SERGE DISCOVERS A CURIOUS CAVERN
At the point where our travellers had again struck the Yukon, nearly
fifteen hundred miles from its mouth, it was still a mighty stream two
miles wide. Above this they found it bounded on both sides by mountains
that often approached to its very waters, where, in sheer precipices
hundreds of feet high, they form gigantic palisades similar to those of
the Hudson, which are known as the “Upper Ramparts.” On the lower river
the sledge party had journeyed over a smooth surface, offering but few
obstructions. Their course from Anvik had at first been due north, then
northeast, then east, and was now due south, the source of the Yukon
towards which they were travelling being some ten degrees south of its
great arctic bend.
Owing to this they now found themselves confronted by the hardest kind
of sledging over rough, hummocky ice that was often piled in chaotic
ridges twenty and thirty feet high. As the river freezes first at its
most northerly point, and this belt of solid ice is gradually extended
south, or back towards its source, the floating cakes of its upper
reaches, borne by the swift current, are piled on the ever-advancing
barrier in confused masses that stretch across the river like windrows.
In the spring, when the ice breaks up and is hurled irresistibly down
stream on the swollen current, the same effect is reproduced on a
vastly increased scale. Then the upper river breaks first, and a sudden
rise of water from some great tributary starts the ice over the still
solid barrier below. The huge cakes slide, jam, push, and crash over
the still unbroken ice sheet, until they are piled in a vast gleaming
mass seventy or eighty feet in height, from a quarter of a mile to one
mile in length, and extending from bank to bank.
This mighty gorge must give way at length, and when it does it goes
with a roaring fury that is terrifying and grand beyond description.
After grinding and tearing onward for several miles, or perhaps less
than one, the furious impulse is again checked by another solid
barrier, which must in turn be broken down and swept away, its added
weight giving increased energy to the mighty force.
So the ice crashes its resistless way down the whole Yukon Valley to
Bering Sea, two thousand miles distant, sweeping everything before
it, mowing down vast areas of forest, submerging islands, tearing
out banks, and leaving everywhere traces of its terrible progress in
the shape of huge ice cakes, weighing many tons, stranded high above
ordinary water-level.
Although Phil Ryder and his companions were not to witness this grand
exhibition of one of nature’s mightiest forces, they were sadly
inconvenienced and delayed by the uncomfortable fashion in which their
frozen highway had been constructed some months earlier. If they could
have left the river and followed along its banks they would have done
so; but this was out of the question, not only on account of their
rugged character, but because on their timbered portions the snow lay
many feet in depth, while from the river it had been so blown by strong
north winds that for long stretches the ice was barely covered. This
enabled the sledge men to walk without snow-shoes, which was a great
comfort to all three, but especially to Jalap Coombs, who had not yet
learned to use the netted frames with “ease and fluency,” as Phil said.
To this light-hearted youth the sight of his sailor friend wrestling
with the difficulties of inland navigation as practised in arctic
regions afforded a never-failing source of mirth. A single glance at
Jalap’s lank figure enveloped in furs, with his weather-beaten face
peering from the recesses of a hair-fringed hood, was enough at any
time to make Phil laugh. Jalap on snow-shoes that, in spite of all his
efforts, would slide in every direction but the one desired, and Jalap
gazing at a frosty world through a pair of wooden snow-goggles, were
sights that even sober-sided Serge found humorous.
But funniest of all was to see Jalap drive a dog team. This he was
now obliged to do, for, while they still had three sledges, they had
been unable to procure any Indians at Forty Mile to take the places of
Kurilla and Chitsah. So while Phil, who was now an expert in the art
of dog-driving, and could handle a six-yard whip like a native, took
turns with Serge in breaking the road, Jalap was always allowed to
bring up the rear. His dogs had nothing to fear from the whip, except,
indeed, when it tripped him up so that he fell on top of them, but they
cringed and whined beneath the torrent of incomprehensible sea terms
incessantly poured forth by the strange master, who talked to them as
though they were so many lubberly sailors.
“Port your hellum! Hard a-port!” he would roar to the accompaniment
of flying chunks of ice that he could throw with amazing certainty of
aim. Then, “Steady! So! Start a sheet and give her a rap full. Now
keep her so! Keep her so! D’ye hear? Let her fall off a fraction of
a p’int and I’ll rake ye fore and aft. Now, then, bullies, pull all
together. Yo-ho, _heave_! No sojering! Ah, you will, will ye, ye furry
sea-cook! Then take that, and stow it in your bread-locker. Shake your
hay-seed and climb――_climb_, I tell ye! Avast heaving!” And so on,
hour after hour, while the dogs would jump and pull and tangle their
“running-rigging,” as Jalap named the trace-thongs, and the two boys
would shout with laughter.
But while the journey thus furnished something of merriment, it was
also filled with tribulations. So bitter was the cold that their
bloodless lips were often too stiff for laughter or even for speech. So
rough was the way that they rarely made more than eight or ten miles
in a day of exhausting labor. Several dogs broke their legs amid the
chaotic ice blocks of the ever-recurring ridges, and had to be shot.
Along the palisaded Ramparts it was difficult to find timbered places
in which to camp. Their dog feed was running low, and there was none
to be had in the wretched native villages that they passed at long
intervals.
At length the setting sun of one evening found them at a point where
the river, narrowed to a few hundred yards, was bounded on one side
by a lofty precipice of rock, and on the other by a steeply sloping
bank that, devoid of timber, seemed to descend from an open plateau.
They halted beside a single log of drift that, half embedded in ice,
was the only available bit of firewood in sight. It was a bleak and
bitter place in which to spend an arctic night, and they shivered in
anticipation of what they were to suffer during its long hours.
“I am going to climb to the top of the bank,” said Serge, “and see if I
can’t find some more wood. If I do, I’ll roll it down; so look out!”
Suiting his action to his words, the active lad started with a run that
carried him a few yards up the steep ascent. It was so abrupt that he
was on the point of sliding back, and dug his feet sharply into the
snow to secure a hold. At the same instant he uttered a cry, threw up
his arms, and dropped from the sight of his astonished companions as
though he had fallen down a well.
Before they could make a move towards his rescue, they were more
astounded than ever to hear his voice, somewhat muffled, but apparently
close beside them.
“I’m all right!” he cried, cheerily. “That is, I think I am, and I
believe I can cut my way out. Don’t try to climb the bank. Just wait a
minute.”
Then the bank began to tremble as though shaken by a gentle earthquake,
and suddenly a hand clutching a knife shot out from it so close to
Jalap Coombs that the startled sailor leaped back to avoid it, stumbled
over a sledge, and plunged headlong among his own team of dogs, who
were lying in the snow beyond, patiently waiting to be unharnessed. By
the time the yelling, howling mass of man and dogs was disentangled
and separated, Serge had emerged from the mysterious bank, and stood
looking as though he did not quite understand what had happened. Behind
him was a black opening into which Phil was peering with the liveliest
curiosity.
“Of all the miracles I ever heard of, this is the strangest!” he cried.
“What does it mean, old man?”
“I don’t exactly know,” answered Serge. “But I rather think it is a
moss blanket. Anyhow, that’s an elegant place to crawl into out of the
cold. Seems to be plenty of wood, too.”
Serge was right in his conjecture. What appeared to be the river-bank
was merely a curtain of tough, closely compacted Alaskan moss, closely
resembling peat in its structure, one foot thick, and reaching from
the crest of an overhanging bank to the edge of the river. It had
thus held together, and fallen to its present position when the river
undermined and swept away the earth from beneath it. That it presented
a sloping surface instead of hanging perpendicularly was owing to a
great number of timbers, the ends of which projected from the excavated
bank behind it. Serge had broken through the moss curtain, fallen
between these timbers to the beach, and then cut his way out. Now, as
he suggested, what better camping-place could they ask than the warm,
dry, moss-enclosed space from which he had just emerged?
“I never saw nor heard of anything so particularly and awfully jolly in
all my life,” pronounced Phil, after the three travellers had entered
this unique cavern, and started a fire by which they were enabled to
see something of its strange interior. “And, I say, Serge, what a
thoughtful scheme it was on your part to provide a chimney for the fire
before you lighted it! See how the smoke draws up? If it wasn’t for
that hole in the roof I am afraid we should be driven out of here in
short order. But, hello, old man! Whew-w! what are you throwing bones
on the fire for? It reminds me of your brimstone-and-feather experiment
on Oonimak.”
“Bones!” repeated Serge, in surprise. “Are those bones? I thought they
were dry sticks.”
“I should say they were bones!” cried Phil, snatching a couple of the
offending objects from the fire. “And, sure as I live, this log I am
sitting on is a bone, too. Why, it’s bigger than I am. It begins to
look as though this place were some sort of a tomb. But there’s plenty
of wood. Let’s throw on some more and light up.”
“Toughest wood to cut I ever see,” growled Jalap Coombs, who was
hacking away at another half-buried log. “’Pears to be brittle, though,
and splits easy,” he added, dodging a sliver that broke off and flew
by his head.
“Hold on!” cried Phil, picking up the sliver. “You’ll ruin the axe.
That’s another bone you’re chopping. This place is a regular giants’
cemetery.”