Roy’s Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother, who was fourteen years older than Kitty, had been working in Alaska building a railroad through the Yukon Territory when he got pleurisy and came to stay with his sister, mother, and Roy at their apartment in Chicago while he recuperated. Buck was forty years old then, a civil and mechanical engineer. He’d been in the Yukon for three months through the late fall and early winter of 1952. Roy was seven and enjoyed listening to his uncle’s stories about clearing forests and laying down tracks, hearing moose calls and wolf howls during the long frigid nights, and the occasional fights among the laborers that sometimes involved gun battles.
“Were any of the men killed?” Roy asked him.
“Only one that I know of, nephew. Almost everybody up there carries a gun or a knife.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, a .357. It’s in my duffel bag.”
“I don’t want a gun in my house,” said Rose, Roy’s grandmother.
“Don’t worry, Ma,” Buck said, “it’s locked in a case and unloaded.”
They were all in the kitchen. Roy’s mother was frying eggs and bacon on the stove for breakfast.
“Put on a shirt, son,” Rose told Buck, “it’s freezing cold in here.”
Buck was wearing only pajama bottoms and his feet were bare.
He laughed and said, “Cold? This isn’t cold. It was thirty below in the Yukon.”
Buck picked up a strip of bacon from a wrapper on the counter, held it in front of his face, and took a bite.
“Buck!” Kitty shouted. “You can’t eat raw bacon! You’ll get sick.”
“All the boys up north eat it right out of the package.”
Buck nibbled the bacon until he’d devoured the entire strip.
“Your uncle’s crazy, Roy,” said Kitty. “Don’t do what he does.”
“Did you see any wolves, Unk?”
“A few, but they mostly kept their distance from our camp. Noise from the trucks, skinners, and bulldozers frightened them away.”
“Are you going back after you feel better?”
“I don’t think so, Roy. It’s already the middle of January and the job is scheduled to wrap up in March.”
Buck was divorced; his eleven–year-old son, Kip, had been sent by his mother, Katarina, to live with her father, Doc Wurtzel, in Mexico until she was resettled. Katarina was an alcoholic, so Buck thought it was better for Kip to live for now at Doc’s hacienda in Cuernavaca.
“Are you going to live in Chicago?”
“I’m going to open an office downtown, nephew, and start my own engineering firm. I want to work for myself from now on.”
“Come on,” said Kitty, “let’s all sit down and eat. The coffee’s ready, Buck.”
“One of our sled dogs bit a thermos in half one morning and scalded himself so bad that he was blinded and had to be shot. Big husky named Bulletproof. The ground was frozen so hard he couldn’t be buried, so the Eskimo boys skinned and ate him.”
“Did you eat dog, Unk? How did it taste?”
“Buck will tell you later, Roy,” said his grandmother. “Finish your eggs.”
Years later, after his mother, grandmother, and Buck were dead, Roy found the steel-toed boots his uncle had worn when he was in the Yukon in a steamer trunk in the garage of Kitty’s house. The leather was stiff, of course, but Roy tried them on anyway. They were too small for Roy, which surprised him because he always thought of Buck as being bigger than he was. Nothing else in the trunk could Roy identify as having belonged to his uncle. The boots had probably been packed away in there since the winter of ’52.
Roy remembered his uncle telling him that one of the work crew in the Yukon, a man named Morrison, told Buck that when he was nineteen years old, laying track in Nome, he’d gotten frostbite so extreme that he’d had to have all of the toes on his left foot amputated. Morrison learned how to walk by putting most of his weight on his right foot, balancing on the toes. The bones in the small toes of that foot kept breaking, though, so when he was twenty-six, he cut them off himself with a hacksaw. He left the big toe attached. Buck asked Morrison how long ago he’d lopped off four of the toes on his right foot and Morrison said, “Must be eight since I’m thirty-four now.” He went on to tell Buck that getting rid of those toes had improved his balance. He always stuffed a heavy sock inside the front of his boots. Buck asked Morrison why he hadn’t cut off the big toe, too. “Just in case,” said Morrison. “In case of what?” asked Buck. Morrison laughed and said, “You never know when another toe could come in handy.”
