________________________________________________
_ No time was lost. Hines and Finn, with the dogs, already on
short rations, were two days in pulling down. At noon of the
third day Elijah arrived, reporting no moose sign. That night
Daylight came in with a similar report. As fast as they arrived,
the men had started careful panning of the snow all around the
cache. It was a large task, for they found stray beans fully a
hundred yards from the cache. One more day all the men toiled.
The result was pitiful, and the four showed their caliber in the
division of the few pounds of food that had been recovered.
Little as it was, the lion's share was left with Daylight and
Elijah. The men who pulled on with the dogs, one up the Stewart
and one down, would come more quickly to grub. The two who
remained would have to last out till the others returned.
Furthermore, while the dogs, on several ounces each of beans a
day, would travel slowly, nevertheless, the men who travelled
with them, on a pinch, would have the dogs themselves to eat.
But the men who remained, when the pinch came, would have no
dogs. It was for this reason that Daylight and Elijah took the
more desperate chance. They could not do less, nor did they care
to do less. The days passed, and the winter began merging
imperceptibly into the Northland spring that comes like a
thunderbolt of suddenness. It was the spring of 1896 that was
preparing. Each day the sun rose farther east of south, remained
longer in the sky, and set farther to the west. March ended and
April began, and Daylight and Elijah, lean and hungry, wondered
what had become of their two comrades. Granting every delay, and
throwing in generous margins for good measure, the time was long
since passed when they should have returned. Without doubt they
had met with disaster. The party had considered the possibility
of disaster for one man, and that had been the principal reason
for despatching the two in different directions. But that
disaster should have come to both of them was the final blow.
In the meantime, hoping against hope, Daylight and Elija eked out
a meagre existence. The thaw had not yet begun, so they were
able to gather the snow about the ruined cache and melt it in
pots and pails and gold pans. Allowed to stand for a while, when
poured off, a thin deposit of slime was found on the bottoms of
the vessels. This was the flour, the infinitesimal trace of it
scattered through thousands of cubic yards of snow. Also, in
this slime occurred at intervals a water-soaked tea-leaf or
coffee-ground, and there were in it fragments of earth and
litter. But the farther they worked away from the site of the
cache, the thinner became the trace of flour, the smaller the
deposit of slime.
Elijah was the older man, and he weakened first, so that he came
to lie up most of the time in his furs. An occasional tree-
squirrel kept them alive. The hunting fell upon Daylight, and it
was hard work. With but thirty rounds of ammunition, he dared
not risk a miss; and, since his rifle was a 45-90, he was
compelled to shoot the small creatures through the head. There
were very few of them, and days went by without seeing one. When
he did see one, he took infinite precautions. He would stalk it
for hours. A score of times, with arms that shook from weakness,
he would draw a sight on the animal and refrain from pulling the
trigger. His inhibition was a thing of iron. He was the master.
Not til absolute certitude was his did he shoot. No matter how
sharp the pangs of hunger and desire for that palpitating morsel
of chattering life, he refused to take the slightest risk of a
miss. He, born gambler, was gambling in the bigger way. His
life was the stake, his cards were the cartridges, and he played
as only a big gambler could play, with infinite precaution, with
infinite consideration. Each shot meant a squirrel, and though
days elapsed between shots, it never changed his method of play.
Of the squirrels, nothing was lost. Even the skins were boiled
to make broth, the bones pounded into fragments that could be
chewed and swallowed. Daylight prospected through the snow, and
found occasional patches of mossberries. At the best,
mossberries were composed practically of seeds and water, with a
tough rind of skin about them; but the berries he found were of
the preceding year, dry and shrivelled, and the nourishment they
contained verged on the minus quality. Scarcely better was the
bark of young saplings, stewed for an hour and swallowed after
prodigious chewing.
April drew toward its close, and spring smote the land. The days
stretched out their length. Under the heat of the sun, the snow
began to melt, while from down under the snow arose the trickling
of tiny streams. For twenty-four hours the Chinook wind blew,
and in that twenty-four hours the snow was diminished fully a
foot in depth. In the late afternoons the melting snow froze
again, so that its surface became ice capable of supporting a
man's weight. Tiny white snow-birds appeared from the south,
lingered a day, and resumed their journey into the north. Once,
high in the air, looking for open water and ahead of the season,
a wedged squadron of wild geese honked northwards. And down by
the river bank a clump of dwarf willows burst into bud. These
young buds, stewed, seemed to posess an encouraging nutrition.
Elijah took heart of hope, though he was cast down again when
Daylight failed to find another clump of willows.
The sap was rising in the trees, and daily the trickle of unseen
streamlets became louder as the frozen land came back to life.
But the river held in its bonds of frost. Winter had been long
months in riveting them, and not in a day were they to be broken,
not even by the thunderbolt of spring. May came, and stray
last-year's mosquitoes, full-grown but harmless, crawled out of
rock crevices and rotten logs. Crickets began to chirp, and more
geese and ducks flew overhead. And still the river held. By May
tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with a great rending and snapping,
tore loose from the banks and rose three feet. But it did not go
down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where the Stewart flowed
into it, must first break and move on. Until then the ice of the
Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasing flood
beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Two
thousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the ice
conditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yukon
could rid itself of the millions of tons of ice that cluttered
its breast.
On the twelfth of May, carrying their sleeping-robes, a pail, an
ax, and the precious rifle, the two men started down the river on
the ice. Their plan was to gain to the cached poling-boat they
had seen, so that at the first open water they could launch it
and drift with the stream to Sixty Mile. In their weak
condition, without food, the going was slow and difficult.
Elijah developed a habit of falling down and being unable to
rise. Daylight gave of his own strength to lift him to his feet,
whereupon the older man would stagger automatically on until he
stumbled and fell again.
On the day they should have reached the boat, Elijah collapsed
utterly. When Daylight raised him, he fell again. Daylight
essayed to walk with him, supporting him, but such was Daylight's
own weakness that they fell together.
Dragging Elijah to the bank, a rude camp was made, and Daylight
started out in search of squirrels. It was at this time that he
likewise developed the falling habit. In the evening he found
his first squirrel, but darkness came on without his getting a
certain shot. With primitive patience he waited till next day,
and then, within the hour, the squirrel was his.
The major portion he fed to Elijah, reserving for himself the
tougher parts and the bones. But such is the chemistry of life,
that this small creature, this trifle of meat that moved, by
being eaten, transmuted to the meat of the men the same power to
move. No longer did the squirrel run up spruce trees, leap from
branch to branch, or cling chattering to giddy perches. Instead,
the same energy that had done these things flowed into the wasted
muscles and reeling wills of the men, making them move--nay,
moving them--till they tottered the several intervening miles to
the cached boat, underneath which they fell together and lay
motionless a long time.
Light as the task would have been for a strong man to lower the
small boat to the ground, it took Daylight hours. And many hours
more, day by day, he dragged himself around it, lying on his side
to calk the gaping seams with moss. Yet, when this was done, the
river still held. Its ice had risen many feet, but would not
start down-stream. And one more task waited, the launching of
the boat when the river ran water to receive it. Vainly Daylight
staggered and stumbled and fell and crept through the snow that
was wet with thaw, or across it when the night's frost still
crusted it beyond the weight of a man, searching for one more
squirrel, striving to achieve one more transmutation of furry
leap and scolding chatter into the lifts and tugs of a man's body
that would hoist the boat over the rim of shore-ice and slide it
down into the stream.
Not till the twentieth of May did the river break. The
down-stream movement began at five in the morning, and already
were the days so long that Daylight sat up and watched the
ice-run. Elijah was too far gone to be interested in the
spectacle. Though vaguely conscious, he lay without movement
while the ice tore by, great cakes of it caroming against the
bank, uprooting trees, and gouging out earth by hundreds of tons.
All about them the land shook and reeled from the shock of these
tremendous collisions. At the end of an hour the run stopped.
Somewhere below it was blocked by a jam. Then the river began to
rise, lifting the ice on its breast till it was higher than the
bank. From behind ever more water bore down, and ever more
millions of tons of ice added their weight to the congestion.
The pressures and stresses became terrific. Huge cakes of ice
were squeezed out till they popped into the air like melon seeds
squeezed from between the thumb and forefinger of a child, while
all along the banks a wall of ice was forced up. When the jam
broke, the noise of grinding and smashing redoubled. For another
hour the run continued. The river fell rapidly. But the wall of
ice on top the bank, and extending down into the falling water,
remained.
The tail of the ice-run passed, and for the first time in six
months Daylight saw open water. He knew that the ice had not yet
passed out from the upper reaches of the Stewart, that it lay in
packs and jams in those upper reaches, and that it might break
loose and come down in a second run any time; but the need was
too desperate for him to linger. Elijah was so far gone that he
might pass at any moment. As for himself, he was not sure that
enough strength remained in his wasted muscles to launch the
boat. It was all a gamble. If he waited for the second ice-run,
Elijah would surely die, and most probably himself. If he
succeeded in launching the boat, if he kept ahead of the second
ice-run, if he did not get caught by some of the runs from the
upper Yukon; if luck favored in all these essential particulars,
as well as in a score of minor ones, they would reach Sixty Mile
and be saved, if--and again the if--he had strength enough to
land
the boat at Sixty Mile and not go by.
He set to work. The wall of ice was five feet above the ground
on which the boat rested. First prospecting for the best
launching-place, he found where a huge cake of ice shelved upward
from the river that ran fifteen feet below to the top of the
wall. This was a score of feet away, and at the end of an hour
he had managed to get the boat that far. He was sick with nausea
from his exertions, and at times it seemed that blindness smote
him, for he could not see, his eyes vexed with spots and points
of light that were as excruciating as diamond-dust, his heart
pounding up in his throat and suffocating him. Elijah betrayed
no interest, did not move nor open his eyes; and Daylight fought
out his battle alone. At last, falling on his knees from the
shock of exertion, he got the boat poised on a secure balance on
top the wall. Crawling on hands and knees, he placed in the boat
his rabbit-skin robe, the rifle, and the pail. He did not bother
with the ax. It meant an additional crawl of twenty feet and
back, and if the need for it should arise he well knew he would
be past all need.
Elijah proved a bigger task than he had anticipated. A few
inches at a time, resting in between, he dragged him over the
ground and up a broken rubble of ice to the side of the boat.
But into the boat he could not get him. Elijah's limp body was
far more difficult to lift and handle than an equal weight of
like dimensions but rigid. Daylight failed to hoist him, for the
body collapsed at the middle like a part-empty sack of corn.
Getting into the boat, Daylight tried vainly to drag his comrade
in after him. The best he could do was to get Elijah's head and
shoulders on top the gunwale. When he released his hold, to
heave from farther down the body, Elijah promptly gave at the
middle and came down on the ice.
In despair, Daylight changed his tactics. He struck the other in
the face.
"God Almighty, ain't you-all a man?" he cried. "There! damn
you-all! there! "
At each curse he struck him on the cheeks, the nose, the mouth,
striving, by the shock of the hurt, to bring back the sinking
soul and far-wandering will of the man. The eyes fluttered open.
"Now listen!" he shouted hoarsely. "When I get your head to the
gunwale, hang on! Hear me? Hang on! Bite into it with your
teeth, but HANG ON! "
The eyes fluttered down, but Daylight knew the message had been
received. Again he got the helpless man's head and shoulders on
the gunwale.
"Hang on, damn you! Bite in" he shouted, as he shifted his grip
lower down.
One weak hand slipped off the gunwale, the fingers of the other
hand relaxed, but Elijah obeyed, and his teeth held on. When the
lift came, his face ground forward, and the splintery wood tore
and crushed the skin from nose, lips, and chin; and, face
downward, he slipped on and down to the bottom of the boat till
his limp middle collapsed across the gunwale and his legs hung
down outside. But they were only his legs, and Daylight shoved
them in; after him. Breathing heavily, he turned Elijah over on
his back, and covered him with his robes.
The final task remained--the launching of the boat. This, of
necessity, was the severest of all, for he had been compelled to
load his comrade in aft of the balance. It meant a supreme
effort at lifting. Daylight steeled himself and began.
Something must have snapped, for, though he was unaware of it,
the next he knew he was lying doubled on his stomach across the
sharp stern of the boat. Evidently, and for the first time in
his life, he had fainted. Furthermore, it seemed to him that he
was finished, that he had not one more movement left in him, and
that, strangest of all, he did not care. Visions came to him,
clear-cut and real, and concepts sharp as steel cutting-edges.
He, who all his days had looked on naked Life, had never seen so
much of Life's nakedness before. For the first time he
experienced a doubt of his own glorious personality. For the
moment Life faltered and forgot to lie. After all, he was a
little earth-maggot, just like all the other earth-maggots, like
the squirrel he had eaten, like the other men he had seen fail
and die, like Joe Hines and Henry Finn, who had already failed
and were surely dead, like Elijah lying there uncaring, with his
skinned face, in the bottom of the boat. Daylight's position was
such that from where he lay he could look up river to the bend,
around which, sooner or later, the next ice-run would come. And
as he looked he seemed to see back through the past to a time
when neither white man nor Indian was in the land, and ever he
saw the same Stewart River, winter upon winter, breasted with
ice, and spring upon spring bursting that ice asunder and running
free. And he saw also into an illimitable future, when the last
generations of men were gone from off the face of Alaska, when
he, too, would be gone, and he saw, ever remaining, that river,
freezing and fresheting, and running on and on.
Life was a liar and a cheat. It fooled all creatures. It had
fooled him, Burning Daylight, one of its chiefest and most joyous
exponents. He was nothing--a mere bunch of flesh and nerves and
sensitiveness that crawled in the muck for gold, that dreamed and
aspired and gambled, and that passed and was gone. Only the dead
things remained, the things that were not flesh and nerves and
sensitiveness, the sand and muck and gravel, the stretching
flats, the mountains, the river itself, freezing and breaking,
year by year, down all the years. When all was said and done, it
was a scurvy game. The dice were loaded. Those that died did
not win, and all died. Who won? Not even Life, the
stool-pigeon, the arch-capper for the game--Life, the ever
flourishing graveyard, the everlasting funeral procession.
He drifted back to the immediate present for a moment and noted
that the river still ran wide open, and that a moose-bird,
perched on the bow of the boat, was surveying him impudently.
Then he drifted dreamily back to his meditations.
There was no escaping the end of the game. He was doomed surely
to be out of it all. And what of it? He pondered that question
again and again.
Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a
sort of religion in his square dealing and right playing with
other men, and he had not indulged in vain metaphysics about
future life. Death ended all. He had always believed that, and
been unafraid. And at this moment, the boat fifteen feet above
the water and immovable, himself fainting with weakness and
without a particle of strength left in him, he still believed
that death ended all, and he was still unafraid. His views were
too simply and solidly based to be overthrown by the first
squirm, or the last, of death-fearing life.
He had seen men and animals die, and into the field of his
vision, by scores, came such deaths. He saw them over again,
just as he had seen them at the time, and they did not shake him.
What of it? They were dead, and dead long since. They weren't
bothering about it. They weren't lying on their bellies across a
boat and waiting to die. Death was easy--easier than he had ever
imagined; and, now that it was near, the thought of it made him
glad.
A new vision came to him. He saw the feverish city of his
dream--the gold metropolis of the North, perched above the Yukon
on a high earth-bank and far-spreading across the flat. He saw
the river steamers tied to the bank and lined against it three
deep; he saw the sawmills working and the long dog-teams, with
double sleds behind, freighting supplies to the diggings. And he
saw, further, the gambling-houses, banks, stock-exchanges, and
all the gear and chips and markers, the chances and
opportunities, of a vastly bigger gambling game than any he had
ever seen. It was sure hell, he thought, with the hunch
a-working and that big strike coming, to be out of it all. Life
thrilled and stirred at the thought and once more began uttering
his ancient lies.
Daylight rolled over and off the boat, leaning against it as he
sat on the ice. He wanted to be in on that strike. And why
shouldn't he? Somewhere in all those wasted muscles of his was
enough strength, if he could gather it all at once, to up-end the
boat and launch it. Quite irrelevantly the idea suggested itself
of buying a share in the Klondike town site from Harper and Joe
Ladue. They would surely sell a third interest cheap. Then, if
the strike came on the Stewart, he would be well in on it with
the Elam Harnish town site; if on the Klondike, he would not be
quite out of it.
In the meantime, he would gather strength. He stretched out on
the ice full length, face downward, and for half an hour he lay
and rested. Then he arose, shook the flashing blindness from his
eyes, and took hold of the boat. He knew his condition
accurately. If the first effort failed, the following efforts
were doomed to fail. He must pull all his rallied strength into
the one effort, and so thoroughly must he put all of it in that
there would be none left for other attempts.
He lifted, and he lifted with the soul of him as well as with the
body, consuming himself, body and spirit, in the effort. The
boat rose. He thought he was going to faint, but he continued to
lift. He felt the boat give, as it started on its downward
slide. With the last shred of his strength he precipitated
himself into it, landing in a sick heap on Elijah's legs. He was
beyond attempting to rise, and as he lay he heard and felt the
boat take the water. By watching the tree-tops he knew it was
whirling. A smashing shock and flying fragments of ice told him
that it had struck the bank. A dozen times it whirled and
struck, and then it floated easily and free.
Daylight came to, and decided he had been asleep. The sun
denoted that several hours had passed. It was early afternoon.
He dragged himself into the stern and sat up. The boat was in
the middle of the stream. The wooded banks, with their
base-lines of flashing ice, were slipping by. Near him floated a
huge, uprooted pine. A freak of the current brought the boat
against it. Crawling forward, he fastened the painter to a root.
The tree, deeper in the water, was travelling faster, and the
painter tautened as the boat took the tow. Then, with a last
giddy look around, wherein he saw the banks tilting and swaying
and the sun swinging in pendulum-sweep across the sky, Daylight
wrapped himself in his rabbit-skin robe, lay down in the bottom,
and fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was dark night. He was lying on his back, and
he could see the stars shining. A subdued murmur of swollen
waters could be heard. A sharp jerk informed him that the boat,
swerving slack into the painter, had been straightened out by the
swifter-moving pine tree. A piece of stray drift-ice thumped
against the boat and grated along its side. Well, the following
jam hadn't caught him yet, was his thought, as he closed his eyes
and slept again.
It was bright day when next he opened his eyes. The sun showed
it to be midday. A glance around at the far-away banks, and he
knew that he was on the mighty Yukon. Sixty Mile could not be
far away. He was abominably weak. His movements were slow,
fumbling, and inaccurate, accompanied by panting and
head-swimming, as he dragged himself into a sitting-up position
in the stern, his rifle beside him. He looked a long time at
Elijah, but could not see whether he breathed or not, and he was
too immeasurably far away to make an investigation.
He fell to dreaming and meditating again, dreams and thoughts
being often broken by sketches of blankness, wherein he neither
slept, nor was unconscious, nor was aware of anything. It seemed
to him more like cogs slipping in his brain. And in this
intermittent way he reviewed the situation. He was still alive,
and most likely would be saved, but how came it that he was not
lying dead across the boat on top the ice-rim? Then he
recollected the great final effort he had made. But why had he
made it? he asked himself. It had not been fear of death. He
had not been afraid, that was sure. Then he remembered the hunch
and the big strike he believed was coming, and he knew that the
spur had been his desire to sit in for a hand at that big game.
And again why? What if he made his million? He would die, just
the same as those that never won more than grub-stakes. Then
again why? But the blank stretches in his thinking process began
to come more frequently, and he surrendered to the delightful
lassitude that was creeping over him.
He roused with a start. Something had whispered in him that he
must awake. Abruptly he saw Sixty Mile, not a hundred feet away.
The current had brought him to the very door. But the same
current was now sweeping him past and on into the down-river
wilderness. No one was in sight. The place might have been
deserted, save for the smoke he saw rising from the kitchen
chimney. He tried to call, but found he had no voice left. An
unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled and wheezed in his
throat. He fumbled for the rifle, got it to his shoulder, and
pulled the trigger. The recoil of the discharge tore through his
frame, racking it with a thousand agonies. The rifle had fallen
across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulder
failed. He knew he must be quick, and felt that he was fainting,
so he pulled the trigger of the gun where it lay. This time it
kicked off and overboard. But just before darkness rushed over
him, he saw the kitchen door open, and a woman look out of the
big log house that was dancing a monstrous jig among the trees. _
Read next: PART I: CHAPTER IX
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