LAST STRAWS
July 8.—Sh-sh-sh!
In two hours we made a large clear stream between high diorite cliffs—the Talushalitna! Every time I leaped behind a horse’s pack in fording it, a bunch of them tore back to shore; so I crossed alone on foot, through a hundred tickliest yards of icy water. Then we covered endless meadows and one-pond swamps, purple with iris, golden with arnica. Jack’s horses stampeded, and he flew into a passion. Now we slid down grassy benches, to a silty slew, where the bent willows were rust-red with glacial mud—from river-floods! Glad omen! But never was reapproach to a river so vanishing: more sloughs and silt flats, a level spruce forest growing from white moss and roses; at last a lead along an endless, gouged drift-pile, and we heard shouts, and saw two tents on a gravel island in the middle of the brown river. The Professor, Miller, and two Siwashes, one big, one little, cavorted across to us in a long boat. Our leader first gravely shook my hand and smiled. “Hello, Dunn,” said he (like that prig Stanley’s icy, “Mr. Livingstone, I believe?” when he met the missionary in darkest Africa, thought I). “You’ve done excellently. We arrived here only this morning.” Mosquito hats choked all of them. They blind and deafen, and if a man as God made him can’t stand the ‘skeets, he’s no right up in this country.
We started to ford, from the south shore to the north. The Bay Dunnage mare was mired in a quicksand and pulled out before we even unpacked and loaded the boat. It was the best place ever for putting in horses to swim, a cut bank they couldn’t climb up on their side, a narrow current nearly all in one channel and shooting across diagonally to the other shore, where a long bar stretched below. I crossed to the island—only a shallow channel’s on the other side—to dry the wet grub at once, as the sugar is syruping away, and the bacon is green with mould. There I heard Jack and King stoning and shouting like maniacs, sweeping the bunch into the current with stretched cinches. Miller was popping his camera at them. At that instant the P. R. Sorrel, leading all in mid-stream, made back for shore! Snorting in spasms, the whole crew followed. The Professor and I dashed into the boat, and hit out to head them off. Jack tore down the south bank, yelling and rocking them like a crazy man. Three or four miraculously climbed out on his side, despite him and the cut bank. Again all depended on one fiber of one horse. We in the boat got below them on Jack’s side, but they shot past, all headed with the current, straight for the snag-pile at the bend. That meant drowning for all—when one beast turned by some miracle, and seemed to lead all, grunting more and more faintly, to the tail end of the bar, saving them by ten yards!
So the whole train was scattered on both sides of the river. We counted them again and again, and made only ten out of the fourteen. We shouted and shouted from bank to bank. No use. We found the three that had scrambled up the bad bank, and Jack had an idea that the Light Gray had gone with them. But we sighted him on the north bank. So only one remained missing, and in vain we dragged the brush and back-trailed. At last Simon, who is always three days behind time, said he’d seen Dark Buck shooting straight down with the current around the drift pile, when the bunch had made for the bar. The Professor, Miller, and he, being on the island with the boat, pursued in it downstream. We swam the three beasts that had climbed the cut bank, standing waist deep in the quicksand, hurling rocks. They made the bar well; we crossed swimming, and gorged on oatmeal and potatoes; then drove the bunch from the island across the shallow channel, safe on the north side of the Skwentna, at last.
In an hour the Professor came back. “We’ve lost another horse,” said he hopelessly—his face is growing white in this Alaskan game, as mine gets tanned and ruddy. I wouldn’t believe that, and King said to me, “Simon and the Professor couldn’t find a horse trail if you rubbed their noses in it. I believe that Buck has landed.” So I sent him off with Jack on the same search. It was after ten o’clock, but in an hour, Miller appeared alone, tracking the boat up the bar, while Jack and King were driving the lost beast up through the brush on the north shore. Shot out by the current from the drift-pile, he had landed where the Professor said that landing was impossible, and had not looked. It takes a lot to kill a cayuse. All was a sort of roast for the Professor, and I think he felt it.
Now he is fussing about, a bunch of shaving paper tied to his breast pocket, stroking every one the right way, and talking with beautiful optimism about how very soon we’ll reach the pass which we must cross in the main Alaskan Range, south of McKinley, before striking northeast along its northwest face, to the foot of the great mountain.
We still have fifty miles of wet country to cross, due north to Keechatna River, which we must ford to its north bank, following it up due west to the pass. The boat, thus, is going back down the
Skwentna, till it meets the Yentna, a northern tributary; up the Yentna, to its western branch, the Keechatna, up that, to the head of navigation, where we meet and again ford the horses; put all the outfit on them, abandon the boat, and hit for the pass. Thus it travels three sides of a parallelogram, while the pack train covers its fourth.
The Professor, who must learn packing someday is going to stick with the boat, still taking with him Miller, whom I want in Simon’s stead with the horses. When I asked for Miller, he smiled, “You have got on so excellently as you are, I think we’ll try it so again.”
The gondoliers say that they had fair sledding on the river, though the ‘skeets were cruel. The Professor confided that once he thought Miller would yield up his soul to their tortures, and propounded a weird theory that their poison in the big doses we get, injures and depresses the blood. As usual, where Si washes and Tyonek men foretold good traveling, it was bad, and vice versa; and the awful canyon just above this camp—one of the country’s bugbears, which they poled to this morning—was calm and navigable. So runs the glass of Alaskan truth and lies.. . .
I am writing by a driftwood fire on the open sand and gravel of the bar. Boxes and tins on the silt-powdered logs tell of the ease of boat-travel.
The Professor has set up an elaborate tripod, and is doing things with one eye to a white mountain of the Talkeetna Range upstream, which he is going to name. Think of that! I wish he would show quality of some sort. He’s so kind and colorless. I like him—but then, I haven’t hit the trail with him yet. He’s just given me a pair of bedroom slippers “to wear about camp,” he says. I thanked him. He uses “How?” instead of “What?” when you ask him a question.
July 9.—So here’s the first day ended on the trail, where Brooks got cold feet last year, and said that King must hit for the hills, or the Government would have no more horses.
We had only four beasts down at once, two mired in beaver dams, two snagged in a sort of pitfall.. . .
We’ve built six smudges, for here in camp the big, yellow-bellied horse-flies blacken the birches. I’ve been drying the tea that was on Dark Buck when he floundered about in a mud-hole. It’s shaving-time for the reflector. King, having climbed a tree to inspect the country ahead, is running straws through the big flies, saying as they sail aloft with wispy kite-tails, “That’s how I like to serve you gentlemen.” Jack is making a pipe from a birch-log, and Simon is giving us some rigmarole about Ricardo and Malthus, which no one is listening to.
We’re in a plague—green inch-worms. Jack has just looked up in forgetful surprise, and said, “What’s that dropping sound all around?” Drying blankets, you have to pick off hundreds to avoid roasting them—en blanquette. They form a scum on the packs. Every leaf and twig they have eaten; the alders and willows are pestilence-stricken. The whole country now seems wintry, now burned over, as they hit the high places for the birches. Their webs blind you on the trail, as you fish for them down your back. We have to eat in the tent. At supper, Simon counted thirteen on the inside of the canvas, and after a thorough house-cleaning. “That’s unlucky for the worms,” said he, squashing them with his spoon.
But I hear the sputter-sputter of boiling Bayos—covered, let’s trust—so all’s well on earth tonight.
July 10.—Jack carried out his threat and sneaked Simon’s mosquito hat into the fire this morning, while the kid was brushing his teeth, or drying his socks, or doing one of the thousand useless stunts he devises while we’re at work. He began crying for it as we cinched Brown B horse. Funny, but no one knew, as King said, “where it had went to.” So Simon sprigged himself out with ferns till he looked like a hayseed, and as he puffed through the worst swamps, Jack hollered, “Say, Jerushy, haow’s the crops?”
In one, where sweet bay grew with buckbrush from the sphagnum, suddenly McKinley, Foraker, and the whole range flashed out, seeming to float in mid-air over the haze, like magic icebergs. They lay between Yenlo Mountain—a low peak east of the Yentna, up which the Professor and Miller were to be plugging to-day to get a good look-see at the valley—and the nearer, opalescent peaks of the great range to the west, where we hope to enter it. Still square-shouldered and massive, each was tricked out wonderfully with cloud and shadow in rocky interstices unimaginably cold and deep, with ridges of bewildering lift and sweep, and a whiteness unknown to earthly snows. Southwest of Foraker, Mount Russell lifted a perfect concaved spire. Simon saw them half an hour after every one else, stopped the train, and ran up to announce his discovery. “I told yer,” said Jack. “He’s got eyes sharper’n a tool-house rat, now he’s no net on.” And we must pass far to the west around them, getting our next view from their other side.
The next minute Jack exploded. The horses I drove balked. He was just ahead, and stooped for a drink. Quickly they tromped over him, though I yelled a halt. He cursed me furiously. Soon he was right behind when I had two beasts mired. I asked him not to drive his brutes over me. He shouted, “By—, I’ll give you some of your own medicine. Git up!”... At noon he was still peevish, and when I asked him to come over where Fred and I lay in the long slough grass, spitting tobacco-juice into a little stream, he shouted something about a “rotten—-lunch,” and didn’t budge. And we were eating a can of mildewed prunes!
Which all reminds me of what Jack said yesterday, and I wanted to digest before recording. As we pulled away from the Skwentna, he came to me, almost humbly, and suggested that he go back to the Inlet in the boat with the two Indians, when we leave it on the Keechatna and put the whole outfit on the horses. “You only have grub enough for five men,” said he, “and it won’t last the six of us.” “Darn the grub, there’ll be enough,” I said. “Isn’t the real reason you want to quit because you’re sore on the outfit?” “It makes me sore how Simon always spits on me,” he answered. I couldn’t get him to cite an instance of that, but I knew he meant the times when the kid jollies Jack about having been a plumber. Appearing disturbed and disappointed, I urged Jack to stay on, putting my desire on the personal basis—the true one—on which he came with us, getting no pay. He said that he was pleased with the way I had treated him. I said that he couldn’t expect us all to know how to shift up here as well as a sourdough like him. He said that he realized that—though you’d seldom think so from his acts. He added that King was sore on the outfit, too, and would have quit long ago, only he felt he was “sort of contracted with the Professor.” That from King doesn’t worry me. He likes to air our troubles, aggravated by the stress of travel, to any one; and Jack he’s naturally most in sympathy with. But King will never quit us. I was telling Jack frankly that I was disappointed in him, when the Professor hove in sight, and I lit out as Jack repeated the short-grub plaint to him. Simon, who had seen us, wanted with excited suspicion to know what Jack had been saying. “Oh, nothing,” said I.
Spite of all, I do mightily enjoy Jack’s company. There’s something very compelling about him, and no malice nor yellowness whatever. He’s simple. Yet I think that of the crowd, except Simon whom we can never lose of course, we could best spare Jack. I can’t let personal wishes block the expedition’s success. I remember how I laughed at Simon when once he said that Jack wouldn’t see the game through. Again, I read men wrong.. . .
On we fought through worms and flies, having at most three horses down. Now, all their tails are swishing furiously outside the tent, and soon we’ll hear them clattering through the dishes. Simon must be homesick. He’s been showing me the pictures of his pa and ma, which he keeps with his eye-wash, tooth-wash, nose-wash, and the rest of his drug outfit in that little bag. G—!. . .
The beast munching grass at my ear is fouling the guy-ropes. King sleeps. Jack is reading the Fortnightly Review—and I can imagine the scornful comments he’s making to himself at its long-winded phrases.
The tag of verse to-day, was:
One thing is truth, and all the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
I think it’s from “The City of Dreadful Night.” Wish that philosophy applied to yellow-bellied horse-flies, too. Good-night.
July 11.—To-day, Brooks’ blazes (we see about two a day) kept leading us three miles forward, then three miles straight back. We couldn’t lose countless slews of the Yentna, which infuriated Jack, so he sulked continually and wouldn’t eat our stale biscuit and drink the stagnant glacier water in the long swamp grass stirred by the horses at the noon halt. Yet—“Say,” he’d shout later, laughing as by chance we took to high ground, “we’ve gone wrong. There’s more water over there.” The Government topographer that King says blazed for Brooks must have reasoned in circles. Any drunk could have crossed this stretch drier and straighten At last we skirted a quiet lake among strange little hills and sprucy meadows lined with otter trails, creeping close to its rock shore, thinking our troubles passed.. . .
Never! This can’t last much longer. Zzzzzz-Zzzzzzzzz!—meaning the yellow-striped flies. It makes you dizzy to watch them swarming over the kicking brutes. Jack and King make caustic cracks about God’s mean notions in creating them. They’re as big as bumble-bees, still crusting sunny sides of the birches. Eight smudges surround us, and here in the tent, I squash them through the canvas, roosting in bunches on the outside. The slew-water—and a quarter mile away, too; we’re a mile beyond the lake—stains the bean juice thick and purple as ink. The swish of horse tails is incessant. There go the brutes now, fouling the guy-ropes, giving the tent d ts. The flies are driving them wild. King says they can’t stand another day of this. Half the hair is eaten off their necks and haunches, and you can grab the pests off their faces in handfuls dripping with blood. The strain on any one with human feeling is dreadful. I never realized before how animals can suffer.... Bang! There they go again, clattering through the dishes. Stamp! stamp! stamp! Hobbled, they couldn’t graze enough, and would burn their hoofs in the smudges.. . .
A ‘skeet in my ear is driving me wild. Jack has blown tobacco smoke into it, and Simon squirted in strong tea through a pipestem. We’re praying for rain.
July 12—Answered. Alone, as usual, I rustled breakfast in the drip, fighting slow ‘skeet torture for an hour before another hand stirred.
Two miles!—and all around grinned the sick spruces and punctured sphagnum of tundra, and tundra in the rain, all humps and gridded with moose trails is the boudoir of Hades. In, out, and around we floundered; hunting leads, scattering the train, till Jack and I missed the lean Bay Dunnage mare, and then lost ‘ourselves hunting her in the maze of tracks. Sense of locality—which maybe I’m losing anyway—all went to pot. Simon yawned, rested, and unpacked the White Grub horse to make himself coffee. King walked almost back to camp, having wrongly counted but thirteen tracks in the mud of the last slew crossed. I found the beast at last, and back-trailed for King, wearing out my neck shouting. He wasn’t at camp or on the trail. So he was lost. Again, responsibility helped the ‘skeets bite. That ghastly four hours! till Fred appeared calmly—I couldn’t hear his tale—and we struggled on.
Suddenly King swore that we were but two miles from the Keechatna, his elastic memory now stretching the right way. And as our hearts rose, the beasts, of course, struggled into the worst swamps yet. The river had flooded meadows belly-deep. Across, we half-swam to an alder swamp that Satan must have sat up night a-plotting; there to react all the desperate old tragic stunts. Down went four beasts together in soupy mud-holes, snagged in roots, worming necks under big logs. Jack and I worked like beavers at the old tricks of kicking their eyes and watering nostrils, till they gurgled serpent hisses, and prodded heels waved. King chopped out the snags under their stomachs, deftly avoiding nicking off any chunk of flesh. We hauled on stiff and mud-hid cinches, fought with soggy grub and gritty-wet blankets, in repacking, at last. And not fifty yards away, swirled the brown tide of the Keechatna—our haven! “A man that’ud take horses on a trail like this,” yelled Jack, his temper switched to the antipodes at the reaction, “they’d lynch him in the Valdez country! I’d help to do it, too.”
Now, we’re lying on three solid feet of spruce boughs spread on soggy quicksand, yet sloshing our backs in the ooze if we move—the worst camp made yet. You could cut the air in this tent, thick with the stink of sore-rubbed horse-blankets which we must sleep in, and the mosquito-corpse fetor of never-washed clothing. Rheumatism numbs my side. Where’s the Professor? He ought to meet us here now. Eaten by ‘skeets and green worms on Yenlo Mountain, I guess. Well, here’s for a page of “Tom Sawyer,” to bring on drowsiness—but sleep, never!
July 13.—After two pages last night, I heard voices, and jumped up with Jack. Miller and the Professor were landing from the boat. It was bright eleven o’clock. “The — of a time to be traveling,” growled King. They had climbed Yenlo the day before, eating gophers—picket-pins, King calls them—while the ‘skeets ate them. They’d failed to cut out the creatures’ scent bags, such as muskrats have, and Miller was still coughing and spitting from their delicious taste. “Yes, we observed McKinley and Foraker from the top, and I obtained a very excellent idea of the country,” said the Professor. He needed it. I said that I was glad.
They were satisfied with eating cold rice and tea. We shunted them from crowding into our tent, helped the Professor pitch his conical silk affair on the only dry inch of ground for miles, and I rustled him boughs in the dark. I saw him work for the first time. Miller says that in the boat he sits and steers, never poling or tracking, always having to try both sides of his paddle before he discovers how to veer the way he wants. Ashore, he still fusses with his instruments. Both, and even the two Siwashes, wore ‘skeet hats. I was ashamed.. . .
This morning we swam the horses to camp on the north side of the river, leading one by one behind the boat. Tiresome, but no more Skwentna games for us.
Simon is beginning to take notice about cooking and packing. He mixed all the panniers up to-day, angering me, and Miller dryly observed, “I’ve read about such fellows as him, but I never thought Fd see one.” “I call him the fifth wheel,” said Jack, “and have noted it to that effect in my diary.” He tried to put fruit in the dried onion bag. Now the onions go in their own sack tomorrow, or Simon goes into the river. Fred got much joy out of the kid’s wanting to pack last night’s spruce boughs across the river for to-night’s camp. He and Jack always build a big drying-fire after supper, and wall it in with blankets hung on cinches. When Simon, who can’t light a fire to save his neck, hangs his wet pants on their lines, they’re promptly thrown off. They dried three pairs of blankets for me to-night—an unheard-of compliment.
The Professor fusses, fusses, fusses with his instruments, which he carries in two big boxes, that will make trouble when we begin to pack everything. He opens a plush case, peeks in, wipes off the brass, closes case again—and there you are. That’s hitting the trail real hard. That’s scientific exploring.
All the food is soaking, yet no one but me seems to worry. All day I’ve been trying to dry it with fires, and cook Alaska rapid-fire, smokeless strawberries—meaning beans—at the same time. The sugar is syruping, and the bacon’s mildewed. This is the first day in seventeen that we have rested, and King has lost his rubber shoes.. . .
To-morrow, we strike west up the Keechatna, hoping to find, in about a hundred miles, a pass leading through the Alaskan range to its northwest face. Brooks found one, and Captain Herron in 1899, navigating to this point in a launch, found another. Across the mountains, he nearly died of starvation.. . . Our boat, with the same crew, taking everything but the bacon and the seven sacks of flour, will follow the horses till the river gets too swift. On both sides its meadows are flooded four feet deep; worse than last year, says King of tricky memory.
And still it rains. We’ll be growing web feet and feathers yet.
July 14.—The worst day yet, King says; but I was too dazed, cold, and wet to feel it. The horses had starved all night. They crossed a slew to a grassless island in the still-rising river, and were too foolish to wade back, so I went swimming after them. We even put the bacon into the boat, and the seven flour sacks went singly on the seven strongest horses, the worn-out others carrying only their saddles. And the hippodrome swim through grass and willow meadows, to the first dry land, ten miles up-river, began.
I really lost my temper with Simon for the first time. Once, crossing silt and quicksand, where the water roared through willow roots to fill inland ponds, and one minute you had a footing and the next ducked in up to your neck, he shouted, and halted the train. I couldn’t hear what he said, the river roared and the horses sloshed so. I called “Hello!” again and again. He didn’t answer, but when at last I went to move on, there he was, only five yards off. He’d deliberately kept me up to my neck in the icy water. I swore at him. He moved on sullenly.
Then Jack lost the Light Gray. I went back alone, and found her right in the middle of the trail, up to her neck in mud, wedged between roots. Got her out, and fell plumb into the river myself. She mired herself three or four times more, and once I thought was a goner. Poor little beast! She loses her head in tight places, and struggles as if crazed. It’s fearful when they close their eyes, lay their necks in the mud, grunt comfortably, and never try to shake the ‘skeets crusted on their necks.
Later we swam the whole bunch, riding them, across a deep slew, and climbed a wooded terrace to camp. Half an hour after the boat landed.. . .
I’ve been urging the Professor to appoint duties and organize some system of camp and pack work. Jack and Fred are beginning to kick, and justly, with a do-nothing like Simon along. An expedition like this won’t run itself. Unless its head, as I’ve been trying to do, sets an example by getting up first, starting breakfast, and leading tirelessly in every job, he’s got to give orders, or growling begins. I told the Professor this. He will neither order, nor lead. He just fusses with his aneroids—junk, I call it all—and like most tenderfeet, is a continuous boot-changer. Simon butted in during our talk, so I observed that the ‘skeets were pretty thick, and lit out. I’ve talked over this system business with King and Jack, which may not be right and loyal, but they and Miller agree with me. I’ve a mind to lie abed and just see what happens if I don’t get up at five-thirty to-morrow and start breakfast. But I know that when the moment comes, I’ll be on deck, and it will be up to Fred and me, in addition, to bake the two reflectorfuls of bread, cook, wash dishes—Lord, everything! First must come success of the expedition, not my ideas, or even justice. The Professor ought now to be balancing side-packs against to-morrow, if he’s really to run the pack train as he says he will, for everything is to go on the horses, and Jack is coming with us, having decided to without discussion or advice. Instead, our chief’s down there by the river, praying over his junk, smiling at screws and nickel cases, lifting, stroking his old Abeny level. I no longer ask him to show quality; I wish he’d show something. He’s too silent; hopeful without being cheerful; slow-witted.
I suppose I am a kicker, but is anyone ever quite responsible in this racket? Oh, well, now I’ve bitten off such a lot I might as well chew it without frothing at the mouth. My back aches from leaning over these pots. Wonder if I’m roasted in the others’ diaries. I ought to be.. . .
Queer how these slogans of travel vary. To-day I muttered over and over:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
Hit her father forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done,
She hit her mother forty-one.
Fred sings:
Over the slew
The packtrain flew—
Over the slew
The packtrain flew.