Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 4

Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.

Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens, all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it, to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crus.h.i.+ng relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature falls.

Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience, feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who had long and often withstood it.

On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to enter a purposeful, vengeful evil. It pursues. The cold itself becomes merely a condition; the wind a deadly weapon which uses that condition to deprive its victim of all defence. The warmth which active exercise stores up, the buckler of the traveller, is borne away. His reserves are invaded, depleted, destroyed. And then the wind falls upon him with its sword. Of all of which we were to have instance here on the Koyukuk.

[Sidenote: "FOUND FROZEN"]

In the second week of our stay at Bettles, while Divine service was in progress in the store building, crowded with whites and natives, the door opened and, with an inrush of cold air that condensed the moisture at that end of the room into a cloud and shot along the floor like steam from an engine exhaust, there entered an Indian covered with rime, his whole head-gear one ma.s.s of white frost, his snow-shoes, just removed, under his arm, and a beaded moose-skin wallet over his shoulder. Every eye was at once turned to him as he beat the frost from his parkee hood and thrust it back, unwrapped fold after fold of the ice-crusted scarf from his face, and pulled off his mittens. Seeking out the agent, he moved over to him and whispered something in his ear. It was plain that the errand was of moment and the message disturbing, and as I had lost the attention of the congregation and the continuity of my own discourse, I drew things to a close as quickly as I decently could. That Indian had come seventy-five miles on snow-shoes in one run, without stopping at all save to eat two or three times, at a continuous temperature of 50 below zero or lower, to bring word that he had found a white man frozen to death on the trail; and on the Koyukuk that feat will always be counted to Albert the Pilot for righteousness. From the location and description of the dead man, there was no difficulty in identifying him. He was a wood-chopper under contract with the company to cut one hundred cords of steamboat wood against next summer's navigation at a spot about one hundred miles below Bettles. He had taken down with him on the "last water" enough grub for about three months, and was to return to Bettles for Christmas and for fresh supplies. After a day or two's rest the Indian was sent back with instructions to bring the body to a native village we should visit, to whipsaw lumber for a coffin and dig a grave, and we engaged to give the body Christian burial.

Uneasy at the softening muscles and sinews of this long inaction, I took snow-shoes and a couple of Kobuks one day and made an ascent of the hill behind Bettles known as Lookout Mountain, because from its top the smoke of the eagerly expected first steamboat of the summer may be seen many miles down the river; being moved to that particular excursion by dispute among the weather-bound freighters as to the hill's height.

The change of temperature as we climbed the hill was striking. On the first shoulder we were already out of the dense atmosphere of the valley and above the smoke gloom of the houses, and as we rose the air grew milder and milder, until at the top we emerged into the first suns.h.i.+ne of many weeks and were in an altogether different climate--balmy and grateful it was to us just come up from the strong cold. The aneroid showed the alt.i.tude about seven hundred feet above Bettles, and I regretted very much I had not brought the thermometer as well, for its reading would have been most interesting.

The view from the top was brilliantly clear and far-reaching. The broad plain across the river was checkered black and white with alternating spruce thickets and lakes; beyond it and the mountains that bounded it lay the valley of the south fork which we had crossed fifty or sixty miles farther up on our journey hither. Right in front of us the middle fork made its big bend from southwest to south, and to the left, that is, to the north, the valley of the John River opened up its course through the sharp white peaks of the Endicott Mountains. It was in this direction that my eyes lingered longest. I knew that sixty or seventy miles up this river we could cross the low Anaktuvak Pa.s.s into the Anaktuvak River, which flows into the Colville, and that descending the Colville we could reach the sh.o.r.es of the Northern Ocean. It was a journey I had wished to make--and have wished ever since. There are many bands of Esquimaux on that coast, never visited save by those who make merchandise of them in one way or another. Please G.o.d, some day I should get there; meanwhile our present hopes lay west, though, indeed, these grew daily fainter.

CHAPTER III

BETTLES TO THE PACIFIC--THE ALATNA, KOBUK PORTAGE, KOBUK VILLAGE, KOTZEBUE SOUND

ALL our preparations were long since made. Our Indian guide had been sent back to Fort Yukon from Coldfoot, and here we engaged a young Esquimau with his dog team and sled, to go across to Kotzebue Sound with us. There was also a young Dane who wished to go from the Koyukuk diggings to the diggings at Candle Creek on the Seward Peninsula, and him we were willing to feed in return for his a.s.sistance on the trail.

The supplies had been carefully calculated for the journey, the toboggans were already loaded, and we waited but a break in the cold weather to start.

Our course from Bettles would lead us sixty-five miles farther down the Koyukuk to the mouth of the Alatna. The visit to the native village and the burial of the poor fellow frozen to death would take us ten miles farther down than that, and we would return to the Alatna mouth. Then the way would lie for fifty miles or so up that stream, and then over a portage, across to the Kobuk River, which we should descend to its mouth in Kotzebue Sound; the whole distance being about five hundred miles through a very little travelled country. We learned indeed, that it had been travelled but once this winter, and that on the first snow. It was thought at Bettles that we might possibly procure some supplies at a newly established mission of the Society of Friends about half-way down the Kobuk River, but there was no certainty about it, and we must carry with us enough man-food to take us to salt water. Our supply of dog fish we might safely count upon replenis.h.i.+ng from the natives on the Kobuk.

Another thing that caused some thought was the supply of small money.

There was no silver and no currency except large bills on the Koyukuk, and we should need money in small sums to buy fish with. So the agent weighed out a number of little packets of gold-dust carefully sealed up in stout writing-paper like medicine powders, some worth a dollar, some worth two dollars, the value written on the face, and we found them readily accepted by the natives and very convenient. Two years later I heard of some of those packets, unbroken, still current on the Kobuk.

At last, on the 26th of January, we got away. The thermometer stood only a few degrees above -50 when we left, but the barometer had been falling slowly for a couple of days, and I was convinced the cold spell was over. With our three teams and four men we made quite a little expedition, but dogs and men were alike soft, and for the first two days the travel was laborious and slow; then came milder weather and better going.

[Sidenote: THE KOYUKUK "TOWNS" OF '98]

We pa.s.sed the two ruined huts of Peavey, the roofs crushed by the superinc.u.mbent snow. In the summer of 1898 a part of the stream of gold seekers, headed for the Klondike by way of Saint Michael, was deflected to the Koyukuk River by reports of recent discoveries there. A great many little steamboat outfits made their way up this river late in the season, until their excessive draught in the falling water brought them to a stand. Where they stopped they wintered, building cabins and starting "towns." In one or two cases the "towns" were electrically lit from the steamboat's dynamo. The next summer they all left, all save those who were wrecked by the ice, and the "towns" were abandoned. But they had got upon the map through some enterprising representative of the land office, and they figure on some recent maps still. Peavey, Seaforth, Jimtown, Arctic City, Beaver City, Bergman, are all just names and nothing else, though at Bergman the Commercial Company had a plant for a while.

We pa.s.sed the mouth of the Alatna, where were two or three Indian cabins, and went on the remaining ten miles to Moses' Village, where the body of the man frozen to death had been brought. Moses' Village, named from the chief, was the largest native village on the Koyukuk River, and we were glad, despite our haste, that we had gone there. The repeated requests from all the Indians we met for a mission and school on the Koyukuk River and the neglected condition of the people had moved me the previous year to take up the matter. This was my first visit, however, so far down the river.

We found the coffin unmade and the grave undug, and set men vigorously to work at both. The frozen body had been found fallen forward on hands and feet, and since to straighten it would be impossible without several days' thawing in a cabin, the coffin had to be of the size and shape of a packing-case; of course the ground for the grave had to be thawed down, for so are all graves dug in Alaska, and that is a slow business. A fire is kindled on the ground, and when it has burned out, as much ground as it has thawed is dug, and then another fire is kindled. We had our own gruesome task. The body should be examined to make legally sure that death came from natural causes. With difficulty the clothes were stripped from the poor marble corpse, my companion made the examination, and as a notary public I swore him to a report for the nearest United States commissioner. This would furnish legal proof of death were it ever required; otherwise, since there is no provision for the travelling expenses of coroners, and the nearest was one hundred and forty or one hundred and fifty miles away, there would have been no inquest and no such proof.

[Sidenote: A WILDERNESS TRAGEDY]

The man had delayed his return to Bettles too long. When his food was exhausted and he had to go, there came on that terrible cold spell. A little memorandum-book in his pocket told the pitiful story. Day by day he lingered hoping for a change, and day by day there was entry of the awful cold. He had no thermometer, but he knew the temperature was -50 or lower by the cracking noise that his breath made--the old-timer's test. At last the grub was all gone and he must go or starve. The final entry read: "All aboard to-morrow, hope to G.o.d I get there." The Indians estimated that he had been walking two days, and had "siwashed it" at night somewhere beside a fire in the open without bedding. Holes were burned in his breeches in two places, where, doubtless, he had got too near the fire. He had nothing whatever to eat with him save a piece of bacon gnawed to the rind. There were only two matches in his pocket, and they were mixed up with trash of birch-bark and tobacco, so it is likely he did not know he had them. He had lit all the fires he could light and eaten all the food he had to eat. Still he was plugging along towards the native village nine miles away. Then he lost the trail, probably in the dark, for it was faint and much drifted, and had taken off his snow-shoes to feel with his moccasined feet for the hardened snow that would indicate it. That was almost the end. He had gone across the river and back again, feeling for the trail, and then, with the deadly numbness already upon his brain, had wandered in a circle. The date of his starting in the memorandum-book and the distance travelled made it almost certain that, at some moment between the time when those three moons floated in the sky and the time when that cross glared on the horizon, he had fallen in the snow, never to rise again. Fifty-eight below zero and a wind blowing!

One supposes that the actual death by freezing is painless, as it is certainly slow and gradual. The only instance of sudden gelation I ever heard of is in Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," where the skipper, having answered one question, upon being asked another,

"Answered never a word, For a frozen corpse was he."

But if the actual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.

But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of peris.h.i.+ng by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach, swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on, thras.h.i.+ng his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.

We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter pa.s.ses that does not claim its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature of 10, the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.

[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]

That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor interpretation I ventured to promise them a mission the next year. Some of them had been across to the Yukon years before and had visited the mission at Tanana. Some had been baptized there. Some had never seen a clergyman or missionary of any sort before, and had never heard the gospel preached. We were touched by one old blind woman who told of a visit to a mission on the Yukon, and how she learned to sing a hymn there. Her son interpreted: "She say every night she sing that hymn for speak to G.o.d." She was encouraged to sing it, and it turned out to be the alphabet set to a tune! After much pleading and with some hesitation, I baptized seventeen children, comforting myself with the a.s.surance of the coming mission, which would undertake their Christian training and instruction.

Back next day at the mouth of the Alatna, I was again impressed with the eligibility of that spot as a mission site. It was but ten miles above the present native village, and, with church and school established, the whole population would sooner or later move to it. This gives opportunity for regulating the building of cabins, and the advantage of a new, clean start. Moreover, the Alatna River is the highway between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, and the Esquimaux coming over in increasing numbers, would be served by a mission at this place as well as the Indians. I foresaw two villages, perhaps, on the opposite sides of the river--one cl.u.s.tered about the church and the school, the other a little lower down--where these ancient hereditary enemies might live side by side in peace and harmony under the firm yet gentle influence of the church. So I staked a mission site, and set up notices claiming ground for that purpose, almost opposite the mouth of the Alatna, which, in the native tongue, is Allakaket or Allachaket.

[Sidenote: THE INLAND ESQUIMAUX]

There was some trail up the Alatna and we made fair headway on its surface, stopping two nights at Kobuk huts. We are out of the Indian country now, and shall see no more Indians until we are back on the Yukon. The mode of life, the habits, the character of the races are very different--the first Esquimau habitation we visited proclaiming it.

These inland Esquimaux, though some of the younger ones have never seen salt water--our guide, Roxy, for one--are still essentially a salt-water people. Their huts, even in the midst of trees, are half-underground affairs, for they have not learned log-building; the windows are of seal gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green fish, hewing them out of the frozen ma.s.s with the axe. The young man had fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_, mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the Tartars. Spa.r.s.ely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged with snow or sand.

At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose, deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.

Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one could wear the large snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.

The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter the step index as the varying surfaces pa.s.sed over require.

Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.

[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]

It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until the tent was struck and the dogs. .h.i.tched and it was time to start, and then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonis.h.i.+ng prospect. We were come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I looked, a swift change came over them. They pa.s.sed through the tones of red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the horizon, and they were golden.

It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have pa.s.sed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable ardency, and I think that this world never presented n.o.bler sight.

Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpa.s.ses all other regions of the earth.

[Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]

That same day we met a couple of Kobuk youths on their way to the Koyukuk, and they gave us the greatest gift it was in the power of man to give us--a trail! There is no finer ill.u.s.tration of the mutual service of man to man than the meeting of parties going opposite ways across the unbroken snows. Each is at once conferring and receiving the greatest of favours, without loss to himself is heaping benefit on the other; is, it may be--has often been--saving the other, and being himself saved. No more hunting and peering for blazes, no more casting about hither and thither when open stretches are crossed; no more three times back and forth to beat the snow down--twenty miles a day instead of ten or twelve--the boys' trail meant all that to us. And our trail meant almost as much to them. So we were rejoiced to see them, st.u.r.dy youths of sixteen or seventeen, making the journey all by themselves. My heart goes out to these adventurous Kobuks, amiable, light-hearted, industrious; keen hunters, following the mountain-sheep far up where the Indian will not go; adepts in all the wilderness arts; heirs of the uncharted arctic wastes, and occupying their heritage. If I were not a white man I would far rather be one of these nomadic inland Esquimaux than any other native I know of.

That same day we crossed two headwater forks of the Kokochatna, as the Kobuks call it, or the Hogatzitna as the Koyukuks call it, or the Hog River, as the white men call it, a tributary of the Koyukuk that comes in about one hundred and fifty miles below the Alatna. As we came down a steep descent to the little east fork, it showed so picturesque and attractive, with clumps of fine open timber on an island, that it remains in my mind one of the many places from the Grand Canon of the Colorado almost to the Grand Canon of the Noatak, where I should like to have a lodge in the vast wilderness.

We had but crossed the west fork when we knew that we were close to the watershed between the Kobuk and the Koyukuk, between the streams that fall into Kotzebue Sound and those that fall by the Koyukuk and the Yukon Rivers into Bering Sea; and because it seemed a capital geographic feature, it was disappointing that it was so inconspicuous. Indeed, we were not sure which of two ridges was the actual divide. Beyond those ridges there was no question, for the ground sloped down to Lake Noyutak, a body of water some three and a half miles in length and of varying breadth that drains into the Kobuk. Here in a cabin we found three more young Kobuks, and spent the night, getting our first view of the Kobuk River next day, not from an eminence, as I had hoped, but only as we came down a bank through thick timber and opened suddenly upon it.

By the pedometer I made the portage forty-six miles.

[Sidenote: THE KOBUK RIVER]

The upper Kobuk is a picturesque river, the timber being especially large and handsome for interior Alaska. We reached it just above the mouth of the Reed River, tributary from the north. The weather was warm--too warm for good travelling--the thermometer standing at 15, 20, and one day even 30 above zero all day long, so that we were all bareheaded and in our s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. From time to time, as the course of the river varied, we had distant views of the rocky mountains of the Endicott Range, or, as it might be written, the Endicott Range of the Rocky Mountains, for such, in fact, it is--the western and final extension of the great American cordillera. On the other side of those mountains was the Noatak River, flowing roughly parallel with the Kobuk, and discharging into the same arm of the sea.

The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to read through again _The Cloister and the Hearth_ and _Westward Ho!_ with much pleasure, quite agreeing with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers in literature to me than Denys of Burgundy, with his "_Courage, camarades, le diable est mort!_" This matter of winter reading is a difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is to take two or three India-paper volumes of cla.s.sics that have been read before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our degenerate eyes.

The days were much lengthened now, and the worst of the winter was done. There would still be cold and storm, but hardly again of the same intensity and duration. When the traveller gets well into February he feels that the back of the winter is broken, for nothing can take from him the advantage of the ever-lengthening days, the ever-climbing sun.

On the afternoon of the third day on the Kobuk we reached a cabin occupied by two white men, the first we had seen since we left Bettles, and we were the first white men they had seen all the winter. They were waiting for the spring, having a prospecting trip in view; simply spending the winter eating up their grub. There was nothing whatever to read in the cabin, and they had been there since the freeze-up! They welcomed us, and we stayed overnight with them, and that night there was a total eclipse of the moon, of which we had a fine view. We had an almanac which gave the time of totality at Sitka, and we knew the approximate longitude of our position, so we were able to set our watches by it.

The next two days are noted in my diary as two of the pleasantest days of the whole journey--two of the pleasantest days I ever spent anywhere, I think. A clear, cloudless sky, brilliant suns.h.i.+ne, white mountain peaks all about us, gave picture after picture, and the warm, balmy air made travelling a delight. There are few greater pleasures than that of penetrating into a new country, with continually changing views of beauty, under kindly conditions of weather and trail. In the yellow rays of the early sun, the spruce on the river bank looked like a screen of carved bronze, while the slender stems of birches in front of the spruce looked like an inlaying of old ivory upon the bronze, the whole set upon its pedestal of marble-like snow. The second day we took a portage of nine or ten miles across a barren flat and struck the river again just below a remarkable stretch of bank a mile or so in length, with never a tree or a bush or so much as the smallest shrub growing on it. Thick timber above suddenly ceased, thick timber below suddenly began again, and this bare bank reached back through open, barren flat to a low pa.s.s in the mountains. It was a bank of solid ice, so we were told later, and I remembered to have heard of ice bluffs on the Kobuk, and wished that the portage had struck the river above this spot instead of below it, that there might have been opportunity to examine it.