Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled Part 9

It was our great good fortune to find this man at this spot. A steamboat he had signalled as she entered the mouth of the Koyukuk had pa.s.sed him by unheeded, and he had been left to make his way six hundred miles up to the diggings, with his winter's outfit in a poling boat. He had accomplished more than half the task, and, warned by the approach of winter, had stopped at this place a few days before we reached it, and had begun the building of a little cabin; meaning to prospect the creek, which had taken his eye as having a promising look. The cabin we helped him finish was the twenty-first cabin he had built in Alaska, he informed us.

There is something very impressive about the quiet, self-reliant, unrecorded hardihood of the cla.s.s of which this man was an excellent type. We asked him why he had no partner, and he said he had had several partners, but they all snored, and he would not live with a man that snored. He had prospected and mined in many districts of Alaska during nearly twenty years. Once he had sold a claim for a few hundred dollars that had yielded many thousands to the purchaser, and that was as near wealth as he had ever come. But he had always made a living, always had enough money at the close of the summer to buy his winter's "outfit" and try his luck somewhere else.

[Sidenote: THE PROSPECTOR]

Singly, or in pairs, men of this type have wandered all over this vast country: preceding the government surveys, preceding the professional explorer, settling down for a winter on some creek that caught their fancy, building a cabin, thawing down a few holes to bed-rock, sometimes taking out a little gold, more often finding nothing, going in the summer to some old-established camp to work for wages, or finding employment as deck-hand on a steamboat.

With an axe and an auger they have dotted their rough habitations all over the country; with a pick and a shovel and a gold pan they have tested the gravels of innumerable creeks. They know the drainage slopes and the practicable mountain pa.s.ses, the haunts of the moose and the time and direction of the caribou's wanderings. The boats they have built have pushed their noses to the heads of all navigable streams; the sleds they have made have furrowed the remotest snows. In the arts of the wilderness they are the equal of the native inhabitant; in endurance and enterprise far his superior. The more one learns by experience and observation what life of this sort means, and realises the demands it makes upon a man's resourcefulness, upon his physique, upon his good spirits, upon his fort.i.tude, the more one's admiration grows for the silent, strong men who have gone out all over this land and pitted themselves successfully against its savage wildness. Often in stress for the necessaries of life, there are yet no men as a cla.s.s more free-handed and generous; trained to do everything for themselves, there are none more willing to help others.

It is no small task to pull a four-ton boat out of the water with only such wilderness tackle as we could devise. We made ways of soft timbers, squaring and smoothing them; we cut down many trees for rollers; we dug and graded the beach. Then, having altogether unloaded her and built a high cache of poles and a platform for her stuff, and having chopped the ice from all around her, we rigged a Spanish windla.s.s and wound that boat out of the water with the half-inch cable she carried, and up on the ways and well into the mouth of the little creek. Then we levelled her up and thoroughly braced her and put her canvas cover all over her, and she lay there until spring and took no harm at all.

Arthur had meantime been making a sled of birch, intending to pull it himself while the doctor and I pulled a Yukon sled borrowed from our friend the prospector. By the 6th of October all our dispositions were made for departure, and the ice seemed strong enough to warrant trusting ourselves to it; but we waited another two days, the thermometer still reaching a minimum each night somewhere around zero. When we said good-bye to our friend Martin Nelson (sometimes one wonders if anywhere else in the world can be found men as kind and helpful to strangers) and started on our journey, it soon appeared that Arthur's sled was more hindrance than help. There was no material to iron the runners save strips of tin can, and these could not be beaten so smooth that they did not drag and cut on the ice. So the load was transferred to our sled and the little sled abandoned, and we took turns at the harness. This was the order of the journey: one man went ahead with an axe to test the ice; one man put the rope trace about his shoulders; one man pushed at the handle-bars which had been affixed to the sled. It was fortunate that amidst the equipment on the launch were two pairs of ice-creepers.

Without them any sort of pulling and pus.h.i.+ng on the glare ice would have been impossible.

We soon found that the bend in which we had frozen was no sort of index of the general condition of the river. Much of it was still wide open, and every elbow between bends was piled high with rough ice from pressure jams. There was sh.o.r.e ice, however, even in the open bends, along which we were able to creep; and, though the ice-jams gave considerable trouble, yet we did very well the first day and camped at dark with eighteen or nineteen miles to our credit, in the presence of a great, red, smoky sunset and a glorious alpenglow on a distant snow mountain.

The next day was full of risks and difficulties. We were to learn more about the varieties and vagaries of ice on that journey than many winters' travel on older ice would teach.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE START OVER THE "FIRST ICE."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ROUGH GOING."]

[Sidenote: THE START]

At times, for a few hundred yards, the sled would glide with little effort over smooth, polished ice; then would come a long sand-bar, the side of which we had to hug close, and the ice upon it was what is called "sh.e.l.l-ice," through several layers of which we broke at every step. As the river fell, each night had left a thin sheet of ice underneath the preceding night's ice, and the foot crashed through the layers and the sled runners cut through them down to the gravel and sand at the bottom. Then would come another smooth stretch on which we made good time. But as we advanced up the river the current was swifter and swifter and the ice conditions grew steadily worse. Here was a steep-cut bank with just about eighteen or twenty inches of ice adhering to it and the black, rus.h.i.+ng water beyond. We must either get our load along that shelf or unload the sled and pack everything over the face of a rocky bluff. Arthur pa.s.sed over it first, testing gently with the axe, and found it none too strong. But the alternative was so toilsome that we resolved to take the chance. The doctor put the trace over his shoulders, Arthur took the handle-bars, while I climbed to a ledge of the rocks and, with a rope made of a pair of camel's-hair puttees unwound for the purpose and fastened to the sled, took all the weight I could and eased the sled over the worst place where the ice sloped to the water. If the ice had broken I might have held the sled from sinking until one of the others came to me, or I might not; the boys would probably have gone in too. It was a most risky spot and the sort of chance no one would think of taking under ordinary circ.u.mstances. As it was, the ice broke under Arthur's feet, and only by throwing his weight on the sled did he save himself a ducking. But we got the load safely across.

A good run of perhaps a mile, and then we had to go back at least half a mile, for the ice played out altogether on our side of the river as we reached the Batzakaket, and there was open water in the middle. To reach the sh.o.r.e ice that was continuous on the other side, we had to "double"

the open water. With such varying fortune the day pa.s.sed, and we camped on the level ice of a little creek tributary to the right bank, having made perhaps another nineteen miles.

When I awoke in the morning my heart sank at the tiny, creeping patter of fine snow on the silk tent. Snow was one thing I greatly dreaded, for there was not a pair of snow-shoes amongst us! A little snow would not do much harm, but if once snow began to fall we might have a foot or two before it ceased, and then we should be in bad case. It stopped before noon, but the half-inch that fell made the sled drag much heavier. The actual force to be exerted was not the most laborious feature of pulling that sled; it was the jerk, jerk, jerk on the shoulders. A dog's four legs give him much smoother traction than a man's two legs give, just as a four-cylinder engine will turn a propeller with much less vibration than a two-cylinder engine. Every step forward gave an impulse that spent itself before the next impulse was given, and the result was that the shoulders grew sore.

We came that morning to the longest and roughest ice-jam we had so far encountered. It was as though a thousand bulls had been turned loose in a mammoth plate-gla.s.s warehouse. Jagged slabs of ice upended everywhere in the most riotous confusion, and it was impossible to pick any way amongst them, so a man had to go ahead and hew a path. It was while thus engaged that the doctor fell and injured his knee so severely on a sharp ice point that he hobbled in pain the rest of the trip. This was a very serious matter to us, for, though he insisted on still taking his trick at the traces, his effectiveness as a motive power was much diminished; and we had no sooner thus hewed and smashed our way through that jam than we had to hew and smash it across to the other side again in our search for pa.s.sage.

[Sidenote: "BY THE BACK OF THE FACE"]

Then we came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve of the river with open water and bad sh.o.r.e ice, we went through a dry slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only known then what we know now we would have cut down and split some saplings and bound them over the iron, and so have saved three fourths of that labour.

[Sidenote: BEAR MEAT AND BEANS]

So the day's run was short, though the most exhausting yet, and we were all thoroughly tired out when we pitched the tent. I have note of a great supper of bear meat and beans, the meat the spoil of our friend the prospector's gun. It is one of the compensations of human nature that the satisfaction of appet.i.te increases in pleasure in proportion to the bodily labour that is done. With food abundant and at choice, I do not like bear meat and will not eat beans. Yet my diary bears special note of the delicious meal they furnished on this occasion. Put any philosopher in the traces, or set him ahead of the dog team on show-shoes, breaking trail all day, and towards evening it is odds that his mind is not occupied with deep speculations about the infinite and the absolute, but rather with the question of what he will have for supper. Particularly should the grub be a little short, should fresh meat give out, or, above all, should sugar be "shy," it is astonis.h.i.+ng how one's mind runs on eating and what elaborate imaginary repasts one partakes of. Yet of all food that a man ever eats there is none that is so relished and gives such clear gustatory pleasure as the plain, rough fare of the camp--provided it be well cooked. Greatly as we were in need of sleep, we got little, for the doctor's knee pained him all night and poor Arthur developed a raging toothache that did not yield until carbolic acid had been thrice applied.

Soon after we started the next day, the river narrowed and swept round a series of mountain bluffs and we began to have the gloomiest expectations of trouble. It seemed certain that ice would fail us for pa.s.sage, and we would have to pack our sled and its load by slow relays over the mountain. But to our delight we pa.s.sed between the bluffs on good, firm, smooth ice, and it was not until we emerged on the flat beyond that our difficulty began. So it is again and again on the trail.

Almost always it is the unexpected that happens; almost always it is something quite different from what our apprehensions have dwelt upon that arises to hinder and distress us. A tongue of level land that struck far out into the water, a cut mud bank with a current so swift that no ice at all had formed along it, interposed an obstacle that it took hours to circ.u.mvent. We had to leave the sled and cut a trail through the brush for half a mile along this peninsula in order to reach a stretch of the river where the ice was resumed, and the little snow that had fallen being quite insufficient to give the sled good pa.s.sage, we had an exceedingly arduous job in getting it across.

A mile or two of good going brought us in view of the smoke of a human habitation. What a blessed sight often and often this waving column of blue smoke in the distance is! Sometimes it means life itself to the Alaskan musher, and it always means warmth, shelter, food, companions.h.i.+p, a.s.sistance; all that one human being can bring to another. "The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn" never "breaks on the traveller faint and astray" with half the rejoicing that comes with the first sight of mere smoke. "I believe I see smoke," cried Arthur, with the quick vision of the native. "Where? Where?" we eagerly inquired, and the doctor left the handle-bars and limped forward to the boy ahead with the axe. "Away yonder on that bank," pointed Arthur. "I see it! I see it!" the doctor shouted; "we're coming to a house, we're coming to people!" The trip was a severe apprentices.h.i.+p to Alaskan life for a man straight from the New York hospitals, although before the accident to his knee I had declared that if only they could be trained to live on dry fish I thought a team of young doctors would haul a sled very well. He was delighted at coming upon the first inhabited house we had seen since we helped Nelson to build his little cabin--and _that_ was only the second inhabited house in three hundred miles.

[Sidenote: BREAKING THROUGH]

But, perhaps because we grew less cautious in our excitement, almost immediately after we had spied the smoke of the cabin we got into one of the worst messes of the whole trip. Arthur had pushed ahead and we had followed with a spurt, and almost at the same time all three of us became aware that we were on dangerous ice. Arthur cried, "The ice is breaking; go back!" just as we began to feel it swaying under our feet.

I shouted to the doctor, "Go _on_ to the bank quick!" and pushed with all my might, and we managed to make a few yards more towards shallow water, over ice that bent and cracked at every step, before it gave way and let down the sled and the men into two feet of water. Arthur had run safely over the breaking ice and had gained the bank, and as I write, in my mind's eye I can see the doctor, who had been duly instructed in the elementary lessons of the trail, standing in the water and calling to Arthur: "Make a fire quick; make a fire. I'm all wet!"

But it was not necessary to make a fire, for the thermometer was no lower than 10 or 15 above zero, and the chief trouble was not the wetting of our legs but the wetting of the contents of the sled. Along the bank was stronger ice, and we managed, though not without much difficulty, to get the sled upon it and to make our way to the Indian cabin.

As soon as old "Atler" (I have never been quite sure of what white man's name that is a corruption) knew who we were, his hospitality, which had been ready enough at first sight, became most cordial and expansive. While we pulled off our wet clothing his wife hung it up to dry and had the kettle on and some tea making, and he and Arthur got out our wet bedding and festooned it about the cabin. Most fortunately the things that would have suffered most from water did not get wet. So there we lay all the afternoon, having made no more than six miles, and there we lay all the next day, which was Sunday.

There was a sort of awful interest that centred upon one member of this family, a boy of seven or eight years. The previous spring he had killed his uncle by the accidental discharge of a .22 rifle, shooting him through the heart. The gun had been brought in loaded and c.o.c.ked and had been set in a corner of the cabin, and the child, playing with it, had pulled the trigger. The carelessness of Indians with firearms is the frequent cause of terrible accidents like this. The child was still too young to realise what he had done, but one fancies that later it will throw a gloom on his life.

To my great relief and satisfaction I was able to arrange here for a young Indian man to accompany us with his one dog. He was a native of those parts and knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed, in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse rather than better, and Arthur was suffering the return of an old rheumatism in his leg. I was the only sound member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual wearing of the crampons. We were now not quite half-way--some sixty miles lay behind us and sixty-five before--and we had been travelling four days.

[Sidenote: "ONE-EYED WILLIAM"]

Divine service being done on Sunday morning, the whole of it well interpreted by Arthur to the great satisfaction of the Indians, he and "One-Eyed William," our recruit, started out to survey to-morrow's route. In this reconnaissance William broke through some slush ice at the greatest depth of the river in seeking a safe place to cross, and, had Arthur not been with him, would almost certainly have drowned, for the current was very swift and the man, like most Indians, unable to swim a stroke;--though, indeed, swimming is of little avail for escape out of such predicament and is a poor dependence in these icy waters winter or summer. More beans boiled and a batch of biscuits baked against our departure, and evening prayer said and interpreted, we were ready for bed again.

Our visit was a great delight to old Atler. An inflamed eye was much relieved by the doctor's ministrations, and the natural piety which he shares with most Indians was gratified at the opportunity of wors.h.i.+p and instruction. A good old man, according to his lights, I take Atler to be, well known for benevolence of disposition and particularly priding himself on being a friend of the white man. He told us of one unworthy representative of that race he had helped a year ago. The man had come out of the Hogatzitna (Hog River) country, entirely out of food, himself and a couple of dogs nigh to starvation, and Atler had taken care of him for several days while he recuperated and had given him grub and dog fish enough to get him to Bettles, one hundred and thirty miles away, where he could purchase supplies. The old Indian had robbed his own family's little winter stock of "white-man's grub" that this stranger might be provided, and had never heard a word from him since, though he had promised to make return when he reached Bettles.

Unfortunately Alaska's white population is sprinkled with men like this, men without heart and without conscience, and it is precisely such rascals who are loudest in their contemptuous talk of the Indians. It is such men who chop down the woodwork of cabins rather than be troubled to take the axe into the forest a few rods away, who depart in the morning without making kindling and shavings, careless how other travellers may fare so themselves be warm without labour; who make "easy money" in the summer-time by dropping down the Yukon with a boat-load of "rot-gut"

whisky, leaving drunkenness and riot at every village they pa.s.s; who beget children of the native women and regard them no more than a dog does his pups, indifferent that their own flesh and blood go cold and hungry. They are the curse and disgrace of Alaska, and they often go long time insolent and unwhipped because our poor lame law is not nimble enough to overtake them; "to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever," one's indignation is sometimes disposed to thunder savagely with Saint Jude; and indeed there needs a future punishment to redress the balance in this country.

[Sidenote: FIDO]

At break of day our reinforced company was off, Arthur and "One-Eyed William" going ahead to sound the ice and pick the way, the dog "Fido"

(such a name for a Siwash dog!) and myself in the traces, the doctor at the handle-bars. The rest had benefited the doctor's knee, but walking was still painful and he needed the support of the handle-bars all day.

What a great difference that one strong, willing little dog made! His steady pulling kept the sled in motion and relieved one's shoulders of the galling jerk of the rope at every step. The going was "not too bad,"

as they say here, all day, though it carried one rather severe disappointment. William had told us of a portage he thought we could take that would cut off eight or nine miles of the river; but when we reached it the snow upon it proved insufficient to afford a pa.s.sage, for it was a rough n.i.g.g.e.rhead flat, and we had to swing around the outer edges of the great curves the river makes, where alone was ice, with trouble and danger at every crossing.

The decision as to whether we should halt or go forward, as to whether ice was safe or unsafe, as to whether we should cross the river or stay where we were--every decision that concerned the secure advance of the party--I put wholly upon William, and would not permit myself or any other to question his judgment or to argue it with him. There was no sense in half-measures; this young man knew the river as none of us did, knew ice as none of us did, and we must put ourselves entirely in his hands. The debate that had become usual at every doubtful course arose at the portage just referred to, but it was at once suppressed by the announcement that hereafter no one could have the floor but William, and that when he had spoken the matter was settled. Day by day I think we all came to a keener realisation of how very dangerous a journey we were making; it lay heavily on my mind that I had brought these two young men--whether by mishap or mismanagement--into real peril of their lives.

Again and again I blamed myself for the delays that had deferred our start up the Koyukuk, again and again I wished that we had waited longer before leaving the _Pelican's_ winter quarters. I had even contemplated a week's stay at Atler's, to give the river a chance to get into better shape, but unless there came a very much sharper spell than we had had so far a week would not make much difference, and our grub began to run short and Atler was none too well supplied. So it seemed best to push on.

The next day was full of toil and difficulty. There was no good ice to make fine time over that day. Starting in the grey dawn, for mile after mile we had to haul the sled over crumbly sh.e.l.l-ice that broke through to gravel; and when the sh.e.l.l-ice was done we came to a new bend where a rapid current washed a steep mud bank. There was just a little shelf of ice, but the brush overhung it so that the pa.s.sage of the sled was not possible. William and Arthur started with the axes to clear away the brush, but it seemed to me foolish to do that unless the ledge held out and led somewhere, for the turn of the bank threw it out of sight. So they went forward cautiously along that ledge to the end--and an end they found, sure enough, so that had we followed the axemen with the sled we should have had to creep all the way back again. There was nothing for it but to cut another land trail on a bench that we could reach where the sled was stopped but that could not be reached at all farther on. A long and slow and laborious job it was, that took most of the morning, to cut that trail and then get the load over it to ice again.

By noon we were opposite the Red Mountain, one of the well-known Koyukuk landmarks, and on the site of an old Indian fis.h.i.+ng camp. William and Arthur had made a great fire when we came up, and we heated some beans and made some tea and ate lunch. A mile farther on was the cabin of a white man, and we paid him a brief visit and got a little tea from him, for ours was nearly gone. It did me good to hear him sing the praises of Deaconess Carter, the trained nurse at the mission. She had taken him in, crippled with rheumatism, and had cured him. Already the new mission was proving a boon to whites as well as natives. We made no more than four or five miles farther when, coming to spruce with no more in sight for a long distance, we pitched the tent, all very tired.

That night the thermometer went to 5 below zero, the coldest weather of the season so far. As a consequence the next day we had a new and very disagreeable trouble. The cold weather, by increasing the amount of running ice in the still open stretches, had brought about a jam that had raised the level of the water and caused an overflow of the ice--a very common phenomenon of a closing river. We picked our way wet-foot much of the day, and towards evening came to a complete _impa.s.se_ in the middle of the river, with open water in front and on one hand, and new thin ice on the other. So we had to turn round and go back again a long way, the mid-river being the only traversable place, until, when it seemed that we should have to go round another bend to reach a crossing, Arthur proposed that he and William, who wore mukluks, should carry the doctor and me, who wore moccasins across the overflow, and then rush the sled across; and this we did, wetting its contents somewhat, however. We camped immediately, for we had landed on impa.s.sable gravel.

[Sidenote: THE RED MOUNTAIN]

That night the thermometer went to 20 below zero, and we took good hope that the cold, which began to approach the real cold of winter, would put an end to overflow; but, on the contrary, it only aggravated the trouble. For the first mile or two there was nothing for it but to go through it, and at 20 below it is a miserable business to be wading in moccasins even for an hour. We had rearranged our load so that it stood up somewhat higher, but we could not avoid wetting the things on the bottom of the sled, and the ice formed about it very inconveniently.

Moreover, the little dog, who had a great dislike to wetting his feet, began to give us a good deal of trouble, and at one time nothing but the admirable presence of mind and prompt action of William saved us from losing our whole load. We had reached a strip of new, dry ice formed the night before, with black, rus.h.i.+ng water on the left, towards which the slippery surface sloped. Presently as we advanced we began to encounter a little overflow water, coming from the bank on the right, seeping up between the ice and the bank; and that dog, to avoid wetting his feet in the overflow, deliberately turned towards the open water and set the sled sliding in the same direction. Without the crampons, which we had not used for the past few days, it was impossible to hold the sled against the dog's traction, and in another moment we should have lost everything, for the dog paid no heed to our voices, when William with a blow of his axe cut the rope by which the dog pulled, and, grasping the sled and throwing himself full length on the ice, managed to stop it on the very brink of the water. It was a close shave, but once more we were safe; and the doctor, in the exuberance of his grat.i.tude, said that night: "If William wants a gla.s.s eye I'll send to New York to get him one." But when William learned that the gla.s.s eye was a mere matter of looks and would in no wise improve his vision, he lost interest in it.

Looks do not count for much amongst the Koyukuk Indians.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARTHUR AND DOCTOR BURKE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAINT JOHN'S-IN-THE-WILDERNESS, ALLAKAKET, KOYUKUK RIVER.]

That night was a long way off yet, however; we had other risks to run, other labours. Here were two islands in the river, and the current, running like a mill-race and burdened with ice cakes, swept around the sh.o.r.e of one of them leaving the pa.s.sage between them quite dry. There was no sh.o.r.e ice at all where the channel was, and it was so ugly-looking a reach that had there been any there I am sure we should not have ventured it. There was nothing for it but to drag the sled half a mile over the gravel, and we did it, the most heart-breaking labour of the whole trip. It took us exactly an hour to make that half mile.

William did not know the trick of the split willows either, so we all four of us sweated for our ignorance. Shortly after, our guide pointed out the spot where poor Ericson's frozen body was found, two years and eight months before.

[Sidenote: A NARROW ESCAPE]