"And I am twenty-seven years old and a man," he privately assured
himself many times in the days that followed. There was need for it.
At the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his eight
hundred pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen pounds of his
own weight. His face was lean and haggard. All resilience had gone
out of his body and mind. He no longer walked, but plodded. And on
the back-trips, travelling light, his feet dragged almost as much as
when he was loaded.
He had become a work animal. He fell asleep over his food, and his
sleep was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming with
agony, by the cramps in his legs. Every part of him ached. He tramped
on raw blisters, yet this was even easier than the fearful bruising his
feet received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea Flats, across
which the trail led for two miles. These two miles represented
thirty-eight miles of travelling. He washed his face once a day. His
nails, torn and broken and afflicted with hangnails, were never
cleaned. His shoulders and chest, galled by the pack-straps, made him
think, and for the first time with understanding, of the horses he had
seen on city streets.
One ordeal that nearly destroyed him at first had been the food. The
extraordinary amount of work demanded extraordinary stoking, and his
stomach was unaccustomed to great quantities of bacon and of the
coarse, highly poisonous brown beans. As a result, his stomach went
back on him, and for several days the pain and irritation of it and of
starvation nearly broke him down. And then came the day of joy when he
could eat like a ravenous animal, and, wolf-eyed, ask for more.
When they had moved the outfit across the foot-logs at the mouth of the
Canyon, they made a change in their plans. Word had come across the
Pass that at Lake Linderman the last available trees for building boats
were being cut. The two cousins, with tools, whipsaw, blankets, and
grub on their backs, went on, leaving Kit and his uncle to hustle along
the outfit. John Bellew now shared the cooking with Kit, and both
packed shoulder to shoulder. Time was flying, and on the peaks the
first snow was falling. To be caught on the wrong side of the Pass
meant a delay of nearly a year. The older man put his iron back under
a hundred pounds. Kit was shocked, but he gritted his teeth and
fastened his own straps to a hundred pounds. It hurt, but he had
learned the knack, and his body, purged of all softness and fat, was
beginning to harden up with lean and bitter muscle. Also, he observed
and devised. He took note of the head-straps worn by the Indians, and
manufactured one for himself, which he used in addition to the
shoulder-straps. It made things easier, so that he began the practice
of piling any light, cumbersome piece of luggage on top. Thus, he was
soon able to bend along with a hundred pounds in the straps, fifteen or
twenty more lying loosely on top the pack and against his neck, an axe
or a pair of oars in one hand, and in the other the nested
cooking-pails of the camp.
But work as they would, the toil increased. The trail grew more
rugged; their packs grew heavier; and each day saw the snow-line
dropping down the mountains, while freight jumped to sixty cents. No
word came from the cousins beyond, so they knew they must be at work
chopping down the standing trees, and whipsawing them into boat-planks.
John Bellew grew anxious. Capturing a bunch of Indians back-tripping
from Lake Linderman, he persuaded them to put their straps on the
outfit. They charged thirty cents a pound to carry it to the summit of
Chilcoot, and it nearly broke him. As it was, some four hundred pounds
of clothes-bags and camp outfit was not handled. He remained behind to
move it along, dispatching Kit with the Indians. At the summit Kit was
to remain, slowly moving his ton until overtaken by the four hundred
pounds with which his uncle guaranteed to catch him.