ice-jam which took an hour of heavy work to cross. At last
Daylight glimpsed what he was looking for, a dead tree close by
the bank. The sled was run in and up. Kama grunted with
satisfaction, and the work of making camp was begun.
Burning Daylight
30
The division of labor was excellent. Each knew what he must do.
With one ax Daylight chopped down the dead pine. Kama, with a
snowshoe and the other ax, cleared away the two feet of snow
above the Yukon ice and chopped a supply of ice for cooking
purposes. A piece of dry birch bark started the fire, and
Daylight went ahead with the cooking while the Indian unloaded
the sled and fed the dogs their ration of dried fish. The food
sacks he slung high in the trees beyond leaping-reach of the
huskies. Next, he chopped down a young spruce tree and trimmed
off the boughs. Close to the fire he trampled down the soft snow
and covered the packed space with the boughs. On this flooring
he tossed his own and Daylight’s gear-bags, containing dry socks
and underwear and their sleeping-robes. Kama, however, had two
robes of rabbit skin to Daylight’s one.
They worked on steadily, without speaking, losing no time. Each
did whatever was needed, without thought of leaving to the other
the least task that presented itself to hand. Thus, Kama saw
when more ice was needed and went and got it, while a snowshoe,
pushed over by the lunge of a dog, was stuck on end again by
Daylight. While coffee was boiling, bacon frying, and flapjacks
were being mixed, Daylight found time to put on a big pot of
beans. Kama came back, sat down on the edge of the spruce
boughs, and in the interval of waiting, mended harness.
“I t’ink dat Skookum and Booga make um plenty fight maybe,” Kama
remarked, as they sat down to eat.
“Keep an eye on them,” was Daylight’s answer.
And this was their sole conversation throughout the meal. Once,
with a muttered imprecation, Kama leaped away, a stick of
firewood in hand, and clubbed apart a tangle of fighting dogs.
Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot,
where it thawed into water. The meal finished, Kama replenished
the fire, cut more wood for the morning, and returned to the
spruce bough bed and his harness-mending. Daylight cut up
generous chunks of bacon and dropped them in the pot of bubbling
beans. The moccasins of both men were wet, and this in spite of
the intense cold; so when there was no further need for them to
leave the oasis of spruce boughs, they took off their moccasins
and hung them on short sticks to dry before the fire, turning
them about from time to time. When the beans were finally
cooked, Daylight ran part of them into a bag of flour-sacking a
foot and a half long and three inches in diameter. This he then
laid on the snow to freeze. The remainder of the beans were left
in the pot for breakfast.
It was past nine o’clock, and they were ready for bed. The
squabbling and bickering among the dogs had long since died down,
and the weary animals were curled in the snow, each with his feet
and nose bunched together and covered by his wolf’s brush of a
tail. Kama spread his sleeping-furs and lighted his pipe.
Burning Daylight
31
Daylight rolled a brown-paper cigarette, and the second
conversation of the evening took place.
“I think we come near sixty miles,” said Daylight.
“Um, I t’ink so,” said Kama.
They rolled into their robes, all-standing, each with a woolen
Mackinaw jacket on in place of the parkas[5] they had worn all
day. Swiftly, almost on the instant they closed their eyes, they
were asleep. The stars leaped and danced in the frosty air, and
overhead the colored bars of the aurora borealis were shooting
like great searchlights.
[5] Parka: a light, hooded, smock-like garment made of cotton
drill.
In the darkness Daylight awoke and roused Kama. Though the
aurora still flamed, another day had begun. Warmed-over
flapjacks, warmed-over beans, fried bacon, and coffee composed
the breakfast. The dogs got nothing, though they watched with
wistful mien from a distance, sitting up in the snow, their tails
curled around their paws. Occasionally they lifted one fore paw
or the other, with a restless movement, as if the frost tingled
in their feet. It was bitter cold, at least sixty-five below
zero, and when Kama harnessed the dogs with naked hands he was
compelled several times to go over to the fire and warm the
numbing finger-tips. Together the two men loaded and lashed the
sled. They warmed their hands for the last time, pulled on their
mittens, and mushed the dogs over the bank and down to the
river-trail. According to Daylight’s estimate, it was around
seven o’clock; but the stars danced just as brilliantly, and
faint, luminous streaks of greenish aurora still pulsed overhead.
Two hours later it became suddenly dark–so dark that they kept
to
the trail largely by instinct; and Daylight knew that his
time-estimate had been right. It was the darkness before dawn,
never anywhere more conspicuous than on the Alaskan winter-trail.
Slowly the gray light came stealing through the gloom,
imperceptibly at first, so that it was almost with surprise that
they noticed the vague loom of the trail underfoot. Next, they
were able to see the wheel-dog, and then the whole string of
running dogs and snow-stretches on either side. Then the near
bank loomed for a moment and was gone, loomed a second time and
remained. In a few minutes the far bank, a mile away,
unobtrusively came into view, and ahead and behind, the whole
frozen river could be seen, with off to the left a wide-extending
range of sharp-cut, snow-covered mountains. And that was all.
No sun arose. The gray light remained gray.
Burning Daylight
32
Once, during the day, a lynx leaped lightly across the trail,
under the very nose of the lead-dog, and vanished in the white
woods. The dogs’ wild impulses roused. They raised the
hunting-cry of the pack, surged against their collars, and
swerved aside in pursuit. Daylight, yelling “Whoa!” struggled
with the gee-pole and managed to overturn the sled into the soft
snow. The dogs gave up, the sled was righted, and five minutes
later they were flying along the hard-packed trail again. The
lynx was the only sign of life they had seen in two days, and it,
leaping velvet-footed and vanishing, had been more like an
apparition.
At twelve o’clock, when the sun peeped over the earth-bulge,
they stopped and built a small fire on the ice. Daylight, with
the ax, chopped chunks off the frozen sausage of beans. These,
thawed and warmed in the frying-pan, constituted their meal.
They had no coffee. He did not believe in the burning of
daylight for such a luxury. The dogs stopped wrangling with one
another, and looked on wistfully. Only at night did they get
their pound of fish. In the meantime they worked.
The cold snap continued. Only men of iron kept the trail at such
low temperatures, and Kama and Daylight were picked men of their
races. But Kama knew the other was the better man, and thus, at
the start, he was himself foredoomed to defeat. Not that he
slackened his effort or willingness by the slightest conscious
degree, but that he was beaten by the burden he carried in his
mind. His attitude toward Daylight was worshipful. Stoical,
taciturn, proud of his physical prowess, he found all these
qualities incarnated in his white companion. Here was one that
excelled in the things worth excelling in, a man-god ready to
hand, and Kama could not but worship–withal he gave no signs of
it. No wonder the race of white men conquered, was his thought,
when it bred men like this man. What chance had the Indian
against such a dogged, enduring breed? Even the Indians did not
travel at such low temperatures, and theirs was the wisdom of
thousands of generations; yet here was this Daylight, from the
soft Southland, harder than they, laughing at their fears, and
swinging along the trail ten and twelve hours a day. And this
Daylight thought that he could keep up a day’s pace of
thirty-three miles for sixty days! Wait till a fresh fall of
snow
came down, or they struck the unbroken trail or the rotten
rim-ice
that fringed open water.
In the meantime Kama kept the pace, never grumbling, never
shirking. Sixty-five degrees below zero is very cold. Since
water freezes at thirty-two above, sixty-five below meant
ninety-seven degrees below freezing-point. Some idea of the
significance of this may be gained by conceiving of an equal
difference of temperature in the opposite direction. One hundred
and twenty-nine on the thermometer constitutes a very hot day,
Burning Daylight