RED FLESH FOR KINGS OF FRANCE
August 2.—We have crossed the entire range.
On to-day’s “march,” as the Professor always says, as if we had a brass band and a drum major, we left the Kuskokwim, for the mountains suddenly ended. We turned northeast to travel the last hundred and fifty miles to McKinley, in airline along the face of the Alaskan range. We jumped from silty woods straight into swamp, for as long as Brooks follows Herron (who kept on down river to get lost) the trail is dry, but Brooks traveling on his own hook always jumps neck-deep into muck.
Miller and I have just climbed the mountain over camp, which stands like a sentinel guarding the vast Kuskokwim valley. Up, up, but not once a foothold to stand upright, through knee-deep moss, avalanche-torn spruces, choking alders, and a big glacier-borne bowlder a thousand feet above camp—we reached aweing talus slopes, fringed with jagged cliffs. The sub-arctic’s months of unbroken sunlight create the same endless, treeless rock fields that you see the year round on great peaks near the equator. The knife-like summit was like a breaking wave, yet with fragile Arctic poppies, defiant and abnormal, abloom on its crest. North, a dull, whitish network of bars and channels, a Kuskokwim tributary which we’ll cross to-morrow, twisted on fans of fresh alluvium from out these endless, angular peaks of terra cotta. Northward drowsed the gentle foot-hill country, one rounded dome standing out mutely to lead us on.
But the west! There the wilderness unfolded, vast and dumb. There low, translucent mountains hovered far beyond the horizon, across some aqueous gap. Over all the great Kuskokwim was sprent [sic], a long-drawn lacework of crackly glass bits, dazzling in the eight o’clock sun. Ghostly shadows filled the low ridges and flat hollows of this no-man’s waste, burned and naked, dull carmine with fire-weed. Never was wilderness so silent and serene, so without inspiration, without even melancholy; so powerful, so subtle, so unplanetary. The barometer, “made in Germany,” from the junk-box registered 26.5. And from the summit we saw, too, the acute angle made by the Professor’s knees with his legs, as he stood by his tent far below, and Simon eating fruit—eating, eating—out of a tin cup.
August 3.—The Professor and I clashed again to-day. He never knows where he wants to stop on the trail. He’s a fearful combination of stubbornness and indecision. Long ago, he said that he expected and wanted criticism, but no one dares advise or suggest anything now; but may laugh in his blue shirt sleeve, instead, at some of his moves.
This morning, as the others loafed in camp, Fred and I as usual hunted lost horses over miles of tundra and started tired. The Professor said that we should noon at the first river-fording. We cross all the streams draining the face of the range at right angles now. Horse-feed aplenty and water were at the river, but the Professor kept on a mile to where there was neither. As we chewed our dry bread, I said, “This is quite the cleverest thing we’ve done yet.” “Where was there water and horse-feed last?” he asked quickly. “Right at the river,” I said. He paused. “In using that word clever, I think you are going quite beyond your bounds,” he said, and the crowd stared, as if a dynamite fuse were discovered fizzling out under their noses. I forbore. The idea of taking my remark seriously! He should have laughed, “If you want water, go back to the river and get some for all of us.”
Nevertheless, I’m still suffering from the inevitable restraint this sort of foolishness gives. It may all seem a small matter, but in this life it’s big as holocaust or battle in civilization. And this is only our second tiff in this lifetime of the storm and stress of travel, of ego galling ego. There’s more laughter in a day than spleen. “Those are the things I try to forget,” said Simon, when I told him I had recorded our fight. Yes, but the pleasant things will be remembered anyhow; the unpleasant are nearer truth as it is in this wilderness life, nearer the blessed weaknesses which make us human, which for some false pride the returning traveler suppresses.
Late this afternoon, we touched tree line again. In the moss lay the whitened saddle of the second horse of Brooks’ to play out. Simon pounced on it and packed it along, girths and all. “He’s got stuff enough there to start a pushcart,” chuckled Miller.. . . “Cheap! Cheap!” went a wise picket-pin, sitting on a mound nearby.
We’re camped on white moss sloping to the north; on the left a creek and spruce, on the right a red mountain; ahead, forest mixed with ponds, the foot-hills unfolding beyond in the first quiet, cloudless twilight for weeks. The horse-bell is clanging hungrily in a bank of almost Keechatna red-top. We’ve eaten four prairie chicken shot by King, ahead of the pack train.
The Professor has spread a handkerchief over the back of his neck, because 2-mosquitoes-2 have been sighted, and is a sketch, making some sort of observation and scratching a bite at the same time. Simon, who is lying on his back, dead to the world, making gulping noises with his bread and tea, was called down for one of his favorite tricks to-day. The Professor saw the wood-and-leather lunch box (some scientific case of his, I think, which now is always tied insecurely on Bridget’s pack,) full of finger-squeezed biscuits insides going to waste, thrown away by fastidious Simon. After supper, I found one of these hidden on the end of a log. I put it in plain sight on the moss. Simon came along, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, stealthily threw the bread off into the brush—which is the kid to a T.
And we have only four sacks of flour left. The summer isn’t half over, and a sack lasts only one week. We’ve hardly seen McKinley. What, besides pemmican, will we eat on it? As we’ve come in—and we couldn’t get out that way much faster—we’re more than four weeks’ steady travel from the coast. Why don’t we worry? Our stomachs are always full, I guess, though only with beans. That’s why.
We have counted on “living off the country,” which no prospector will ever do, because of Fred’s tales how last year these foot-hills were alive with caribou, moose, and bear. But except the old grizzly and cubs a month ago, and the sheep on Tateno River, not a bit of blood-red meat have we seen. And both quarries our bum guns lost. “I don’t see what good it’ud do us to see a caribou,” says Fred. “Couldn’t hit one with that old.44 of the Professor’s. Like some of them horses, it was a good gun oncet.. . . Yes, sir, las’ year the caribou was thick on these hills. Must hev all migrated off. Yer can’t tell in a big country like this. It’s spotted. Game’s here one year, there the next. I b’lieve the caribou has all took to the woods for winter, and we shan’t see none without we stop to hunt.”
August 4.—We struggled among the ponds, crossed a river, and toiled through burned forest, where smouldering fire gnawed the moss, and black bark scaled from the spruces as if by disease. Bare, dead roots rose gnarled and sinewy from the brick-red sand, as skin might decay and powder, revealing the bones of a corpse. Suddenly I saw a tawny form swinging in the open a-top a ridge, and signaled to Fred, who dashed ahead with the old .44, twisting his neck to see the beast, running in circles like a man with epilepsy. We halted the train, whispering, “Moose!” But soon Fred reappeared ahead cursing the gun, swearing he’d never use it again, even if a caribou poked him in the shoulder. He had only wounded a big grizzly lying on his stomach digging for picket-pins, who rolled over and made off solemnly into the woods. “And I ain’t following no wounded grizzlies, not to-day,” he added, “nor termorrow with thet old Winchester.”
We covered rolling opens of white moss, where blue-bells, forget-me-nots, and white blossoms with coarse, aromatic leaves stood between lush banks of red-top and late snow-drifts. Bordering gullies of brown stones flat as a pounded pavement, where a drift had lately melted, willow and buckbrush would be planed off even with the general level by blizzard and cold, as if with a scythe, and lift atrophied twigs toward a sickly pond.. . .
Out over the dumb valley, all day translucent clouds have glowed, produced anon and anon by mirage and obliterated; thin lines of hills, now intense purple, now like wasted, shadowy rainbows far below down there, changing deep emerald at twilight, foreshortened into a single line, yet shading the darkening expanse, whence you get some hint of a loneliness yet unknown to man, perhaps of suffering.
Again we camp in a clump of rotting cottonwoods, which always outlast spruce toward the mountains. I have shaved, I even brushed my teeth. Then Miller went me one better, and carried out his threat to bathe in the creek, But I surpassed him by giving my feet a soap wash. Somehow I never have time to take off and dry my socks.
August 5.—Fresh meat at last, though only a grizzly!
In the cold rain, we sighted a blur moving across the hills. “Moose!” again we whispered, and the train halted. Fred dashed over the ridge; a shot; a great, grayish beast with branching antlers, running—floating, rather—toward the mountains, turning now and then to stare at us through the fusillade. “Caribou,” we breathed, seeing its white rear, though “Moose, moose,” insisted the Professor. Over the hills it leaped, down the slope, paused in the willows, pranced off up the talus, and over the ridge. I headed it around a hill into a creek bottom; King saw and tore down, but it nosed through the willows to more peppering—from the .44 nevertheless—and scudded into the horizon. What can you expect from that old Antarctic blunderbuss—and the Professor’s initials carved on the handle?
We moved on, weary, hungry, cold, and wet. But in an hour we found Fred, who had followed the quarry into the horizon, standing by a brown, dead thing, a year-old girl-grizzly, caught unawares pawing vindictively for gophers. We unpacked for bags and knives, skun her for the back fat, dissected her innards and captured her liver. And I, for one, cut strips of warm flesh from the disembowelment, and ate them raw.
And to-night King had a go at the Professor. Fred wanted to camp in a cottonwood grove in mid-afternoon, our leader to go on. On we went. “We’ll burn moss if we can’t find wood,” said he. “Then you’ll have to cook supper over it,” said I. You could as well burn snow as this rain-soaked sphagnum. But we found other cottonwoods, at last. Nearly all the horses went down together through the crumbling sod of the bank we climbed to camp; wedged themselves, lying on their necks and waving legs in air turning back-somersaults, packs under them, tie-ropes choking them. The Dark Gray nearly kicked me silly, flinging his hoofs turtle-fashion, as I pushed him over on his side. Fred and I alone hauled, and tugged, and drove, for Simon and the Professor had welched up to camp. Fred was furious. He climbed the bank and shouted, “You evidently don’t want no pack train anymore. You don’t never pay any attention to it.” The two of them didn’t budge; and somehow we managed to right the beasts, and hew a new trail up the slope.
But sudden sunshine and the meat humored us. First we ate the liver, which has the odor of smelts and is too sweet. After, King and I started up the glacier stream to find a crossable ridge for the train to-morrow, into the foot-hills, which are growing higher. We trudged up roaring willow-flats, with right at hand the pillars of two glorious rainbows, then around a greenish mountain on which rock, like bunches of dough, was stuck all over the talus. Head winds knifed us, clouds poured over a flat peak slashed with snowy gullies that quivered through the scud, as it were a wall dripping with tallow. We found Brooks’ horse-tracks (we packers, always traveling with an eye peeled on the ground, can find horse-tracks wherever and whenever we want to) and climbed an easy ridge by a lush gulley filled with pie-plant, blue-bells, and forget-me-nots. And up there was a sheep, staring at us from a cliff ahead! Up we sneaked. He was an old ram, lying down resting his twisted brown horns with a bothered expression on his face, and his legs folded under him. We dropped, and crept on; but when next we raised our heads, and near five hundred feet higher, there scampered the old fellow’s harem, a string of snowballs rolling up a summit two miles away. “Now ef a man was really starving,” philosophized King, “he could put in a day, and git one o’ them old rams.”
So we’ve come back to a supper of dried apricots. Every twig and branch hanging over the fire is alive with wet socks. Simon has sewed on his black velvet cap a canvas visor made from the old saddle he found, and with his thin Mosaic whiskers,. looks as if he was just off the yacht from Kishinev. Now he’s patching his busted rubber shoe with what was left over from the cap. He’s pitched the tent in such a holey place, King is sleeping outside. I hate the smell of punky cottonwood.
August 6.—We hit over the sheep ridge, and all day plunged dizzily down and up, over slidy talus cut with crags, through airy abysses, across little streams. The train slid and floundered, mashing feet, always out of plumb and off balance; and the Professor got nervous. You’ll never believe till you see, how horses can be herded in such treacherous steep places, sometimes with a 400-foot cliff right under your own sheer slope. Bless the mean, tough cayuse!
The King of France with twenty-thousand men Marched up a hill, and then marched down again!
New worlds of higher peaks, freshly snow-powdered, opened near, slid-to everywhere. “Good practice for McKinley,” gasped the Professor on each summit, having always seemed to rest on the ascent at the wrong place, and for much too long.
We’re camped at the forks of two small streams, in a courtyard of snow mountains and by poles of an ancient Siwash camp. Bleached sheep horns lie on the stones of an old fire;—yet nothing to burn but green willows. The Professor has trimmed his whiskers, and now resembles a codfish. He’s lying on his stomach, studying the map with a piece of straw, to find how we’re going to cover three thousand miles an hour, on a sled to be built some day, which he’s always mentioning, to slide down from the top of McKinley. Miller threatens to wash again.
August 7.—Forever King-of-Francing it, and—then our first caribou.
This morning, King wanted Simon’s Colt automatic, sacred to Simon, to stalk bear. Simon’s excuse for hogging it—though he couldn’t hit a glacier from its moraine—was that all the cartridges were packed on a horse. So, seeing a bear near a big river, instinct overcame Fred’s oath never to use the Antarctic blunderbuss again, and off he dashed with it. Volley after volley echoed from the old iron, but Mrs. B’ar and her one overgrown cub loped away downstream and up a bank, stopping to peek at us now and then from the willows, and say, “What sort of a noisy gilly have we here, my child?” King came back cursing. The Professor still wouldn’t admit that the gun was useless, and made uncovert hints that Fred had buck fever. But he will never shoot. Chewing stale bread in a broad glacier valley at noon, I diplomatically wheedled the Colt from Simon, and insisted on unpacking horses—all, if necessary—till we found cartridges. At that the Professor growled, till we told him that as Simon ran it that gun might as well be a walking-stick. Cartridges were in the second pack.
Instantly a caribou came nosing up a river-bar, edging toward us, advancing, retreating, in short swinging little runs, sniffing us nervously, nosing the air, as if punching holes in it. It’s wonderful how they glide, keen head and delicate horns erect, in that thrilling grace of limb over silt and tundra, where we struggle. He saw us, paused, advanced slowly across the bowlders to investigate, with a “Tsuss! Tsuss!” like steam escaping from a valve. Fred fired the Colt. The creature ran back a little, pausing now and then to throw a puzzled look over his shoulder and say (to himself), “Now, what did you make that funny sound with?” He shook with sudden tremors, perhaps from a bullet, perhaps from mosquitoes, and loped far away. But in five minutes, another came bobbing and swinging up the bar, to within ten yards, as Miller calmly photographed him. Fred knelt, Simon hopping at his shoulder, whispering, “Lemme, lemme, oh lemme!” Fred fired. Fired again—again. The caribou shook himself, turned his back; slowly, slowly his front legs quaked, his fragile head went down, and up and down, as the Professor to vindicate the blunderbuss blazed away, too.
We sloshed across the channel to revel in the liver, blood, and entrails. It seemed to matter nothing that we had something beside fetid grizzly meat; paramount was—though plain to all but the Professor—whose shot had killed? A grand pow-wow over that began, all of us elbow-deep in blood, feeling for bullets. Fred at last found a.44, but only in the deer’s neck. Thus the Professor’s gun was vindicated, and Fred discredited with buck fever, and all on a scratch shot!
Now caribou are circling around camp; one browsing in a meadow, one beautifully reticulated with black horns still in the velvet against the sunset. They’ve investigated, and decided we’re not worthwhile. For curiosity, they’re quite beyond cats and women. Down the valley, ten sheep are crossing a talus to watch us cook; up, Miller is stalking four that impertinently peeked right into the green willow camp-fire. The mountains are netted with their paths, but stalk as you will, an old ram guards the herd, and it’s off, leaping gorges, mounting sheer cliffs to three miles away and two thousand feet above at the first shot. They’re very funny when they run—just white ermine specks against the vast talus, a string of snowballs, on invisible legs, pitter-pattering with an easy, sideway swing from crag to crag, and never a sound below down here.
So we’re all happy, full of blood and fibrin; even Miller. His stomach had turned, like the worm of history, at fishy bear meat. Cold caribou grease is good as butter. Simon finds it better than sugar. He’s even thrown away the two-inch bear steak he saved when we shot the caribou, and had said, “I may not like caribou as well.”
August 8.—Angular ochre peaks feebly grassed and a bit too theatric as they vanish suddenly into calm snows; now and then a hanging glacier; scented fields of wild chrysanthemum deliciously crushed by the horses; gnarled streams and gravels in a bleak valley—eight hours we beat the brutes up two thousand feet, down two thousand; again, again, and again, ever northeast toward McKinley, a mountain ascent every half hour. “G—! I ken see Seattle,” says Fred on a summit. “Let’s go to the dance to-night. I hear Tom Healey’s git a new pornograph in his bar. See yonder, they’re buildin’ on the new brewery. Hear there’s been a strike. Getting home to-night, we’ll ask thet whiskered old feller that comes in on the six-thirty train how the new court-house is comin’ on down ter Skomock-away.” A caribou played detective on us in each canyon, and one peeked over a bench at us as we ate at noon.
Toward four, we took a high saddle, and sliding down to Tonzona River, got stuck on a craggy pinnacle. The beasts tumbled and coasted with the shale, bracing their four legs at once, scuttling down like peas over a gable, as we tore about crazily hallooing and beating them into line. Here from camp, in the first spruce seen for days, we’re gazing up at that rock steeple, wondering how any horse—or man, for that matter—could have fallen from it without somersaulting in mid-air.
A fat bull moose, skulking a hundred yards off in the brush, welcomed us here. Simon wanted to shoot him, but was suppressed. We can’t carry anymore meat, and who knows what prospector’s life this beast or his offspring may not some day save? Alaska belongs to the free miner and Heaven knows Nature has given him little enough help in his fight against her. I am glad we’ve no murderous sportsman in the crowd.. . . Mr. Moose watched us awhile with a bored expression, like a prize bull in his pen at a county fair, and made a solemn exit up the mountains, as if to say, “Now, who do you think those busy freaks are? They annoy me.” His dignity was rather travestied by a two-foot-long dewlap, which bobbed and swayed as he lumbered off. Bears “galumph,”
“The beasts coasted with the shale, bracing their legs as we tore about hallooing and beating them into line.” (Traveling through the foot-hill country.) ^ moose “lumber,” you observe, and caribou, which are the most human, fascinating beings, “float.”
Out on the gravel flat, we’ve been rendering out caribou lard from intestinal fat. As for me, I’m beginning to smell like a New England farm-house. And Miller has washed again!
August 9.—Crossing Tonzona River to-day, our thousand-and-first Rubicon, all the horses were stoned into the vicious black water, tearing through drift-piles and wrecked spruces, wetting their packs. We mounted a bench to—desert. Bare, bleak, and vast, it stretched out as dumb as in the recent hour when its ice-cap shriveled; strewn with white granite bowlders, as if hurled there only yesterday from invisible cannon. Northeast we filed in silence. Smoke softened and made magical the unresponsive plain, recalling Whymper on the arenal of Ecuador, early rangers in the Rockies, trekking Boers, Napoleon back-trailing from Moscow. Far below its immensity, the stark forest brooded, pale purple, and beyond, a wasted carmine, like summer midnight in the Arctic. Eastward, stupendous peaks reared snows veiled in opal cloud and magnified by refraction. Over the highest, a pale blue nimbus shed watery rays of a million hues, down among ringed, azure snow squalls—the Dorean vision of a sunlit paradise.
I fell behind with Miller, and talking politics! Now and then a larger bowlder notched the smoky blue-pink horizon; always gigantic, though miles away. We crossed a dry stream of round, white bowlders, like an avenue of skulls, each splashed grewsomely with pink lichen—and Simon found a new flower. We passed a grassless lake. At last came a roar, like a mill-race pounding over iron arches, and two dusky miles betrayed a clump of Childe Roland willows, beside another path of skulls.. . .
Caribou supper is over, and Fred, as usual, is changing his socks. He has three pairs in commission at once; one he sleeps on to dry them—which takes more courage than I should have; two are hanging on the reflector to improve the bread. Every morning, just as we pull out, someone rescues a forgotten fourth pair from a distant bush.
. . . Fred always finishes eating first. Tonight, the Professor remarked that he was off his feed. “A hog eats fast, y’ know,” drawled Fred, “and don’t take no small bites.”