A thousand deaths by Jack London

steadiness and certitude that was to him appalling.

He sat and cursed–he had no breath for it when under way–and

fought the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco. Before the

mile pack was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying. The tears

were tears of exhaustion and of disgust with self. If ever a man

was a wreck, he was. As the end of the pack came in sight, he

strained himself in desperation, gained the camp-site, and pitched

forward on his face, the beans on his back. It did not kill him,

but he lay for fifteen minutes before he could summon sufficient

shreds of strength to release himself from the straps. Then he

became deathly sick, and was so found by Robbie, who had similar

troubles of his own. It was this sickness of Robbie that braced him

up.

“What other men can do, we can do,” Kit told him, though down in his

heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.

IV.

SMOKE BELLEW

14

“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

SMOKE BELLEW

15

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.

V.

Kit plodded along the trail with his Indian packers. In recognition

of the fact that it was to be a long pack, straight to the top of

Chilcoot, his own load was only eighty pounds. The Indians plodded

under their loads, but it was a quicker gait than he had practised.

Yet he felt no apprehension, and by now had come to deem himself

almost the equal of an Indian.

At the end of a quarter of a mile he desired to rest. But the

Indians kept on. He stayed with them, and kept his place in the

line. At the half mile he was convinced that he was incapable of

another step, yet he gritted his teeth, kept his place, and at the

end of the mile was amazed that he was still alive. Then, in some

strange way, came the thing called second wind, and the next mile

was almost easier than the first. The third mile nearly killed him,

and, though half delirious with pain and fatigue, he never

whimpered. And then, when he felt he must surely faint, came the

rest. Instead of sitting in the straps, as was the custom of the

white packers, the Indians slipped out of the shoulder- and head-

straps and lay at ease, talking and smoking. A full half hour

passed before they made another start. To Kit’s surprise he found

himself a fresh man, and ‘long hauls and long rests’ became his

newest motto.

The pitch of Chilcoot was all he had heard of it, and many were the

occasions when he climbed with hands as well as feet. But when he

reached the crest of the divide in the thick of a driving snow-

squall, it was in the company of his Indians, and his secret pride

was that he had come through with them and never squealed and never

lagged. To be almost as good as an Indian was a new ambition to

cherish.

When he had paid off the Indians and seen them depart, a stormy

darkness was falling, and he was left alone, a thousand feet above

timber line, on the back-bone of a mountain. Wet to the waist,

famished and exhausted, he would have given a year’s income for a

fire and a cup of coffee. Instead, he ate half a dozen cold flap-

jacks and crawled into the folds of the partly unrolled tent. As he

dozed off he had time only for one fleeting thought, and he grinned

with vicious pleasure at the picture of John Bellew in the days to

follow, masculinely back-tripping his four hundred pounds up

Chilcoot. As for himself, even though burdened with two thousand

pounds, he was bound down the hill.

SMOKE BELLEW

16

In the morning, stiff from his labours and numb with the frost, he

rolled out of the canvas, ate a couple of pounds of uncooked bacon,

buckled the straps on a hundred pounds, and went down the rocky way.

Several hundred yards beneath, the trail led across a small glacier

and down to Crater Lake. Other men packed across the glacier. All

that day he dropped his packs at the glacier’s upper edge, and, by

virtue of the shortness of the pack, he put his straps on one

hundred and fifty pounds each load. His astonishment at being able

to do it never abated. For two dollars he bought from an Indian

three leathery sea-biscuits, and out of these, and a huge quantity

of raw bacon, made several meals. Unwashed, unwarmed, his clothing

wet with sweat, he slept another night in the canvas.

In the early morning he spread a tarpaulin on the ice, loaded it