Journal of a Cowboy
Jacques tells Jean-Luc the poem of the Cremation of Sam McGee, part one
“Ineed to ask you a question,” Jean-Luc told Jacques while he was drinking a cup of coffee. “I’ve always wondered if you might have wanted to be anything greater than a cowboy?”
“I’ve never, ever considered the possibility that there was anything greater than being a cowboy,” Jacques replied with a great big smile. He took another hot sip from his cup and then he paused. “But now that you’ve posed the question, I always thought about the idea that one day I might like to go to the Yukon and moil for gold.”
“Where did you learn the word ‘moil,’ my friend?” JeanLuc teased him.
“Between 1886 and 1899, when the gold rush was at its zenith,” Jacques told him, “there was a young man named Robert W. Service who lived in England and in Scotland. In 1907, he wrote a very funny poem about a gold miner named Sa, McGee, who was always cold. The first time that I read that satiric poem, it had become part of Canadian Literature, when I learned the word ‘moil.’ I even memorized the poem, and I would repeat it to myself when I would go to bed at night. Would you like to hear it?” he asked him.
Propping himself up on his pillow and pulling his blankets over his ankles, he cleared his throat, and he began his long narrative:
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee. Now Sam
McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows.
“He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell; Though he’d often say in his homely way that ‘he’d sooner live in hell.’ On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! Through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see; it wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
“And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow, and the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe, he turned to me, and ‘Cap,’ says he, ‘I’ll cash in this trip, I guess; and if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.’ Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan: ‘It’s the cursed cold, and it’s got right hold ’til I’m chilled clean through to the bone. Yet ’tain’t being dead — it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains; so I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.’ A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail; and we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale. He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee; and before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee. There wasn’t a breathe in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven, with a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given; it was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: ‘You may tax your brawn and brains, but you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.’
“Hold on there for just a minute, my friend,” Jean-Luc interrupted him. “Since young Sam McGee had been born in the deep part of the Southern States, when he went off to pursue his dreams of gold in the Yukon, he hadn’t realized that he was going to settle in a corner close to the North Pole where perhaps he would be in danger of freezing to death?
“And when he felt that the weather was growing cold, he extracted a promise from his friend that whenever the time came, he should cremate his remains and when his friend looked at him. He saw nothing more than a frozen skeleton grinning at him, and so he decided what to do with the cadaver of the dead man who was looking at him. Am I right in what I am saying?”
Jacques paused to contemplate Jean-Luc’s interrogation of the wild tale as they both sipped their coffee thoughtfully.