Hokes Post

Your post reminds me, I once hired a grizzled old feller in the Alaskan bush named "Hokes Post"  to ferry me across the bay in his seal-skin umiak.

I had just stepped in when he handed me a rawhide-bandaged old paddle and said, "Here, you take 'Orion' and I'll take 'Explorer' and we'll chew the fat a bit while we work our way across."

He looked Inuit, but he spoke the local dialect with a bit of a drawl and a hint of Texas-like twang. Hokes really liked to talk (also unlike most of the folks around there), but when questioned about that Hoax swore he had lived in the Alaskan wild since the day he was born. Over the course of our two-hour struggle with the surface chop and shifting tidal currents, Post told me a fantastic story that his mother had told him many times about how Hokes' dad had fallen in live with her. The story was that he fell for her after she bravely rescued him out of the belly of a giant bird that had been caught in the teeth of the Great White Lake.  This mythical bird was so big that the White Lake could not digest it all at once, but would take a bite, chew on it when the nights were still long, swallow what it could, then run to the sea and back again with the summer salmon - and just as ravenous. I didn't believe him, of course, but Hokes did spin a nice yarn.

I remember that as we approached the far shore - me, totally exhausted from constant paddling, and Hokes not at all, even with the constant legend telling -  I could see two huge mastiff-like dogs watching intently but quietly from a small berm just above the graveled bank clearing that I assumed would be our eventual landing point. Hokes warned me, "Don't worry about Will and Wiley. They know better than to come down here and bother my customers...unless you got some bacon in your pack. In which case you are own your own and may God have mercy on your soul."