impressiveness, “that came from a mammoth.”
“Nonsense!” I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my
unbelief. “The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the
earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have
unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to
melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no
living specimen exists. Our explorers–”
At this word he broke in impatiently. “Your explorers? Pish! A
weakly breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man,
what you may know of the mammoth and his ways.”
Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my
hook by ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the
subject in hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was
prehistoric, and marshalled all my facts in support of this. I
mentioned the Siberian sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth
bones; spoke of the large quantities of fossil ivory purchased from
the Innuits by the Alaska Commercial Company; and acknowledged
having myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel
of the Klondike creeks. “All fossils,” I concluded, “found in the
midst of debris deposited through countless ages.”
“I remember when I was a kid,” Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a
most confounded way of sniffing), “that I saw a petrified water-
melon. Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves
into thinking that they are really raising or eating them, there
are no such things as extant water-melons?”
A Hyperborean Brew
6
“But the question of food,” I objected, ignoring his point, which
was puerile and without bearing. “The soil must bring forth
vegetable life in lavish abundance to support so monstrous
creations. Nowhere in the North is the soil so prolific. Ergo,
the mammoth cannot exist.”
“I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland,
for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same
time, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no
longer exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own
right arm.”
Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewood
at the dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.
Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and
requite me for my St. Elias bear.
“It was this way,” he at last began, after the appropriate silence
had intervened. “I was in camp one day–”
“Where?” I interrupted.
He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where
stretched a TERRA INCOGNITA into which vastness few men have
strayed and fewer emerged. “I was in camp one day with Klooch.
Klooch was as handsome a little KAMOOKS as ever whined betwixt the
traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-
blood Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her,
and with understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson
Bay stock. I tell you, O man, she was a corker combination. And
now, on this day I have in mind, she was brought to pup through a
pure wild wolf of the woods–grey, and long of limb, with big lungs
and no end of staying powers. Say! Was there ever the like? It
was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look forward to
big things.
“As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely
delivered. I was squatting on my hams over the litter–seven
sturdy, blind little beggars–when from behind came a bray of
trumpets and crash of brass. There was a rush, like the wind-
squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and I was midway to my
feet when knocked flat on my face. At the same instant I heard
Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you’ve planted your fist
in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I twisted
my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the blue
sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain of
flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the
open. I caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in
girth as my body, standing out straight behind. The next second
only a tremendous hole remained in the thicket, though I could
still hear the sounds as of a tornado dying quickly away,
underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees snapping and crashing.
“I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with
the muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel
out of line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I
A Hyperborean Brew
7
looked for the slut, and–and what do you suppose?”
I shook my head.
“May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of
her! Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars–gone, all
gone. Where she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in
the soft earth, all of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a
few scattered hairs.”
I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and
glanced at Nimrod.
“The beast was thirty long and twenty high,” he answered, “and its
tusks scaled over six times three feet. I couldn’t believe,
myself, at the time, for all that it had just happened. But if my
senses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in the
brush. And there was–or, rather, there was not–Klooch and the
pups. O man, it makes me hot all over now when I think of it
Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new race! And a rampaging,
ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood, wiping them, root
and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder that the
blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed the
hand-axe and took the trail?”
“The hand-axe?” I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture.
“The hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty
feet–”
Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. “Wouldn’t
it kill you?” he cried. “Wasn’t it a beaver’s dream? Many’s the
time I’ve laughed about it since, but at the time it was no
laughing matter, I was that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch.
Think of it, O man! A brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted
breed, and wiped out before ever it opened its eyes or took out its
intention papers! Well, so be it. Life’s full of disappointments,
and rightly so. Meat is best after a famine, and a bed soft after
a hard trail.
“As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and
hung to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward
the head, I was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I
might as well stop long enough to explain a couple of points. Up
thereabouts, in the midst of the mountains, is an almighty curious
formation. There is no end of little valleys, each like the other
much as peas in a pod, and all neatly tucked away with straight,
rocky walls rising on all sides. And at the lower ends are always
small openings where the drainage or glaciers must have broken out.
The only way in is through these mouths, and they are all small,
and some smaller than others. As to grub–you’ve slushed around on
the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way, most
likely, seeing as you’re a traveller. And you know how stuff grows
there–big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that’s the way it was
with those valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and
such things in patches higher than your head. Rain three days out
of four during the summer months; and food in them for a thousand
mammoths, to say nothing of small game for man.
A Hyperborean Brew
8
“But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded
and gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my
dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I’d never know peace of
mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that
that stood for SKOOKUM MAMOOK PUKAPUK–excuse Chinook, I mean there
was a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was very
narrow, and the walls steep. High up on one side was one of those
big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some call them, weighing
all of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. I hit back for
camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn’t slip past, and got
my ammunition. It wasn’t worth anything with the rifle smashed; so