Narrated by Andy Andrews

A Double Feature!

By Robert W. Service

Robert W. Service was known as “The Bard of the Yukon” during the gold rush days. It was another way of saying he was like Shakespeare to the people who lived and worked in the frozen North. His first book of “story verse” was released in 1907, called Songs Of A Sourdough, and quickly sold more than three million copies! It seemed everyone loved his raw, outdoorsy stories with their perfect rhymes. We think you and your family will too!

Wisdom Harbour is making this Double Feature available two ways: a print version for you to read to your family or classroom, and an audio version, narrated by Andy Andrews. So, if you’d like to just relax and listen—just close your eyes, feel the cold, and imagine your sled dogs howling at the Northern lights.

Listen to the Poems Here

The Shooting of Dan McGrew

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his regular love, the lady we all call Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a mouse,
Yet he brushed at a half inch of dust on the bar, and called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank to his health, but the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face full of hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he’d do,
And I turned my head — and watching him there was the lady we all call Lou.

His eyes went rubbering around the room, and he seemed in some sort of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell, in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his taloned hands — my God, but that man could play!

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was full and clear,
When the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you almost could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, cold world, gone mad for that muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the Northern Lights swept in bars? —
Then you have a hunch what the music meant. . . the hunger, the night, and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so crammed full of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman’s love —
A woman dearer than all the world, and virtuous as Heaven is true —
(But my God, how ghastly this one looks through her rouge, — the lady we all call Lou.)

Then all of a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarcely could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all you had once held dear;
Someone had stolen the woman you loved; and her love was a devil’s lie;
Your guts were gone, and the best for you was to just crawl away and die.
That’s the crowning cry of a heart’s despair, and it soaks you through and through —
“So I guess I’ll spread the misery around,” said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away … then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, “Repay, repay,” and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust came in me to kill, to kill … then the music stopped with a crash,
Then the stranger turned, and his eyes, they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;

Then his lips turned in, with kind of a grin. He spoke, and his voice was calm,
“Boys,” said he, “you don’t know me, and none of you give a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my horse they’re true,
One of you for sure is a hound of hell. . .and that man is Dan McGrew.”

Then I ducked my head, the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,
A woman screamed, the lights came up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady we all call Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with “hooch,” and I’m not denying it’s so.
I’m not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —
The woman that kissed him — and stole his horse — was the lady we all call Lou.

The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill

I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,

Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die —

Whether he die in the light o’ day or under the peak-faced moon;

In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, early morning or late afternoon

On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw;

In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw;

By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead —

I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot

On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot.

And where he died or how he died, it didn’t matter a damn

So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone “epigram.”

So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin

(Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin).

Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: “Here lies poor Bill MacKie,”

And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die.

Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange,

Of a long-deserted line of traps ’way back of the Bighorn range,

Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still,

Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.

So I thought of the contract I’d made with him, and I took down from the shelf

The swell black box with the silver plate he’d picked out for hisself;

And I packed it full of grub and “hooch,” and I slung it on the sleigh;

Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day.

You know what it’s like in the Yukon wild when it’s sixty-nine below;

When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow;

When the pine-trees crack like rifle shots in the silence of the wood,

And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood;

When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,

And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit;

When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill —

Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.

Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand,

As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land;

Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking woes,

And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!

North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain

Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.

River and plain and mighty peak — and who could stand unawed?

As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God.

North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes,

And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes,

Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill,

And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill.

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;

Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;

Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair,

Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;

Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.

I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,

And at last I spoke: “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,

A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.”

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,

With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control?

Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,

And that seems to say: “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in”?

I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue

As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do.

Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,

And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.

Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn’t seem no good;

His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.

Till at last I said: “It ain’t no use — he’s froze too hard to thaw;

He’s obstinate, and he won’t lie straight, so I guess I got to — saw.”

So I sawed off poor Bill’s arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight

In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate,

And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;

Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town.

So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep,

And there he’s waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep;

And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,

And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful things I done.

And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding on God’s Law,

I often think of poor old Bill — and how hard he was to saw.

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Born in Lancashire, England 1874, Robert W. Service wrote his first poem on his sixth birthday. He was raised in Scotland by his grandfather, where his interest in poetry grew alongside a desire for travel and adventure.

Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Service sailed to western Canada in 1894 at the age of twenty to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a bank teller in Vancouver Island at the time of the Gold Rush, gleaning material that would inform his poetry for years to come and earn him his reputation as “Bard of the Yukon.”

Service also worked as an ambulance driver in France during World War I.

A prolific writer and poet, Service published numerous collections of poetry during his lifetime, including Songs of a Sourdough, released in 1907.

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