BURIED IN A SNOW SLIDE
Fear lent wings to the three boys as they saw the awful wall of snow and
ice bounding down the gorge upon them. With one accord they rushed
toward the steep slope on their left, scrambling up it in frantic
efforts to gain a height out of reach of the avalanche, before it
descended and crushed them under its ponderous plunging weight.
The dog team sensed its peril instinctively and struggled after the
boys, dragging the heavy sledge behind them. Toma, slightly in the rear,
grasped the sledge and began helping the dogs in their unequal fight for
safety.
“Leave the sledge go!” shouted Dick to the young Indian. “Save
yourself.”
But the courageous Toma did not heed. Stubbornly, he stayed by the
sledge, falling far behind his companions.
Then, with a roar that shook the walls of the gorge as if an earthquake
had occurred, the avalanche plunged past on its way to the tundra far
below.
Dick and Sandy barely escaped the flying ice and stones and with a cry
of despair they saw Toma with the sledge and dog team vanish in a swirl
of flying snow.
The avalanche thundered on, sight and sound of it dying away down the
gorge as quickly as it had come. Dick and Sandy were left high on the
wall of the desolate gorge, gazing with sad eyes at the point where Toma
and the dog team had disappeared.
“It happened so suddenly I can hardly realize it,” Sandy spoke in a low
voice. “Poor Toma.”
“I won’t give up hope yet,” Dick declared grimly. “Toma was not caught
by the full force of the avalanche. You must remember he and the dogs
were almost out of the way when they were hit. Let’s look along the
slope.”
Sandy followed Dick to the bottom of the gorge, and the two began
picking their way along the path of the avalanche. Every now and then
huge masses of snow, left adhering to the walls of the gorge, loosened
and fell, starting miniature snow slides in their wake, but Dick and
Sandy kept their eyes open and managed to avoid these dangers by a wide
margin.
They had retraced their upward trail about two hundred yards when there
was borne to their ears the faint but unmistakable bark of a dog.
“Listen!” Dick grasped Sandy’s arm, as they stopped dead still.
Again there echoed in the canyon the sharp bark of an excited dog.
“It sounds like one of our Eskimo dogs,” Sandy spoke in a subdued voice,
scarcely able to believe his ears. “But for the life of me I can’t tell
where it comes from.”
“Let’s walk on a little further,” Dick suggested.
They continued on their way for a few steps, then stopped again. The dog
had barked again, and now the sound seemed to come from above and behind
them.
“Why not shout Toma’s name?” said Sandy. “If he’s alive he’ll hear us.”
Dick thought this an excellent idea and in unison they raised their
voices.
“Toma! Toma!” they shouted at the tops of their lungs, and paused to
listen intently.
A second of silence, then the faraway crags of the glacier threw back
their cries like mocking laughter.
Drawing deep breaths for another shout, they hesitated. Several dogs had
commenced to bark, and were making a veritable bedlam of racket, what
with the echoes that were flying about.
“It’s our dogs!” ejaculated the amazed boys.
“Come on. Toma may be alive,” Dick sang out, charging up the slope of
the gorge, with Sandy close at his heels.
Half way up the side of the gorge they came suddenly upon the dogs in a
snow filled ledge. There were ten of the twelve dogs alive and well, the
other two had been crushed to death under a huge boulder deposited there
by the avalanche. The sledge of supplies, badly twisted and smashed, lay
overturned, half-buried in the snow, but still hitched to the tangled
dogs. Eagerly the boys searched the wreckage, but at first there was no
sign of Toma. Then one of the dogs, whining plaintively, began pawing
into a heap of packed snow. The boys rushed to the dog and found he had
uncovered a boot. Silently, the boys attacked the packed snow with
mittens and boots, and in five minutes they dragged their young Indian
friend free of the lodged snow.
“Pray he’s alive!” Dick implored, as they lay the quiet form upon some
sledge packing.
Toma’s dark face was darker still, as if he had smothered, yet as the
boys chafed his hands and listened for heart beats, a flicker of eye
lashes showed a sign of life. Redoubling their efforts to bring the boy
back, they were finally rewarded by a deep sigh from the dusky lips, and
presently Toma’s dark eyes were open.
“Humph!” Toma grunted as he sat up uncertainly, and vigorously shook
himself like a big dog. “No can breathe under snow. Think um see Happy
Hunting Grounds.”
“It’s a miracle you didn’t!” exclaimed Dick fervently.
“Tell us how it all happened,” Sandy urged.
“Not know much,” Toma blinked, “come too quick. Something hit me. I see
many stars, an’ whirl, whirl in snow. Feel like fly like bird, then big
bump. All still. I can no breathe. All get like night, then I see you
fellas.”
Overjoyed at the recovery of Toma, the boys could do little but discuss
the narrow escape for some time. Finally they set to work untangling the
dogs, and when that was done they started to repair the sledge.
It took more than three hours to fix the sledge so it was worthy of the
trail, but they at last had the worst breaks spliced and lashed with
leather thongs. By this time they were all so tired that they decided to
pitch camp and fix something to eat. This they did as soon as they were
on the floor of the gorge.
“We don’t need to be afraid of any more snow slides for some time to
come,” Dick relieved their fears in that direction. “All the loose ice
and stones was cleared out by that big avalanche.”
After an appetizing meal of broiled musk-ox, the boys slept for several
hours. When they awakened they noticed for the first time a change in
the sunlight, and were concerned at the approach of winter which this
signaled.
“Seems strange to see evening come again,” remarked Sandy. “Wonder how
it would feel to go to bed in honest-to-goodness darkness again?”
“If we don’t get a move on we’ll get more darkness than we want,” said
Dick, referring to the approach of the Arctic’s long night.
But when the boys started up the gorge again it was no darker. So far,
all the night they were to experience for a few weeks was to be several
hours of twilight.
Not far up the gorge, beyond the point where the avalanche had narrowly
missed destroying them, Dick called the attention of his chum to three
tiny figures walking along the rim of the gorge above them.
“I wonder if those men could be Moonshine Sam and his two companions,”
said Dick. “They’ve had just about time to come this far if they had
headed this way shortly after we stopped trailing them.”
“Well, I hope they won’t try any monkeyshines like starting another
avalanche,” Sandy shivered. “When I die I don’t want to get that kind of
a sendoff for the Happy Hunting Grounds. What do you say, Toma?”
The young Indian grunted his emphatic sanction of Sandy’s preferences,
while all three watched the men on the cliff. The men they thought might
be Moonshine Sam and the two half-breeds from Mistak’s band, kept
abreast of the boys for nearly a half hour, then as the gorge began to
grow shallower upon nearing the plateau down from which it led, they
disappeared.
“If they ever get wind of the fact that we know Corporal Thalman is
still alive, our lives won’t be worth a cent,” Dick expressed his
thoughts aloud. “They’ll put an end to Corporal Thalman right away, too,
if they think for a minute we have a chance to rescue him—if they
haven’t done that already.”
The boys hurried on, and soon came out of the gorge upon what they were
quite sure was the top of the glacier. An icy wind, that cut to the very
marrow of their bones, blew across the vast, white field of ice. But
they struck out bravely across the lonely forbidding desert of the
north, hoping soon to locate the first of the three main fissures marked
on the map.
They were now traveling southwest with the sun in their eyes, and for
the first time since they saw genuine “sun-dogs.” The phenomenon was
intensely interesting and for a time attracted almost all their
attention. The sun-dogs were in the form of four miniature suns situated
one above, one below, and one on either side of the big disc of light
that was the source of them. They were not really suns, however, but
reflections of the sun upon the countless particles of frost in the air.
One of the “dogs” was somewhat like the rainbow, for it seemed to hang
just a few feet ahead of the dog team, dancing just out of reach, like a
will-o’-the-wisp, as they plodded along.
Then they came upon a deep fissure in the glacier which temporarily
crowded the sun-dogs out of their minds. The crack was not an
exceptionally large one in comparison to other glacial fissures they had
seen, being only about four feet across at the widest points. Several
smaller fissures were indicated on the map as preceding the first main
fissure, so the boys crossed the gap by jumping, improvising a bridge
with the sledge for those dogs to cross over which were too stubborn to
make the leap.
“We may be misled after all by these fissures,” Dick spoke when they had
resumed their journey “New cracks form pretty often, and it’s possible
the main fissures Corporal Thalman observed while Mistak was taking him
to the prison pit are not the main ones any longer.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Sandy replied. “A lot of small fissures
might show up in eight months’ time, but these big fissures are very old
and they wouldn’t change much.”
By this time they had reached another small fissure, about the size of
the first one, but much longer. As far as they could see on either side
of them the crooked crack stretched away like a huge, black snake,
wriggling across the snow-bound glacier roof.
Keeping a rough account of the miles they had traversed since reaching
the top of the glacier, they believed the first main fissure could not
be far away according to the map. An hour after crossing the first small
fissure, they reached what they were almost certain was the first main
fissure. In places it yawned to an unestimable depth, and at many points
was more than twenty feet in width. After sledging along the rim of it
for a half mile they located a natural bridge of ice over which they
crossed without mishap.
Excited by their success so far, they increased their pace, again
crossing numerous small chasms in the glacier before arriving at the rim
of the second main fissure. This they finally contrived to bridge at a
point where a jutting ice ledge partly spanned the seemingly bottomless
void.
From there on, the top of the glacier ceased to be level. Great holes
yawned everywhere amidst heaps of shattered ice many feet in height.
Apparently, at some time years ago, two divisions of the glacier had met
there in their slow progress, crumbling their giant fronts upon one
another.
In the midst of the veritable “bad lands” of ice they came upon what
they were reasonably certain was the third main fissure, somewhere at
the bottom of which was the pit in which Corporal Thalman had been
imprisoned. But the immensity of the task still ahead of them awed the
boys. For, though they had reached the fissure, it was miles long and
they had no way of judging any nearer than five or ten miles just where
the prison pit was located.
“There’s nothing to do but look for a way of climbing down to the bottom
of the fissure,” Dick finally spoke. “Mistak must know a way to get down
there, and if we look long enough, we can find it.”
“Maybe we ought to wait until the policemen get here,” Sandy expressed
his doubts, while gazing down into the black chasm that was the main
fissure.
“No, it’s best we keep on trying since we’ve come this far without any
fatal accidents. Corporal McCarthy can trail us wherever we go, so
there’s no need waiting for him and the Constable.”
The boys set out along the glacier looking for a place that offered
possibilities of descent into the fissure. It was slow going over the
heaps of shattered ice, and before they had gone a mile they were worn
out. They halted to rest in a shallow pit which protected them from the
cold wind. As they sat there, Dick noticed that a small fissure about
three feet wide and as high as a man’s head opened out of a bulwark of
ice in front of them. The crack seemed to lead downward at a sharp
slant.
“That hole looks like it might lead down to the bottom of the fissure,”
Dick said to Sandy and Toma. “Let’s go into it and investigate.”
After resting a few more minutes, they got up and walked into the
passage. Advancing cautiously, they reached an underground chamber,
about twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and somewhat higher than their
heads. The sunlight reached the chamber through its entrance and the dim
rays lighted up a very beautiful scene. The walls and roof of the
natural cavity were formed of crystallized moisture, shaped in many
grotesque and fantastic figures.
“I believe this is part of the crystal grottoes Corporal Thalman
mentioned in his message!” Dick exclaimed examining the glittering
walls.
“Maybe we just found the outlet that the Corporal failed to find,” Sandy
brightened.
But upon investigating further they were disappointed. The first chamber
led into a second and smaller chamber which had no outlet, and seemed
the end of the cavern.
After sounding the walls to make certain they could not break into a
larger cavity, the boys made their way back to the narrow passage
leading up to the outer air.
Dick went first, and as he stopped into the sunlight a premonition of
danger seized him. But before he could act to defend himself, a shadow
was flung across his path and a heavy weight descended upon his head and
shoulders. Dick went to the ice, stunned and half-blinded.