights of the faro or blackjack tables in the early days. You might see these gregarious septuagenarians sitting in at the game of pangini that ran continuously through the black days and black nights of the Baranof winter. Their rendezvous was the back room of the old Sockeye Tobacco Store on Bering Street. There they sat around the green-baize-covered pan table, with its semicircle at one side scooped out to accommodate the dealer, like a great bite taken from the edge of a pie. Panguingui had been brought to Baranof by Tony Ferrari back in those almost mythical days of the early rush. There were those who said that it was he who first had discovered the precious metal in the creeks. The pan room was warm, smoke-dimmed, strangely quiet except for the slip-slap of the cards and an occasional cackle of triumph from some withered winner. Their faces had the wistful innocence of those who had been defeated by life. The effect of the room, with its desiccated glittering-eyed players bent over the table in that hazy air, was that of a mellow Rembrandt.

Of the less sporting among these relics you might daily, in the winter months, see a dozen at a time sitting like wax figures in the gritty lobby of the Pole Star Hotel, the maroon rep armchairs showing the imprint of their weary heads; their work-bitten hands, strangely inert now, resting loosely on the chair arms. Only their eyes moved, lively, amused. They always could spot the visitor from Outside—those brisk close-shaven businessmen just flown in from Seattle. Smart in their checked English tweeds imported from neighboring Canada, their expensive cashmere topcoats with the sharp lapels, they had office faces, these men; the elements had left no scars on their features. To the hotel clerk they said, what do you mean no room with bath, my secretary distinctly said room with bath in my wire, well, if somebody checks out remember me, will you, I’ll be grateful, see what I mean.