CHAPTER XIX.

YARNING BY THE WAY.

Within an hour they set sail. The skipper proved to be an active, intelligent man, and fell into the spirit of the undertaking. He crowded on all the sail his little ship could carry, and they scudded through the waves at a splendid pace. And this was kept up all day and through the night. There was a good stiff breeze all the time.

Captain Dartmoor and Admiral Eccles, like true old sailors, fell to spinning yarns, and you may be sure the boys were delighted listeners. Captain Dartmoor told this story:

“Not so many years ago I found myself with very little money, and, as far as I could see, not much chance of getting more in Vancouver, British Columbia. I had arrived there from Australia with the hopes of getting up to Klondike and making a fortune in no time. As it was almost impossible for me or any one else to get through to Dawson City in the winter time, I knocked about Vancouver doing whatever my hand found to do, from peeling potatoes in a hotel kitchen to painting the woodwork of a house.

“Just when I was breaking into my last few cents I met another Australian, who, with his wife, immediately offered me that boundless hospitality of the Australian all the world over, and in a few days I was as one of themselves. This gentleman’s name was Grindle, and he and his wife had more than once made the trip to Dawson City by way of White Horse. He was then contemplating another journey into the gold region when I met him, but, being a lazy sort of individual and careless of his belongings when on the tramp, his wife, who could not on this occasion accompany him, offered me fifty dollars to go and look after her husband.

“Of course, I jumped at the chance, and with a couple of other companions we left by boat in June, nineteen hundred, and, landing shortly after at White Horse, on the Yukon River, prepared for our long tramp of two hundred miles to a part of the country known as the Alsek, where, in the creeks, we hoped to stake out claims and return muchly enriched.

“I had always considered this part of the world as a cold and barren land, the home of snowdrifts and storm; but when we landed at White Horse I found it to be a land of beauty, of sunny days and clear skies, of foaming waters and green, dome-shaped hills, of high cliffs and granite peaks, snow-crowned for all time.

“The great river which we call the Yukon the Indians call the Yu-kon-ah--meaning mighty water; nor does it belie its name. It is over two thousand miles long and seventy-five miles wide at its mouth, and the large river steamers can navigate it for over one thousand eight hundred miles.

“The enchanting beauty of the wide-spreading Yukon Valley--its sunshine and wealth of vegetation, fruits, and flowers--came as a great surprise to me, and forced me to exclaim, ‘This cannot be the North!’ And it certainly was not that northland of which you may have read, described by the vivid imagination of those who have never seen it. No more glorious summers are to be found anywhere else on the earth’s surface, so far as I know--and I have visited many corners of this globe--and it is a hunter’s paradise.

“Here, in the late fall, you can hear the moose and caribou calling that it is time to get into their favorite meadows, where they winter; and hear in the white, soft evenings the goats and sheep trampling in droves, and seeming to confer as to the best location for their exodus; the grouse softly call in the thickets, and the ptarmigan, wild geese, and ducks gather in great flocks. There are also bears--black, grizzly, brown, and cinnamon--fat and sleepy; and in the sedges can be heard waterfowl discussing the annual excursion to the South. The streams are thick with trout, and one has only to cut a stick from the nearest tree, affix a line to it, with a couple of hooks baited with a bit of flannel, and at the first cast you will probably land a brace of beauties.

“This was the country, then, I found myself in when we started off from White Horse to tackle our little ‘stampede,’ as they call the tramp in the far Northwest. Each of us carried a pack weighing one hundred and twelve pounds, and we didn’t make very good progress the first day.

“Anyhow, when we came to the end of the day’s march, the first thing I did was to strip by the bank of a creek for a swim. I selected what I took to be a deep water hole about ten yards across; and without as much as dabbling a toe in it, to see what the temperature was like--as I said before, it was a fine day in June--I plunged in, and I’m not quite sure that I have recovered from the shock yet! That creek was a glacial one, and the water liquid ice!

“Our second day’s tramp was spent mostly in my trying to get my circulation up again, and my companions in joking me on my bathing propensities. Also, on this day, every old hand we passed on the trail warned us about a dry patch of country ahead of us on our next day’s travel, and we were advised to start at daybreak if we wished to negotiate this terrible stretch of country successfully. Not only did we get verbal warnings, but scattered about on the trunks of pine trees we came across the legend, ‘Beware of the dry patch!’

“Well, the next morning we were on the move early, and I would just like to say here that Grindle and myself were each armed with a good old Australian ‘billy’ can. These we filled with water from a creek before we went, and, humping our packs, off we started to cross the dry patch. And what do you think this awful dry patch was? Why, just a little stretch of fine, dry, scrub country, only fourteen miles in extent! An Australian doesn’t reckon anything under about fifty miles of waterless country a dry patch, but out on the Yukon they think great things of themselves to have ‘crossed the dry patch.’

“After we’d tramped eight miles or so we called a halt, lit a fire, and soon had our two billies going. And the sensation they caused to the uninitiated American and European prospectors who passed our camps! They all wanted to know where we got the water from; and when we explained that we had carried it along with us in the billies they seemed quite flabbergasted at the idea.

“Needless to say, the dry patch held no terrors for us. As to the food we carried, it consisted of bacon, rice, flour, and salt, with, of course, tea and sugar. Whether the awful cold of the eight-months winter freezes all the goodness out of the wood I do not know, but ashes never retain their heat in the northwest and damper is always cooked in ashes. We made flapjacks instead. These are made by mixing flour and water to the consistency of thin dough in a gold pan and pouring it into a frying pan, in which bacon fat still remains. The frying pan is then set in an oven built of boulders heated almost white hot by fire, and in no time one has a plentiful and excellently baked supply of flapjacks; or, if you want plain loaves, the frying pan is first cleaned of all fat.

“We came in for a mild sensation on the fourth day. I was walking some distance from my three companions, and, on reaching the top of a small knoll, I came slap on a pair of bear cubs, playing and gamboling about like a couple of kittens. Having no firearms with me--in fact, the only weapon among the four of us was a jack-knife--I skirted round them to see if the parents were anywhere in the vicinity; and not seeing them, and finding my companions were now on ahead of me, I let out a yell of ‘Bears!’ The way those three fellows hustled was a caution, as they thought the bears might be after the food they had in the packs on their backs.

“We carried extra rations of food, and ‘cached’ it each day for our needs on the return journey, in case we decided to return. By ‘caching’ I mean we suspended meat, or whatever we thought necessary, in the forked branches of trees, and the bears, of which there are a great many in that part of the world, naturally try and break open the caches to get a cheap feed.

“It’s only natural, too, for a bear to try and do this; but there is a very strict, unwritten law that man may not break a cache except when in the last pangs of hunger, and then he must only take enough to keep himself alive. Any one found breaking a cache for the purpose of stealing would receive a short shrift in a summary and most unpleasant manner.

“The morning of our fifth day’s stampede found us on the edge of what is known as the Champagne Landing, so named from the manner in which the water foams and bubbles over the river bed. It is a ford or crossing over a creek where the current swirls above a shifting bed at a frightful pace. Grindle explained that it was hopeless to try and wade through in bare feet, as the toes and feet sank into the treacherous sand, and, besides having to battle with the water, a man might almost get sucked down. We tackled it, accordingly, in top-boots, held one another’s hands, and worked across upstream from one patch of firm sand, or poised ourselves on a jutting bit of rock until we could find a safe stepping place ahead.

“It only took us actually four minutes to cross the Champagne Landing, and it mayn’t sound much to talk about; but it’s one of the nastiest and most dangerous spots on the road to Alsek, and many have been the tragedies and hairbreadth escapes experienced in those foaming waters.

“Beyond the Landing, and when we had recovered from the buffeting we had received in the crossing, we struck into beautiful meadowlands, where flowers bloomed and mosses carpeted the earth.

“A friend of mine, now in White Horse, has made a collection of these Alaskan mosses--principally found on the Yukon and Klondike--comprising one thousand three hundred species, some of them exceedingly graceful; and unless you have seen them, you can hardly imagine the wonderful length and softness of the mosses in that region. For the greater part of the year they lie buried under the snow and ice, only to cover the earth with a mantle of vivid green when the snows have melted.

“After continuing our tramp till almost sundown, we struck a patch of wild strawberries and gooseberries, and we stayed right there. We slung off the packs, lay down, and just had, as the lower-school boys would say, ‘a real good blow-out.’ Unfortunately, those berries of both varieties were hardly ripe, but it made no difference; we ate, and ate, and ate till we could eat no more. Then we rolled over and tried to sleep. But we tried in vain, and the reason was not far to seek. I never saw men tied in such knots before outside a circus; and even in my own pain I could scarcely help laughing at the agonized expressions on my companions’ faces.

“Owing to one accident which occurred on the next day, I might have been compelled to enter Alsek even as Adam promenaded the Garden of Eden before his fall. It came about this way. All night it rained in torrents, and in the morning we built a huge fire under a giant fir tree. We erected a sort of drying house out of stripped boughs, and, stretching our sopping garments on this, we sauntered away to keep ourselves warm by moving about. On our return to the drying house, what was our consternation to discover that the fire had undermined it, and our clothes--at least my clothes, my companions were more fortunate--were burned. Of my one suit nothing remained but a metal trousers button and a buckle, both partly melted!

“The next hour or so had to be spent by all hands in fashioning me a pair of nether garments out of old flour sacks and a bit of spare canvas off one of the packs.

“Nothing more of interest happened till we reached the Alsek creeks, eight days after we had left White Horse, and then we at once set about staking our claims. Our first venture was on the side of a hill, and after a thorough trial we gave it up as hopeless. The only crop we might have raised out of it was boulders, and it didn’t give even a glimmer of gold.

“We pegged another claim on one of the creeks, and thought it looked very promising; it petered out, and didn’t show gold worth a cent.

“As our two claims had come to naught, we decided to return to White Horse. From information we received after having been only a day on the creeks, we found every yard of likely ground had been acquired; so, with a stay of but three days, we set out on our return journey, which occupied us two days less than the first one had done.

“On the final day we created a record, too, by doing the last forty-five miles into White Horse in one day, and on one meal. When we at last reached the city, I, for one, was too tired to eat; the very sight of food made me feel sick, so I turned in and slept for twelve solid hours; then I got up and showed them how a hungry Australian could eat!

“Meals cost a dollar a time then in White Horse; but I don’t fancy the restaurant keeper made much profit out of the first meal he served me with when I awoke.”