Showing posts with label Yukon Jack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yukon Jack. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2016

Yukon Jack

Yukon Jack
back cover advertisement, Epic Illustrated magazine, August 1983

As a major storm dumps snow and cold temperatures on the Northeast, and the media work themselves into a frenzy with Winter Storm Watch coverage, it's time to take heart....... from a most Manly of Advertisements, from way back in 1983......


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

[......why Hueblein, Inc., the Yukon Jack importer at that time, thought that Epic Illustrated was the type of magazine whose readership identified with macho, fur-wearing, whiskey-drinkin' mountain men, and thus an ideal publication from which to purchase a full-page back cover ad, is not entirely clear...........?! ]

The advertisement's verse excerpt is from 'The Heart of the Sourdough' by British-Canadian poet Robert William Service (1874 -1958).

Few poems are as Manly as this one............I've pasted it below in its entirety:



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 shakedown 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 mine 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.