Harper's Round Table, May 28, 1895 Part 3

And at length, when the spring-time came over the land, Bert Woolley and Kit Bundy one evening helped off the cars a very pale but very radiant lad, while the former said,

"See, Limpy, there are all the beach-combers coming to welcome you home."

Cordially the rough youths crowded about their young comrade, healed and restored as though by a miracle, and shook him warmly by the hand, wondering to see in a slight limp the only trace of his former lameness.

But the throng parted as an auburn head suddenly flashed through their midst, and Eileen, throwing her arms around her brother, cried:

"Oh, Jem, Jem! this is the happy day for sure--to see you walking on your own two feet, while the father has signed the pledge, and a pair of luck-birds are building their nest in the big pine-tree right forninst our door."

SNOW-SHOES AND SLEDGES.

BY KIRK MUNROE.

CHAPTER XXV.

SERGE DISCOVERS A CURIOUS CAVERN.

At the point where our travellers had again struck the Yukon, nearly 1500 miles from its mouth, it was still a mighty stream two miles wide.

Above this they found it bounded on both sides by mountains that often approached to its very waters, where, in sheer precipices hundreds of feet high, they found gigantic palisades, similar to those of the Hudson, which are known as the "Upper Ramparts." On the lower river the sledge party had journeyed over a smooth surface, on which were few obstructions. Their course from Anvik had at first been due north, then northeast, then east, and was now due south, the source of the Yukon towards which they were now travelling being some ten degrees south of its great arctic bend.

Owing to this, they now found themselves confronted by the hardest kind of sledging over rough hummocky ice that was often piled in chaotic ridges twenty and thirty feet high. As the river freezes first at its most northerly point, and this belt of solid ice is gradually extended south, or back toward its source, the floating cakes of its upper reaches, borne by the swift current, are piled on the ever-advancing barrier in confused ma.s.ses that stretch across the river like windrows.

In the spring, when the ice breaks up and is hurled irresistibly down stream on the swollen current, the same effect is reproduced on a vastly increased scale. Then the upper river breaks first, and a sudden rise of water from some great tributary starts the ice over the still solid barrier below. The huge cakes slide, jam, push, and crash over the still unbroken ice sheet, until they are piled in a vast gleaming ma.s.s seventy or eighty feet in height, from a quarter of a mile to one mile in length, and extending from bank to bank.

This mighty gorge must give way at length, and when it does it goes with a roaring fury that is terrifying and grand beyond description. After grinding and tearing onward for several miles, or perhaps less than one, the furious impulse is again checked by another solid barrier, which must in turn be broken down and swept away, its added weight giving increased energy to the mighty force.

So the ice crashes its resistless way down the whole Yukon Valley to Bering Sea, two thousand miles distant, sweeping everything before it, mowing down vast areas of forest, submerging islands, tearing out banks, and leaving everywhere traces of its terrible progress in the shape of huge ice cakes, weighing many tons, stranded high above ordinary water level.

Although Phil Ryder and his companions were not to witness this grand exhibition of one of nature's mightiest forces, they were sadly inconvenienced and delayed by the uncomfortable fas.h.i.+on in which their frozen highway had been constructed some months earlier. If they could have left the river and followed along its banks, they would have done so; but this was out of the question, not only on account of their rugged character, but because on their timbered portions the snow lay many feet in depth, while from the river it had been so blown by strong north winds that for long stretches the ice was barely covered. This enabled the sledge men to walk without snow-shoes, which was a great comfort to all three, but especially to Jalap Coombs, who had not yet learned to use the netted frames with "ease and fluency," as Phil said.

To this light-hearted youth the sight of his sailor friend wrestling with the difficulties of inland navigation as practised in arctic regions afforded a never-failing source of mirth. A single glance at Jalap's lank figure enveloped in firs, with his weather-beaten face peering from the recesses of a hair-fringed hood, was enough at any time to make Phil laugh. Jalap on snow-shoes that, in spite of all his efforts, would slide in every direction but the one desired, and Jalap gazing at a frosty world through a pair of wooden snow-goggles, were sights that even sober-sided Serge found humorous.

But funniest of all was to see Jalap drive a dog-team. This he was now obliged to do, for, while they still had three sledges, they had been unable to procure any Indians at Forty Mile to take the places of Kurilla and Chitsah. So while Phil, who was now an expert in the art of dog-driving, and could handle a six-yard whip like a native, took turns with Serge in breaking the road, Jalap was always allowed to bring up the rear. His dogs had nothing to fear from the whip, except, indeed, when it tripped him up so that he tell on top of them, but they cringed and whined beneath the torrent of incomprehensible sea terms incessantly poured forth by the strange master, who talked to them as though they were so many lubberly sailors.

"Port your h.e.l.lum! Hard a-port!" he would roar to the accompaniment of flying chunks of ice that he could throw with amazing certainty of aim.

Then, "Steady! So! Start a sheet and give her a rap full. Now keep her so! Keep her so! D'ye hear! Let her fall off a fraction of a p'int and I'll rake ye fore and aft. Now, then, bullies, pull all together. Yo-ho, heave! No sojering! Ah, you will, will ye, ye furry sea-cook! Then take that, and stow it in your bread-locker. Shake your hay-seed and climb--_climb_, I tell ye. Avast heaving!" And so on, hour after hour, while the dogs would jump and pull and tangle their "running rigging,"

as Jalap named the trace-thongs, and the two boys would shout with laughter.

But while the journey thus furnished something of merriment, it was also filled with tribulations. So bitter was the cold that their bloodless lips were often too stiff for laughter or even for speech. So rough was the way, that they rarely made more than eight or ten miles in a day of exhausting labor. Several dogs broke their legs amid the chaotic ice blocks of the ever-recurring ridges, and had to be shot. Along the palisaded Ramparts it was difficult to find timbered places in which to camp. Their dog feed was running low, and there was none to be had in the wretched native villages that they pa.s.sed at long intervals.

At length the setting sun of one evening found them at a point where the river, narrowed to a few hundred yards, was bounded on one side by a lofty precipice of rock, and on the other by a steeply sloping bank that, devoid of timber, seemed to descend from an open plateau. They halted beside a single log of drift that, half embedded in ice, was the only available bit of firewood in sight. It was a bleak and bitter place in which to spend an arctic night, and they s.h.i.+vered in antic.i.p.ation of what they were to suffer during its long hours.

"I am going to climb to the top of the bank," said Serge, "and see if I can't find some more wood. If I do, I'll roll it down; so look out!"

Suiting his action to his words the active lad started with a run that carried him a few yards up the steep ascent. It was so abrupt that he was on the point of sliding back, and dug his heel sharply into the snow to secure a hold. At the same instant he uttered a cry, threw up his arms, and dropped from the sight of his astonished companions as though he had fallen down a well.

Before they could make a move toward his rescue they were more astounded than ever to hear his voice, somewhat m.u.f.fled, but apparently close beside them.

"I'm all right!" he cried, cheerily. "That is, I think I am, and I believe I can cut my way out. Don't try to climb the bank. Just wait a minute."

Then the bank began to tremble as though shaken by a gentle earthquake, and suddenly a hand clutching a knife shot out from it so close to Jalap Coombs that the startled sailor leaped back to avoid it, stumbled over a sledge, and plunged headlong among his own team of dogs, who were lying in the snow beyond, patiently waiting to be unharnessed. By the time the yelling, howling ma.s.s of man and dogs was disentangled and separated, Serge had emerged from the mysterious bank, and stood looking as though he did not quite understand what had happened. Behind him was a black opening into which Phil was peering with the liveliest curiosity.

"Of all the miracles I ever heard of this is the strangest!" he cried.

"What does it mean, old man?"

"I don't exactly know," answered Serge: "but I rather think it is a moss blanket. Anyhow, that's an elegant place to crawl into out of the cold.

Seems to be plenty of wood too."

Serge was right in his conjecture. What appeared to be the river-bank was merely a curtain of tough, closely compacted Alaskan moss, closely resembling peat in its structure, one foot thick, and reaching from the crest of an overhanging bank to the edge of the river. It had thus held together, and fallen to its present position when the river undermined and swept away the earth from beneath it. That it presented a sloping surface instead of hanging perpendicular was owing to a great number of timbers, the ends of which projected from the excavated bank behind it.

Serge had broken through the moss curtain, fallen between these timbers to the beach, and then cut his way out. Now, as he suggested, what better camping-place could they ask than the warm, dry, moss-enclosed s.p.a.ce from which he had just emerged.

"I never saw nor heard of anything so particularly and awfully jolly in all my life," p.r.o.nounced Phil, after the three travellers had entered this unique cavern, and started a fire by which they were enabled to see something of its strange interior. "And, I say, Serge, what a thoughtful scheme it was on your part to provide a chimney for the fire before you lighted it! See how the smoke draws up? If it wasn't for that hole in the roof I am afraid we should be driven out of here in short order.

But, h.e.l.lo, old man! Whew--w! what are you throwing bones on the fire for? It reminds me of your brimstone-and-feather experiment on Oonimak."

"Bones!" repeated Serge in surprise. "Are those bones? I thought they were dry sticks."

"I should say they were bones!" cried Phil, s.n.a.t.c.hing a couple of the offending objects from the fire. "And, sure as I live, this log I am sitting on is a bone too. Why, it's bigger than I am. It begins to look as though this place were some sort of a tomb. But there's plenty of wood. Let's throw on some more and light up."

"Toughest wood to cut I ever see," growled Jalap Coombs, who was hacking away at another half-buried log. "'Pears to be brittle, though, and splits easy," he added, dodging a sliver that broke off and flew by his head.

"Hold on!" cried Phil, picking up the sliver. "You'll ruin the axe.

That's another bone you're chopping. This place is a regular giants'

cemetery."

CHAPTER XXVI.

CAMPING 'MID PREHISTORIC BONES.

So strange and uncanny was the place in which our sledge party thus unexpectedly found themselves, that Phil was for exploring it, and attempting to determine its true character at once; but practical Serge persuaded him to wait until they had performed their regular evening duties, and eaten supper. "After that," he said, "we can explore all night if we choose."

So Phil turned his attention to the dogs, which he unharnessed and fed, while Serge prepared supper, and Jalap Coombs gathered a supply of firewood from the bleached timber ends projecting from the bank behind them. He tested each of these before cutting into it to make certain that it was not a bone, quant.i.ties of which were mingled with the timber.

The firewood that he thus collected exhibited several puzzling peculiarities. To begin with, it was so very tough and thoroughly lifeless that, as Jalap Coombs remarked, he didn't know but what bones would cut just as easy. When laid on the fire it was slow to ignite, and finally only smouldered, giving out little light, but yielding a great heat. As Serge said, it made one of the poorest fires to see by and one of the best to cook over that he had ever known.

Although in all their experience they had never enjoyed a more comfortable and thoroughly protected camping-place than this one, the lack of their usual cheerful blaze and their mysterious surroundings created a feeling of depression that caused them to eat supper in unusual silence. At its conclusion Serge picked up a freshly cut bit of the wood, and, holding it in as good a light as he could get, examined it closely.

"I never saw nor heard of any wood like this in all Alaska," he said at length. "Do you suppose this can be part of a buried forest that grew thousands of years ago?"

"I believe that's exactly what it is," replied Phil. "I expect it was some awfully prehistoric forest that was blown down by a prehistoric cyclone, and got covered with mud, somehow, and was just beginning to turn into coal when the ice age set in. Thus it has been preserved in cold storage ever since. It must have grown in one of the ages that one always likes to hear of, but hates to study about, a paleozoic or Silurian or post-tertiary, or one of those times. At any rate I expect it was a tropical forest, for they all were in those days."

"Then like as not these here is elephant's bones," remarked Jalap Coombs. "I were jest thinking as how this one had a look of ivory about it."

"They may be," a.s.sented Phil, dubiously, "but they must have belonged to pretty huge old elephants; for I don't believe Jumbo's bones would look like more than toothpicks alongside some of these. It is more likely that they belonged to hairy mammoths, or mastodons, or megatheriums, or plesiosauruses, or fellows like that."