ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
While the boys did not expect to be gone longer than a week, or ten days
at the most, on any one spoke of their prospecting wheel, and carried
good grub to last them for this length of time, they nevertheless took
the precaution to stock up with enough alcohol, compressed tea, hard
tack and pemmican for themselves, and dried fish for the dogs, to stave
off starvation for a month in the event of meeting with an accident,
getting stormbound, or wanting to make a longer stay.
With a team apiece of seven dogs and a load of only a hundred and fifty
pounds it was possible for them to ride on their sleds a good deal of
the time. But this does not mean that they could very often actually sit
on them but the way they did it was to stand on the rear ends of the
runners and hold on to the handle bars.
The night before they made their first trip out they packed their
traveling mess-gear, which consisted of a collapsible stove and alcohol
for fuel, grub and the few other necessary things of their outfit, on
the sleds, so that they could make a start the next morning at
day-break.
They crossed the Big Black River and drove due north over the tundra (a
Russian word, pronounced _toon-dra_,) which is a rolling prairie,
without any trees on it; the soil is black and soft, or _muck_ as it is
called, and on it both mosses and lichens grow. They drove due north and
in the course of time Bill announced that according to the sun, his
watch and his stomach there should be a period of rest and of eating.
According to Jack’s calculations they had made about twelve miles and
were moreover right then on the Arctic Circle.
“After we gets through with the eats, Jack, I wants you to edicate me on
this Arctic Circle thing,” said Bill as he threw the dogs their fish.
Jack was busy opening the thermos bottles of hot tea and getting out the
sandwiches.
“What do you want to know about it?” he asked absent-mindedly, for he
was not a little bit interested in this at the particular moment.
“I wants to know _why_ is the Arctic Circle, and everything else about
the bloomin’ thing. The way I’ve doped it out it is like a meridian or
the equator, that is, it’s a line that you can’t see and yet it’s there
or here just the same. I’m settin’ on it and I know it but I can’t prove
it, As man to man, now, I’m askin’ you what is it?” asked Bill with
great earnestness.
Jack looked at him and laughed.
“You asked a question and then answered it yourself in the next breath.
You’ve said all there is to say about it except that it’s a circle
running round the North Pole like an ostrich feather on a lady’s hat,
only, different from the latter, it extends on all sides of the pole to
latitude sixty-six degrees and thirty-two minutes north.”
“But why is it?” persisted Bill.
Jack thought a moment.
“The chief reason the Arctic Circle is so called is because it is the
circle below which the sun does not drop in mid-summer. If we were here
on the Arctic Circle in summer we’d see the sun at midnight just above
the horizon, and the farther north a person goes in summer the higher he
will see the sun above the horizon at midnight. Lots of tourists come up
here every summer just to take a look at the midnight sun, and the
natives call them _sunners_.”
“An’ we won’t get to see it then?” kicked Bill; “it’s just my luck. If
it ’ud be rainin’ soup I’d be standin’ out in it with a fork.”
“We’re not up here to see the sun at midnight,” Jack came back at him,
“we’re lucky if we get a glimpse of it at noon. What we’re up here for
is to get the yellow stuff.”
“Oh yes, I kinda lost sight o’ the bloomin’ gold for a minute,” was
Bill’s reply.
It was great sport, now that their loads were light, for the young
drivers to flourish their whips and crack them in the dry air, while the
dogs, fed-up, fresh and eager, raced along, with tinkling bells where
the going was good, as though they were making a dash for the pole. The
boys and their outfit would have made a capital movie, but there wasn’t
a cinematograph camera nearer than Skagway on the south or St. Michaels
on the west.
At this time of the year, the period of daylight on the Arctic Circle is
very short and as darkness came on they pulled up on the banks of a
stream to make camp.
“This must be the Rat River,” said Bill.
“It is, but it certainly isn’t much at this point. We’re close to its
head waters though and that accounts for it. It empties into the
Porcupine River about sixty or seventy miles west of here. It might be
worth our while to make a survey up and down the river for a few miles,
so to-morrow let’s go down stream.”
They had not gone more than five miles the next morning when their
attention was attracted by a huge fire a couple of hundred feet back of
the north bank and they drove up to see what was going on.
“Bet it’s the Yeehats barbecuin’ a caribou,” suggested Bill who was
dying by inches for the want of a caribou steak.
“Look again,” said Jack, and then Bill saw the winter diggings of some
miners, three all told, one white man and two Indians, busy with picks
and shovels.
“Lookin’ for our gold,” was Bill’s idea of it.
“More likely they are mining for some on their own account. A great deal
of placer mining is done up here in the winter--has to be done in winter
as a matter of fact--because the ground is so low and wet that they
can’t do any digging in the summer time, for the hole fills up with
water as fast as the dirt is thrown out.
“The way they work it according to what Rip Stoneback told me, is like
this. The miner cuts all the fire-wood he can in the summer, which isn’t
a great deal as it is so scarce in these parts, and builds his
_sluice-box_; then when winter sets in and it begins to freeze, he
clears the moss off of a small patch. On this clearing he builds a fire
and keeps it going until the ground is thawed down a foot or so when he
digs it out; then he builds another fire, digs out the thawed ground and
repeats the operation until he has sunk a shaft through the muck and
gravel to bed-rock.
“Now between the gravel and bed-rock is a layer of gold-bearing dirt
called _pay-streak_ and this is hoisted to the surface by means of a
windlass on the ends of whose rope are spliced a couple of buckets; and
this windlass, of course, sets over the shaft. Usually two men go down
in the shaft and pick the frozen pay streak from the ground. The shafts
vary in depth from fifteen to forty feet depending on what part of the
country the mine is located.
“The third man stays on top to draw up the buckets and with a
wheel-barrow wheels the gold-bearing dirt back and dumps it in a pile
where it will be in no danger of getting washed away by the melting
snows when spring comes. In the spring when water is plentiful the fun
begins for then the _clean-up_ takes place and the men who were as poor
as Indian dogs all winter wax rich and take their winnings back to
civilization where they can be separated from it.
“The _clean-up_ means that the color-bearing dirt is shoveled into the
sluice-box, that is, a trough without ends, into which the miner has
contrived to keep a steady stream of water running. The water washes
away the dirt and leaves the free gold just as it does in the more
primitive method of panning.”
The miners were as glad to see the boys as the latter were to see them,
yes even more so. They immediately knocked off all work and there was a
regular “chin-fest,” as Bill called it, from that time on. They made the
boys stay to supper and improvised bunks in their cabin for them to
sleep on. After Art Jennings, who, as you will gather from his name, was
the lone white man, had heard the news of the outside world they talked
about three other things only, the first of which was gold, the second
gold and the third gold.
“This placer minin’ is altogether too slow a game for me,” remarked Bill
when they were on their way again. “What I wants is to see moosehide
sacks of it piled up like cordwood, I do.”
“Well there are moosehide sacks of it _cached_ right here in Yeehatville
on the Circle. From the Pacific Ocean on up to the Arctic Ocean there’s
gold. In every stream and river, as well as the land between them, this
precious metal is found in either particles or in nuggets. Take the
Klondike! it’s not much larger than the Rat River here and yet so much
gold was found there its name became known all over the world. Every
river in Alaska and the Yukon, I suppose, is just as rich but you don’t
hear much about them because the Klondike was the first and so outshone
all the rest. We’ll get ours yet, don’t worry,” said Jack hopefully.
Each trip the boys made from their base of supplies took them from one
to two weeks. Their marches in and out were usually made in a couple of
days and when they had worked away from their permanent base as far as
they wanted to go they would set up a temporary camp.
If the weather was not too severe, that is to say below zero, they
pitched their tent, but when it got to twenty, forty or sixty below, or
a blizzard struck them as it frequently did in mid-winter, they made a
better camp by cutting out blocks of snow and piling them up into a
dome-shaped shelter like the igloo of the Eskimo, but which Bill, who
always persisted in nick-naming everything that was new to him, called a
_butter-dish_.
Building a snow igloo was a simple matter after they had put up a
couple, and the boys got it down to such a fine point that they could do
the complete job in two or three hours. Of course this was largely the
result of Jack’s experience in the Arctic which enabled him to go about
it in the right way. He had brought his saw-knife with him for this
express purpose. This useful tool is about eighteen inches long and one
and three-fourths inches wide and while one of the edges of it is sharp
like a knife the other edge has teeth cut in it like a saw.
With this saw-knife Jack or Bill would saw out the hard frozen snow into
blocks which for the lower layers of the igloo measured about two feet
in length and eighteen inches wide and high; as the upper layers were
reached they used smaller and smaller blocks. Finally when all of the
snow-blocks but one were laid up and the igloo was as hemispherical as
the half of a ball, the last block, which they beveled on four sides,
was set in the center and this held all of the other blocks out like the
keystone of a bridge.
They made these snow igloos about six feet in diameter on the inside of
the base so that they could lie down comfortably. To get into the igloo
they left one of the snow blocks of the first layer out and through this
hole they also took in the grub they needed, the alcohol stoves and the
sleeping bags. To close the hole it was only necessary to push in the
snow block when they were pretty well housed in.
What, then, with their fur clothing, a log house at their permanent base
and these snow igloos at the ends of their trips, they were able to keep
quite comfortable. Nearly every one who has never put in a winter in the
Arctic, or sub-Arctic, regions seems to think that the extreme cold is a
thing to be feared, but it isn’t if one has the right kind of clothes,
enough food and if, when outside of the shelter, he does not stop but
keeps right on going or working. But the long hours of darkness often
get to be mighty monotonous.
Being boys, however, nothing could chill their ardor or cast a gloom on
their spirits for any length of time and they were always ready for a
frolic. Thus it was when they were sledding on streams where the ice was
good they had some great races. Each contended that his team was the
swiftest that ever pulled a sled and this difference of opinion
invariably led to a challenge to prove it.
The dogs entered into the spirit of the races with as much zest as their
young masters and when they were abreast and the signal to _go_ was
given, the whips cracked and the dogs jumped to get first place. Onward
they dashed with an ease and grace that made them seem more like rubber
balls bouncing along low on the course, than four-footed animals whose
business it was to work.
But the spirit of sport was strangely strong in these living, vibrant
creatures and as they fairly flew along over the course they voiced
their joy by short howls and yelps when they were in the lead or their
anguish by whines and cries when they dropped behind.
Jack was, perhaps, a better driver than Bill but in his own heart he
gave the credit to his team when they won and win they nearly always
did. Bill was a good “sport” though and never got “sore” when he lost a
race; he always took the blame on himself for his poor driving and
nothing could shake his belief that his was the fastest team, bar none,
in all Alaska.
There were a few times though when Bill’s team won. One of these rare
occasions was when a snowshoe rabbit ran from a bank onto the ice
intending to cross to the other side; finding himself in front of a
terrible pack of running dogs or wolves, he knew not which, that were
bent on catching him, instead of going on across to safety he ran
straightaway ahead of them.
Sate, Bill’s lead-dog, spotted him first and he ran as he had never run
before; the dogs of his team felt this super-burst of speed on his part
and as the rabbit paced him, so he paced them with the highly gratifying
result, to Bill, that his team jumped ahead of Jack’s by a length. The
boys urged their teams on with their “yow-yows,” and the bells jingled
joyously while the wild race was on.
The dogs of both teams had forgotten that there were such things as a
trace or trail, while the boys had lost sight of the treasure they were
seeking and let nothing impede their mad flight toward destruction. At
the end of a quarter of a mile Bill’s team was nearly three lengths
ahead of Jack’s and he felt the race well won. His dogs had lost all
interest in the race, indeed, they did not know they were racing for it
was the rabbit they were after now. Then little snowshoe fooled them,
for he made a sharp turn and ran up the bank.
Sate likewise turned as sharp as the high speed he was making would
allow; the team swerved abruptly, slipped and slid for half-a-dozen
yards, the sled upset and everything was piled up in a heap. Jack’s team
shot by them like an arrow and they ran for another quarter of a mile
before he could stop them in their mad flight. When he got back he had
to admit that Bill’s team had won the race but it cost them an hour’s
work to make good the damage done. There was no more racing that day.
“You see, Jack, as I always told you, my team is faster than yourn and
all it needs to show speed is a rabbit for a pace maker,” was Bill’s
comment as he picked himself up.
In their goings and comings they ran across all sorts of wild animal
life from the little lemmings, a mouse-like animal with short ears and
tail, which looks like a miniature yellow rabbit, to the giant moose. In
between these two extremes they saw squirrels, snowshoe rabbits, red and
black foxes, lynxes, gray wolves and caribou. They had also seen the
tracks of bears, for the species of bear that live in the sub-Arctic
regions does not hibernate.
They often shot squirrel, rabbit and ptarmigan (pronounced
_tar’-mi-gan_), a bird of the grouse order, and these served as dishes
of great delicacy for the boys, as well as giving the dogs a welcome
change from dried fish. Bill declared it to be the open season for
bagging some big game and Jack agreed that they must. But it is hard to
seek cached treasure and be big game hunters at the same time.
Once while they were moving leisurely along after a satisfying dinner
and they were talking about hunting the caribou, moose and bear, the
tables were suddenly turned on them when they became the _hunted_ prey
of wild beasts, for a pack of famished wolves had scented them out and
were headed straight for them.
Pell-mell came the lean, long-legged beasts with ears erect, ribs
bulging out of their loose skins, tails drooping and starved to
desperation. Instantly the boys halted their teams and had barely time
enough to cut the dogs out of their traces before the pack was upon
them. The dogs knew they were in for a fight to the death and braced
themselves for it, while the boys drew their revolvers and stood on
their sleds ready for the attack.
In less than a minute the wolves were upon them and the fight was on.
The dogs met the onslaught with the strength and courage the wolves
lacked; and in between pistol shots, each of which picked off a wolf,
the dogs snapped in two the legs, and broke the necks of their savage
ancestors with a crunch of their powerful jaws, or opened their bellies,
which let their entrails half out, or severed the jugular veins when
streams of blood spurted forth from the rips made by merciless fangs.
But the dogs suffered too, for often three or even four wolves would
fight a single one and in this unequal struggle he would go down unless
his master took a hand and evened up numbers by a few well-placed
bullets. Nor was it easy for the boys to shoot the wolves, for the fight
was so fast and furious it was well-nigh impossible at times to send a
piece of cold lead into their miserable carcasses without the danger of
hitting their dogs.
One of the curious things was that when a wolf got hold of the harness
on a dog it mistook it for brute substance instead of inert leather and
it would bite it viciously and shake it furiously without getting the
living response that it had the right to expect.
When the number of wolves had been brought down to twice that of the
dogs, they knew they were beaten and the moment this happened their
courage failed them and those that were left with strength enough to
take to their heels slunk quickly away.
An examination of the dogs showed that far from coming out of the fight
unscathed every one of them was in a bad way and, still more sad to
relate, Jennie and Prince, two of the outside dogs of Jack’s team, had
to be shot to put them out of their misery. As the dogs were so badly
off and the harness cut up and chewed to pieces the boys had to make
camp on the spot.
They dressed the wounds of the dogs as well as they could and gave them
half-a-can of pemmican apiece--a food that the dogs liked above all
else. While the dogs laid down and rested and nursed their hurts, their
masters built an igloo, for they couldn’t tell when they would be able
to move on. While the igloo was going up there was nothing but kind
words and praise for the dogs and it could be seen by the looks in their
eyes and the expressions on their faces that they knew every word which
was said to and about them, and enjoyed and appreciated it all. As Bill
saw them now he was more thoroughly convinced than ever that these
particular dogs were endowed with human brains and not just common dog
brains.
“I always told you my team could outrun yourn and you’ll have to admit
they out-fought yourn too,” said Bill boastfully after the gloom had
somewhat worn off.
“I don’t see how you make that out,” Jack flared up.
“Well, two of your dogs will never _mush_ again pullin’ a sled after
them here on earth--though they may haul a little red cart with angels
in it when they go tearin’ along the trails o’ heaven.”
“That’s no argument at all,” returned Jack soberly, “and you can’t get
away with it either. Why, I saw ’Frisco rip the throats open of one wolf
after another when four of them were at him at once. Prince and Jennie
went down in a fluke--in a fluke I tell you--and that is the only reason
they lost out.’”
“This is soitenly tough luck,” said Bill as he was going over the wounds
of the dogs before they turned in.
“And I’m two dogs short,” moaned Jack, “though I’m mighty glad they were
not the malamutes.”
“Never youse mind, Buddy. I’ll give youse one of mine and we’ll still be
even.”
“I don’t want any of your dogs, Bill, I’ll just drive my five dogs along
until we strike an Indian village or some camp and then I’ll buy a
couple of Siwashes. But I’m sure sorry to lose Prince and Jennie for
they were a couple of dandy dogs to say the least.”
Just the same when Bill had fixed the harness and hitched up the dogs
preparatory to making a fresh start, Jack saw with grim pleasure that
the teams were even and that Bill’s best dog, next to Sate his leader,
was in the traces of his team.
Jack didn’t say anything about it then but he made up his mind that when
he went ’round the world on a pleasure jaunt, or anywhere else, Bill
could go with him however crude his speech, and rough his manner.
They limped back to their base of supplies and stayed there for a week
until the dogs got into shape again.