Samuel's Quest

Published: South Dakota Review; Vol. 44, No. 2; Spring 2006

copyright©Jerry D. McDonnell, 2005

                                                                   by

                     Jerry D. McDonnell

             The arctic wind out of the north slammed into the wood shack causing the tin cups on the counter to play a tinkling tune, which Samuel immediately whistled along with while he continued clipping his coupons. A whiff of wind found its way through a minute crack in the shack wall and a clipped coupon offering 50 cents off a can of Alpo dog food inched across the table . . . determined . . . like a calculated chess move.

Samuel’s round face grinned at the coupon as he watched it flutter onto the in-progress chess game on the table waiting patiently for Michael to return and make his next move. Samuel, as in all things, was thinking check. Samuel’s whistling and the whiff of wind began to play a duet that tickled Samuel so much that he started laughing. He laughed so loud that his lead dog tethered outside Samuel’s shack began howling along, which made Samuel laugh all the more until he slid off his chair and ended up on the floor on his back, his large belly undulating in waves like a rolling sea. And of course when one dog howls all the others gregariously join in until the entire kennel orchestrates a gusto of sound, which of course wakes the neighboring kennel and so on, which places the entire village at 3 o’clock in the morning on red alert. It could be a bear . . . or it could be . . .

Damit Samuel is the usual retort from his closest neighbor and friend, Michael, who would usually have come running, ears ablaze with indignation, and obscenities issuing from his large lungs. But this night, or morning, as the first light of day slightly before 4 A.M. was just coming over the mountain in Alaska north of 58 degrees latitude, Michael was reluctantly motivated to roll out of the sack and leave behind his woman, not to mention that his head was presently too large to carry due to a shipment of liquid spirits that came up river last night and had miraculously found its way into Michael’s hand. He had to drink it. It would have been a sin not to drink it. But Michael did grudgingly respond. He pulled on his trousers and limped, one eye open, a shoe not yet tied, a sleeve not yet filled, hair on a rampage, and entered Samuel’s shack. Damit Samuel John he said in a voice so soft that even a nervous ptarmigan would not have flinched a feather.

The sight of Michael in his disheveled state only increased the laughter of Samuel. He quit laughing when the wind from the open door stirred the coupons into the air like confetti thrown from a skyscraper. It was Michael’s turn to laugh watching Samuel grasping in the air trying to catch the acrobatic coupons swirling like snowflakes ignoring gravity. Michael shut the door, sat on the other chair at the table and studied the chessboard, waiting for Samuel and the coupons to land. The wind now shut outside, the paper chase came to an end resulting in a floor littered with the bargains of America. Michael moved his knight, held his fingers on it for a moment, took them off, rested his chin in his hand and continued to study the chess game.

“Help me pick them up,” Samuel said from his knees on the bare wood floor. 

“Why does someone keep us awake all night?” Michael asked rhetorically. Samuel walked on his knees to the table and reconnoitered the chessboard from a nose level perspective like a fox sneaking through tall grass.  

“I’m doing this for everyone. The whole village. Not just for me.”

“This coupon thing is . . . is . . . rather silly.”

“Just think of all the money someone will save,” Samuel said looking at a coupon offering $1.00 off a bag of potato chips. “Think of these coupons as small dividend checks from the state. In fact, think of how much further someone’s money from a dividend check will go with these coupons.”

“Temptations Hairball Control, 50 cents off?” Michael read, picking up a few coupons. “$3.00 off frost tip for hair. What the hell is that? Who is going to use this stuff? Hairballs? Who has a cat?”

“Audrey has a cat. A white cat.”

“Not anymore. Henry shot it and Anieca made a hat out of it. It’s a good looking hat. . . but not as warm as a beaver hat.”

“Someone will see. These coupons will come in handy.  And I’m getting a telephone.”

“It is Eskimo silly. One would think a person was a drinking man the way someone comes up with these weird ideas. Someone needs to go fishing or hunting for muskrat or duck. The salmon will be coming into the river soon, and they don’t take coupons,” Michael said, moving his king out of check.

“Someone will see,” Samuel laughed. “Eskimo economics will pay off. That is the way it is done in the towns. These coupons come in the Anchorage Daily News every Sunday. Everyone uses these coupons. It is a way of life we must learn these days.”

“Someone will stick with his net and gun. Coupons aren’t food. And besides neither one of us has ever been to Anchorage.”

Samuel moved his rook and said, “Check and mate.”

Samuel’s telephone became his joy. He had never had a telephone before. The man who installed it warned him that long distance calls could cost him much money. Samuel could take advice. He avoided long distance calls. After a couple of weeks, the school principal, Steve Long, who would be leaving for the summer soon, stopped answering the phone because Samuel, acting like a teenager, was calling him four or five times an hour. In desperation, Mr. Long offered Samuel a temporary job just to get him away from the telephone. The rest of the village was also very glad not to have to answer calls from Samuel so often. Everyone prayed that the salmon would start running before Mr. Long left the village for the summer so that Samuel would have to go fishing and not have a telephone at hand. The week before Mr. Long flew out of the village found Samuel left alone with a paint brush in his hand and with instructions to complete painting one of the school’s outbuildings, inside and out. After that job his temporary employment with the school district would be over.

Inside the building it was hot. Samuel found a pile of magazines in a corner of the room and began leafing through them. Samuel was a very good reader: the top of his graduating high school class six years ago. He loved reading about money and economics, a subject of mystery to him. An article concerning money opened before him on page twenty-two of the magazine in hand. Credit cards were discussed. A true mystery. Samuel read the article twice and decided he should try one of these credit cards. Dropping the paintbrush, Samuel immediately went home and splurged a long distance telephone call and after much button pushing connected with a human. Yes I can initially take your information on the phone, a pleasant voice said. After Samuel’s full name came the hard part.

“And what is your street address?” she asked.

“We don’t have streets.”

“We have to have a street address, your physical location in the city.”

“We don’t have a city. We are a village.”

“The name of your village then, but I still need a physical address.”

“Igusik is the village. My house is a short walk from Michael’s house on the west side of the village. A couple of hundred yards from the river. We live on the Igusik River.”

“I’m sorry we must have a street address. We cannot set up an account without a street address. What is your mailing address?”

“Yes. P.O. Box 239, Igusik, Alaska 99945. And I have a telephone.”

“Yes give me that, please and I will send you an application.”

And thus Samuel was educated in the world of credit. His first request was respectfully denied. No physical address. No permanent, gainful income since the painting of the outbuilding when finished would also terminate his employment. No credit references. No work history. Samuel was deflated. His attempt to enter the world of economics had been sunk before the craft was launched.

Not one to be discouraged long, Samuel went to the house of his favorite schoolteacher. Teach me about streets and numbers, Samuel said. Robert, the teacher, was at first reluctant: Why? Robert asked. Robert knew Samuel well. He had been one of Robert’s best students, but he also knew Samuel’s quests for knowledge often initiated projects that shaped spontaneous consequences. Like the time Samuel started a lottery after reading about it in a magazine. Samuel had collected money from almost everyone in the village. Unfortunately the prize money Samuel offered far exceeded the revenue he took in. Samuel’s plan to sell more tickets in other villages was thwarted by a lack of communication and transportation. Connecting twelve villages, distant from each other from 100 to 200 miles (the furthest from Igusik being 225 miles) proved too expensive by small aircraft and his father refused to let him take the snow machine to put his venture to work. Samuel was only 12 at the time; his father would not let him take the dog team either. And then there was the time Samuel read about network marketing, or pyramid schemes as most people know of them. Between Robert and Samuel’s father they managed to return all the money to the people of the village after Samuel’s entrepreneurial ventures. Samuel’s father died the next year; his mother had died at birth. Samuel became independent early, even with his aunt’s raising him.

To save money, Samuel applied to other credit card agencies by mail. His fourth attempt was successful. He now had a street address. It was simple. Learning from the Dillingham street map in the telephone book what street and house numbers were, he made a map of the village, drew some lines between the houses, named the lines, and assigned a number to each house. Robert thought it was great idea since everyone ran into the same problem when ordering things in the mail. The shippers were most demanding about addresses (most people just invented them on the spot, depending upon their mood). UPS had no idea that a place without streets or house numbers could exist or that there were no roads to get there. They did not understand the bush of Alaska. The U.S. Post Office was much more knowledgeable and efficient and less expensive, which gave Samuel another idea once . . . but he put it on hold. One could only have so many projects.

But now Samuel had his first credit card. To try it out he made a phone call to Anchorage and ordered a new pair of canvas shoes, black, size 11 wide, on sale for $39.95 plus shipping. They were on his feet five days later. Samuel now thought he could walk anywhere in the world with this credit card. The information on the credit card application may be a bit fictional, but the store selling the shoes didn’t ask for any of that information. They didn’t know that Samuel was not employed full time by the school district as a maintenance man making $65,000 a year, which was an excellent salary in 1955, or that he had not been in that profession for three years or that he did not have a 2 year college degree or that he did not have bank accounts—checking and savings—with substantial funds or that he did not have other assets totaling close to $100,000.  Samuel was now a graduate of credit card application procedures. He even thought about giving classes on the subject. And with that knowledge and his now established credit he methodically, over time, obtained more credit cards. To purchase a small token of legitimacy, he had to open a checking and savings account in the Dillingham bank.

Samuel was not a fool. He continued his subsistence life-style, dried and smoked his seasonal salmon, caught and cured caribou and moose and seals, collected berries and used the credit cards frugally for a year, making small purchases, many with mail order coupons, and paying his credit card debt promptly at the end of each month from his checking account. He obtained cash from selling furs from his winter trapline, working as a hand on fishing boats in the short summer season and of course his Permanent Fund Dividend check from the State of Alaska, much of which he saved. At the end of the second year his credit was now established and two of the credit card companies raised his limit. This raise was a revelation to Samuel, which required more reading into the subject of credit. He took an air-taxi into Dillingham and went to the library. He found there are limits and there are limits. Some are gold. Some are platinum. Some are . . . credit mining became a new interest of Samuel.

As the seasons went by, Michael and people in the village noticed a change in Samuel. It had been over two years since he had come up with a money scheme. The people were starting to worry. Smiling, laughing Samuel was becoming serious. The town of Dillingham, only 25 miles away by air-taxi where the jets from Anchorage landed, was a place Samuel had only visited occasionally. He, more than most of the villagers, had apparently been reluctant to go there. The people of the village remembered that even when Samuel was selling the lottery tickets or the pyramid scheme he had avoided the larger population of Dillingham. This was a place with two grocery stores, a fish cannery, two restaurants, several shops and the jet airport linking it to Anchorage; it was a town, not a village. The only thing one could buy in Igusik was gas, spark plugs, soda pop, candy, a few groceries, but nothing fresh like milk, bread or lettuce. If it was not in a can or could not sit on a shelf for many years, it was not available in the village.  But now, Samuel was taking trips to Dillingham almost every month and they knew he had never touched liquor or beer or drugs. In the summer he flew to Dillingham on the short flights of 25 miles one way and in the winter he took his dogs and sled into the town. He brought back books. It became common knowledge that Samuel was spending his time in the library, which was not too alarming since his reputation as a reader was well known. But Michael was worried. On their hunting and fishing trips, Samuel didn’t talk about money anymore, but would stare off over the tundra as if he was seeing something no one else could see. When he did talk, he asked questions.

“Has someone ever thought how big a castle is?”

 “What is a castle?” Michael said, “Help me skin this caribou.”

Or conversations he forced on Steve Long, the principal, or Robert the teacher. “Is there really a canal that runs through a desert? What is a desert like? Is it like tundra? Are there really places where he snow melts completely in the summer?”

“ I just wish you would finish painting the building I paid you to paint three years ago,” Mr. Long said shaking his head.

“Where are the street maps you were going to make and have printed to give to everyone in the village?”  Robert asked.

“Have you ever seen a flower garden? What does a lawn feel like?” Samuel said as he walked to the river and sat looking at the water go out with the tide thinking that downstream an hour or so their small river flowed into the Bering Sea and maybe some of this water at his feet had lapped the shores of another continent. He sat there until sundown. Sundown in July was followed in only a few short hours with sunrise.

Mr. Long and Robert finally finished painting the outbuilding. Robert got the map from Samuel, made copies in the school and gave them to the kids to take to every house in the village. Robert graciously titled the directory Samuel’s Street Addresses.

Samuel quietly left the village in the fall. He turned his sled dogs over to Michael, gave him money and feed and said to take good care of them, don’t run them too hard, feed them well and love them and don’t tell anyone I’ve left until next week . . . or at least for three days. “Someone will miss the chess games and the camps,” Samuel said shaking Michael’s hand before handing his small duffle bag containing all his belongings to the pilot of the Cessna.

“Someone will not miss the chess. Someone never wins.” Michael said looking out over the tundra.

      Credit limits on three cards had gone up to $50,000 each. Samuel felt he had become money mature. He could have bought his own drift net and herring boat with these credit cards but the interest would have been appalling. Once, years before the credit cards, he had talked to the bank about a loan but they had laughed at him. Samuel didn’t like being laughed at by gusiks; their laugh was mean. When Michael was drunk and laughing at Samuel it was okay, but that was a friend and Samuel could laugh along. Samuel liked to laugh. He wanted to keep his laughter with him.

      Looking out of the side window of the Cessna 210, Samuel took a picture of the tundra with his new camera, the muddy Igusik River meandering through the hummocks of green, the small muskegs spattered between the feeder streams like drops of blue-green paint dripped from a brush. On the mountains to the west, patches of snow hung onto the peaks like winter napping. Halfway to Dillingham the pilot banked the small aircraft over the river. Below, in the brown, tide-influenced river, white backs of beluga whales rolled upstream emerging like marshmallows floating to the surface and then sinking again. Directly ahead lie the Bering Sea covering the land from North America to the next continent. Inland, a brown bear was walking slowly across the tundra, head up, placing each step like he could walk to eternity. Samuel saluted the bear and looked at the western horizon of the great sea. Over there was Russia, Japan and beyond all of Asia and then Europe. Samuel placed his hand over his five credit cards secured in his pocket.

     If it hadn’t been for a man sitting next to him on the jet to Anchorage that he knew from another village, Samuel may have never survived his first day in Anchorage. The man showed him how to get to and from the airport—how to ride a bus and a taxi cab, shared a hotel room with him, took Samuel shopping for clothes and a suitcase and took him to dinner. The fourteen story, solid-glass office buildings with the reflecting abstract images captivated him. He stood for at least ten minutes looking straight up at these buildings. Buildings that tall he had only seen in pictures. And Samuel saw his first movie, after which he was pixilated for almost an hour trying to understand why those people were so angry at each other over a made up problem. And such a big screen! But the most frightening part of the city was the traffic and the people. Dillingham had cars and trucks and a few people in the village had trucks or vans, but so many cars and trucks! So many people in cars and trucks! So many people in a hurry! However, Samuel had done his research. He was somewhat prepared for this, although it was still frightening. From his studies, he knew he was traveling into a world that in places would be overburdened with people; he had studied how to make airline reservations; he had studied how to get the best fares. He had booked his flight to London, England several weeks ago. It was the end of the tourist season and he had obtained cut-rate prices.

      He was speechless on the flight to England. The seat was too small for his large body and he had never sat that long in one place in his life. Fortunately his short legs fit better in the seat than his rear end. Having not slept since he left Anchorage, he was too shocked to know he was exhausted when they landed at Heathrow in London.

      “Mr. John, you will be in room 233,” the London desk clerk said. “Your reservation is for two nights, is that correct?” Samuel smiled at the man’s British dialect. Since the flight, he was getting used to it and liked to hear it.

      “Please call me Samuel, yes.”  He was afraid to say too much. He had begun to notice his village English dialect was geographically unique.

      “Is there anything else you need?”  Samuel shook his head. “I see you are from San Francisco. A lovely city. I went on holiday there once.”  Samuel smiled and picked up his key. He was a bit taken back when a man took his bag just as he was reaching for it, but then he remembered seeing a scene like this in the movie he saw in Anchorage. The man was going to carry his bag up to his room. This wasn’t like the Anchorage hotel in which he and his friend had stayed. This hotel had a large lobby with comfortable chairs, high ceilings, small tables with lamps on them, potted plants, and a dining room off to the side. Samuel also noticed the men were wearing coats and ties, and the women worn nice dresses. Samuel had on his new clothes, but he could see that his warm-up jacket, khaki pants, plaid sport shirt, baseball cap and tennis shoes that his village friend had recommended were not like anything anyone else was wearing. Anchorage and London were definitely different. “Where can someone buy clothes?” he asked the desk clerk. Samuel had a new suit fitted in the hotel clothing store. It would be delivered to his room.

      Samuel lay on the bed to test it and immediately fell asleep. Hours later, he awoke and sat in a chair looking out the window from his 10-story room. On the street below different looking cars and double-decker buses paraded consistently. He watched the traffic and the people walking until dark when the street lit up like the stars from above. Looking up into the night sky, he wondered where all the stars had gone; what had the English done with the stars in the sky? He began wondering if he was doing the right thing and began to be homesick. He could be upriver with Michael tonight, camping, waiting for signs of the first caribou, or trying to snare a moose. He could be seeing the sky filled with stars, not lights on crowded streets, feel a breeze on the back of his neck, hear the wind rustle the brush, smell the wet of the tundra, the aroma of the plants and perhaps watch an owl hunting.

Samuel took a walk that evening dressed in his new coat and tie. The tie was knotted oddly. It was one of the things the couple seated next to him at a small restaurant noticed as Samuel sat down. The tie and Samuel’s facial features peaked the man’s curiosity.

     “Forgive me sir, do you speak English?” Samuel nodded yes. “Are you from Russia?” Samuel was shocked and did not know what to say. “I apologize for being so forward, but my curiosity  . . . let me be straight, sir. My name is Oliver Norton. I’m an anthropologist. This is my wife Sara. We have just returned from Eastern Russia and met with a group of Siberian Yup’iks . . . your resemblance to the people we met is uncanny. Are you Yup’ik?” Samuel nodded yes. “From Russia?” 

      “No, I’m from San . . . No.  Where are the stars?”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “Where are the stars? In the sky.” Samuel said pointing out the window. The man looked perplexed. “I don’t understand where the stars have gone. I can barely see any stars in the sky.”

The man smiled. “You are from Alaska. Near the Bering Sea. Somewhere between Bethel and Dillingham. Am I correct?”  Samuel, taken back, got up to leave.

      “Please don’t leave. I have studied dialects of the Yup’ik people. I have been to Western Alaska. The stars are in the sky. One merely cannot see them due to the reflection of light from the city. London’s population tallies over seven and one-half million people. How many people reside in the town from which you come?”

     “Someone . . . I lives in a village, no town. Maybe less than 250 in winter. In the summer we go down river to fish camp.”

     “Are you here to visit?”

     “Yes to visit.”

     “Friends or Holiday.”

     “Yes, holiday.”

     “Splendid. Please allow me to show you around while you are here. How long will you stay in London?”

     “Only one more night.”

     “So soon? Nevertheless tomorrow you will be my guest. We shall see a few sights. You are sure you can not stay longer?”

     “No I must keep moving.”

     “Moving? You are on a schedule?”

     “Yes, a schedule,” Samuel lied.

   
      The next day Samuel was initiated into the world of seeing sights and learned much about customs. The neatness of the domestic gardens and city parks impressed him the most. Mr. and Mrs. Norton were touched when Samuel took the opportunity to actually lie on a manicured green lawn. Mr. Norton taught him how to put a proper knot in a tie. Samuel also learned he was staying in a very expensive hotel. A fact which impressed Mr. Norton and his wife but shocked Samuel when he learned just how expensive. He would have to be more careful, but the purpose of Samuel’s quest was exploration. He planned on mining as many treasures as he could against the clock of economics. A five-star hotel was checked off the list.

      Two days later found Samuel in Ireland at a modest Inn. The following weeks took him around the island visiting early castle strongholds, formal 17th century gardens, landscape parks of the 18th century, rustic wilderness gardens, 20th century cottage gardens, and botanic gardens. He especially liked the castles on the West Coast of Ireland as the country was much less populated. Kylemore Abbey, now the home of the Benedictine Nuns, built originally as a Castle in 1868, impressed him with its seashore location. He imaged the same water lapping these shores as connected to the river flowing yards from his shack. The castles and gardens of Ireland tallied another item on his list.

But he had to keep moving. He never stayed at any one location more than two nights, often only one. His calculated use of the credit cards required a log to be kept. He rotated the cards frequently, kept a tally of cost and specific use of each card and used cash judiciously that he had saved over the years. A one-month tour of Europe terminated with a flight to the Suez Canal. He tried to lie in the sand, but immediately experienced heat not made by fire. He stayed one night and left. Throughout Asia he used trains and buses and even camels. The first part of February, six months into the journey, before the rainy season started, he took a giant leap by air to Belize and went bone fishing and against his structured plan he stayed four days. He would have liked to stay longer but . . .

      “Mr. John this card seems not to be going through.”

      “Ah, yes, I’ve cancelled that one. I forgot. Please use this one.”

      “Very good. Will you be staying longer?”

      “I would like to but a business emergency has come up. Is there a seat on the next flight out?” Samuel’s village dialect had diminished significantly and he was learning a few languages.

      “One to Belize City in three hours, but the Cancun flight left an hour ago.”

      “Belize it is. I can connect from there. Can you book me?”

      And the first credit card was lost in action. Using cash in South America allowed him to stay in remote, very inexpensive locations for several weeks, and then he decided to return to Europe and tour the Scandinavian Countries in the spring. Norway was beautiful, but expensive and he soon found himself in Northern Finland. Prices were more reasonable but the country and the people reminded him of home and for the second time in a year he felt homesick. It was late May; summer was approaching; breakup was starting in Finland and the salmon would soon be running. Michael would be preparing the skiff and mending nets and lines. And who would look after him if he got more booze? But he had one credit card he had not used yet, and the others were maybe still good . . . for a while. He had to keep moving. On a lark, he went south to Romania. From Romania he found connections that took him north again to Moscow to the railway which stretched across the continent to the far eastern shore of Russia. Days later, he found himself looking across the Bering Sea toward Alaska in the invisible distance. The people he was standing with spoke Yup’ik in a dialect he could mostly follow. He stayed for over a month, telling stories of his journey around the fires at night. They asked of his father and mother and the history of his family. They discovered connections through their histories. They told him stories and myths of the world they owned. They sang songs and used drums. They danced. Samuel’s great, great grandfather on his mother’s side was born in this place. He found he was talking to his cousins, his family. Some were still partially dressed in tanned skins. Some wore baseball caps and coarse shirts and cheap shoes. Samuel’s tie and coat were in his suitcase; he had on Levis he had bought in Anchorage almost a year ago and a wool shirt he had bought in Europe. They served muktuk and dried salmon dipped in seal oil and fried caribou and he thought of Michael and the village. No alcohol was present. They shared the food they had with Samuel, some of which Samuel had helped them gather. They had a few rifles, but Samuel was allowed to kill his first caribou with a spear and he showed them how to set a snare in a different way. Samuel went seal and walrus hunting with them on the Bering Sea in their 20-foot open skin boat they called an angyeg.

       The day he left an elder grandmother gave Samuel a small, scimitar-shaped dull knife. “This is a storyknife. It was carved by my son for his daughter, but the daughter is dead now. A storyknife is usually used only by women, but times are changing; I know you have something to do,” she said looking directly into his eyes. He looked down in respect. “With this knife you can trace stories in the sand or the mud bank. Tell only the stories about good behavior, how we depend upon each other, and how someone must be responsible for someone’s deeds. You can also tell history, but make believe scary stories about monsters are not to be told. Be a good teacher,” and she quickly shuffled away.

       “When someone goes home Samuel, will they tell of us?”

      “Someone doesn’t know when a person’s going home,” Samuel said, stirring the coals of an evening fire in the woods just off the beach and tracing a symbol in the sand with his storyknife.

      “Why would someone not go home?”

      “Home is a long journey for some people.”

      “Ah . . . have some more fish. It is good.”  Samuel sat on the beach that night looking across the Bering Strait and felt the wind from the east blowing in his face. When he left he gave them most of his clothes and several hundred dollars. His round trip train ticket took him back across the whole of Asia, west to Europe.Greece, Italy, Spain: the Mediterranean held him hostage. He couldn’t move. Like his ancestors he had traveled and now needed to stop. In coastal village after village, he would sit on the beach in the evenings in good weather or in an Inn and tell stories of his home using the storyknife or demonstrating its use if inside. People gathered and listened. He told old legends of his people, tales of hunting and trapping, of running dogs and sleds and many myths, of people being rewarded and consumed by the land and by new ways. The audiences laughed and cried with him as he described his journeys around the planet. He had learned of the battles of Europe and Asia and told of the wars of Eskimos and Indians. The castles defeating centuries, the mud huts leaking in the summer, the histories of people, his shack, the skin clothes and songs of Siberian Yupiks, all became intertwined into stories he related . . . and created to fit the times, but he did not tell scary monster stories. He sang songs and made a drum. He told the stories of the human race and their gifts and rewards to and from the land, the triumphs of great men, the defeats of others. He told of his journey over the Khyber Pass and eventually into Jammu and Kashmir where his life was threatened by possible bandits, of the art works destroyed in Afghanistan and the preservation of structures in Europe. His stories grew, as did his reputation. Hotels and Inns hired him and more people came to listen. By the end of the following year, he was well known in and around the Mediterranean Sea. He had quit using his credit cards (although he still had one that had not been used) and was living on the wages and donations of his audiences. He had become proficient in several languages. And with a Samuel smile, his belly again shaking with laughter, he waited for them to come.

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