I can only add that judment I have none. Long have I pondered, weighed, and balanced, but
never have my conclusions been twice the same–forsooth! because Thomas Stevens is a greater
man than I. If he has told truths, well and good; if untruths, still well and good. For who can
prove? Or disprove? I eliminate myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do as
I have done–go find the said Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his face the various matters which,
if fortune serve, I shall relate. As to where he may be found? The directions are simple:
anywhere between 53 north latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on the other, the likeliest
hunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia and the farthermost Labrador. That he
is there, somewhere, within that clearly defined territory, I pledge the word of an honorable man
whose expectations entail straight speaking and right living.
Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we first met (it were well to
mark this point), he wandered into my camp when I thought myself a thousand miles beyond the
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3
outermost post of civilization. At the sight of his human face, the first in weary months, I could
have sprung forward and folded him in my arms (and I am not by any means a demonstrative
man); but to him his visit seemed the most casual thing under the sun. He just strolled into the
light of my camp, passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten trails, threw my
snowshoes the one way and a couple of dogs the other, and so made room for himself by the fire.
Said he’d just dropped in to borrow a pinch of soda and see if I had any decent tobacco. He
plucked forth an ancient pipe, loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as a by your
leave, whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff was fairly good. He sighed
with the contentment of the just, and literally absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow
flakes, and it did my smoker’s heart good to behold him.
Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; just sort of knocking about. Had
come up from the Great Slave some time since, and was thinking of trapesing over into the
Yukon. The Factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and he was of a
mind to run over for a peep. I noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular,
calling it the Reindeer River–a conceited custom the Old Timers employ against the chechaquos
and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course that there
was no sting, and I forgave him. He also had it in view, he said, before he crossed the divide into
the Yukon, to make a little run up Fort o’ Good Hope way.
Now Fort o’ Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond the Circle, in a place
where the feet of few men have trod; and when a nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the
night, from nowhere in particular, to sit by one’s fire and discourse on such in terms of
“trapesing” and “a little run”, it is fair time to rouse up and shake off the dream. Wherefore I
looked about; saw the fly, and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the
grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and,
above, a great streamer of the aurora bridging the zenith from southeast to northwest. I shivered.
There is a magic in the northland night, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes.
You are clutched and downed before you are aware. Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying prone
and crossed where he had flung them. Also I had an eye on my tobacco pouch. Half, at least, of
its goodly store had vamoosed. That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all.
Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man–one of those wild stampeders,
strayed far from his bearings and wandering like a lost soul through great vastnesses and
unknown deeps. Oh well, let his moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits
together. Who knows?–the mere sound of a fellow creature’s voice may bring all straight again.
So I led him on in talk, and soon I marveled, for he talked of game and the ways thereof. He had
killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He
averred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of
the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk
ox’s winter trail.
And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no account the last), and
deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why it was I know not, but the spirit moved me to
repeat a tale told me by a man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of the
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4
great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St. Elias, never descending
to the levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this
creature for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a
foot longer than those of the other. This is mighty convenient, as
will be readily admitted. So I hunted this rare beast in my own
name, told it in the first person, present tense, painted the requisite
locale, gave it the necessary garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see the man
stunned by the recital.
Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he objected, denying the dangers of
such a hunt by virtue of the animal’s inability to turn about and go the other way, I could have
taken him by the hand for the true sportsman he was. Not he. He sniffed, looked at me, and
sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me
examine the gear. It was a mukluk of the Innuit pattern, sewn together with sinew threads, and
devoid of beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that was remarkable. In that it was all of
half an inch thick, it reminded me of walrus hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no
walrus ever bore so marvelous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles this hair was well-nigh
worn away, from friction with underbrush and snow; but around the top and down the more
sheltered back it was coarse, dirty black, and very thick. I parted it with difficulty and looked
beneath for the fine fur that is common with northern animals, but found it in this case to be
absent. This however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, the tufts that had survived
wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.
I looked up into the man’s face, and he pulled his foot down and asked, “Find hide like that on
your St. Elias bear?”
I shook my head. “Nor on any other creature of land or sea,” I answered candidly. The thickness
of it, and the length of the hair, puzzled me.
“That,” he said, and said without the slightest hint of 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 we
have unearthed, and by a frozen carcass the Siberian sun saw fit to melt out from 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 marshaled all my facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberian sandbars
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
A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE
5
myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks. “All fossils,”
I concluded, “found amidst debris deposited through countless ages.”