Sunrise Service

The Heart of the Sourdough

There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon,

There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,

And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.

 

 There where the livid tundras keep their tryst with the tranquil snows;

There where the silences are spawned, and the light of hell-fire flows

 Into the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.

There where the rapids churn and roar, and the ice-floes bellowing run;

 

  Where the tortured, twisted rivers of blood rush to the setting sun –

I’ve packed my kit and I’m going, boys, ere another day is done.

I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings;

It’s the olden lure, it’s the golden lure, it’s the lure of the timeless things,

And to-night, oh, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings!

 

I’m sick to death of your well-groomed gods, your make-believe and your show;

I long for a whiff of bacon and beans, a snug shake-down in the snow,

A trail to break, and a life at stake, and another bout with the foe.

With the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life, the Wild that would crush and rend,

I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend;

Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out – yet the Wild must win in the end.

 

  I have flouted the Wild. I have followed its lure, fearless, familiar, alone;

By all that the battle means and makes I claim that land for my own;

Yet the Wild must win, and a day will come when I shall be overthrown.

 

  Then when as wolf-dogs fight we’ve fought, the lean wolf-land and I;

Fought and bled till the snows are red under the reeling sky;

 

Even as lean wolf-dog goes down will I go down and die.

 

 

 

The Poem: The Heart of the Sourdough

by Robert Service

Photographs by Kuskulana Steve, January 19, 2008

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