was on the extreme edge. Moreover, the distance was twice as great as it
had been at the first, and the waves were running high, and it was dark.
They made way slowly, and the pan often wavered beneath them; but Donald
was intent upon the thing he was doing, and he was not afraid.
Then came the time—they were but ten yards off the standing edge—when
North struck his gaff too deep into the water. He lost his balance,
struggled desperately to regain it, failed—and fell off. Before Donald
was awake to the danger, the edge of the pan sank under him, and he, too,
toppled off.
Donald had learned to swim now. When he came to the surface, his father
was breast-high in the water, looking for him.
“Are you all right, Donald?” said his father.
“Iss, zur.”
“Can you reach the ice alone?”
“Iss, zur,” said Donald quietly.
Alexander Bludd and Bill Stevens helped them up on the standing edge,
and they were home by the kitchen fire in half an hour.
“’Twas bravely done, b’y,” said Job.
So Donald North learned that perils feared are much more terrible than
perils faced. He has a courage of the finest kind, in these days, has
young Donald.
A CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
By J. E. Chamberlin
Having lived all his fourteen years in New York City, making occasional
visits to his grandfather’s house in Connecticut, Horace Mason had often
sighed for an adventure, and lamented because life in the eastern part of
the country is so tame and uninteresting. It had certainly never occurred
to him that the chance for a pretty thrilling adventure existed in the
quiet country neighborhood in which his grandfather lived.
About a week before Christmas Horace’s mother took him to his
grandfather’s farm for the holidays—he had seldom been there in winter.
The weather became remarkably cold and rough, but Horace found pleasure
in walking about woods and pastures in rubber boots and ulster, and
noting how odd the familiar scenes looked when covered with snow and ice,
instead of dressed in green.
A tree was to be set up on Christmas Eve in the old homestead; but
Uncle John, on the afternoon of the twenty-third, brought in for the
celebration a rather scraggly little red cedar, brown rather than
green, which Horace deemed totally unfit for the dignity of a Christmas
celebration.
“Why didn’t you get a fir balsam, with a nice even top to it?” Horace
asked his uncle.
“Don’t grow around here.”
“But there are some over in the Big Swamp,” said Horace.
“Never noticed ’em,” said Uncle John.
Horace said nothing to this, because he was aware that he had often
noticed things about the region, in the way of trees, plants and birds,
which were apparently quite unobserved by the residents.
“You won’t be offended if I go after one to-morrow, will you, Uncle John?”
“Bless your heart, no!”
The next morning a blizzard raged. Horace, looking out, saw nothing but
the whirling fine snow; the wind rattled all the shutters on the old
house; it shook the building to its very foundations.
Horace thought it would be great fun to go out into this storm, with
ulster, high rubber boots, and cap over his ears, looking for a Christmas
tree in the Big Swamp. It did not occur to him that he needed to get his
mother’s permission for the expedition, and it certainly did not occur to
her that the boy would start out in such a storm.
Shortly after breakfast he took an ax from the wood-shed, and was gone.
On the way he thought for a time that he must turn back—the storm
buffeted him so terribly, and the cold, in spite of his warm coverings,
was so intense. But he fought his way along, and at last came to the
borders of the swamp, a flat tract of perhaps a hundred acres, lying in
a hollow between hills.
In the spring this level expanse was mostly covered with water, up
through which grew many low red maples, some scattered firs and cedars,
and a jungle of alders. Horace had often wished that he might explore
the gloomy depths of this swamp, but in midsummer mosquitoes and pools
forbade. Now, with the ground and the pools frozen, he had no doubt he
could pass through the swamp from end to end.
He left the wood road, and plowed through the deep snow along the margin
of the swamp, looking out for firs. But he could see nothing more than
a rod or two away. The storm did not diminish, and all about him the
snow seemed extraordinarily deep. He sank into it up to his knees, and
sometimes it was deeper still. He walked thus a long way on the edge of
the swamp woodland, not caring to plunge into the swamp until he should
have spied out a balsam.
At last he saw, through the cloud of snow, the tapering head of an
unmistakable fir balsam. He struck into the swamp after it, parting the
alder branches with the ax held with both hands before him, and sinking
two or three inches deeper into the snow.
The fir proved to be too irregular for a Christmas tree. Then, through
the snow, he saw another farther in the swamp. He penetrated to that, and
found one side of it lacking. Beyond were other firs, and he fought his
way deeper and deeper into the swamp.
He discovered now a circumstance that aided him somewhat in working his
way through the jungle. The matted alders seemed to lean away in masses
from the hummocks of earth upon which they grew, in such a way as to make
crooked arched-over passageways, which, Horace thought, were curiously
like the paths moles make under matted grass. He had often amused himself
in summer digging out these mole-paths, and wondering why the crooked
ways were constructed.
These avenues through the alder thickets, away down in the bottom of
a swamp quite impenetrable without them, often came to an abrupt end.
Then Horace, floundering on hands and knees in the deep snow, sometimes
thrusting his foot down into a watery depth, had to break his way with
his ax through to another opening.
He found the seclusion somewhat interesting. Down here there was no
wind, and his clothing and his laborious exercise made him warm—even
uncomfortably so. He lay a few minutes on his back, in a place where he
could look up through an opening in the branches, and marveled at the
sight of the stormy maelstrom overhead.
The whirling snow looked black. For a moment the current of it seemed
flowing like a river all one way; then it appeared to turn, to cross
itself, and to twist about in a circle, from which it soon disentangled
itself, to resume its swift and steady march in one direction.
All at once it occurred to Horace to ask himself, Which direction was
that? He thought first that he could not get lost in the swamp so long
as he could see which way the snow was driving; but a chill ran over
him when he reflected that he had not noticed, in his eagerness all the
morning to be out in the storm, which way the wind was blowing. He tried
now to think which way it had come as he walked to the swamp, but all he
could recall was that the storm seemed to be coming from all directions
at once.
He started up with a sudden alarm; and then, noticing the deep track he
had made as he floundered to the place where he lay now, he began to
laugh. To get out of the swamp, he had only to follow his tracks back.
He had come in here to find a nice young fir for a Christmas tree, and he
was bound to get one. As he sat up, preparatory to rising, he saw that
the snow, sifting down straight and steady from the eddying masses above
the tops of the alders, had covered his coat and trousers with a deposit
half an inch thick. And the minute of inaction had made him feel cold and
stiff. He must be stirring.
He plowed along farther into the swamp. Coming out on the surface of one
of the pools, he was rejoiced to see some balsam tops that seemed not
more than a rod or two from the other edge of the pool. He struck through
to them, but found here not even a mole-path; he had to cut and slash
with his ax to get to the trunks of the firs.
Although the butts were five or six inches thick, the tops seemed
tapering and even, and he set about cutting down one of the trees. Very
soon he had the trunk cut in two, and it settled down into the snow; but
fall it certainly could not, so dense was the growth all about it. He
had to drag the butt through the bushes, still fighting his way with the
ax, until the tree lay nearly flat on the ground; and then he found that
the shape did not suit him at all.
He left this fir on the ground and went plowing after another.
Before long, traversing one of the tunnels under the alders, he came upon
the very fir he wanted—a beautiful, even little tree, thick and green.
He cut it down eagerly; but in another moment he found that it was as
impracticable to drag that bushy-headed young tree through the alder
jungle as it would have been to move a house through the same wilderness.
Horace had literally to carve a way for it. He slashed and chopped and
worked the tree along a rod or two, and this took him at least half an
hour.
Horace sat down, quite out of breath, on the butt of the little tree to
think it over. How could he get the tree out? He pondered a good while,
and began to feel very cold, and then looked up to see if the storm was
still raging violently. It certainly was. The space above the treetops
was black with clouds of snow.
Then, chancing to look away in the direction from which he had come, he
noticed that his tracks were already filled with snow! Horace jumped up,
quite willing to leave his Christmas tree behind, and dragging his ax,
rushed through the tunnel toward the pool that he had crossed less than
an hour before. The track disappeared completely before he had reached
this small open space. Although the alder branches were so thick, they
held up very little of the snow. Leafless and wiry, they afforded little
surface for the hard snow to cling to.
Nevertheless, Horace found his way to the pool, and there the storm
struck him full in the face. It was blinding. He could no longer see the
fir tops that had beckoned him on an hour ago! Every track that he had
made in coming in was completely obliterated!
Perhaps if he beat round the outskirts of the pool he could find the
tracks where he came in, among the bushes on the other side. So he began
to walk round and round the little open space, searching in vain for the
tracks, and finding nothing but those by which he had just come out of
the alders where he had cut the tree; and even these tracks were rapidly
being covered.
He began to feel decidedly queer, for he had not the slightest idea now
which was the way out of the swamp. But he must be able to reach some
place where he could see the woods; and once out of the swamp and into
these, he could easily enough find his way back to the house.
So for more than an hour—it seemed longer to him, but he had left his
watch at home, and had no way of telling the time—he dragged himself
through the tunnels under the alders, or slashed to right and left with
his ax. He struggled and grew desperate, and never once did he catch
sight of anything that looked like the woods or the margin of the swamp.
The snow grew deeper and deeper, and made the arching tops of his
mole-paths lower and lower, while the labor of floundering and dragging
himself through them became more terrible. Once he felt a thrill of
relief upon coming on a track which he knew must be his own. He supposed
that it was the track by which he had come into the jungle in the
morning, strangely left uncovered by some better protection than the
thicket had provided elsewhere. So he started back on it quite joyfully.
And he followed it until he came to the trunk of a little maple-tree
which he knew he had cut down not fifteen minutes before to clear a path.
Then he knew he was winding about and had crossed his own tracks. If he
followed them farther, they would simply bring him back to where he stood
now.
Meanwhile he had grown very faint—he was almost too badly scared to be
aware that he was hungry.
But he felt that it must be afternoon; and on such a day, and at this
time of year, the darkness would fall by half past three. He felt himself
hopelessly lost—and abandoned, too, for why did not the people at the
house miss him, and know that, having gone after a Christmas tree, he
must be lost in the Big Swamp? Why did they not send after him?
They _must_ come! But if he sat down and waited for them he would get
chilled. Already, in spite of his efforts, he felt a numbness creeping
over him. The sense of it filled him with horror. He hurled himself
against the bushes; he threw himself on his hands and knees, and worked
his way through the narrow passages. His mind went over and over various
futile schemes for tracing his way.
All at once he stopped and pondered. If he was really going round in a
ring when he thought he was going straight, could it be possible that
he would go straight if he tried to go round in a ring? And if he found
his way back to his track and made a ring, why not start out anew and
deliberately add another ring to that? Enough circles made thus, placed
side by side, would reach at last the edge of the swamp.
He went back on his tracks, and was pleased to find that the snow had not
yet covered them so deeply but that he could find the place where he had
branched off from the ring he had made.
Walking back on this a few steps, Horace went off to the left, purposely
intending to make another circle and come back to this one. But after
threading and pushing his way a long time, he convinced himself that he
was not returning to it; no more tracks did he find. Did this mean that
he was now following a straighter line, or merely that he was making a
larger circle, and going entirely round the inner one?
A terrible fear of the snow and the earth came over him, and he could not
bear to get down on his hands and knees to follow the tunnels under the
bushes. But he was too weak to fight his way upright through the thicket.
His brain reeled as he strained his eyes for the five-hundredth time for
some sign of the trees of the woods.
It reeled still more when it seemed to him that he saw something large
and black and shapeless through the gloom—some strange and threatening
object descending upon him.
The boy was so weak and tired and dazed by the long beating about and
the everlasting swirl of the storm above his head, that he could not
bring his reason to bear upon the consideration of the question what
this thing might be. It seemed to dash forward at him, and the formless
black mass then divided as if it were the mouth of a crocodile, and then
it drew back; it shook angrily from side to side; now it dashed at him
again, and opened its terrible mouth.
Horace felt himself swooning in horror, and he knew that if he fainted
here it would be the last of him. Oh, why had not his mother sent for him?
Then a thought of shame came over him, that he should be fainting with
terror over something that could not be real.
Out of this shame grew a resolution, and suddenly the resolution mended
his reason, and enabled him to see that this terrible shapeless object
was a great pine-tree, whose dark branches were waving and bending and
opening in the storm, seen dimly through the thick snow.
Then he was at the edge of the woods! He tore through the bushes, and
came out on the clear space about the tree, and rushed up to it. He
dropped the ax and put his arms round the tree. Now he had to pull
himself together to save himself from swooning with joy. But in another
minute he felt much better. He had no idea on which side of the swamp he
was, but that did not matter. He could find his way well enough now.
After a little search, he found that he was exactly on the opposite side
of the swamp from that on which he had gone in. And as he was skirting
the edge of it, feeling fearfully hungry as well as weak, he saw,
growing quite within his reach, a fine young fir-tree.
Then he remembered that he had dropped the ax at the foot of the
pine-tree, and he had to go back and get it before he could cut down the
little tree. But he did cut it down, and staggered home with it, weak but
triumphant.
He found that it was three o’clock, and his mother was very much
agitated, and Uncle John had gone away, by the road, to the Big Swamp
about half an hour before. The boy had been so much accustomed to going
off by himself that his mother had not worried until he had failed to
return for the midday meal. Nor had she any idea what sort of a place the
Big Swamp was.
When Uncle John got it through his somewhat slow head that Horace had in
all probability actually gone there, he, too, had become alarmed, and
after slow preparations, had started. Horace had missed him by coming
home across the pastures.
But Uncle John was brought home in an hour by the hired man, and as
Horace felt much better after a good meal and a rest, the tree that he
had brought was dressed, and the Christmas festival merrily celebrated by
its aid.
CHASED BY THE TRAIL
By Jack London
Walt first blinked his eyes in the light of day in a trading post on the
Yukon River. Masters, his father, was one of those world missionaries who
are known as “pioneers,” and who spend the years of their life in pushing
outward the walls of civilization and in planting the wilderness. He had
selected Alaska as his field of labor, and his wife had gone with him to
that land of frost and cold.
Now, to be born to the moccasin and pack-strap is indeed a hard way of
entering the world, but far harder it is to lose one’s mother while yet a
child. This was Walt’s misfortune when he was fourteen years old.
He had, at different times, done deeds which few boys get the chance to
do, and he had learned to take some pride in himself and to be unafraid.
With most people pride goeth before a fall; but not so with Walt. His
was a healthy belief in his own strength and fitness, and knowing his
limitations, he was neither overweening nor presumptuous. He had learned
to meet reverses with the stoicism of the Indian. Shame, to him, lay not
in the failure to accomplish, but in the failure to strive. So, when he
attempted to cross the Yukon between two ice-runs, and was chased by the
trail, he was not cast down by his defeat.
[Illustration: A GUSH OF WATER FOLLOWED, BURYING THE SLED AND WASHING THE
DOGS FROM THEIR FEET—page 69
_From the drawing by George Giguère_]
The way of it was this. After passing the winter at his father’s claim
on Mazy May, he came down to an island on the Yukon and went into
camp. This was late in the spring, just before the breaking of the ice
on the river. It was quite warm, and the days were growing marvelously
long. Only the night before, when he was talking with Chilkoot Jim, the
daylight had not faded and sent him off to bed till after ten o’clock.
Even Chilkoot Jim, an Indian boy who was about Walt’s own age, was
surprised at the rapidity with which summer was coming on. The snow had
melted from all the southern hillsides and the level surfaces of the
flats and islands; everywhere could be heard the trickling of water and
the song of hidden rivulets; but somehow, under its three-foot ice-sheet,
the Yukon delayed to heave its great length of three thousand miles and
shake off the frosty fetters which bound it.
But it was evident that the time was fast approaching when it would again
run free. Great fissures were splitting the ice in all directions, while
the water was beginning to flood through them and over the top. On this
morning a frightful rumbling brought the two boys hurriedly from their
blankets. Standing on the bank, they soon discovered the cause. The
Stewart River had broken loose and reared a great ice barrier, where it
entered the Yukon, barely a mile above their island. While a great deal
of the Stewart ice had been thus piled up, the remainder was now flowing
under the Yukon ice, pounding and thumping at the solid surface above it
as it passed onward toward the sea.
“To-day um break um,” Chilkoot Jim said, nodding his head. “Sure!”
“And then maybe two days for the ice to pass by,” Walt added, “and you
and I’ll be starting for Dawson. It’s only seventy miles, and if the
current runs five miles an hour and we paddle three, we ought to make it
inside of ten hours. What do you think?”
“Sure!” Chilkoot Jim did not know much English, and this favorite word of
his was made to do duty on all occasions.
After breakfast the boys got out the Peterborough canoe from its winter
cache. It was an admirable sample of the boat-builder’s skill, an
imported article brought from the natural home of the canoe—Canada.
It had been packed over the Chilkoot Pass, two years before, on a
man’s back, and had then carried the first mail in six months into the
Klondike. Walt, who happened to be in Dawson at the time, had bought it
for three hundred dollars’ worth of dust which he had mined on the Mazy
May.
It had been a revelation, both to him and to Chilkoot Jim, for up to its
advent they had been used to no other craft than the flimsy birch-bark
canoes of the Indians and the rude poling-boats of the whites. Jim, in
fact, spent many a happy half-hour in silent admiration of its perfect
lines.
“Um good. Sure!” Jim lifted his gaze from the dainty craft, expressing
his delight in the same terms for the thousandth time. But glancing over
Walt’s shoulder, he saw something on the river which startled him. “Look!
See!” he cried.
A man had been racing a dog-team across the slushy surface for the shore,
and had been cut off by the rising flood. As Walt whirled round to see,
the ice behind the man burst into violent commotion, splitting and
smashing into fragments which bobbed up and down and turned turtle like
so many corks.
A gush of water followed, burying the sled and washing the dogs from
their feet. Tangled in their harness and securely fastened to the heavy
sled, they must drown in a few minutes unless rescued by the man. Bravely
his manhood answered.
Floundering about with the drowning animals, nearly hip-deep in the icy
flood, he cut and slashed with his sheath-knife at the traces. One by one
the dogs struck out for shore, the first reaching safety ere the last was
released. Then the master, abandoning the sled, followed them. It was a
struggle in which little help could be given, and Walt and Chilkoot Jim
could only, at the last, grasp his hands and drag him, half-fainting, up
the bank.
First he sat down till he had recovered his breath; next he knocked the
water from his ears like a boy who has just been swimming; and after that
he whistled his dogs together to see whether they had all escaped. These
things done, he turned his attention to the lads.
“I’m Muso,” he said, “Pete Muso, and I’m looking for Charley Drake. His
partner is dying down at Dawson, and they want him to come at once, as
soon as the river breaks. He’s got a cabin on this island, hasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Walt answered, “but he’s over on the other side of the river, with
a couple of other men, getting out a raft of logs for a grub-stake.”
The stranger’s disappointment was great. Exhausted by his weary journey,
just escaped from sudden death, overcome by all he had undergone in
carrying the message which was now useless, he looked dazed. The tears
welled into his eyes, and his voice was choked with sobs as he repeated,
aimlessly, “But his partner’s dying. It’s his partner, you know, and he
wants to see him before he dies.”
Walt and Jim knew that nothing could be done, and as aimlessly looked out
on the hopeless river. No man could venture on it and live. On the other
bank, and several miles up-stream, a thin column of smoke wavered to the
sky. Charley Drake was cooking his dinner there; seventy miles below, his
partner lay dying; yet no word of it could be sent.
But even as they looked, a change came over the river. There was a
muffled rending and tearing, and, as if by magic, the surface water
disappeared, while the great ice-sheet, reaching from shore to shore, and
broken into all manner and sizes of cakes, floated silently up toward
them. The ice which had been pounding along underneath had evidently
grounded at some point lower down, and was now backing up the water like
a mill-dam. This had broken the ice-sheet from the land and lifted it on
top of the rising water.
“Um break um very quick,” Chilkoot Jim said.
“Then here goes!” Muso cried, at the same time beginning to strip his wet
clothes.
The Indian boy laughed. “Mebbe you get um in middle, mebbe not. All the
same, the trail um go down-stream, and you go, too. Sure!” He glanced at
Walt, that he might back him up in preventing this insane attempt.
“You’re not going to try and make it across?” Walt queried.
Muso nodded his head, sat down, and proceeded to unlace his moccasins.