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Table of contents
All the various acetylene lamps are useless because water is required to generate the gas, and water may not be had without stopping and building a fire and melting ice or snow. The electric flash-lamp, useful enough round camp, goes out of operation altogether on the trail, because the "dry" cell that supplies its current [35] is not a dry cell at all, but a moist cell, and when its moisture freezes is dead until it thaws out again. No extremity of cold will stop a candle from burning, and if it be properly sheltered by the tin can it will stand a great deal of wind.
The "folding pocket lantern," which is nothing but a convenient tin can with mica sides, is the best equipment for travel, but an empty butter can or lard can is sometimes easier to come by. The Chandalar is wide-spread in these parts, with several channels, and the trail was hard to follow. One track we pursued led us up a bank and along a portage and presently stopped at a marten trap; and we had to cut across to the river and cast about hither and thither on its broad surface to find the mail trail.
All the rivers that are confluent with the Yukon in the Flats enter that dreary region through gaps in the mountains that bound the broad plain. These gaps are noted for wind, and the Chandalar Gap, which had loomed before us since daybreak, is deservedly in especial bad repute. The most hateful thing in the Arctic regions is the wind. Cold one may protect one's self against, but there is no adequate protection against wind.
The parkee without opening front or back, that pulls on over the head, is primarily a windbreak, and when a scarf is wrapped around mouth and nose, and the fur-edged hood of the parkee is pulled forward over cap and scarf, the traveller who must face the wind has done all he can to protect himself from it. Unfortunately, in the confusion of striking the tent and packing in the dark, my scarf had been rolled up [36] in the bedding, and, since the wind was not bad until we approached the Gap in the evening, I had not troubled about it. Now, as we drew nearer and nearer, the wind rose constantly.
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But to get my scarf meant stopping the whole procession and unlashing and unloading the sled, and the man who unlashed in that wind would almost certainly freeze his fingers. So I gave up the thought of it, turned my back to the wind while I tied my pocket handkerchief round mouth and nose, drew the strings of my parkee hood close, and then faced it again to worry through as best I could.
The ice is always swept clear of snow in the Gap. The river narrows within its jaws, the ragged rocks rise up to the bluffs on either hand, and the blue-streaked ice stretches between. We all suffered a good deal. Against that cruel wind it was impossible to keep warm. The hands, though enclosed in woollen gloves, and they in blanket-lined moose-hide mitts, grew numb; the toes, within their protection of caribou sock with the hair on, strips of blanket wrapping, and mukluks stuffed with hay, tingled with warning of frost-bite; the whole body was chilled.
We all froze our faces, I think, for the part of the face around and between the eyes cannot be covered. I froze my cheeks, my nose, and my Adam's apple, the last a most inconvenient thing to freeze. The cabin was just the other side of the Gap, and it was well that it was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and dangerously cold with the exposure [37] of the last hour. It was rather a large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut.
When we went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard to heat in one evening.
It is curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains again. At the end of the second day from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk River.
Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" and mountain trails are almost always "sidling" , the toboggan swings off on the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force. The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that, like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was painful and slow.
In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce [39] for camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted for the night.
Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight.
As we began the descent and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at.
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Each peak had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's Mountains of California surely the finest mountain book ever written of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking at a similar spectacle.
It meant that a storm was raging on high, although so far we were sheltered from it.
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It meant that the dry, sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as I could see mountain peaks I could see the snow banners, [40] all pointing one way, all waving, all luminous and shimmering in the sun-rays.
It was a very noble sight, and I gazed a long while entranced, not knowing how ominous it was. When we reached the valley and left the shelter of the gulch we struck the full force of that fearful gale, and for two days and nights of incessant blizzard we lay in a hole dug out of a sand-bank for we had no tent that year , the trail lost, the grub box nearly empty, and no fire possible to cook anything with had the grub box been full.
The valley before us—to resume the narrative—is a high, wind-swept region of niggerhead and swamp, the catch-basin of the South Fork of the Koyukuk River. The trail descends one of its southern draws, follows up the main valley awhile, crosses it, and leaves by one of its northern draws to pass over the mountains that separate its drainage from the main fork of the Koyukuk.
The cold had given place to wind, and though the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in such open places the trail is soon obliterated altogether. When the light fails this casting about for blazes whenever a clump of spruce is reached becomes increasingly slow and difficult and at last becomes hopeless. The general direction determined, it might be thought that the traveller could ignore the tracks of previous passage and strike out for himself, but he knows that the trail, however rough, is at least practicable, whereas [41] an independent course may soon lead to steep gullies or cut banks, or may entangle him in some thicket that he must resort to the axe to pass through.
Moreover, even two or three passages through the snow in the winter will give some bottom to a trail; a bottom that, when the wind-swept areas are passed and the snow-shoes are resumed, both he and his dogs will be thankful for. Making camp under such circumstances is always a very disagreeable proceeding.
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It takes time and care to make a comfortable camp, and time and care in the wind and the cold involve suffering. Two suitable trees must be selected between which the tent is to be suspended by the ridge-rope, and the snow must all be scraped away by the snow-shoes, or, if it be too deep, beaten down.
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Then while one man unlashes and unpacks the sleds, another cuts green spruce and lays it all over the tent space, thicker and finer where the bed is to be. Then up goes the tent, its corner ropes and its side strings made fast to boughs, if there be such, or to stakes, or to logs laid parallel to the sides. Then the stovepipe is jointed and the stove set up on the edge of green billets properly shaped.
Meanwhile the axe-man, the green boughs cut, has been felling and splitting a dry tree for stove wood, and the whole proceedings are rushed and hastened towards getting a fire in that stove. Sometimes it is a question whether we shall [42] get a fire before we freeze our fingers or freeze our fingers before we get a fire.
The fire once going, we are safe, for however much more work there is in the open, and there is always a good deal more, one can go to the tent to get warm. Enough stove wood must be cut, not only for night and morning, but for cooking the dog feed. The dog pot, filled with snow, into which the fish are cut up, is put upon the outdoor fire as soon as man-supper begins cooking in the tent. When it boils, the rice and tallow must be added, and when the rice has boiled twenty minutes the whole is set aside to cool.
Meanwhile the two aluminum pots full of snow, replenished from time to time as it melts, are put upon the stove in the tent as the necessary preliminary to cooking.
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Sometimes ice, and more rarely water, may be had, and then supper is hastened. If we are camped on the river bank sometimes a steel-pointed rifle-bullet fired straight down into the ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a treasure.
There is still work for every one as well as the cook.