HUMANITY AND HAPPINESS
September 20.—Still we plunged east, at right angles across the valley, around the bare granite hills. The channel puckered narrower and narrower—into another black canyon. Ethel was ahead, just inside its jaws. Suddenly Simon shouted, pointing to the black rim of rock between water and cliffs.
“Tent! tent!” he cried. “See the stove pipe! Siwash dogs!”
And there, as if washed ashore from the black mill race, was a smoking log hut, too, and a whole lay-out of sluices.
We whistled and shouted. Two men in blue shirts and rubber boots appeared walking carelessly up-shore. The very light-haired one—Swede, of course—gave a faint, cheerful whoop, and his black-haired little partner with the prospector’s bulging eyes pointed out the eddy to swing into.
We landed, waiting for them to speak. I suppose that our failure, forgotten in this joy and those quick, homeward dashes, silenced us unconsciously.
“Which way did you come?” asked the dark man. “By the Tokashitna?” That river was a new one on us. We had missed it. They said that we had passed its mouth just below the second big glacier. But wasn’t the Chulitna quite unexplored? Yes, until they had ascended it this summer, as far as where we built our rafts, it appeared. Indians had told them of the Tokashitna.
Then we told them, but quite carelessly, in perhaps a hundred words, that we had been spending the summer about Mt. McKinley. We asked, between sentences, if they had salt or flour to spare, The Professor had the nerve to say that we had fresh meat to trade for luxuries like that.
“Yes, we heard of your outfit and plans at Tyonek,” they said. But they didn’t ask if we’d reached the top of McKinley.
“Them Indians at Sushitna Station will go crazy when they see you,” said the Swede—Chrest Hansen by name. “You’re a hard-looking lot with them red bandannas tying up you’ hair.”
In the tent, they gave us sour-dough bread, and we ate it standing in that human smell of old sourdough miners that I know so well; by the long, plain board table with pressed glass salt cellars on it, the box-board bunk and great wads of gray blankets, the leather valises with boards on top for seats; the alarm clock. It was great to feel yourself reading what might be somewhere near the right time of day.
They had been digging flour gold here since July; getting a stake, no more. They gave us salt and tobacco—a whole plug to Fred—but had no flour to spare. Hansen gave me a pipe. They actually accepted some of our moose meat; held it up laughing a little childishly, saying, “Sure, yes, we know,” as we warned them to shave the outside, and not get their noses too near. They told in great detail how they had missed hitting a brown bear up the river last July.. . .
“See me spit on the rocks,” chuckled Fred, as we walked back to the raft. “I chew it, tin tags an’ all. It’ll take a hell of a lot of chawin’ till I catch up lost time on plugs.”
Hansen told us that the canyon was fifteen miles long, safe to raft if we kept to the right, and its lower end was not a dozen miles from the junction with the Sushitna! Last June it had taken them two weeks in high water to rope its length up to there.
But we haven’t made the forks to-night. We ran the canyon in two hours. Camped here on the bar, it’s very cold. Yet we’re only a hundred miles from the Sushitna trading store—civilization.
September 21.—Right at the start to-day, the river hurled us through a whole archipelago—once staid, tree-covered flats, which it had lately severed into town-lots. We dodged Mary Ann among shreds of jungle quivering in the white water, slapped her against the logs, till she buried a side, and the dizzy angle freed us. Fred and I hopped about, giving orders, changing them, cursing each other after every escape.
We had luck, but Ethel didn’t. Once, where we landed to wait for her, first thing we know, Simon comes kiting down the bar after the axe. Back half a mile, we found Ethel hung up slanting on a willow snag, water washing over the junk boxes, the Professor and Miller nursing their dry feet on her up-turned edge. Fred jumped in and hacked them out, and in a half hour, both rafts abreast, we swung out upon the broad, even channel of the Chulitna and Sushitna pulling together for Cook Inlet. Rafting was easy now.
Here we sit on our load, raised on two logs in the middle of the raft and covered with the tent. Now and then we wonder which channel to take among the large islands, and the river chooses for us. Sometimes we loiter along shore, roused to paddle furiously when the steely water hustles on suddenly, and we scrape over shallows. But channels make little difference now; every lead has water enough.
Fred is staining the river with tobacco juice; I am smoking Chrest Hansen’s pipe. We swing slowly round and round, as air bubbles hiss up from the gray-green flood. “See the view change without you movin’,” says Fred; and after silent intervals, “Beautiful! beautiful! beautiful!” They seem asleep on the other raft; the Professor, anyway.
Northwest, McKinley, Foraker, and the coronet-like Titan between which we discovered, rise ever higher over these limitless lowlands. Clean blue shadows glaze the deeps of the saffron cottonwoods. Riffles upon shallows far ahead snuffle delicately and distinct through the warm sunlight of Indian summer. We dip our paddles with neat care. We live utterly in the present.
I wonder, shall I ever return to so glorious a land, to such happiness?
September 24.—This afternoon, we began to bet on the exact time by the Professor’s watch when Sushitna Station would loom up. He and Miller studied every eddy. A long one, said they, stretched just above the Station, into which flowed Yentna river, which they had ascended to meet us last July. We were standing on our loads, shading our eyes, speaking very seldom.
Toward four o’clock, a ruined cabin slid out upon a terrace with a clay bank under, and below dories were ranked ashore in a long stretch of dead water. Then weathered huts were tumbled in long, dead grass sloping evenly to the river. Spires of blue smoke rose, and on an island opposite appeared frowsy Siwash huts, the whine of dogs, savage shouts, scarlet cloth on the heads of moving squaws.
A tall old man strolled up-shore with four white men’s dogs. We pulled in toward him, and asked him—not if Jack, whom we had sent back so sick just eight weeks ago, had ever reached here—but the news of the world. He knew of nothing since August 10.
“But yer know the Pope’s dead?” he drawled. “And them cardinals held a sort of political convention, where Gibbons he acted as a kind of boss, showin’ them the American way, and they elected a new Pope, his man. Roosevelt, he’s agreed to complain to the Tsar of Rooshia about them massacred Jews, and someone’s killed that Queen Dragon of Servia, try in’ to jump her claim to the throne. And Rooshia’s goin’ to fight the Japs. The’ ain’t much happened this summer.” His heavy boots clattered over the stones as he followed us, but he did not look at our open mouths, or ask us one word.. . .
We’re sitting about a camp-fire in the dark on the beach just below Shorty’s store. He is on a trip to Tyonek, and his squaw wife handles his keys. Prospectors don’t usually care for squaw-men, except Shorty, who is nearly seven feet tall. The wife walks about aggressively timid, maintaining the respect of all these prospectors, which she has mastered. Her eight children she guards in her cabin. She has been selling Simon candy of the Lower Silurian Age.
Nearly all the cabins are occupied. Prospectors are coming into this valley for the first time. No strike has been made, no, but it’s the last valley in Alaska still untouched. They have spent the late summer boating up their years’ supplies from the head of the Inlet. Some have dogs, some hope to get them from somewhere before winter. They are the bedrock Alaskan article, the men to be first on the claims if an Eldorado is struck. They start their stampede the winter before, not in the spring, which is the tenderfoot way. Each has just waked from failure—in a rush camp, or looking for daily wages in Valdez. Again they take up the old, relentless, dream-trail to riches through the desolate and uncertain North. Human beings, at least, men after my heart! In Arizona, Oregon, South Africa, the Philippines, each has more than once risked his poor all, and lost, always lost. But now the Eldorado is at hand, in this Sushitna valley, here is the place. They may hand-sled their outfits up the river in March, making many double trips; but to what point each is still undecided. There’s plenty of time yet to think.
They handle the few rocks I have picked up, asking the simple, penetrating questions of men who have learned geology only in the field, and with one idea, placer gold. They talk of porphyry, bull granite, and gravel wash. They trace wise, slow fingers across our sketch maps, asking advice where they should go, like children. But if we have not seen such and such a schist on this or that creek, with bedrock so deep, it settles that Eldorado. Climbing McKinley does not interest them at all.. . .
A tall, gaunt man has just come from prospecting in Luzon. He is cursing that country with great ingenuity. It’s worthless, apparently, because you cannot grow oats there; corn, either, which he took out to settle the fate of the tropics with. There the natives are so thick and starved they search the mountains at night with candles for lizards to eat, till the hills seem alive with fire-flies.
Silently we look up to Mount Sushitna, rising clear and lone over the glossy river and the unknown wilderness, which is bright with uncertain auroras.
A shadowy figure approaches. I hear the Professor’s voice in my ear. He is talking about Jack. He has heard that some such man, still ill, out of grub, with stories of many wrecks from a raft on the Keechatna, reached here in August. He took our boat to Tyonek. That is very annoying. However, the Professor has secured another craft, and to-morrow we shall follow to the sea.
THE END
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