Part 27 (2/2)

”Sure. A dog team can trot faster than a man can walk but not as fast as he can run. So a fellow's got to run in the deep snow a hundred yards or so, then walk, then run, an' so on. I met Alexis a year or two after the expedition an' he told me all his troubles. They got to the top of the mountain, he said, in the midst of a furious snowstorm. It was so thick that the natives could not decide on the road an' it was impossible to stay up on the crest without freezin' to death. At last they decided to chance it. The side of the mountain was so steep that the dogs couldn't keep up with the sleds an' there was nothing to do but toboggan to the bottom of the hill.

”What fun,” exclaimed Eric.

”Ye-es,” the other said dubiously, ”but it was a two-thousand-foot slide! They wound small chains around the runners of the sleds to try an' check their speed a little, an' hoping that they wouldn't hit anything, let 'em go. Just as the first sled had begun slidin', Alexis told me he called out that he thought they were a little too much to the north an' all the sleds would go off a precipice into the sea. It was too late to stop, then. It took three hours to climb one side of the mountain, an' less than three minutes to go down the other side.

”From there they went straight along the coast to Kiyilieugamute, where they had reckoned on gettin' dogs to replace the young dogs on the 'scratch teams' Alexis had made up. All the dogs had gone on a trip for fish an' the natives said it would be two days before they arrived. So Jarvis went ahead with the two good teams, leavin' Bertholf to follow as soon as the native dogs arrived. Four days of hard traveling, stoppin'

at Akoolukpugamute, Chukwoktulieugamute, Kogerchtehmute, and Chukwoktulik brought 'em to the Yukon at the old Russian trading post of Andreavski.

”On the Yukon, I guess they made good time. You know, in the fall, when there are sou'westerly gales in the Bering Sea, the water rises in the lower Yukon, an' as it freezes quickly, there may be a trail of smooth glare ice for miles. Then there's prime traveling. But, often as not, the water flows back again before the ice is thick enough to travel on.

It makes a thin sh.e.l.l, an' dogs, sleds an' everybody goes through an'

brings up on the solid ice below.

”As a matter of fact, it put Jarvis' teams down an' out; most of his dogs were bleeding at every step from ice-cuts in the cus.h.i.+ons of their feet. He had trouble with the natives, too. Two of them got violent colds, an' they were no use for traveling.”

”Seems queer to think of Eskimos catching cold,” said Eric; ”now if it had been Lieutenant Jarvis, I wouldn't have been surprised.”

”There's nothing as tough as a white man,” said the whaler. ”If you look up stories of explorers you'll always find it's the natives that get used up first.”

”Why, do you suppose?”

”A white man is more used to putting out energy. After all, natives are lazy, an' a white man on an exploring expedition or a rescue is pus.h.i.+ng natives faster than they have ever been used to going.”

”He's taking the same trouble himself!” objected the boy.

”Sure, he is. But then, in one way or another, he's pus.h.i.+ng all the time. Jarvis told me that the next two or three days were bad. Off Point Romanoff the ice-crush was piled high an' they had to lift the sleds over the hummocks for two days on end. A snowstorm came up in the middle of it, an' I guess it was touch and go until they made Pikmiktallik, nine miles further on. Next day, late in the afternoon, they drove into St. Michael's, havin' covered three hundred and seventy-five miles in twenty-one days, with only one day's rest.

”The story of how Jarvis got teams at St. Michael's and Unalaklik is a yarn all by itself. Anyway, he got 'em, and on January fifth left Unalaklik, by a mountainous trail along the sh.o.r.e. A wild bit of road delayed 'em before they reached Norton's Bay. On the further sh.o.r.e, I guess they had real trouble. Jarvis told me--and the phrase has stuck in my mind ever since--that the ice looked like a cubist picture. I've seen stuff like that, but I never had to travel over it.”

”It sounds awful,” said Eric.

”It's worse than that,” was the reply. ”I don't want any of that sort of travel in my dish, thanks. Well, to go on. It was right there that Jarvis' an' Bertholf's trail divided. Orders had been left at Unalaklik for Bertholf to go on an' meet Jarvis at Cape Blossom, on the north side of Kotzebue Sound, with a thousand pounds of provisions.”

”How could he catch up with Jarvis with a load like that,” queried the boy, ”when the first part of the expedition was traveling light?”

”Jarvis had to make a nine-hundred-mile roundabout, clear the way round the Seward Peninsula,” explained the whaler.

”What for?”

”To get the reindeer.”

”That's right,” said Eric. ”I forgot about the reindeer.”

”They're the whole story,” the other reminded him. ”They couldn't have got food up to us with dogs, nohow. It would have taken an army of dogs.”

”I don't see why?”

”You've got to feed dogs,” was the answer. ”Two hundred an' fifty pounds is a good weight for a dog team an' half of that is dog-feed. The food for the humans in the party is nigh another fifty pound. So, you see, a dog team on a long journey will only get in with about a hundred pounds.

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