________________________________________________
_ On the river, where was a packed trail and where snowshoes were
unnecessary, the dogs averaged six miles an hour. To keep up
with them, the two men were compelled to run. Daylight and Kama
relieved each other regularly at the gee-pole, for here was the
hard work of steering the flying sled and of keeping in advance
of it. The man relieved dropped behind the sled, occasionally
leaping upon it and resting.
It was severe work, but of the sort that was exhilarating.
They were flying, getting over the ground, making the most of the
packed trail. Later on they would come to the unbroken trail,
where three miles an hour would constitute good going. Then
there would be no riding and resting, and no running. Then the
gee-pole would be the easier task, and a man would come back to
it to rest after having completed his spell to the fore, breaking
trail with the snowshoes for the dogs. Such work was far from
exhilarating also, they must expect places where for miles at a
time they must toil over chaotic ice-jams, where they would be
fortunate if they made two miles an hour. And there would be the
inevitable bad jams, short ones, it was true, but so bad that a
mile an hour would require terrific effort. Kama and Daylight
did not talk. In the nature of the work they could not, nor in
their own natures were they given to talking while they worked.
At rare intervals, when necessary, they addressed each other in
monosyllables, Kama, for the most part, contenting himself with
grunts. Occasionally a dog whined or snarled, but in the main
the team kept silent. Only could be heard the sharp, jarring
grate of the steel runners over the hard surface and the creak of
the straining sled.
As if through a wall, Daylight had passed from the hum and roar
of the Tivoli into another world--a world of silence and
immobility. Nothing stirred. The Yukon slept under a coat of
ice three feet thick. No breath of wind blew. Nor did the sap
move in the hearts of the spruce trees that forested the river
banks on either hand. The trees, burdened with the last
infinitesimal pennyweight of snow their branches could hold,
stood in absolute petrifaction. The slightest tremor would have
dislodged the snow, and no snow was dislodged. The sled was the
one point of life and motion in the midst of the solemn quietude,
and the harsh churn of its runners but emphasized the silence
through which it moved.
It was a dead world, and furthermore, a gray world. The weather
was sharp and clear; there was no moisture in the atmosphere, no
fog nor haze; yet the sky was a gray pall. The reason for this
was that, though there was no cloud in the sky to dim the
brightness of day, there was no sun to give brightness. Far to
the south the sun climbed steadily to meridian, but between it
and the frozen Yukon intervened the bulge of the earth. The
Yukon lay in a night shadow, and the day itself was in reality a
long twilight-light. At a quarter before twelve, where a wide
bend of the river gave a long vista south, the sun showed its
upper rim above the sky-line. But it did not rise
perpendicularly. Instead, it rose on a slant, so that by high
noon it had barely lifted its lower rim clear of the horizon. It
was a dim, wan sun. There was no heat to its rays, and a man
could gaze squarely into the full orb of it without hurt to his
eyes. No sooner had it reached meridian than it began its slant
back beneath the horizon, and at quarter past twelve the earth
threw its shadow again over the land.
The men and dogs raced on. Daylight and Kama were both savages
so far as their stomachs were concerned. They could eat
irregularly in time and quantity, gorging hugely on occasion, and
on occasion going long stretches without eating at all. As for
the dogs, they ate but once a day, and then rarely did they
receive more than a pound each of dried fish. They were
ravenously hungry and at the same time splendidly in condition.
Like the wolves, their forebears, their nutritive processes were
rigidly economical and perfect. There was no waste. The last
least particle of what they consumed was transformed into energy.
And Kama and Daylight were like them. Descended themselves from
the generations that had endured, they, too, endured. Theirs was
the simple, elemental economy. A little food equipped them with
prodigious energy. Nothing was lost. A man of soft
civilization, sitting at a desk, would have grown lean and
woe-begone on the fare that kept Kama and Daylight at the
top-notch of physical efficiency. They knew, as the man at the
desk never knows, what it is to be normally hungry all the time,
so that they could eat any time. Their appetites were always
with them and on edge, so that they bit voraciously into whatever
offered and with an entire innocence of indigestion.
By three in the afternoon the long twilight faded into night.
The stars came out, very near and sharp and bright, and by their
light dogs and men still kept the trail. They were
indefatigable. And this was no record run of a single day, but
the first day of sixty such days. Though Daylight had passed a
night without sleep, a night of dancing and carouse, it seemed to
have left no effect. For this there were two explanations first,
his remarkable vitality; and next, the fact that such nights were
rare in his experience. Again enters the man at the desk, whose
physical efficiency would be more hurt by a cup of coffee at
bedtime than could Daylight's by a whole night long of strong
drink and excitement.
Daylight travelled without a watch, feeling the passage of time
and largely estimating it by subconscious processes. By what he
considered must be six o'clock, he began looking for a
camping-place. The trail, at a bend, plunged out across the
river. Not having found a likely spot, they held on for the
opposite bank a mile away. But midway they encountered an
ice-jam which took an hour of heavy work to cross. At last
Daylight glimpsed what he was looking for, a dead tree close by
the bank. The sled was run in and up. Kama grunted with
satisfaction, and the work of making camp was begun.
The division of labor was excellent. Each knew what he must do.
With one ax Daylight chopped down the dead pine. Kama, with a
snowshoe and the other ax, cleared away the two feet of snow
above the Yukon ice and chopped a supply of ice for cooking
purposes. A piece of dry birch bark started the fire, and
Daylight went ahead with the cooking while the Indian unloaded
the sled and fed the dogs their ration of dried fish. The food
sacks he slung high in the trees beyond leaping-reach of the
huskies. Next, he chopped down a young spruce tree and trimmed
off the boughs. Close to the fire he trampled down the soft snow
and covered the packed space with the boughs. On this flooring
he tossed his own and Daylight's gear-bags, containing dry socks
and underwear and their sleeping-robes. Kama, however, had two
robes of rabbit skin to Daylight's one.
They worked on steadily, without speaking, losing no time. Each
did whatever was needed, without thought of leaving to the other
the least task that presented itself to hand. Thus, Kama saw
when more ice was needed and went and got it, while a snowshoe,
pushed over by the lunge of a dog, was stuck on end again by
Daylight. While coffee was boiling, bacon frying, and flapjacks
were being mixed, Daylight found time to put on a big pot of
beans. Kama came back, sat down on the edge of the spruce
boughs, and in the interval of waiting, mended harness.
"I t'ink dat Skookum and Booga make um plenty fight maybe," Kama
remarked, as they sat down to eat.
"Keep an eye on them," was Daylight's answer.
And this was their sole conversation throughout the meal. Once,
with a muttered imprecation, Kama leaped away, a stick of
firewood in hand, and clubbed apart a tangle of fighting dogs.
Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot,
where it thawed into water. The meal finished, Kama replenished
the fire, cut more wood for the morning, and returned to the
spruce bough bed and his harness-mending. Daylight cut up
generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling
beans. The moccasins of both men were wet, and this in spite of
the intense cold; so when there was no further need for them to
leave the oasis of spruce boughs, they took off their moccasins
and hung them on short sticks to dry before the fire, turning
them about from time to time. When the beans were finally
cooked, Daylight ran part of them into a bag of flour-sacking a
foot and a half long and three inches in diameter. This he then
laid on the snow to freeze. The remainder of the beans were left
in the pot for breakfast.
It was past nine o'clock, and they were ready for bed. The
squabbling and bickering among the dogs had long since died down,
and the weary animals were curled in the snow, each with his feet
and nose bunched together and covered by his wolf's brush of a
tail. Kama spread his sleeping-furs and lighted his pipe.
Daylight rolled a brown-paper cigarette, and the second
conversation of the evening took place.
"I think we come near sixty miles," said Daylight.
"Um, I t'ink so," said Kama.
They rolled into their robes, all-standing, each with a woolen
Mackinaw jacket on in place of the parkas[5] they had worn all
day. Swiftly, almost on the instant they closed their eyes, they
were asleep. The stars leaped and danced in the frosty air, and
overhead the colored bars of the aurora borealis were shooting
like great searchlights.
[5] Parka: a light, hooded, smock-like garment made of cotton
drill.
In the darkness Daylight awoke and roused Kama. Though the
aurora still flamed, another day had begun. Warmed-over
flapjacks, warmed-over beans, fried bacon, and coffee composed
the breakfast. The dogs got nothing, though they watched with
wistful mien from a distance, sitting up in the snow, their tails
curled around their paws. Occasionally they lifted one fore paw
or the other, with a restless movement, as if the frost tingled
in their feet. It was bitter cold, at least sixty-five below
zero, and when Kama harnessed the dogs with naked hands he was
compelled several times to go over to the fire and warm the
numbing finger-tips. Together the two men loaded and lashed the
sled. They warmed their hands for the last time, pulled on their
mittens, and mushed the dogs over the bank and down to the
river-trail. According to Daylight's estimate, it was around
seven o'clock; but the stars danced just as brilliantly, and
faint, luminous streaks of greenish aurora still pulsed overhead.
Two hours later it became suddenly dark--so dark that they kept
to
the trail largely by instinct; and Daylight knew that his
time-estimate had been right. It was the darkness before dawn,
never anywhere more conspicuous than on the Alaskan winter-trail.
Slowly the gray light came stealing through the gloom,
imperceptibly at first, so that it was almost with surprise that
they noticed the vague loom of the trail underfoot. Next, they
were able to see the wheel-dog, and then the whole string of
running dogs and snow-stretches on either side. Then the near
bank loomed for a moment and was gone, loomed a second time and
remained. In a few minutes the far bank, a mile away,
unobtrusively came into view, and ahead and behind, the whole
frozen river could be seen, with off to the left a wide-extending
range of sharp-cut, snow-covered mountains. And that was all.
No sun arose. The gray light remained gray.
Once, during the day, a lynx leaped lightly across the trail,
under the very nose of the lead-dog, and vanished in the white
woods. The dogs' wild impulses roused. They raised the
hunting-cry of the pack, surged against their collars, and
swerved aside in pursuit. Daylight, yelling "Whoa!" struggled
with the gee-pole and managed to overturn the sled into the soft
snow. The dogs gave up, the sled was righted, and five minutes
later they were flying along the hard-packed trail again. The
lynx was the only sign of life they had seen in two days, and it,
leaping velvet-footed and vanishing, had been more like an
apparition.
At twelve o'clock, when the sun peeped over the earth-bulge,
they stopped and built a small fire on the ice. Daylight, with
the ax, chopped chunks off the frozen sausage of beans. These,
thawed and warmed in the frying-pan, constituted their meal.
They had no coffee. He did not believe in the burning of
daylight for such a luxury. The dogs stopped wrangling with one
another, and looked on wistfully. Only at night did they get
their pound of fish. In the meantime they worked.
The cold snap continued. Only men of iron kept the trail at such
low temperatures, and Kama and Daylight were picked men of their
races. But Kama knew the other was the better man, and thus, at
the start, he was himself foredoomed to defeat. Not that he
slackened his effort or willingness by the slightest conscious
degree, but that he was beaten by the burden he carried in his
mind. His attitude toward Daylight was worshipful. Stoical,
taciturn, proud of his physical prowess, he found all these
qualities incarnated in his white companion. Here was one that
excelled in the things worth excelling in, a man-god ready to
hand, and Kama could not but worship--withal he gave no signs of
it. No wonder the race of white men conquered, was his thought,
when it bred men like this man. What chance had the Indian
against such a dogged, enduring breed? Even the Indians did not
travel at such low temperatures, and theirs was the wisdom of
thousands of generations; yet here was this Daylight, from the
soft Southland, harder than they, laughing at their fears, and
swinging along the trail ten and twelve hours a day. And this
Daylight thought that he could keep up a day's pace of
thirty-three miles for sixty days! Wait till a fresh fall of
snow
came down, or they struck the unbroken trail or the rotten
rim-ice
that fringed open water.
In the meantime Kama kept the pace, never grumbling, never
shirking. Sixty-five degrees below zero is very cold. Since
water freezes at thirty-two above, sixty-five below meant
ninety-seven degrees below freezing-point. Some idea of the
significance of this may be gained by conceiving of an equal
difference of temperature in the opposite direction. One hundred
and twenty-nine on the thermometer constitutes a very hot day,
yet such a temperature is but ninety-seven degrees above
freezing. Double this difference, and possibly some slight
conception may be gained of the cold through which Kama and
Daylight travelled between dark and dark and through the dark.
Kama froze the skin on his cheek-bones, despite frequent
rubbings, and the flesh turned black and sore. Also he slightly
froze the edges of his lung-tissues--a dangerous thing, and the
basic reason why a man should not unduly exert himself in the
open at sixty-five below. But Kama never complained, and
Daylight was a furnace of heat, sleeping as warmly under his six
pounds of rabbit skins as the other did under twelve pounds.
On the second night, fifty more miles to the good, they camped in
the vicinity of the boundary between Alaska and the Northwest
Territory. The rest of the journey, save the last short stretch
to Dyea, would be travelled on Canadian territory. With the hard
trail, and in the absence of fresh snow, Daylight planned to make
the camp of Forty Mile on the fourth night. He told Kama as
much, but on the third day the temperature began to rise, and
they knew snow was not far off; for on the Yukon it must get warm
in order to snow. Also, on this day, they encountered ten miles
of chaotic ice-jams, where, a thousand times, they lifted the
loaded sled over the huge cakes by the strength of their arms and
lowered it down again. Here the dogs were well-nigh useless, and
both they and the men were tried excessively by the roughness of
the way. An hour's extra running that night caught up only part
of the lost time.
In the morning they awoke to find ten inches of snow on their
robes. The dogs were buried under it and were loath to leave
their comfortable nests. This new snow meant hard going. The
sled runners would not slide over it so well, while one of the
men must go in advance of the dogs and pack it down with
snowshoes so that they should not wallow. Quite different was it
from the ordinary snow known to those of the Southland. It was
hard, and fine, and dry. It was more like sugar. Kick it, and
it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was no cohesion
among the particles, and it could not be moulded into snow-
balls. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals--tiny,
geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but
frost.
The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the
two men, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as
they toiled. They failed to make Forty Mile that night, and when
they passed that camp next day Daylight paused only long enough
to get the mail and additional grub. On the afternoon of the
following day they camped at the mouth of the Klondike River.
Not a soul had they encountered since Forty Mile, and they had
made their own trail. As yet, that winter, no one had travelled
the river south of Forty Mile, and, for that matter, the whole
winter through they might be the only ones to travel it. In that
day the Yukon was a lonely land. Between the Klondike River and
Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred miles of snow-covered
wilderness, and in all that distance there were but two places
where Daylight might look forward to meeting men. Both were
isolated trading-posts, Sixty Mile and Fort Selkirk. In the
summer-time Indians might be met with at the mouths of the
Stewart and White rivers, at the Big and Little Salmons, and on
Lake Le Barge; but in the winter, as he well knew, they would be
on the trail of the moose-herds, following them back into the
mountains.
That night, camped at the mouth of the Klondike, Daylight did not
turn in when the evening's work was done. Had a white man been
present, Daylight would have remarked that he felt his "hunch"
working. As it was, he tied on his snowshoes, left the dogs
curled in the snow and Kama breathing heavily under his rabbit
skins, and climbed up to the big flat above the high earth-bank.
But the spruce trees were too thick for an outlook, and he
threaded his way across the flat and up the first steep slopes of
the mountain at the back. Here, flowing in from the east at
right angles, he could see the Klondike, and, bending grandly
from the south, the Yukon. To the left, and downstream, toward
Moosehide Mountain, the huge splash of white, from which it took
its name, showing clearly in the starlight. Lieutenant Schwatka
had given it its name, but he, Daylight, had first seen it long
before that intrepid explorer had crossed the Chilcoot and rafted
down the Yukon.
But the mountain received only passing notice. Daylight's
interest was centered in the big flat itself, with deep water all
along its edge for steamboat landings.
"A sure enough likely town site," he muttered. "Room for a camp
of forty thousand men. All that's needed is the gold-strike."
He meditated for a space. "Ten dollars to the pan'll do it, and
it'd be the all-firedest stampede Alaska ever seen. And if it
don't come here, it'll come somewhere hereabouts. It's a sure
good idea to keep an eye out for town sites all the way up."
He stood a while longer, gazing out over the lonely flat and
visioning with constructive imagination the scene if the stampede
did come. In fancy, he placed the sawmills, the big trading
stores, the saloons, and dance-halls, and the long streets of
miners' cabins. And along those streets he saw thousands of men
passing up and down, while before the stores were the heavy
freighting-sleds, with long strings of dogs attached. Also he
saw the heavy freighters pulling down the main street and heading
up the frozen Klondike toward the imagined somewhere where the
diggings must be located.
He laughed and shook the vision from his eyes, descended to the
level, and crossed the flat to camp. Five minutes after he had
rolled up in his robe, he opened his eyes and sat up, amazed that
he was not already asleep. He glanced at the Indian sleeping
beside him, at the embers of the dying fire, at the five dogs
beyond, with their wolf's brushes curled over their noses, and at
the four snowshoes standing upright in the snow.
"It's sure hell the way that hunch works on me" he murmured.
His mind reverted to the poker game. "Four kings!" He grinned
reminiscently. "That WAS a hunch!"
He lay down again, pulled the edge of the robe around his neck
and over his ear-flaps, closed his eyes, and this time fell
asleep. _
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