Burning Daylight Page 8

  CHAPTER VIII

  No time was lost. Hines and Finn, with the dogs, already on shortrations, were two days in pulling down. At noon of the third dayElijah arrived, reporting no moose sign. That night Daylight came inwith a similar report. As fast as they arrived, the men had startedcareful panning of the snow all around the cache. It was a large task,for they found stray beans fully a hundred yards from the cache. Onemore day all the men toiled. The result was pitiful, and the fourshowed their caliber in the division of the few pounds of food that hadbeen recovered. Little as it was, the lion's share was left withDaylight and Elijah. The men who pulled on with the dogs, one up theStewart and one down, would come more quickly to grub. The two whoremained would have to last out till the others returned. Furthermore,while the dogs, on several ounces each of beans a day, would travelslowly, nevertheless, the men who travelled with them, on a pinch,would have the dogs themselves to eat. But the men who remained, whenthe pinch came, would have no dogs. It was for this reason thatDaylight and Elijah took the more desperate chance. They could not doless, nor did they care to do less. The days passed, and the winterbegan merging imperceptibly into the Northland spring that comes like athunderbolt of suddenness. It was the spring of 1896 that waspreparing. Each day the sun rose farther east of south, remainedlonger in the sky, and set farther to the west. March ended and Aprilbegan, and Daylight and Elijah, lean and hungry, wondered what hadbecome of their two comrades. Granting every delay, and throwing ingenerous margins for good measure, the time was long since passed whenthey should have returned. Without doubt they had met with disaster.The party had considered the possibility of disaster for one man, andthat had been the principal reason for despatching the two in differentdirections. But that disaster should have come to both of them was thefinal blow.

  In the meantime, hoping against hope, Daylight and Elija eked out ameagre existence. The thaw had not yet begun, so they were able togather the snow about the ruined cache and melt it in pots and pailsand gold pans. Allowed to stand for a while, when poured off, a thindeposit of slime was found on the bottoms of the vessels. This was theflour, the infinitesimal trace of it scattered through thousands ofcubic yards of snow. Also, in this slime occurred at intervals awater-soaked tea-leaf or coffee-ground, and there were in it fragmentsof earth and litter. But the farther they worked away from the site ofthe cache, the thinner became the trace of flour, the smaller thedeposit of slime.

  Elijah was the older man, and he weakened first, so that he came to lieup most of the time in his furs. An occasional tree-squirrel kept themalive. The hunting fell upon Daylight, and it was hard work. With butthirty rounds of ammunition, he dared not risk a miss; and, since hisrifle was a 45-90, he was compelled to shoot the small creaturesthrough the head. There were very few of them, and days went bywithout seeing one. When he did see one, he took infinite precautions.He would stalk it for hours. A score of times, with arms that shookfrom weakness, he would draw a sight on the animal and refrain frompulling the trigger. His inhibition was a thing of iron. He was themaster. Not til absolute certitude was his did he shoot. No matter howsharp the pangs of hunger and desire for that palpitating morsel ofchattering life, he refused to take the slightest risk of a miss. He,born gambler, was gambling in the bigger way. His life was the stake,his cards were the cartridges, and he played as only a big gamblercould play, with infinite precaution, with infinite consideration.Each shot meant a squirrel, and though days elapsed between shots, itnever changed his method of play.

  Of the squirrels, nothing was lost. Even the skins were boiled to makebroth, the bones pounded into fragments that could be chewed andswallowed. Daylight prospected through the snow, and found occasionalpatches of mossberries. At the best, mossberries were composedpractically of seeds and water, with a tough rind of skin about them;but the berries he found were of the preceding year, dry andshrivelled, and the nourishment they contained verged on the minusquality. Scarcely better was the bark of young saplings, stewed for anhour and swallowed after prodigious chewing.

  April drew toward its close, and spring smote the land. The daysstretched out their length. Under the heat of the sun, the snow beganto melt, while from down under the snow arose the trickling of tinystreams. For twenty-four hours the Chinook wind blew, and in thattwenty-four hours the snow was diminished fully a foot in depth. Inthe late afternoons the melting snow froze again, so that its surfacebecame ice capable of supporting a man's weight. Tiny white snow-birdsappeared from the south, lingered a day, and resumed their journey intothe north. Once, high in the air, looking for open water and ahead ofthe season, a wedged squadron of wild geese honked northwards. Anddown by the river bank a clump of dwarf willows burst into bud. Theseyoung buds, stewed, seemed to posess an encouraging nutrition. Elijahtook heart of hope, though he was cast down again when Daylight failedto find another clump of willows.

  The sap was rising in the trees, and daily the trickle of unseenstreamlets became louder as the frozen land came back to life. But theriver held in its bonds of frost. Winter had been long months inriveting them, and not in a day were they to be broken, not even by thethunderbolt of spring. May came, and stray last-year's mosquitoes,full-grown but harmless, crawled out of rock crevices and rotten logs.Crickets began to chirp, and more geese and ducks flew overhead. Andstill the river held. By May tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with agreat rending and snapping, tore loose from the banks and rose threefeet. But it did not go down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where theStewart flowed into it, must first break and move on. Until then theice of the Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasingflood beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Twothousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the iceconditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yukon could riditself of the millions of tons of ice that cluttered its breast.

  On the twelfth of May, carrying their sleeping-robes, a pail, an ax,and the precious rifle, the two men started down the river on the ice.Their plan was to gain to the cached poling-boat they had seen, so thatat the first open water they could launch it and drift with the streamto Sixty Mile. In their weak condition, without food, the going wasslow and difficult. Elijah developed a habit of falling down and beingunable to rise. Daylight gave of his own strength to lift him to hisfeet, whereupon the older man would stagger automatically on until hestumbled and fell again.

  On the day they should have reached the boat, Elijah collapsed utterly.When Daylight raised him, he fell again. Daylight essayed to walk withhim, supporting him, but such was Daylight's own weakness that theyfell together.

  Dragging Elijah to the bank, a rude camp was made, and Daylight startedout in search of squirrels. It was at this time that he likewisedeveloped the falling habit. In the evening he found his firstsquirrel, but darkness came on without his getting a certain shot.With primitive patience he waited till next day, and then, within thehour, the squirrel was his.

  The major portion he fed to Elijah, reserving for himself the tougherparts and the bones. But such is the chemistry of life, that thissmall creature, this trifle of meat that moved, by being eaten,transmuted to the meat of the men the same power to move. No longerdid the squirrel run up spruce trees, leap from branch to branch, orcling chattering to giddy perches. Instead, the same energy that haddone these things flowed into the wasted muscles and reeling wills ofthe men, making them move--nay, moving them--till they tottered theseveral intervening miles to the cached boat, underneath which theyfell together and lay motionless a long time.

  Light as the task would have been for a strong man to lower the smallboat to the ground, it took Daylight hours. And many hours more, dayby day, he dragged himself around it, lying on his side to calk thegaping seams with moss. Yet, when this was done, the river still held.Its ice had risen many feet, but would not start down-stream. And onemore task waited, the launching of the boat when the river ran water toreceive it. Vainly Daylight staggered and stumbled
and fell and creptthrough the snow that was wet with thaw, or across it when the night'sfrost still crusted it beyond the weight of a man, searching for onemore squirrel, striving to achieve one more transmutation of furry leapand scolding chatter into the lifts and tugs of a man's body that wouldhoist the boat over the rim of shore-ice and slide it down into thestream.

  Not till the twentieth of May did the river break. The down-streammovement began at five in the morning, and already were the days solong that Daylight sat up and watched the ice-run. Elijah was too fargone to be interested in the spectacle. Though vaguely conscious, helay without movement while the ice tore by, great cakes of it caromingagainst the bank, uprooting trees, and gouging out earth by hundreds oftons.

  All about them the land shook and reeled from the shock of thesetremendous collisions. At the end of an hour the run stopped.Somewhere below it was blocked by a jam. Then the river began to rise,lifting the ice on its breast till it was higher than the bank. Frombehind ever more water bore down, and ever more millions of tons of iceadded their weight to the congestion. The pressures and stresses becameterrific. Huge cakes of ice were squeezed out till they popped intothe air like melon seeds squeezed from between the thumb and forefingerof a child, while all along the banks a wall of ice was forced up.When the jam broke, the noise of grinding and smashing redoubled. Foranother hour the run continued. The river fell rapidly. But the wallof ice on top the bank, and extending down into the falling water,remained.

  The tail of the ice-run passed, and for the first time in six monthsDaylight saw open water. He knew that the ice had not yet passed outfrom the upper reaches of the Stewart, that it lay in packs and jams inthose upper reaches, and that it might break loose and come down in asecond run any time; but the need was too desperate for him to linger.Elijah was so far gone that he might pass at any moment. As forhimself, he was not sure that enough strength remained in his wastedmuscles to launch the boat. It was all a gamble. If he waited for thesecond ice-run, Elijah would surely die, and most probably himself. Ifhe succeeded in launching the boat, if he kept ahead of the secondice-run, if he did not get caught by some of the runs from the upperYukon; if luck favored in all these essential particulars, as well asin a score of minor ones, they would reach Sixty Mile and be saved,if--and again the if--he had strength enough to land the boat at SixtyMile and not go by.

  He set to work. The wall of ice was five feet above the ground onwhich the boat rested. First prospecting for the best launching-place,he found where a huge cake of ice shelved upward from the river thatran fifteen feet below to the top of the wall. This was a score offeet away, and at the end of an hour he had managed to get the boatthat far. He was sick with nausea from his exertions, and at times itseemed that blindness smote him, for he could not see, his eyes vexedwith spots and points of light that were as excruciating asdiamond-dust, his heart pounding up in his throat and suffocating him.Elijah betrayed no interest, did not move nor open his eyes; andDaylight fought out his battle alone. At last, falling on his kneesfrom the shock of exertion, he got the boat poised on a secure balanceon top the wall. Crawling on hands and knees, he placed in the boathis rabbit-skin robe, the rifle, and the pail. He did not bother withthe ax. It meant an additional crawl of twenty feet and back, and ifthe need for it should arise he well knew he would be past all need.

  Elijah proved a bigger task than he had anticipated. A few inches at atime, resting in between, he dragged him over the ground and up abroken rubble of ice to the side of the boat. But into the boat hecould not get him. Elijah's limp body was far more difficult to liftand handle than an equal weight of like dimensions but rigid. Daylightfailed to hoist him, for the body collapsed at the middle like apart-empty sack of corn. Getting into the boat, Daylight tried vainlyto drag his comrade in after him. The best he could do was to getElijah's head and shoulders on top the gunwale. When he released hishold, to heave from farther down the body, Elijah promptly gave at themiddle and came down on the ice.

  In despair, Daylight changed his tactics. He struck the other in theface.

  "God Almighty, ain't you-all a man?" he cried. "There! damn you-all!there!"

  At each curse he struck him on the cheeks, the nose, the mouth,striving, by the shock of the hurt, to bring back the sinking soul andfar-wandering will of the man. The eyes fluttered open.

  "Now listen!" he shouted hoarsely. "When I get your head to thegunwale, hang on! Hear me? Hang on! Bite into it with your teeth,but HANG ON!"

  The eyes fluttered down, but Daylight knew the message had beenreceived. Again he got the helpless man's head and shoulders on thegunwale.

  "Hang on, damn you! Bite in!" he shouted, as he shifted his grip lowerdown.

  One weak hand slipped off the gunwale, the fingers of the other handrelaxed, but Elijah obeyed, and his teeth held on. When the lift came,his face ground forward, and the splintery wood tore and crushed theskin from nose, lips, and chin; and, face downward, he slipped on anddown to the bottom of the boat till his limp middle collapsed acrossthe gunwale and his legs hung down outside. But they were only hislegs, and Daylight shoved them in; after him. Breathing heavily, heturned Elijah over on his back, and covered him with his robes.

  The final task remained--the launching of the boat. This, ofnecessity, was the severest of all, for he had been compelled to loadhis comrade in aft of the balance. It meant a supreme effort atlifting. Daylight steeled himself and began. Something must havesnapped, for, though he was unaware of it, the next he knew he waslying doubled on his stomach across the sharp stern of the boat.Evidently, and for the first time in his life, he had fainted.Furthermore, it seemed to him that he was finished, that he had not onemore movement left in him, and that, strangest of all, he did not care.Visions came to him, clear-cut and real, and concepts sharp as steelcutting-edges. He, who all his days had looked on naked Life, had neverseen so much of Life's nakedness before. For the first time heexperienced a doubt of his own glorious personality. For the momentLife faltered and forgot to lie. After all, he was a littleearth-maggot, just like all the other earth-maggots, like the squirrelhe had eaten, like the other men he had seen fail and die, like JoeHines and Henry Finn, who had already failed and were surely dead, likeElijah lying there uncaring, with his skinned face, in the bottom ofthe boat. Daylight's position was such that from where he lay he couldlook up river to the bend, around which, sooner or later, the nextice-run would come. And as he looked he seemed to see back through thepast to a time when neither white man nor Indian was in the land, andever he saw the same Stewart River, winter upon winter, breasted withice, and spring upon spring bursting that ice asunder and running free.And he saw also into an illimitable future, when the last generationsof men were gone from off the face of Alaska, when he, too, would begone, and he saw, ever remaining, that river, freezing and fresheting,and running on and on.

  Life was a liar and a cheat. It fooled all creatures. It had fooledhim, Burning Daylight, one of its chiefest and most joyous exponents.He was nothing--a mere bunch of flesh and nerves and sensitiveness thatcrawled in the muck for gold, that dreamed and aspired and gambled, andthat passed and was gone. Only the dead things remained, the thingsthat were not flesh and nerves and sensitiveness, the sand and muck andgravel, the stretching flats, the mountains, the river itself, freezingand breaking, year by year, down all the years. When all was said anddone, it was a scurvy game. The dice were loaded. Those that died didnot win, and all died. Who won? Not even Life, the stool-pigeon, thearch-capper for the game--Life, the ever flourishing graveyard, theeverlasting funeral procession.

  He drifted back to the immediate present for a moment and noted thatthe river still ran wide open, and that a moose-bird, perched on thebow of the boat, was surveying him impudently. Then he drifted dreamilyback to his meditations.

  There was no escaping the end of the game. He was doomed surely to beout of it all. And what of it? He pondered that question again andagain.

  Conve
ntional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort ofreligion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and hehad not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death endedall. He had always believed that, and been unafraid. And at thismoment, the boat fifteen feet above the water and immovable, himselffainting with weakness and without a particle of strength left in him,he still believed that death ended all, and he was still unafraid. Hisviews were too simply and solidly based to be overthrown by the firstsquirm, or the last, of death-fearing life.

  He had seen men and animals die, and into the field of his vision, byscores, came such deaths. He saw them over again, just as he had seenthem at the time, and they did not shake him.

  What of it? They were dead, and dead long since. They weren'tbothering about it. They weren't lying on their bellies across a boatand waiting to die. Death was easy--easier than he had ever imagined;and, now that it was near, the thought of it made him glad.

  A new vision came to him. He saw the feverish city of his dream--thegold metropolis of the North, perched above the Yukon on a highearth-bank and far-spreading across the flat. He saw the riversteamers tied to the bank and lined against it three deep; he saw thesawmills working and the long dog-teams, with double sleds behind,freighting supplies to the diggings. And he saw, further, thegambling-houses, banks, stock-exchanges, and all the gear and chips andmarkers, the chances and opportunities, of a vastly bigger gamblinggame than any he had ever seen. It was sure hell, he thought, with thehunch a-working and that big strike coming, to be out of it all. Lifethrilled and stirred at the thought and once more began uttering hisancient lies.

  Daylight rolled over and off the boat, leaning against it as he sat onthe ice. He wanted to be in on that strike. And why shouldn't he?Somewhere in all those wasted muscles of his was enough strength, if hecould gather it all at once, to up-end the boat and launch it. Quiteirrelevantly the idea suggested itself of buying a share in theKlondike town site from Harper and Joe Ladue. They would surely sell athird interest cheap. Then, if the strike came on the Stewart, hewould be well in on it with the Elam Harnish town site; if on theKlondike, he would not be quite out of it.

  In the meantime, he would gather strength. He stretched out on the icefull length, face downward, and for half an hour he lay and rested.Then he arose, shook the flashing blindness from his eyes, and tookhold of the boat. He knew his condition accurately. If the firsteffort failed, the following efforts were doomed to fail. He must pullall his rallied strength into the one effort, and so thoroughly must heput all of it in that there would be none left for other attempts.

  He lifted, and he lifted with the soul of him as well as with the body,consuming himself, body and spirit, in the effort. The boat rose. Hethought he was going to faint, but he continued to lift. He felt theboat give, as it started on its downward slide. With the last shred ofhis strength he precipitated himself into it, landing in a sick heap onElijah's legs. He was beyond attempting to rise, and as he lay heheard and felt the boat take the water. By watching the tree-tops heknew it was whirling. A smashing shock and flying fragments of icetold him that it had struck the bank. A dozen times it whirled andstruck, and then it floated easily and free.

  Daylight came to, and decided he had been asleep. The sun denoted thatseveral hours had passed. It was early afternoon. He dragged himselfinto the stern and sat up. The boat was in the middle of the stream.The wooded banks, with their base-lines of flashing ice, were slippingby. Near him floated a huge, uprooted pine. A freak of the currentbrought the boat against it. Crawling forward, he fastened the painterto a root.

  The tree, deeper in the water, was travelling faster, and the paintertautened as the boat took the tow. Then, with a last giddy lookaround, wherein he saw the banks tilting and swaying and the sunswinging in pendulum-sweep across the sky, Daylight wrapped himself inhis rabbit-skin robe, lay down in the bottom, and fell asleep.

  When he awoke, it was dark night. He was lying on his back, and hecould see the stars shining. A subdued murmur of swollen waters couldbe heard. A sharp jerk informed him that the boat, swerving slack intothe painter, had been straightened out by the swifter-moving pine tree.A piece of stray drift-ice thumped against the boat and grated alongits side. Well, the following jam hadn't caught him yet, was histhought, as he closed his eyes and slept again.

  It was bright day when next he opened his eyes. The sun showed it tobe midday. A glance around at the far-away banks, and he knew that hewas on the mighty Yukon. Sixty Mile could not be far away. He wasabominably weak. His movements were slow, fumbling, and inaccurate,accompanied by panting and head-swimming, as he dragged himself into asitting-up position in the stern, his rifle beside him. He looked along time at Elijah, but could not see whether he breathed or not, andhe was too immeasurably far away to make an investigation.

  He fell to dreaming and meditating again, dreams and thoughts beingoften broken by sketches of blankness, wherein he neither slept, norwas unconscious, nor was aware of anything. It seemed to him more likecogs slipping in his brain. And in this intermittent way he reviewedthe situation. He was still alive, and most likely would be saved, buthow came it that he was not lying dead across the boat on top theice-rim? Then he recollected the great final effort he had made. Butwhy had he made it? he asked himself. It had not been fear of death.He had not been afraid, that was sure. Then he remembered the hunchand the big strike he believed was coming, and he knew that the spurhad been his desire to sit in for a hand at that big game. And againwhy? What if he made his million? He would die, just the same asthose that never won more than grub-stakes. Then again why? But theblank stretches in his thinking process began to come more frequently,and he surrendered to the delightful lassitude that was creeping overhim.

  He roused with a start. Something had whispered in him that he mustawake. Abruptly he saw Sixty Mile, not a hundred feet away.

  The current had brought him to the very door. But the same current wasnow sweeping him past and on into the down-river wilderness. No onewas in sight. The place might have been deserted, save for the smokehe saw rising from the kitchen chimney. He tried to call, but found hehad no voice left. An unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled andwheezed in his throat. He fumbled for the rifle, got it to hisshoulder, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the discharge torethrough his frame, racking it with a thousand agonies. The rifle hadfallen across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulderfailed. He knew he must be quick, and felt that he was fainting, so hepulled the trigger of the gun where it lay. This time it kicked offand overboard. But just before darkness rushed over him, he saw thekitchen door open, and a woman look out of the big log house that wasdancing a monstrous jig among the trees.