CAMPING ’MID PREHISTORIC BONES
So strange and uncanny was the place in which our sledge party thus
unexpectedly found themselves that Phil was for exploring it and
attempting to determine its true character at once; but practical Serge
persuaded him to wait until they had performed their regular evening
duties and eaten supper. “After that,” he said, “we can explore all
night if we choose.”
So Phil turned his attention to the dogs, which he unharnessed and fed,
while Serge prepared supper, and Jalap Coombs gathered a supply of
firewood from the bleached timber ends projecting from the bank behind
them. He tested each of these before cutting into it to make certain
that it was not a bone, quantities of which were mingled with the
timber.
The firewood that he thus collected exhibited several puzzling
peculiarities. To begin with, it was so very tough and thoroughly
lifeless that, as Jalap Coombs remarked, he didn’t know but what bones
would cut just as easy. When laid on the fire it was slow to ignite,
and finally only smouldered, giving out little light, but yielding a
great heat. As Serge said, it made one of the poorest fires to see by
and one of the best to cook over that he had ever known.
Although in all their experience they had never enjoyed a more
comfortable and thoroughly protected camping-place than this one, the
lack of their usual cheerful blaze and their mysterious surroundings
created a feeling of depression that caused them to eat supper in
unusual silence. At its conclusion Serge picked up a freshly cut bit of
the wood, and, holding it in as good a light as he could get, examined
it closely.
“I never saw nor heard of any wood like this in all Alaska,” he said at
length. “Do you suppose this can be part of a buried forest that grew
perhaps thousands of years ago?”
“I believe that’s exactly what it is,” replied Phil. “I expect it was
some awfully prehistoric forest that was blown down by a prehistoric
cyclone, and got covered with mud somehow, and was just beginning to
turn into coal when the ice age set in. Thus it has been preserved in
cold storage ever since. It must have grown in one of the ages that
one always likes to hear of, but hates to study about――a palæozoic or
silurian or post-tertiary, or one of those times. At any rate, I expect
it was a tropical forest, for they all were in those days.”
“Then like as not these here is elephants’ bones,” remarked Jalap
Coombs. “I were jest thinking as how this one had a look of ivory about
it.”
“They may be,” assented Phil, dubiously, “but they must have belonged
to pretty huge old elephants; for I don’t believe Jumbo’s bones
would look like more than toothpicks alongside some of these. It is
more likely that they belonged to hairy mammoths, or mastodons, or
megatheriums, or plessiosauruses, or fellows like that.”
“I don’t know as I ever met up with any of them, nor yet heerd tell
of ’em,” replied Jalap Coombs, simply, “onless what you’ve jest said
is the Latin names of rhinocerosses or hoponthomases or giraffles, of
which my old friend Kite Roberson useter speak quite frequent. He allus
said consarning ’em, though, that they’d best be let alone, for lions
nor yet taggers warn’t a sarcumstance to ’em. Now ef these here bones
belonged to any sich critters as them, he sartainly knowed what he were
talking about, and I for one are well pleased that they all went dead
afore we hove in sight.”
“I don’t know but what I am too,” assented Phil, “for at close range
I expect it would be safer to meet one of Mr. Robinson’s taggers.
Still, I would like to have seen them from a safe place, like the top
of Groton Monument or behind the bars of a bank vault. Where are you
going, Serge?”
“Going for some wood that isn’t quite so prehistoric and that will
blaze,” answered the other lad, who had picked up an axe and was
stepping towards the entrance to the cavern.
“That’s a scheme! Come on, Mr. Coombs. Let’s help him tackle that
up-to-date log outside, and see if we can’t get a modern illumination
out of it,” suggested Phil.
So they chopped vigorously at the ice-bound drift-log that had induced
them to halt at that point, and half an hour later the gloom of their
cavern was dispelled by a roaring, snapping, up-to-date blaze. By its
cheerful light they examined with intense interest the great fossil
bones that, in various stages of preservation, lay scattered about them.
“I should think a whole herd of mammoths must have perished at once,”
said Phil. “Probably they were being hunted by some antediluvian Siwash
and got bogged in a quicksand. How I wish we could see a whole one!
But, great Scott! now we have gone and done it!”
Phil’s final exclamation was caused by a crackling sound overhead.
The sloping moss roof had caught fire from the leaping blaze, and
for a moment the dismayed spectators of this catastrophe imagined
that their snug camping-place was about to be destroyed. They quickly
saw, however, that the body of the moss was not burning; it was too
thoroughly permeated with ice for that, and that the fire was only
flashing over its dry under surface.
As they watched these fitful flames running along the roof and
illuminating remote recesses of the cavern, all three suddenly uttered
cries of amazement, and each called the attention of the others to
the most wonderful sight he had ever seen. Brilliantly lighted and
distinctly outlined against the dark background of a clay bank, that
held it intact, was a gigantic skeleton complete in every detail, even
to a huge tusk that curved outward from a massive skull. For a single
minute they gazed in breathless awe. Then the illuminating flame died
out, and like a dissolving picture the vast outline slowly faded from
view and was lost in the blackness.
[Illustration: FOR A SINGLE MINUTE THEY GAZED IN BREATHLESS AWE]
“Was that one of ’em?” gasped Jalap Coombs.
“I expect it was,” answered Phil.
“Waal, then, old Kite didn’t make no mistake when he said a tagger
warn’t a sarcumstance.”
“It must have been all of twenty feet high,” remarked Serge,
reflectively.
For more than an hour they talked of the wonderful sight, and Phil told
what he could remember of the gigantic hairy mammoth discovered frozen
in a Siberian glacier, and so perfectly preserved that sledge-dogs were
fed for weeks on its flesh.
As they talked their fire burned low, and the outside cold creeping
stealthily into camp turned their thoughts to fur-lined sleeping-bags.
So they slept, and dreamed of prehistoric monsters; while Musky,
Luvtuk, Amook, and their comrades restlessly sniffed and gnawed at the
ancient bones of this strange encampment, and wondered at finding
them so void of flavor.
Glad as our sledge travellers would have been to linger for days and
fully explore the mysteries of that great moss-hidden cavern, they
dared not take the necessary time. It was already two weeks since they
had left the mining camp, winter was waning, and they must leave the
river ere spring destroyed its icy highway. So they were off again with
the first gray light of morning, and two days later found them at the
mouth of the Pelly River, the upper Yukon’s largest tributary, and two
hundred and fifteen miles from Forty Mile.
The last half of this distance had been traversed amid scenes of the
same stupendous grandeur that attracts thousands of tourists to the
Yosemite and Yellowstone. But our travellers only shuddered at its
wind-swept silence and terrible loneliness. The latter was increased
by the melancholy ruins of old Fort Selkirk, whose three gaunt
chimneys still stand, about one mile below the mouth of the Pelly, on
the opposite side of the Yukon. That evening in the snug quarters of
Harper, the Pelly River trader, who was the last white man they could
hope to meet before reaching the coast, they listened to the story of
Fort Selkirk.
It was established in 1850 by the Hudson Bay Company, and was their
remotest post. So far removed was it from the base of supplies that
goods destined for it were two full years in making the journey from
London by ship and across the great northern wilderness by river and
portage. Previous to that time the Indian trade of the Yukon valley
had been monopolized by the Chilkats, wealthiest, most enterprising,
and most warlike of Alaskan natives. Securing goods from the Russians
at Sitka, they would carry them to their distant villages in canoes,
and transport them across the mountains to Yukon head-waters on their
backs. There they would be met by the interior Indians, whom they never
allowed to visit the coast.
The Chilkats were shrewd enough to reap enormous profits from this
trade, and to fully appreciate its value. As soon, therefore, as they
learned of the establishment of Fort Selkirk, and realized that it
meant the overthrow of their lucrative business, they resorted to the
only method of trade competition of which they had any knowledge. They
organized a war party, crossed the mountains, descended the Yukon
nearly five hundred miles, and wiped Fort Selkirk out of existence,
seizing its goods in payment for their trouble.
From the Pelly River trader our travellers gained much valuable
information concerning the routes they might pursue and the difficulties
they had yet to encounter. They had indeed heard vaguely of the great
cañon of the Yukon, through which the mad waters are poured with such
fury that they can never freeze, of the rocky Five Fingers that obstruct
its channel, the Rink and White Horse rapids, and the turbulent open
streams connecting its upper chain of lakes; but until this time they
had given these dangers little thought. Now they became real, while some
of them, according to the trader, were impassable save by weary détours
through dense forests and deep snows that they feared would delay them
beyond the time of the river’s breaking up.
“What, then, can we do?” asked Phil.
“I’ll tell you,” replied the trader. “Leave the Yukon at this point, go
about fifty miles up the Pelly, and turn to your right into the Fox.
Ascend this to its head, cross Fox Lake, Indian Trail Lake, Lost Lake,
and three other small lakes. Then go down a creek that empties into
the Little Salmon, and a few miles down that river to the Yukon. In
this way you will have avoided the Five Fingers and the Rink Rapids,
and found good ice all the way. After that keep on up the main river
till you pass Lake Le Barge. There again leave the Yukon, this time
for good, by the first stream that flows in on your right. It is the
Tahkeena, and will lead you to the Chilkat Pass, which is somewhat
longer, but no worse than the Chilkoot. Thus you will avoid most of the
rough ice, the great cañon, and all the rapids.”
“But we shall surely get lost,” objected Phil.
“Not if you can hire Cree Jim, who lives somewhere up on the Fox River,
to go with you, for he is the best guide in the country.”
So the next morning Phil and his companions again set forth, this time
up the Pelly River, with all their hopes for safety and a successful
termination to their journey centred upon the finding and hiring of
Cree Jim, the guide.