Burning Daylight Page 4

  CHAPTER IV

  On the river, where was a packed trail and where snowshoes wereunnecessary, the dogs averaged six miles an hour. To keep up withthem, the two men were compelled to run. Daylight and Kama relievedeach other regularly at the gee-pole, for here was the hard work ofsteering the flying sled and of keeping in advance of it. The manrelieved dropped behind the sled, occasionally leaping upon it andresting.

  It was severe work, but of the sort that was exhilarating.

  They were flying, getting over the ground, making the most of thepacked trail. Later on they would come to the unbroken trail, wherethree miles an hour would constitute good going. Then there would beno riding and resting, and no running. Then the gee-pole would be theeasier task, and a man would come back to it to rest after havingcompleted his spell to the fore, breaking trail with the snowshoes forthe dogs. Such work was far from exhilarating also, they must expectplaces where for miles at a time they must toil over chaotic ice-jams,where they would be fortunate if they made two miles an hour. Andthere would be the inevitable bad jams, short ones, it was true, but sobad that a mile an hour would require terrific effort. Kama andDaylight did not talk. In the nature of the work they could not, norin their own natures were they given to talking while they worked. Atrare intervals, when necessary, they addressed each other inmonosyllables, Kama, for the most part, contenting himself with grunts.Occasionally a dog whined or snarled, but in the main the team keptsilent. Only could be heard the sharp, jarring grate of the steelrunners over the hard surface and the creak of the straining sled.

  As if through a wall, Daylight had passed from the hum and roar of theTivoli into another world--a world of silence and immobility. Nothingstirred. The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick. Nobreath of wind blew. Nor did the sap move in the hearts of the sprucetrees that forested the river banks on either hand. The trees,burdened with the last infinitesimal pennyweight of snow their branchescould hold, stood in absolute petrifaction. The slightest tremor wouldhave dislodged the snow, and no snow was dislodged. The sled was theone point of life and motion in the midst of the solemn quietude, andthe harsh churn of its runners but emphasized the silence through whichit moved.

  It was a dead world, and furthermore, a gray world. The weather wassharp and clear; there was no moisture in the atmosphere, no fog norhaze; yet the sky was a gray pall. The reason for this was that,though there was no cloud in the sky to dim the brightness of day,there was no sun to give brightness. Far to the south the sun climbedsteadily to meridian, but between it and the frozen Yukon intervenedthe bulge of the earth. The Yukon lay in a night shadow, and the dayitself was in reality a long twilight-light. At a quarter beforetwelve, where a wide bend of the river gave a long vista south, the sunshowed its upper rim above the sky-line. But it did not riseperpendicularly. Instead, it rose on a slant, so that by high noon ithad barely lifted its lower rim clear of the horizon. It was a dim,wan sun. There was no heat to its rays, and a man could gaze squarelyinto the full orb of it without hurt to his eyes. No sooner had itreached meridian than it began its slant back beneath the horizon, andat quarter past twelve the earth threw its shadow again over the land.

  The men and dogs raced on. Daylight and Kama were both savages so faras their stomachs were concerned. They could eat irregularly in timeand quantity, gorging hugely on occasion, and on occasion going longstretches without eating at all. As for the dogs, they ate but once aday, and then rarely did they receive more than a pound each of driedfish. They were ravenously hungry and at the same time splendidly incondition. Like the wolves, their forebears, their nutritive processeswere rigidly economical and perfect. There was no waste. The lastleast particle of what they consumed was transformed into energy.

  And Kama and Daylight were like them. Descended themselves from thegenerations that had endured, they, too, endured. Theirs was thesimple, elemental economy. A little food equipped them with prodigiousenergy. Nothing was lost. A man of soft civilization, sitting at adesk, would have grown lean and woe-begone on the fare that kept Kamaand Daylight at the top-notch of physical efficiency. They knew, asthe man at the desk never knows, what it is to be normally hungry allthe time, so that they could eat any time. Their appetites were alwayswith them and on edge, so that they bit voraciously into whateveroffered and with an entire innocence of indigestion.

  By three in the afternoon the long twilight faded into night. The starscame out, very near and sharp and bright, and by their light dogs andmen still kept the trail. They were indefatigable. And this was norecord run of a single day, but the first day of sixty such days.Though Daylight had passed a night without sleep, a night of dancingand carouse, it seemed to have left no effect. For this there were twoexplanations first, his remarkable vitality; and next, the fact thatsuch nights were rare in his experience. Again enters the man at thedesk, whose physical efficiency would be more hurt by a cup of coffeeat bedtime than could Daylight's by a whole night long of strong drinkand excitement.

  Daylight travelled without a watch, feeling the passage of time andlargely estimating it by subconscious processes. By what he consideredmust be six o'clock, he began looking for a camping-place. The trail,at a bend, plunged out across the river. Not having found a likelyspot, they held on for the opposite bank a mile away. But midway theyencountered an ice-jam which took an hour of heavy work to cross. Atlast Daylight glimpsed what he was looking for, a dead tree close bythe bank. The sled was run in and up. Kama grunted with satisfaction,and the work of making camp was begun.

  The division of labor was excellent. Each knew what he must do. Withone ax Daylight chopped down the dead pine. Kama, with a snowshoe andthe other ax, cleared away the two feet of snow above the Yukon ice andchopped a supply of ice for cooking purposes. A piece of dry birchbark started the fire, and Daylight went ahead with the cooking whilethe Indian unloaded the sled and fed the dogs their ration of driedfish. The food sacks he slung high in the trees beyond leaping-reachof the huskies. Next, he chopped down a young spruce tree and trimmedoff the boughs. Close to the fire he trampled down the soft snow andcovered the packed space with the boughs. On this flooring he tossedhis own and Daylight's gear-bags, containing dry socks and underwearand their sleeping-robes. Kama, however, had two robes of rabbit skinto Daylight's one.

  They worked on steadily, without speaking, losing no time. Each didwhatever was needed, without thought of leaving to the other the leasttask that presented itself to hand. Thus, Kama saw when more ice wasneeded and went and got it, while a snowshoe, pushed over by the lungeof a dog, was stuck on end again by Daylight. While coffee wasboiling, bacon frying, and flapjacks were being mixed, Daylight foundtime to put on a big pot of beans. Kama came back, sat down on theedge of the spruce boughs, and in the interval of waiting, mendedharness.

  "I t'ink dat Skookum and Booga make um plenty fight maybe," Kamaremarked, as they sat down to eat.

  "Keep an eye on them," was Daylight's answer.

  And this was their sole conversation throughout the meal. Once, with amuttered imprecation, Kama leaped away, a stick of firewood in hand,and clubbed apart a tangle of fighting dogs. Daylight, betweenmouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed intowater. The meal finished, Kama replenished the fire, cut more wood forthe morning, and returned to the spruce bough bed and hisharness-mending. Daylight cut up generous chunks of bacon and droppedthem in the pot of bubbling beans. The moccasins of both men were wet,and this in spite of the intense cold; so when there was no furtherneed for them to leave the oasis of spruce boughs, they took off theirmoccasins and hung them on short sticks to dry before the fire, turningthem about from time to time. When the beans were finally cooked,Daylight ran part of them into a bag of flour-sacking a foot and a halflong and three inches in diameter. This he then laid on the snow tofreeze. The remainder of the beans were left in the pot for breakfast.

  It was past nine o'clock, and they were ready for bed. The squabblinga
nd bickering among the dogs had long since died down, and the wearyanimals were curled in the snow, each with his feet and nose bunchedtogether and covered by his wolf's brush of a tail. Kama spread hissleeping-furs and lighted his pipe. Daylight rolled a brown-papercigarette, and the second conversation of the evening took place.

  "I think we come near sixty miles," said Daylight.

  "Um, I t'ink so," said Kama.

  They rolled into their robes, all-standing, each with a woolen Mackinawjacket on in place of the parkas[5] they had worn all day. Swiftly,almost on the instant they closed their eyes, they were asleep. Thestars leaped and danced in the frosty air, and overhead the coloredbars of the aurora borealis were shooting like great searchlights.

  In the darkness Daylight awoke and roused Kama. Though the aurorastill flamed, another day had begun. Warmed-over flapjacks,warmed-over beans, fried bacon, and coffee composed the breakfast. Thedogs got nothing, though they watched with wistful mien from adistance, sitting up in the snow, their tails curled around their paws.Occasionally they lifted one fore paw or the other, with a restlessmovement, as if the frost tingled in their feet. It was bitter cold,at least sixty-five below zero, and when Kama harnessed the dogs withnaked hands he was compelled several times to go over to the fire andwarm the numbing finger-tips. Together the two men loaded and lashedthe sled. They warmed their hands for the last time, pulled on theirmittens, and mushed the dogs over the bank and down to the river-trail.According to Daylight's estimate, it was around seven o'clock; but thestars danced just as brilliantly, and faint, luminous streaks ofgreenish aurora still pulsed overhead.

  Two hours later it became suddenly dark--so dark that they kept to thetrail largely by instinct; and Daylight knew that his time-estimate hadbeen right. It was the darkness before dawn, never anywhere moreconspicuous than on the Alaskan winter-trail.

  Slowly the gray light came stealing through the gloom, imperceptibly atfirst, so that it was almost with surprise that they noticed the vagueloom of the trail underfoot. Next, they were able to see thewheel-dog, and then the whole string of running dogs and snow-stretcheson either side. Then the near bank loomed for a moment and was gone,loomed a second time and remained. In a few minutes the far bank, amile away, unobtrusively came into view, and ahead and behind, thewhole frozen river could be seen, with off to the left a wide-extendingrange of sharp-cut, snow-covered mountains. And that was all. No sunarose. The gray light remained gray.

  Once, during the day, a lynx leaped lightly across the trail, under thevery nose of the lead-dog, and vanished in the white woods. The dogs'wild impulses roused. They raised the hunting-cry of the pack, surgedagainst their collars, and swerved aside in pursuit. Daylight, yelling"Whoa!" struggled with the gee-pole and managed to overturn the sledinto the soft snow. The dogs gave up, the sled was righted, and fiveminutes later they were flying along the hard-packed trail again. Thelynx was the only sign of life they had seen in two days, and it,leaping velvet-footed and vanishing, had been more like an apparition.

  At twelve o'clock, when the sun peeped over the earth-bulge, theystopped and built a small fire on the ice. Daylight, with the ax,chopped chunks off the frozen sausage of beans. These, thawed andwarmed in the frying-pan, constituted their meal. They had no coffee.He did not believe in the burning of daylight for such a luxury. Thedogs stopped wrangling with one another, and looked on wistfully. Onlyat night did they get their pound of fish. In the meantime they worked.

  The cold snap continued. Only men of iron kept the trail at such lowtemperatures, and Kama and Daylight were picked men of their races.But Kama knew the other was the better man, and thus, at the start, hewas himself foredoomed to defeat. Not that he slackened his effort orwillingness by the slightest conscious degree, but that he was beatenby the burden he carried in his mind. His attitude toward Daylight wasworshipful. Stoical, taciturn, proud of his physical prowess, he foundall these qualities incarnated in his white companion. Here was onethat excelled in the things worth excelling in, a man-god ready tohand, and Kama could not but worship--withal he gave no signs of it.No wonder the race of white men conquered, was his thought, when itbred men like this man. What chance had the Indian against such adogged, enduring breed? Even the Indians did not travel at such lowtemperatures, and theirs was the wisdom of thousands of generations;yet here was this Daylight, from the soft Southland, harder than they,laughing at their fears, and swinging along the trail ten and twelvehours a day. And this Daylight thought that he could keep up a day'space of thirty-three miles for sixty days! Wait till a fresh fall ofsnow came down, or they struck the unbroken trail or the rotten rim-icethat fringed open water.

  In the meantime Kama kept the pace, never grumbling, never shirking.Sixty-five degrees below zero is very cold. Since water freezes atthirty-two above, sixty-five below meant ninety-seven degrees belowfreezing-point. Some idea of the significance of this may be gained byconceiving of an equal difference of temperature in the oppositedirection. One hundred and twenty-nine on the thermometer constitutesa very hot day, yet such a temperature is but ninety-seven degreesabove freezing. Double this difference, and possibly some slightconception may be gained of the cold through which Kama and Daylighttravelled between dark and dark and through the dark.

  Kama froze the skin on his cheek-bones, despite frequent rubbings, andthe flesh turned black and sore. Also he slightly froze the edges ofhis lung-tissues--a dangerous thing, and the basic reason why a manshould not unduly exert himself in the open at sixty-five below. ButKama never complained, and Daylight was a furnace of heat, sleeping aswarmly under his six pounds of rabbit skins as the other did undertwelve pounds.

  On the second night, fifty more miles to the good, they camped in thevicinity of the boundary between Alaska and the Northwest Territory.The rest of the journey, save the last short stretch to Dyea, would betravelled on Canadian territory. With the hard trail, and in theabsence of fresh snow, Daylight planned to make the camp of Forty Mileon the fourth night. He told Kama as much, but on the third day thetemperature began to rise, and they knew snow was not far off; for onthe Yukon it must get warm in order to snow. Also, on this day, theyencountered ten miles of chaotic ice-jams, where, a thousand times,they lifted the loaded sled over the huge cakes by the strength oftheir arms and lowered it down again. Here the dogs were well-nighuseless, and both they and the men were tried excessively by theroughness of the way. An hour's extra running that night caught uponly part of the lost time.

  In the morning they awoke to find ten inches of snow on their robes.The dogs were buried under it and were loath to leave their comfortablenests. This new snow meant hard going. The sled runners would notslide over it so well, while one of the men must go in advance of thedogs and pack it down with snowshoes so that they should not wallow.Quite different was it from the ordinary snow known to those of theSouthland. It was hard, and fine, and dry. It was more like sugar.Kick it, and it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was nocohesion among the particles, and it could not be moulded intosnowballs. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals--tiny,geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost.

  The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the twomen, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as theytoiled. They failed to make Forty Mile that night, and when theypassed that camp next day Daylight paused only long enough to get themail and additional grub. On the afternoon of the following day theycamped at the mouth of the Klondike River. Not a soul had theyencountered since Forty Mile, and they had made their own trail. Asyet, that winter, no one had travelled the river south of Forty Mile,and, for that matter, the whole winter through they might be the onlyones to travel it. In that day the Yukon was a lonely land. Betweenthe Klondike River and Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred milesof snow-covered wilderness, and in all that distance there were but twoplaces where Daylight might look forward to meeting men. Both wereisolated trading-posts, Sixty Mile and Fort
Selkirk. In thesummer-time Indians might be met with at the mouths of the Stewart andWhite rivers, at the Big and Little Salmons, and on Lake Le Barge; butin the winter, as he well knew, they would be on the trail of themoose-herds, following them back into the mountains.

  That night, camped at the mouth of the Klondike, Daylight did not turnin when the evening's work was done. Had a white man been present,Daylight would have remarked that he felt his "hunch" working. As itwas, he tied on his snowshoes, left the dogs curled in the snow andKama breathing heavily under his rabbit skins, and climbed up to thebig flat above the high earth-bank. But the spruce trees were too thickfor an outlook, and he threaded his way across the flat and up thefirst steep slopes of the mountain at the back. Here, flowing in fromthe east at right angles, he could see the Klondike, and, bendinggrandly from the south, the Yukon. To the left, and downstream, towardMoosehide Mountain, the huge splash of white, from which it took itsname, showing clearly in the starlight. Lieutenant Schwatka had givenit its name, but he, Daylight, had first seen it long before thatintrepid explorer had crossed the Chilcoot and rafted down the Yukon.

  But the mountain received only passing notice. Daylight's interest wascentered in the big flat itself, with deep water all along its edge forsteamboat landings.

  "A sure enough likely town site," he muttered. "Room for a camp offorty thousand men. All that's needed is the gold-strike." Hemeditated for a space. "Ten dollars to the pan'll do it, and it'd bethe all-firedest stampede Alaska ever seen. And if it don't come here,it'll come somewhere hereabouts. It's a sure good idea to keep an eyeout for town sites all the way up."

  He stood a while longer, gazing out over the lonely flat and visioningwith constructive imagination the scene if the stampede did come. Infancy, he placed the sawmills, the big trading stores, the saloons, anddance-halls, and the long streets of miners' cabins. And along thosestreets he saw thousands of men passing up and down, while before thestores were the heavy freighting-sleds, with long strings of dogsattached. Also he saw the heavy freighters pulling down the mainstreet and heading up the frozen Klondike toward the imagined somewherewhere the diggings must be located.

  He laughed and shook the vision from his eyes, descended to the level,and crossed the flat to camp. Five minutes after he had rolled up inhis robe, he opened his eyes and sat up, amazed that he was not alreadyasleep. He glanced at the Indian sleeping beside him, at the embers ofthe dying fire, at the five dogs beyond, with their wolf's brushescurled over their noses, and at the four snowshoes standing upright inthe snow.

  "It's sure hell the way that hunch works on me" he murmured. His mindreverted to the poker game. "Four kings!" He grinned reminiscently."That WAS a hunch!"

  He lay down again, pulled the edge of the robe around his neck and overhis ear-flaps, closed his eyes, and this time fell asleep.

  [5] Parka: a light, hooded, smock-like garment made of cotton drill.