CHAPTER XVIII

RAVENS AND DOOMED HORSES

September 1.—To-day, as I geologized alone on the glacier, the others dashed below to the spruce camp and Miller. I did not reach it till dark.

That endless, lone walk, past the lower reaches of gravel and chaos, out again upon the flat, forbidden tundra! Generations had passed since it had oppressed, warned, inspired, and all to no purpose. It was just the same, as must be the world to a criminal after trial and false acquittal. Ravens circled overhead, following confidently. “You’re caught, you’ll die,” they seemed to jeer. “Can’t get out of this country before winter. You’re fools, but we like human carrion. We’ve got you. Ha!” And aren’t they right to be so hungry and hopeful about us, with our one remaining sack of flour, one of beans, and civilization, as we have come from the Pacific, forty-eight days’ distant? All the meat has rotted. All the horses are lost, having slipped our dear clothes-mending Simon before he joined us on the mountain. Miller, hunting a week, has not found them.

I came upon the four sitting in dead silence about a dying camp-fire in the weird but friendly timber. They had only just reached camp, having found the Brown Mare far up along the ice, with a snagged foot, and so useless to us anymore, and helped her in. “I never thought you fellers would be back so soon,” said Miller in his low voice, taking me aside. It sounded like an accusation of cowardice. In his heart of hearts, I know he thinks us quitters; but that’s human nature, for he was ambitious and wasn’t with us. No use ever to explain.

Now I can think better about yesterday. We were checkmated by steepness at 11,300 feet (by the Professor’s aneroid) with eight days’ mountain food on our hands. But remember this: also with scarce two weeks’ provisions below on which to reach the coast, and winter coming. The foolishness of the situation, and the fascination, lies in the fact that except in this fair weather, unknown in Alaska at this season, we might have perished either night in those two exposed camps. Even the light wind nearly collapsed the tent, and any alpinist will tell you what storm and six inches of snow on that sheer slope would have meant. But where fools precede angels, the drunkard’s providence goes along, too. I don’t think the slope we did climb would have worried an experienced mountaineer, who might succeed on the yellow wall above. I should like to see one there—but not a Swiss or a Dago.

September 2.—Again life is a horse-hunt.

Down the river for miles are only old tracks in the sparse spruces; on the back trail, no lead across the crick five miles away. Hunting alone, I have the dear, Munchausen-like dreams roused by the wild tundra when the buck-brush is scarlet, cranberries are ripe, and winter’s in the North. Hunting with Fred and Miller (after losing Simon) I hear the few last chapters in their life-stories, which give the final key to the real manhood of these two. To-day as we lazed on the hunt, eating blueberries, Fred told of the girl he had been in love with when first he went to Montana in ’83; how he started to travel east to Iowa in prairie wagons with her and her parents, paying his way by chopping wood for them. But he never married. He hid his sentiment with funny tales of buckskin-clad female rounders met on the way. Miller told how after capsizing in a small boat off Vancouver Island, he went home to his mother who had heard that he was drowned. And, as we ate the sour, fermented berries, we gazed into the aching dimness of the tundra, and wondered if that stream bed, scarcely outlined so far away, turned to right or left toward the Yukon, behind that gnomish range of hills. And all through these endless, vain hours, those eager ravens with their silken death-rustle swooped overhead.

Late this afternoon, Simon and Fred came in with the two Grays, Big Buck, P. R., and White-face. We saddled them, and till twilight would catch sight of one another, gliding into reality, vanishing, on distant swells of the tundra, like horse-and-rider statues. The Professor, on a Gray, crossed the stream to hunt, knowing no beast would have wandered there. And we found no more.. . .

Miller and I to-night had just finished eating a mess of cranberries stewed in moose-grease and condensed milk, when in comes Simon, and we give him a taste. It so tickles his palate, he dashes off to make a mess of it for himself, blindly picking the handiest red berry—the poison, bitter kind that grows on a bush. He almost swore, and shaving by the fire light I cut myself from laughing. I had been watching a bully, big, gray wolf haunt the opposite river bank, for we’ve thrown the spoiled meat right under the bank near camp. I lay flat in the brush and studied his big bushy tail, lithe as a cat’s. He vanished for a long time. Suddenly, right at my head, I heard a great rattle of stones, but when I jumped up, Mr. Wolf and a hind quarter of the meat were gone.

We’ve been discussing how to get out of the country, for ice is beginning to rim the river slews at night. Twelve days’ rafting down the Peters stream should bring us to Tanana river and a Yukon trading post. But northeast stretches mile on mile, white with 10,000-foot alps, and the flat avenues of the world’s biggest inland glaciers, ramifying like the tentacles of a cuttle-fish this supreme American range. And it is all unmapped, undiscovered, bleak and shriveled under the breath of autumn. And south across these mountains, to the Sushitna River and Cook Inlet, the Government Survey report we read between chapters of our one and only Tom Sawyer, says with familiar triteness that it is “extremely doubtful” if any pass exists.

That challenged us. That settled it. We will find that pass, and most of us for a separate reason. We were all wonderfully in accord, deciding without argument. Miller, Fred, and I would take all risks crossing the mountains, for the very sake of them, and the unutterable rewards of discovery; the Professor agreed, because finally defeated on McKinley he thought, (so he said), he must propitiate science by some sure-enough exploration. And Simon declared that he wanted to reach the Sushitna thus in order to attack the south side of McKinley—on the two teaspoonfuls of tea we have left blizzards and zero weather. His “hollers” are still in order, and our flashes of heroism on the sheer neve have burned out and left us frail with the human passions of again hitting the long, long trail behind a pack train—which is more the test of manhood, I hold (if you do any work), than cutting steps on the perpendicular.

Miller bets we’ll be only two days going to rafting water on the Sushitna. I took him.

September 3.—All horse-hunting but the Professor, who lazed in camp.

Fred and I late this afternoon struck a tributary of the Peters stream far below where any of us had gone before, and there came upon the freshest horse tracks yet. We counciled, as in war. We couldn’t trail the beasts and get back to-night. We had seven horses already, enough to cross the mountains with. We are eating into the last sack of flour, and still out of meat, having no time to hunt, though to-day this pondy country all about the horizon was alive with caribou. We decided to return to camp, and argue on these grounds with the Professor, for a start to find a pass to-morrow. We did.

Back there, he heard us, and agreed, ordering all extras to be thrown away. But I notice that the Professor is keeping all his junk, and Simon is holding on to his stray overall patches, bits of leather, tooth-brush, and the glass thing he snuffs catarrh cure into his nose from. At supper Miller and I found his college flag, which he boasted in New York he was going to wave from the top of McKinley, and we—wiped the dishes with it.

So seven horses remain to die. Perhaps that ought to worry us, but it doesn’t. They will have a better chance to pull through the winter here, rustling grass through the light snow of the interior, than on the Sushitna side of the range, where it is very heavy, and we shall abandon the others. Also much depends on their physical condition, which should be good now; they should have fattened while we were on the mountain. Ought we to find and shoot them? I for one could not stand by and see horses that have served and suffered for us dumbly, on such a grind in such a land, shot in warm blood. It would be too much like murder; better to kill some humans. And I hold this allowable human selfishness. We measure others’ suffering in terms of our own pain, and if we’re far away at the momentary wrench when others die, effectively no suffering exists. At least this cowardice is the custom, and such sophistry the perquisite of Alaskans, though in civilization you will condemn it. No prospector will ever shoot his horse.

September 4.—This evening we packed, and were off. Our route lies northeast, along the north face of this great east-curving range. Ahead, we can see that it throws spurs and ranges out into the tundra, but we shall keep as near to its heart as possible, right at the moraine heads of its glaciers.

From here our course leaves Brooks’, who struck out among the hills on the tundra, reaching the north-flowing Cantwell River, thence the Tanana and the Yukon. The head of the Cantwell breaks far into the range, and has been used as a pass traveling north from the Sushitna, but we hope to find our pass south, in an opposite direction, a hundred miles this side of it.

We halted at a large flat of tangled streams to hunt caribou; Fred stalking toward the mountains, Simon tiptoeing close behind, like a comic dwarf. Shots crackled under a morainal hill, and the Professor, thinking them misses, bungled the train across a willow swamp, where we floundered waist-deep. But under the hill, there were Fred and Simon standing by a big dead moose, with sixty-four-inch horns. They had executed a clever sneak, and shot him from a few yards, as he looked the other way, quite unawares. “The old cuss was sort o’ logy,” said Fred, “jes’ ready to git off an’ rut.” The Professor insisted on propping up his head with sticks, and photographing him as if he were a bull lying alive in a pasture. “Now take him with his slayer,” said the Professor,” and Simon, who hadn’t fired a shot, dashed in and posed by Fred.

But five sacks of meat and sixty pounds of tallow he has given us, and the kid has cut off his dewlap for a cap.

September 5.—A gosh-awful horse-hunt. Season, failure, being homeward bound—nothing changes that torture.

Simon and the Professor lazing about camp, Miller, Fred, and I started to back trail for the beasts. Simon’s excuse for loafing is that he has to wash the dishes; but though we’re gone hunting for hours, he seldom has it done when we get back, and then begins packing the things as you put rings into a jewel case, but so most of them get squashed. Fred and I can never find what we want to cook with at night.. . . Toward noon I saw the beasts on top of a mountain, just sneaking down the other side. They had been in full sight of the camp for an hour, so the Professor said afterward. I had nearly busted my heart making the 3,000-foot ascent for them, and met Fred on the summit. And at camp they had seen us and the beasts before we saw them, and never shouted, or started after them! “Oh, we thought you’d see them before long,” said the Professor. Da—Christopher!

Toward afternoon we approached the flat, gravel desert of Muldrow glacier, named by Brooks, and the largest on the north face of the range. Far beyond it, out upon the tundra, smoke rose from a squat hill, the first human sign for two months. Indians? White men who have found our lost horses? We lit the moss in vain answer to that heartsick expanse, where far away glittered Lake Minchumina, near where Herron all but starved four years ago, a streak of silver through the haze. So we have camped at the far end of the great willow flat under the frozen brown estuary, which is four miles broad if a single inch; and three miles from water.

Reaching camp every night now, I say aloud:

There was a man in our town,

And he was wondrous wise.

He jumped into a bramble bush,

And scratched out both his eyes.

But when he saw his eyes were out,

With all his might and main,

He jumped into another bush,

And scratched them in again.

Simon laughs and repeats it; but he doesn’t see the point: that McKinley is the Professor’s first bramble bush, and the pass is to be the other—I hope.

Miller and I are “trying out” moose-fat in the pots. You cut it up into small squares, fill pans full over the fire, and pour out the melted grease to harden in old baking-powder tins. The gut fat is best, and makes bully “crackles” for eating. At last, Fred admits what I have always insisted, that caribou is better eating than moose—probably because we have no caribou now. Every mouthful we eat swims in grease. We use it for gravy on the beans. Good-night. Overhead rise the miniature hills of the moraine, icy in their depths, but yellow with dying cottonwoods.

September 5.—It’s all an undiscovered country, virgin to white men’s eyes—this bare, cold moss, these cloudy glaciers. And yet—

“I have been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell;

I know that keen, sweet smell.

That’s wrong, but how does it go, and what is it from? . . . I’ve done too much discovering.

I’m unimpressed, jaded.

We veered a bit east to-day, following up the north side of the petrified Muldrow desert, into the great space north of McKinley and the Sushitna head waters, which is blank on all maps. The horses had wandered three miles back to the Muldrow stream, and Fred and I, chasing them, saw two big black animals lurching through the willows of the flat. “B’ars, by gum,” said he, “else very dark moose. They move too slow for caribou.” Packing up, no one could find Fred’s ice axe. (We still keep the axes, why, I don’t know, unless for souvenirs.) We tore up the ground hunting it; every one thought it had vanished through the other’s carelessness, and no one believed his fellow’s protest and innocent tale. Evidence was that Simon had used the axe to dig a water hole last night—when lo! Fred found it himself, under a willow bush. Starting, we followed a stream parallel to the ice, where the Professor traveled so slowly, the horses jammed behind a bowlder hanging over the torrent. One by one, they took to the water and swam across. We tried in vain to stone them back, till the Professor, seeing whose fault it was, made a grand-stand dash, and corailed all on our bank again. He was sore with us, and showed it by hiding it so well.

Noon, and we struck down into a broad silt plain heading into large glaciers from the range’s heart behind Muldrow, and ate our boiled moose bones. We mounted a low, grassy saddle, and entered a broad valley opening before, which cut at right angles, against all reason, through the bounding peaks of the range. We traveled between pale, clinkery walls. The valley was two miles broad; we kept along its southern wall, and toward four o’clock a mountain jutted into its middle. ^

Making camp, we climbed it. Far away southeast, McKinley rose like an unearthly castle of opalescent glass, wrapped in the streaked, cold clouds of a Turner sunset; its summit, now seen from a different angle, a wilderness of peaks and gullies. We stared at it, seeing no better route up those steeps; looked wonderingly, and no longer in guilty silence. Northeast, the valley still keeps on far as the eye can reach, and far ahead, where a stream cutting it at right angles broke through the northern wall to the tundra, we saw spruces—think of that, for we’ve almost forgot how trees look!—stealing upward and dying away on its bleak, flat opens. Fred even refused to believe his eyes saw timber.

The Professor has just “worked out our position,” with a map, a pencil, and a straw. Now he travels with his wooden compass in his pocket, the Abney level tied on the Light Gray (the new lead horse—for L. C. is one of the lost), poor beast, loaded to the ground with the junk boxes. We’ve lugged pounds of instruments which haven’t been used at all, and now we’re lugging them home. Noble apology for adventuring, this science! “There’s a good chance to use your theodolite now,” said Miller to-day, pointing to an angle of Muldrow, whose direction of flow we’d been arguing about. The Professor only smiled, and never touched an instrument—as often before when we’ve wanted an observation. Sometimes as we plug along I feel, from what I’ve seen here and elsewhere, that not much will be done in Northern exploration till it gets into the hands of someone Napoleonic, brutal, perhaps, but with a compelling ego and imagination; away from the bourgeois and cranks.

We’re camped in a steep gulley on the valley’s right. Miller and I have been digging out chunks of lignite from the stream to cook to-morrow’s breakfast with. Now for bed, and the school-room scene from Tom Sawyer, before dark. Every one corrals horse blankets, and sleeps on a dais of them these icy nights. But we don’t smell moldy anymore. Good-night!

September 6.—On through our broad valley, U-shaped, and therefore glacier-carved, we still veer east with the eastward trend of the great range. Slate, which hints of the Sushitna watershed, replaced the porous pink porphyry to-day, and we nooned by beds of lignite bursting out of the ground like big truffles. On the flat of the wooded stream seen yesterday, but far above where timber had petered out, lay—a crumpled piece of birchbark. Bark cut by a knife! held by human ‘ hands!—and no birch grows on this side of the mountains!

It must have been carried from the Sushitna valley; but Siwashes or white men here? Never! Our valley cuts all streams at right angles on their way north to the Yukon, and we cross just under their glaciers, while the mountains are thickening ahead. So I was hot to explore for a pass up this stream’s valley, though I believe that we can cross the range by almost any of these ice rivers, ’spite of the Government. But no; the Professor would listen to no hint, and looking toward the ice, sighed, “It’s following the line of least resistance to keep on.” Line of least resistance! Hell! and Fred was mad, too.

So we dragged up the poor beasts again from the flat to the valley level; and camp is by a salt lick, a giant clay sore breaking through the tundra, where the beasts are swabbing their tongues in its cold mud.. . .

First cut in rations to-day. We’re limited to two biscuits each at breakfast. Its panful must last for lunch, and at night we must ask the Professor’s permission to cook more. He’s taking notice with a vengeance about grub and cooking. He used to expect us to bring him food like genii. Now he loves to chop green willows and insists on smothering the cook fire with them. They do give a hotter blaze, but if we always waited till they flamed up, we’d never get to food and bed.

Now the Professor is ascending a clinker hill with the wooden compass. Far ahead, queer slaty peaks, crimped and steepled, seem to choke the valley. We’ve followed it for thirty miles.. . .

Ice is forming around the willows of our stream.

September 7.—To-day, two low ridges ribbed the valley transversely; two more large glacier streams cut it, draining 10,000-foot peaks at the heart of the range, which stared at us crookedly for hours. We traveled eight miles, swinging to N. 720 E., and killed a fat caribou with thirty-five-point horns.

Since all valleys seemed equally good for a pass, and all were condemned, I thought that we should keep on through the low black spurs ahead, which must drain into Cantwell River, as it eats far into the range, causing what we geologists call “stream capture.” I supposed that we were now bound for the Cantwell’s known pass to the Sushitna. Again no; we struggled up that first conglomerate hill blocking the valley, and having chewed our cold boiled caribou, hit the stream beyond. We followed it up. Beyond the higher hill ahead, the country was rougher, but not impassable, and the main range was plainly lower there, promising a pass wherever you wanted. But the Professor ordered camp on the sparse willow flat, two miles below the stream’s ice. We halted. He ran out across the flat to look at the glacier, hid by a crook of rock. I followed. Nunataks rose like carbon needles from the cloud-hung fields. Its gorge seemed less promising than any condemned; yet—“We’ll find a pass up here,” ordered the Professor. “There was a man—” muttered I with fervor.

Not a blade of grass grows here, and all the pea-vine is dead. It’s wonderful how spry the horses keep on almost no feed at all. “Pretty poor pickin’, but it’s the same everywheres,” says Fred. Every minute or so the beasts start hot-footing on the back trail, and one of us—never Simon—scoots after them on the run. Ptarmigan are flocking in bands of hundreds in the bare willows. Now we are watching Simon chase sheep on a near mountain, the animated snowballs stringing out in a flying wedge as they see him rise like a rock mannikin above. The winter sunlight lies on dark peaks, growing ever mightier as they fill the north, and a smell of snow pervades the air.

The Professor has broached a scheme for keeping tab on the horses all night. We are to divide into watches. He cut five willow twigs, and we have drawn lots. Fred is to watch from 9 to 11; the Professor from 11 to 1; Simon, I to 3; I, 3 to 5; Miller, 5 to 7, while cooking breakfast. Then we’ll start up the pass! Miller and I think that we should reconnoitre here to-morrow, and that the Professor is working his faith-in-God-and-self, and line-of-least-resistance racket, a mite too strong.