James Baquet “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.” So begins “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” written in 1907 by Canadian poet Robert W. Service. Although he wrote voluminously, this and similarly-titled “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” are his only two works familiar to readers today. The poem tells a tall tale about life on the Yukon gold fields, when some 100,000 men in the “Klondike Gold Rush” descended on northwestern Canada where it meets what is now the American state of Alaska. This is also the setting of Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” about the domestic dog Buck who joined a pack of wolves. Cap, the poem’s narrator, tells of his companion Sam McGee, from the warm southern state of Tennessee. Sam says that since leaving home, he has never once been warm, instead suffering from the icy-cold weather of the far north. It seems he was bewitched by the promise of striking it rich in the gold fields. But on one Christmas Day, as Cap and Sam were traveling by dog-sled, Sam confided that he believed he would die soon, and extracted from Cap a promise that he would cremate Sam’s body rather than bury him in the cold ground. Well, Sam did die. But they were miles from anywhere, and the middle section of the poem tells of Cap’s macabre struggle to transport Sam’s corpse across the snow until, at last, he spots a derelict ship, the “Alice May,” that had been stuck in the ice on the shores of Lake Lebarge sometime before. Cap enters the boat and starts up the boiler furnace. When the fire is roaring, he places Sam in it to burn, while he takes a walk away from the “greasy smoke.” He returns to the place to “take a peep inside” to see how it’s going. And when he opens the boiler door, there is Sam, warming himself at the fire, and asking Cap to “close that door ... you’ll let in the cold ...” Sam ends by saying, “Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.” Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. a dead body 2. a device to drive the engine on a steam ship 3. drew out, obtained 4. edge, shore 5. a quick look 6. strange, odd 7. work hard 8. the burning of a dead body 9. in poor condition, neglected 10. creepy, horrifying | 