WILLOW BUSHES TO AQUATICS
September 8.—We went to bed by starlight. Fred watched o k., but the talk at changing shifts, and at last a long confab of the Professor and Simon kept me awake. It was the kid’s watch after his boss’s. I could see them there by the fire. Some trouble was up. Ptarmigan swooping from place to place made a noise like a wheat thrasher in full blast.
The blind kid came to me for my Zeiss glasses, useless even on a dull day, and now scudding cloud hid the moon. “The horses have disappeared,” said he. “The Professorr-r wants me to go downstream to look.” I said a few profane things.
I went to the fire. The Professor took shape out of the night. “Why, I went out to make sure the horses were there every little while,” said he, childishly. “Three times I headed them off. They kept so still, I was sure it was they, but when I went over, it was only a willow bush!” Only a willow bush! I could have—but I didn’t. So, the author of this fussy scheme was the very one to lose the beasts on his own watch, dreaming at the fire, having kept us awake all night. And then, instead of chasing the beasts himself, he went to bed, ordering his orderly to hunt. Simon was only too eager, knowing he couldn’t find them, so he could sleep at daylight while we hunted. And he expected me now to sit and wait by the fire, then hunt all day, too. We ought to have let the horses go for a while, half of us hunted them to-day, while the others “found the pass.”
After enough sleep, the Professor’s conscience began to work; he thought he ought to go hunting, and was up with me at daylight. Fred and Miller sensibly lay like logs. The Professor went downstream, I up, without eating, nearly to the glacier, where a strange sulphurous smell, either from a rock vent or decaying sulphides, filled the air. No tracks. Back at camp, Miller was trying to light the fire, speechless with grouch. Downstream I followed the Professor, who soon appeared near the little creek flowing off the hill crossed yesterday, shouting something—he hadn’t the horses, so I didn’t care what. I went far below where we struck the stream, then back to where the Professor had stood, and right there were tracks, scattering up the hill, lost in the moss. He’d welched back to camp. Suppose he had seen and hadn’t followed them! I boiled.
I trudged the three miles over to the big stream crossed yesterday—the logical, hard thing; walked a mile up and down its bed, searching the flats beyond. No traces: only sixty-eight sheep not half a mile off, eating the sunlight off the mountain. Returning, there was Fred, driving the lost beasts up our stream. At camp, he and Miller were pretty mad. What they said about the Professor as a watchman and horse-rustler would never do to write. But he hadn’t seen any tracks at the creek. “Rub his nose in tracks, and he wouldn’t see them,” said Fred, who had found my tracks, but instead of back-trailing, had swung along the hill-top. “I found’em on a scratch shot,” said he.
“Back here,” said Miller, “the Professor didn’t seem to give a hang whether he had his horses or not. He just said, ‘Tell Dunn and King to bring the outfit up the glacier to the pass when they find the horses.’” “Pass? What pass?” sneered Fred. “Why, with hungry horses lost like that, nothing but frozen grass anywheres, we ought to have expected to be here a week huntin’, they might scatter so far. But no, I see with only a week’s grub, and us on the wrong side of the mountains, he doesn’t give a hoot about his pack train, and just starts up onto the ice with his orderly, Simon. H—l!”
We considered waiting there for the pass-finders, but felt more charitable after eating, and packed up, leaving behind for spite Simon’s caribou skin.
So we drove the beasts up the long, hoof-grueling moraine, out upon clean ice. Ahead, the dazzling avenue swung east past a pyramidal white peak, whose nearer ridge met the glacier’s left wall at a tiny nick. Forward loomed a serac; clouds scudded up from the north; we bungled on for an hour in a snowstorm, till the Professor and Simon glimmered atop the icefall, giants by mirage. Once more we played the old game of quadrilling upward among snow-choked crevasses in a blizzard, each tied to a horse for safety. Twice the Dark Gray and P. R. caved through and were roped out. Once Fred went under just where I had been standing.
The Professor had peeked through the nick before going to the glacier’s end, and had seen light down a narrow valley. We neared the place. The ice rose in frozen combers on a little fan of upright slate needles, perhaps forty feet wide, joining in a hundred yards white pillars supporting Heaven, which you felt should tremble in the luminous scud. Somehow we dragged the beasts to its knife-like top. But a pass was there, indeed a pass! Elevation, 6,100 feet. Now and again, as with beating hearts we started down from this most fiendish zenith of Alaskan desolation, the dark chasm curved away below in a tremor of sunlight; now, across sheer walls monstrously patched with round neve and gully snow, quivered an unearthly gold; then, far, far beyond, a silver glimmer revealed green lowlands and translucent peaks, surely guarding the Pacific!
Save poor dumb beasts from such a descent again! Never were horses so punished, even in this land. One by one we wheeled them, switch-backed them, stoned them, hauled them, shouted ourselves hoarse at them, till the thin snow on the cruel talus was a ladder of blood. Unshipping their packs, they fell, bracing themselves. At one drop, the P. R. lost his head, dashing up and down a narrow shelf, his load under his stomach; then with blood-dripping legs, he balked half an hour, till I thought his bones must stay there. Ten mud holes on the tundra would not have roused such terror.
Yet in two hours we came down three thousand feet, to the first bite of unfrozen grass for a fortnight, to forget-me-nots and hare-bells in bloom, and a last winter’s snowbank still shriveling under a clump of willows that were putting forth stillborn leaves. Here, south of the mountains, summer lasts longer, though the snow never melts, and spring was just coming to those bushes.
“There was a man in our town,” we said at supper, but I made it “willow,” instead of “bramble bush.” Honor be, after all, to the Professor.
We’re safe on the south side of the range.
September 9.—Early we came upon a sizable stream flowing east, draining the range at right angles to its valleys. Miller had left his camera hanging on a bush, and climbed back to camp for it as we waited. Simon and the Professor drew guess-maps of the valley, then played Pythagoras very seriously in the river sand. Fred, sitting on a log, sez he to me, sez he, “Look at the Professor in them ragged clothes. With his trousers hitched up, his heels tight together, he looks jest like a ballet girl goin’ on the stage. No, more like an overgrown boy lookin’ fer a job, or a down at a circus, with that little cap, an’ his long hair.” Halfway from this point to Cook Inlet, and north of where we left its western tributaries last July to cross the mountains, the Sushitna forks. The water that carries its name fills the east side of the valley; the Chulitna River, the west, our side; while a low range squats between. Above the forks, the Chulitna is all unmapped and unexplored; no one knows even if it is larger or smaller than the Sushitna. We are either at the Chulitna headwater, or a tributary of it—it’s impossible to tell, and makes no difference, as all these rivers split into scores of tentacles at their heads. As soon as we strike deep enough water, we’ll leave our horses and raft for speed’s sake; but that stream was still too shallow, and hadn’t yet decided to turn south— our direction. We were sure it veers before long, for eastward we can see the far wall of the valley running straight south from the great range which we have just crossed, and the gap where the Sushitna and Cantwell headwaters meet.
Halfway to the forks, Government maps show two dotted parallel lines, marking a supposed huge glacier—probably seen from the Sushitna side of the valley, which has been explored—meeting the Chulitna from the south side of McKinley. We want to confirm and investigate this glacier. As the rainfall on this side of the mountains is much greater than on the north side, this ice river, if it exists, should be larger than Muldrow glacier, even if its watershed is smaller. Simon fondly pretends to imagine that we shall try to ascend McKinley by it. It is the glacier which the Professor, in his old day-dreams of success, declared we should follow on sleds in descending the mountain. Once he even hinted that we ought to lug runners to the top, to skid down upon!
So we left the stream, and struck southeast out into the valley, away from the mountains, over the sunbaked rocks of a big moraine, which showed that this river’s course had once all been ice. Simon fell behind with me, chattering confidingly. His father makes paint, and sells a wonderful preparation (so he said) called—something-“oid,” which you can use to roof the desert, mend holes in your head, heart, or cabin; it’s bullet-proof, acid-proof, water-proof, fire-proof, God-and-devil-proof; and in every uncivilized part of the world pioneers bless it nightly with flesh sacrifices. Poor, practical, material Simon! He chattered on and on, as the tundra streams gathered into a torrent, and plunged us into canyons. He is going to devote his life to booming and discovering new uses for “something-oid.” This is simplicity and enthusiasm for you—and money to be got.
At last sheer slate cliffs and the torrent’s roar cast us upward to camp, drenched and sore-hoofed. From our hill, we look down upon an even larger source of the Chulitna, flowing straight east from the cloudy northern precincts of McKinley, among labyrinthine sand-bars and lines of saffron cottonwoods.
For supper, we’ve tried Labrador tea, having scarce a handful of the real stuff left. Its ferny leaves, red and woolly underneath, taste mild and old-maidish, and of the swamp.
September 10.—Through strangling alders once more we slid down to that big stream. One mile, and it swung due north, into a great canyon. We followed.
Shall we ever get out of this cursed gorge?
Again begins the old game of fording and refording. All day, we watched that familiar cartoon of humanity, the Professor, sprawling on the overloaded Light Gray’s rear, as we swung from bar to bar, ploughing every few yards through a treacherous channel. Up leaped the cliffs to 400 feet sheer on both sides. It was swim or back trail, if we didn’t like it. Hour after hour the canyon twisted like a snake, so it seemed at each bend that we must tunnel a way on. I pitied the poor shivering brutes, with hoofs still mashed from that pass, unable to see the stones that moiled them in the milk-white water—each of us on a rump, making two and a half hundred pounds on all of five backs.
By noon, channels were so deep each ford was a swim. And resting at noon grub, I insulted fate, and have swallowed the consequences. I used Miller’s pocket mirror to examine some pimples on my face (from eating beans floating in moose-fat). Then I sat on the mirror and broke it. So, soon after, as the horses crowded together at the thousandth ford, the Whiteface got a bad hold on a bowlder with his right hind foot; it slipped, and landed on my left, his whole weight, plus the leverage of the other three hoofs used in scrambling to regain his balance. I thought he’d hacked the foot off. But on I pottered, moaning, hopping, groveling, over two more swims, till the Professor made me take off my boot. There were the toes all right, but bloody and with big red gobs under the nails; and he wrapped them in his red bandanna.
Still we forded, each time having to swim further and further, until the Little Gray rolled over in mid-channel, shipping the Professor, who sprawled along, swept into a rapid under the slate cliffs. “He floats very high—from the air in his clothes, I guess’’ said Fred calmly, looking on. That brought the man sense to call a halt. Still, we had one more channel, and that nearly did for me. In mid-stream, and I perched behind his pack, pain, mashed toes and all, Whiteface stood a while upright, treading water with his hind legs, pawing the air with his front. The crowd thought he’d topple over; he ought to have, and if he had-
I’ve hopped on one leg to this bar camp. Everything is sandy and soaked. Our clothes are falling to pieces, our boots are worn out; mine are a castoff pair of Miller’s. I’ve been sitting still an hour, sick at my stomach, moaning, swearing, biting my shirt from pain. Not a blade of grass down here, and stuck in this canyon, we can’t get the beasts up these stage back-drop cliffs. Fred has just climbed them, and reports swamps, lakes, and confused tributaries ahead—making it impossible to travel up there—and no break in our gorge. We’ve no idea how far we are from the sea, what falls or rapids may be ahead, whether the water fills the canyon completely, as it may, and checkmate us. This is making Cook Inlet in two days from crossing the pass, as the Professor prophesied and Miller bet, with a vengeance. We haven’t started down this immense valley. Bets are that we’ll abandon the horses to-morrow.
The Professor is trimming Fred’s whiskers into a vandyke. It’s nearly dark. Drying fires twinkle in the willows; over one, Simon is giggling and waving his wet college flag. We’re soaked in caribou grease; we eat so much we exude it. The Abney level is drying in the reflector. We’re making sarcastic remarks about the existence of that big glacier.
Miller shouts from the fire, “How late’s the barber shop open?” And it’s beginning to rain.
September 11.—Not a wink of sleep last night, from the foot pain, and the hungry beasts pawing and tramping ceaselessly four inches from our heads. Right after starting, the canyon narrowed, so we had to ford every forty feet or so. And every channel was a swim. We covered about a quarter mile an hour.
Most packers will tell you that it’s impossible to ride a swimming packed horse. If he once turns turtle, he can’t right himself; his pack’s too heavy, and generally swings under his stomach. You must slip off then, escaping the splashy play of his hoofs, if you can. Unless he’s washed ashore on a bar, he drowns, and the pack’s lost.
Again and again all the morning, we just escaped. Your beast stands upright, circling downstream, treading water, ready to topple over, till the current eases, or a hoof strikes a bowlder safely. We kneeled on the haunches, like circus-riders, frantically wigging an ear, banging a neck, blinding an eye with one hand, as your shivering, overloaded beast snorts in the icy mud-water, and your eyes play about on the racing shore line, and the whirlpool sneaks toward you, up through the humming rapid under the cliff. The Professor began to hop round like a puppet, trying to choose fords where the current shot you just right to still water on the other shore, so you might, or might not, escape the foam collars. And all in the rain.
Of course it was madness. Spruces a-plenty for rafts grew in rock clefts, but halt and build them the Professor would not. Why? Just pig-headedness. He said that the water wasn’t deep enough for rafting. “There’s rafting water for you,” said Miller at each crossing. “A schooner’d float from here to the Inlet without scratchin’,” Fred would mutter. But we were too engrossed and excited to revolt. The game was capturing our blood. From dreading, pausing, talking fast and nervously, wait-for the first man to plunge in at each swim, we began to dash in all together and carelessly, with the intoxication you get from having survived too often when you shouldn’t. Of course, the slow-blooded Professor responded cumbrously to this stimulant. He began to value life after we had forgotten it. Toward noon, an earth bank replaced a cliff, and we scrambled up to the valley level, traveling east a while from the river.
Two miles, and the stream followed and headed us; so we plunged down between gravel banks, to where it flowed openly over bars all the afternoon. Late, a large clear stream emerged on the left (east). And again the slate canyon cliffs menace ahead.
We’ve come perhaps six miles to-day. Camp’s in the rain here, a mile below the tributary. For the first time since leaving Peters glacier the tents are up. Simon and I have just batted the poor beasts up the alder-covered wall of the gorge, where some miracle may have grown feed. Campfire is between two little spruces in the oozy river muck, just big enough for three to huddle over, while the others stand and shiver. Too wet and chill to write.
One thing’s sure: we can’t take horses down this river-bed to the big mythical glacier. To-morrow’ll be worse than to-day. I’ve just told the Professor so. He simply went on eating, not even winked. Of course he’s never told us in so many words that he intends driving the pack train to the glacier, but has often given that impression. He gives nothing but impressions; you have to be a mind-reader to draw him out. Still none of our plans or intentions are put into words, still we grope along in the dark. Certainly, we’re losing by not rafting, to say nothing of the silly risk. And if time is no object, it’s sure possible to take the beasts slowly across the box canyons and small stream gorges of the valley level. Any way is less stubborn and childish than this sloshy, amateur hippodroming.
September 12.—Still the swimming game, which now seems to amuse the Professor so; still rain. Never before has the outfit been so soaked and demoralized. Still the canyon, and the second ford was a long swim.
All but Simon had crossed circus-fashion, kneeling on his horse’s haunch behind the pack. We turned to watch the kid on the Big Gray, last as usual. He was cavorting backward in circles, with a good list, downstream under the cliffs. “Jump! Swim!” we shouted to him, but still he clung to the wall-eyed beast, whose pack slipped under his stomach, as he lurched on one side, all under water but his waving heels. Simon appeared a goner. Finally, where the water boiled worst, the boy seemed to get free of the horse, struggling with his rubber cape. And he escaped the heels, swimming, and to our amazement dragged himself out on a ledge of the 500-foot cliff, but it was on the wrong shore.
Away floated the Gray, rolling, snorting, plunging down the swift water, arching up his neck less and less for a grunt of air, his nose under water. Fred and I dashed down the bar to grab him, in case he touched an eddy on our shore. But we thought he was done for—with my camera, sweater, mackinaw, and Tom Sawyer aboard; when slyly he did strike a backwater, righted himself, and stood up bewildered and dripping, a water-logged statue.
Simon, unable to climb around the cliff, was stripping to swim. The Professor from our side did the same, to rescue Simon, I suppose, while Fred and I hugged the background to let the man get a dose of the fruit of his own fording medicine. But the kid pluckily dived and swam the current, his duds tied around his neck, before the hesitating Professor was wet to the knees. He made shore a hundred yards below us, as Miller dashed out into the current, gallantly throwing him a coiled cinch line.
My pent indignation broke loose. I asked the Professor if rafting wasn’t now “following the line of least resistance.” (Fred whispered sarcastically at my side, “Holler about not wantin’ to abandon this nice pack outfit yet, so he will quit it; he goes so by opposites.”) Silence. His stubbornness, no sense of humor, unsensitiveness to the hurts of man and beast, awful self-seriousness—all are amazing. He wouldn’t even stop to build drenched Simon a fire, and Simon complained to me. For once I pitied the poor kid, clattering over the stones on the run for warmth. I told him that he stood too much from the Professor. But think of his orderly’s kicking! And still we forded and reforded the deadly channels.
We set a drift-pile ablaze at noon. Right after, the river made amazing twists, and having spared us in another bad swim, the current grew narrower and swifter than ever before, butting into the cliffs at right angles with a good whirlpool under. The Professor halted and began talking about taking too much risk, with Miller and King unable to swim. I said that I’d try the place, though it was worse than Simon’s Scylla; that since we’d swam so far, we might as well keep on swimming. The Professor hemmed and hawed quite seriously; up to now he’d pretended to take all our aquatics as a huge joke. He sidled over to Miller, and smirked, “How would you like to ford a horse here, if you can’t swim?” That made me hot. “Of course, Miller’ll follow wherever you lead,” I said. “How can you ask him that? His swimming a horse here is a question for you to decide, not Miller.” Only more hemming and hawing for answer; gazing sleepily at the timber, and a wonder “if the horses can get out of the canyon.” Then the Professor’s inevitable procrastinative, “Well, camp anyhow, and we’ll see.”. . .
Half the sugar has seeped away, and the syrupy sack is squashed flat. The beans are swollen and sprouting. The last baking-powder tin had only two teaspoonfuls of a brown liquid, which faintly inspired the last reflector-full of bread, which when cooked you couldn’t bite even after soaking. It’s filled with chunks of green mildew, like currant cake. No tea at all. I’ve kicked the reflector off into the brush (we’ve nothing more to bake) without obsequies. The caribou and moose meat’s dumped out into the sand in the rain—at a safe distance from camp—since each chunk is deeply shaved before it’s edible. Kerosene, mildew, horse-sores, and a week’s soaking make our blankets fit to please some Paul Verlaine.
I’m in the tent, which smells something like a stable—the Augean one before what’s-his-name flushed it. The bushes about the fire groan under wet and rotten socks, pants, coats, all getting wetter. The rain falls in great gobs from the yellow cottonwoods. The starved horses are crashing about in the brush. I can see four sullen human beings, hands behind backs, backs to the fire, not a soul uttering one word.
Simon has been hollering once more about throwing away chances to climb McKinley by abandoning the horses. He laid it on stronger than ever before, and the bluff was more transparent. No one paid any attention to him but the Professor, to whom the kid must be our indefatigable hero. Now he’s talking about the specific gravity of cottonwood; Miller about how unwieldly a raft of it would be; Fred about how it’s sure death to swim a pack horse more than thirty feet. No sound but the patter of rain and the incessant roar of this rock-walled river, flowing only God knows where.. . .
At last the Professor’s pig-head is snagged! To-morrow, so he says, we’re to build rafts; not of spruce, which is best, but of the big cottonwoods over camp. We might just as well have rafted in the beginning, and been at the mythical glacier three days ago.
Lord! There’s the kid making another holler about quitting the horses, offering to drive them down the canyon behind the rafts with us aboard!
September 13.—Early the river-bed began shaking with the fall of eighty-foot cottonwoods—whiz, zizz, crash! Fred was chopping in the rain at dawn, and all day we’ve been rolling logs to the whirlpool back-water, on all kinds of clumsy rollers and skids devised by the Professor.
He was so nifty at this, that as we pawed along logs with our hands, bent double in the quicksand, I said, “You must have worked in a lumber yard once.” “I really don’t know that I ever have,” he answered seriously, and offended. Worst was rolling them out through shallow water and foamy stones to mid-channel, to drift to the pool. Simon and the Professor of course shied at getting their feet wet and Miller lost the first log he guided, getting in over our only rubber boots. He took them off and went to work again, but the other two now wouldn’t even work with them on. Rubber boots are a dreadful affectation; once I get them, in they go to the old Chulitna.
Through the afternoon everyone but yours truly appointed himself a Herreshoff, and gave orders to Fred, who notched the logs. Miller especially assumed an air of touch-me-not importance, being an amateur Puget Sound sailor. Y. t retired to camp to dry the dregs of the food, as the rain had stopped, and took the liberty of naming the raft Mary Ann—accepted in the face of Miller’s suggested Reliance, and Simon’s Discovery.
Now at dusk she rocks large, green and clumsy in the whirlpool ways. The Professor has climbed the bench, and seen nothing in the fog. Yet squatting here over our beans swimming in grease, our meat fried to leather to kill the fetor, he has found a mind again, and announces that as the river “may be straighter” from the terrace-top, the horses will be driven on another day or two, while Miller and King, the non-swimmers, will speed the raft. Simon, of course, had to volunteer to stick by the beasts, having hollered so much about quitting them. I could do as I chose, and having decided a week ago, wrapped my meagre duffle in a tarpaulin, and said, “Raft.”