The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 33

"Dazed and incapacitated, he was an easy mark for the bear, who turning, with a growl at the pain of her wounds from the three bullets, seized him in her teeth. Then, apparently suffering acutely herself, she dropped him to give a vicious bite at the blood dripping from her side, where one of the bullets had entered.

"The hunter, who had been thrown several feet when the bear dropped him, was still game. He staggered up with some vague idea of finding and using the rifle, when, with an angry snort, she rushed at him again. But one of the steel-coated messengers of death had found a vital part and her eyes were growing dim, so that though her claws lacerated his thigh, her jaws came together a foot from him, and in her overreaching rush she knocked him down without further injury.

"There, then, crouched bear and man, almost within striking distance of each other, and yet both too weak to get up. Prudence bade the hunter lie still, but seeing that the eyes of the bear were glazing fast, he thought he might make shift to defend himself in the event of a final rush, and he reached out his hand for his hunting knife, which had fallen a few feet away. But the brute was still conscious of danger, and she reared with a roar of pain and thundered down upon the man, who struck with the knife as she fell upon him, the blade striking the snout, the tenderest part of the whole body. She buried her teeth in his shoulder, but relaxed the pressure almost instantly from her own pain and rolled over him leaving him free.

"Once more she lurched heavily to her feet, and the man lying on the ground in a frenzy of pain, closed his eyes, only hoping that the end might come quickly. Once he opened them, and there, not three feet away, stood the bear, apparently blind from the approach of death, rocking and sawing unsteadily on her feet, and then toppled over, dying. Three or four times, even then, she tried to rise, but fell back each time with a low growl, her b.l.o.o.d.y jaws snapping with fury scarcely a yard from the hunter's face, but the bullets had not failed to do their work, and with a last roar she fell back, dead.

"The hunter declared, but is not sure whether he was conscious or no, that hardly had the she-bear fallen dead, than out from the woods stepped another immense bear, almost twice the size of the female.

Quietly he walked to the cub, and smelt it with a growl, next smelt the body of the she-bear with another growl, and with his hair bristling, walked to where the hunter was lying. The man was paralyzed by fear and pain and did not move, whereon the bear, showing no hurry, shambled into the woods again and was gone.

"The whole affair, from the first shooting of the cub to the appearance and disappearance of the parent bear, had not taken five minutes, and when the half-breed, who had heard the shooting and the growls, reached the place, it was all over. The hunter, dazed and scarcely conscious, was lying beside a stone with the dead cub a few feet behind him and the dead mother a few feet in front of him. Apparently the man had not moved since the bear died, and probably was not aware of his escape, but was lying there, awaiting death in a most horrible form, not realizing that his foe had pa.s.sed beyond revenge."

"But how did he get to you?" asked the boy.

"The half-breed brought him, as I told you. In some unexplained way he lifted him to the saddle, and had the good judgment to let him fall forward on the neck of the horse, thereby closing the wounds in the neck and shoulder, which were the worst of all. But the hunter was terribly lacerated, for the claws of a bear rip right to the bone, sinews, tendons, veins, everything being shorn clean through.

"I doctored up his wounds as well as I could, but he did not regain consciousness all night, and I thought he would never pull through. But just as he had shown plenty of pluck in his fight with the bear, so he also showed a good deal of vitality in his fight with death. Though time was very precious to us, we stayed there three days to give him a chance, and then we sent him down to Rampart."

"I should have thought that the ride would kill him," said the boy.

"There was certainly a chance that it would," replied the topographer.

"But he could not have gone down the Kanuti River with us, and he could not stay up there alone with the half-breed. Then I thought there was less danger of some blood poisoning or infection setting in if he was somewhere that he could be watched by a doctor, and the journey was worth the risk."

"Did you ever hear of him afterwards?"

"Oh, yes. He is recovering, though, of course, he will never be the same man again."

"That," mumbled Roger, his voice thick with sleep, "was a close shave,"

and a moment later his heavy breathing told the topographer that his audience was asleep.

"He's a plucky little customer himself," he commented, as he left the tent.

CHAPTER XVIII

FIGHTING FIRE IN THE TUNDRA

The next day, June 12th, with Roger at the bow and Harry at the stern of the leading canoe, they started down the Kanuti River. The stream was swift, shallow, and full of boulders, and for the first couple of days more of the work was done wading in the stream than by paddling. The second day, particularly, it seemed to the boy that he had not been out of the water at all during the fourteen hours of the march, except for the brief halt at noon.

The next day, however, was travel of the kind that he liked. Two small tributaries of the Kanuti, mere mountain streams, flowed in and raised the water to a height where it was possible to shoot the rapids instead of wading them, carrying the canoes. Ever since the canoe slide on the Cantwell, Roger had felt quite proud of his powers as a canoeist, and this pride was considerably heightened as he found how able he was to handle the boat on this new stream. It was different, too, for while the first set of rapids had been a torrent foaming between jagged upstanding crags of rock, this was a swift river running over heaps of boulders, and the Indian had to judge by the swirl of the water just what was below.

A broad valley, through which the river wound in a very crooked way, afforded a quick day's journey, but bad rapids were then met with, which taxed the resources of the party to the utmost, and proved all in vain to prevent the boats from being swamped. Twice the boats went over, once the leading boat to Roger's great chagrin, and the second time the second boat, which in consequence made the boy feel much better. No serious harm resulted as the supplies were always packed in watertight bags. There was a fall of eight hundred feet in the thirty miles of these rapids, so that, as Magee said, "it was a case of whistling for brakes all the time."

The mosquitoes became very bad in the lower reaches of the river, the only redeeming feature of which part of the trip was the immense abundance of ducks and geese, which, being shot, were a welcome and toothsome addition to the larder. With this to aid the quiet progress, the party soon arrived at Arctic City, at the junction of the Kanuti and Koyukuk rivers, and thence one day's paddling up the latter broad stream brought them to Bergman. This is a central trading post, and there again they secured supplies for the last stage of the journey.

As it was already June 23d, and the hardest stretch was yet to come, little time was lost at Bergman, and three days later the voyagers crossed the Arctic Circle and touched at Bettles, at the junction of the Koyukuk and John (or Totsenbet) rivers. There Roger saw the last white face he would see, other than the members of the party, until he had crossed the great Arctic Divide, made his bow to the not-distant North Pole, reached the frozen ocean, and returned to civilization.

But when they came to the John River and Roger saw the force of the waters of the stream, and learned that there was one hundred and forty-five miles of up-stream work against that current, he realized that all his previous experience of labor had been child's play compared to it.

"That's going to be a pretty stiff pull, Mr. Rivers, isn't it?" said Roger to the geologist, as he was standing by the edge of the river just as the boats were being launched.

"It would be, Doughty," was the answer, "that is, if it wasn't for the milking."

"Milking?" questioned the boy in surprise, doubting if he had heard the word aright.

Just then Magee replied over his shoulder.

"Yes, milking, of course. Didn't you know they had cows here to do all the work? Sure! You've read of the cleverness of ants? Well, they're no better than fools compared to John River cows. They have a regular system. The cows up here have immensely long horns and two of them catch the end of one horn in the bow of the canoe, and another one, a mooley cow, shoves behind, and there you are. That's what they call milking--milking the brush, up here. Don't you expect to go up the John by milking the brush?" he added, turning to Rivers.

"Certainly," replied the geologist, then, seeing the lad's confusion, he continued, "but you mustn't mind Magee; milking the brush isn't quite that. It's a term used to specify that way of traveling which consists of pulling the canoes up stream by the boughs of branches along the bank. You see the John River is so swift that, if we were to depend only on paddling and poling, progress would be extremely slow."

"But how about tracking?" suggested the boy. "What is to prevent the canoes being pulled along by ropes from the sh.o.r.e?"

"The timber and brush come right down to the water's edge," was the reply. "There are no bars and level banks such as there were in the upper part of the Dall River, just before we came to the portage, and of course it is almost out of the question to pull or tow a canoe, when the banks are so thick that you would have to cut a trail in order to get through yourself. The trees and undergrowth overhang the river for quite a distance. Therefore all that can be done is to pull the boats up along the branches, hand over hand, one man poling in the stern. Of course, every few yards the boats get entangled and have to be pushed and pulled out. It's the only way, but it's back-breaking work."

It was, there was no doubt about that, and Roger added another chapter to his ideas of what hard work meant. The current of the river was so swift that it was useless to try and paddle up against it, while keeping in the middle of the stream, the banks were so thick and wooded that tracking was impossible, and "milking the brush" required incredible labor, because it meant keeping the canoe so near the bank that it was grounding or striking snags or becoming entangled in roots constantly, or misbehaving itself in some way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN ICY WATER UNDER A BURNING SUN.

Taking a canoe up a glacier-fed current in the height of an Alaskan summer.

_Photograph by U.S.G.S._]

Then to make a change, a long rapid would appear, and the only way to negotiate it was to lift the canoes shoulder-high, all the party together under the one canoe, and climb up that rapid with the ice water perhaps up to the waist, and a cruel, drenching spray whipping into their faces. In the meantime, if the mosquito veils were thrown back--and few things are more uncomfortable than a wet mosquito veil flopping about the face, why, then those torturing pests got in a full day's work; the while that a hot Alaskan summer sun blazed above them and blistered face, arms, and neck, exposed alternately to vivid sun and icy spray.

On July 5th, the spruce, which had thinned out rapidly during the couple of days preceding, came to a sudden end, the northern limit of timber having been reached. Nothing seemed to impress on Roger so clearly the fact that he was now in the Arctic Circle as the thought that he was in a climate so rigorous and gale-swept in winter that no tree could grow.

A few stunted willow bushes, here and there, still remained, when sheltered on the bank of the river, but trees, as such, worthy of the name, there were none of any sort whatever.

"I never realized," said Roger, "that there was no timber of any kind in the far north. What do the Eskimos burn for fuel?"

"Have you ever seen pictures of stoves or fireplaces in the Eskimo snow hut?" was the answer. "They depend on the heat of their own bodies in a hut without any ventilation, on the flame of blubber lamps, and occasionally, on a little driftwood which may have come down into the Arctic Ocean from some immense stream like the Mackenzie, which, flowing thousands of miles, has pa.s.sed in its upper reaches through a timbered country."

But by the time that the boy had reached this northern limit of spruce he had lost all idea of time. The days and nights seemed one perpetual nightmare. When asleep he dreamed that he was wading, or tracking, or poling, and when awake he felt as though he were working in his sleep.

It seemed to him that he had spent years and years on an icy river, and that fate had tied him to it for ever and ever. By the time that two full weeks of it had pa.s.sed by, the boy no longer had any thought of reaching the summit, that this toil could stop was a thought incredible, and though his muscles, stiffened and well-trained, continued to do their full man's share of the work, the mental strain was intense.

Rivers and Gersup were considerably troubled over the fact that the boy's strength showed no signs of giving way, and they would almost rather have seen him break down physically than continue his work doggedly, yet like a machine. It became hard, toward the end of the trip, to make him answer a question, and it would have to be repeated several times before the boy could grasp it. Orders regarding the work he seemed to understand at once, but other matters fell on deafened ears.

The older men tried to sting him into life in many ways. They attacked his pride, they endeavored to insult him, they reasoned with him, but there was no response, the heavy and sunken eyes regained no l.u.s.ter, the hard-set jaw never relaxed, and the channels of speech seemed frozen.

This went on as the river shallowed until, when the John had become so small that further work by water was impossible, Rivers gave word for a portage.

But the chief was far too wise a leader not to be prudent as well as urgent, and he knew that there were times when a rest would be wise for most of the party, and imperative for Roger. He had not dared to give anything to the boy, because of the need of travel the next day, but now that a short rest was in sight, he mixed up from the little medicine chest a sleeping draught of triple strength, and made the boy take it down. Through the entire night and the whole of the next day Roger slept unmoving, and when evening came, Rivers and Gersup discussed whether they should wake him.

"Let him sleep, if he wants to," put in Magee, who had heard the talk; "sure he can't be gettin' into any harm while he's asleep, an' if it's rest he wants, I think it's better not to wake him."