The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 34

"But, Magee," said the chief, "sometimes a man gets into one of those sleeps and nothing will rouse him after."

"Of course, there's a risk, but if the boy's brain needs sleep so bad as all that, I should think the shock of waking him would be bad."

And so it was decided to let the lad sleep as long as he would. All through that second night he slept, though it was almost full daylight the whole night through, and all the next morning, till about three o'clock in the afternoon, when he stirred, looked around languidly, and fell to sleep again. He woke at five o'clock, and sat right up, his eye clear and the leaden weight upon his tongue loosened.

The men crowded round with questions, and Roger learned that they had reached the head of the pa.s.s, but he had retained no memory whatever of the last ten days of the trip. He buckled to and ate steadily for an hour and a half, to the huge joy of the cook, and then curled up for some more sleep, awakening the next morning bright and chipper as though he were in Washington before the trip had been begun.

On July 17th, therefore, the lad being quite himself again, three days after their arrival at Anaktuvuk Pa.s.s, at the head of the John River, Rivers gave the word for the portage to be begun. It was a twelve-mile portage and hard going, for though, unlike all the previous carries, there was no timber to intercept, and through which a trail must be cut, the entire work was over the tundra.

The moss-plains of the Arctic slopes, brilliant with wild flowers and fragrant with heather and gorse, which surround the Polar Seas the world around, come almost first in the list of objectionable travel. Even in the blazing heat of a summer where the sun shines for twenty-two hours out of twenty-four and the heat is nothing short of tropical, two feet below the surface the spade would touch perpetual frost, a factor of no importance to the branching-rooted tundra moss. Centuries of centuries of growth and decay have created a network of roots, rotten, spongy, and wet, so that walking over it resembles treading on soaked sponges two feet deep.

But that nothing may remain to be thought of in the viciousness of that footing, every six or eight inches apart, tufts of gra.s.s and moss, known as "n.i.g.g.e.rheads," hard and round, stick up a foot high. If the unwary traveler decides to walk on these as on the stones of a ford crossing, he finds them slippery and insecure, they turn under his foot, and give him the experience of a twisted ankle; while, on the other hand, if he should endeavor to walk between them he runs a fair chance of tripping upon those hummocks and falling headlong in the oozy moss. Indeed, he can hardly walk at all.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THUS FAR WITH THE BOATS, AND NO FARTHER!

The beginning of a portage at the summit of a divide; often a road must be cut through the brush.

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

The portage took two days, Rivers making a forced march, and the cook was left at the new camp with the first day's supplies, the carry being to Cache Lake, a large slough which forms the headwaters of the Anaktuvuk River. Early the next morning the rest of the party returned to the old camp, where they had left the canoes, to bring them over to the Lake for their trip down to the Arctic Ocean.

Towards evening, as they were returning, and had just ascended a little knoll, Roger hurried up to the chief of the party.

"Mr. Rivers," he said, "there seems to be a lot of smoke over there, in the direction of the camp."

The geologist looked up sharply and then turned.

"Quick, boys," he said, "take the boats to that pond"--the tundra was dotted with small stretches of water--"and anchor them in the middle.

The tundra is on fire, and if it's going to spread the boats must be saved. Harry, you go ahead to the camp." He dropped his pack and broke into a run.

Bulson, grasping the situation, stuck one of the punting poles deep into the shallow bottom and made fast the canoes to it in the middle of the slough. Then, with the rest of the men he followed the Indian and the chief for the camp. Roger's light weight and his training on the track had made him a good runner, but he did not try to outdistance the other men, and of course Harry was out of sight.

Plunging over and through the tundra, however, with veins swollen almost to bursting with the heavy going, the men kept on, no one speaking, though once, as a sheet of flame shot up, Gersup pointed with his finger. It was a welcome sight, on topping a small rise, to see in the distance that two of the three tents were still standing, though ringed round with a smoldering fire; in the foreground the blackened figures of the cook and the Indian, working for their lives, and the chief just pounding into the camp. With never a pause, save when some fellow tripped and fell, the men tore over the rough ground until they reached the flames. Under the vigorous work of all hands an impression began to be made, and two hours later the fire was under control.

"How did it happen, George?" the chief asked.

Twice the cook tried to answer, but the pungent smoke and the exertion had made him almost speechless, and he could only whisper hoa.r.s.ely.

Though the fire was officially out, every few minutes a puff of smoke would reveal a smoldering root of moss, and all night through two men watched, two hours apiece, to see that it did not break out anew. And these men never had five minutes' quietude, for the fire, which had been burning unseen in the network of roots for hours, would suddenly send up a flame, and the whole line of that smoldering glow would have to be beaten and drenched out.

As the cook described it later, the fire did not appear for over an hour after the party had left, and when the smoke first arose, he did not pay much attention to it, merely thinking that it was one of the circles of "smudges" which had been lighted the night before all round the camp to keep the mosquitoes away, and which had not been properly put out. He looked up a couple of times, but not for another hour did he notice any change, and then he saw a faint vapor rising near the first.

Thinking by this time that it might be as well to go and keep the fire from spreading, he strolled over to the column of smoke. But he had not come within thirty feet of the place when he found that he was walking over a glowing furnace, the tundra being red hot between the green moss above, which would not burn, and the wet roots below. Each step he took, of course, put out the fire under his footstep by pressing the glowing moss into the substratum of water, but it created a current of air to the moss around that footstep, and looking behind he saw smoke arising from every impress of his foot.

At this point he became alarmed, and instead of making a circle around the camp of moss thoroughly beaten down and soaked, he started to try to beat out the existing fire, an almost hopeless task, for the reason that the flames crept under the surface unseen and almost unfelt, only betraying their presence by a faint film of vapor. By the time that he realized that he should have devoted his energy to making a fireguard around the camp, the tundra was burning too close to the tents for him to be able to dare stop checking it long enough to start protective remedies.

In spite of all his labor, however, the fire reached one of the smaller tents, where some of the maps were kept, and the dry canvas and mosquito netting, catching alight suddenly, went up in the air as though it had been a fire balloon, and blazing fragments of the tent, falling on the tundra about, gave source to a dozen more fires. George rushed over the red-hot tundra and carried the maps, which, though scorched, were not badly injured, to the main tent, and then devoted himself to encircling that tent thoroughly with beaten and wetted moss, watching to see that no spark crossed and that no treacherous fire crept along between the roots of the moss.

Matters were at this point when the Indian appeared, and with one man watching the tents and the other beating out the fire progress was made, the danger being entirely averted when the whole party arrived. The peril over, the other members of the party went back for the canoes, bringing them into the camp late in the evening.

The next morning all boarded the canoes to cross Cache Lake, which, connected with a score of other sloughs, led to the initial streams of the Anaktuvuk, the main tributary of the Colville, which latter river flows into the Arctic Ocean. They had paddled perhaps two miles when the Indian gave a guttural grunt and pointed to the sh.o.r.e that they had left. There, rising high in the clear air, was a column of faint blue smoke.

"They say you can't put out a tundra fire," said Rivers, "and I begin to believe it."

"Then how long do you suppose that will burn?" asked Roger.

"Until the winter puts about a foot of snow over it, I suppose," the geologist answered, "and it'll hate to quit even then."

CHAPTER XIX

RACING A POLAR WINTER

The comparatively flat plateau country, dotted with sloughs, on which the party had embarked after leaving the camp on the tundra, where they had been forced to fight with fire to save their possessions, lasted but a short while on the journey. Before evening the edge of the table-land was neared and the scattering rivulets drained into a narrow and swift stream, which Roger learned was the Anaktuvuk. Rivers, though conservative in manner as always, was obviously delighted at the thought that all the hard up-stream labor was at an end, with the expedition well ahead of its time, and many important details, topographical and geological, discovered.

It was a matter of absolute ease to float down the smoothly flowing Anaktuvuk, and for the first two days the only disadvantage to life were the clouds of mosquitoes. But the third day these pests disappeared in time to allow the voyagers to pay due attention to a troubled piece of water, as the stream shot down the northern slope of the Arctic Rockies through gorges and canyons of no little height.

The pitch of the stream Roger saw to be very great, but his skill as a canoeist was not heavily drawn upon, since the bed of the stream was little impeded, save for a few boulders at scattered intervals. But despite the smoothness of the stream, the banks overhung the river so far as to cause a most unpleasant sensation of fear. It seemed to the boy every minute as though the pendent ma.s.ses of earth and rock would fall and overwhelm them, and the boy could tell, from the anxious glances cast overhead by Rivers, that the same thought was disturbing the chief of the party.

About two o'clock in the afternoon of the third day they ran through a long gorge of this undercut character, and one, moreover, from which little trickling muddy streamlets showed that the frozen ground was thawing under the hot August sun. Roger, as usual, was in the leading boat with Rivers and Bulson, the Indian being in the stern. Suddenly the boy heard a warning cry from the other boat, and looking overhead, saw a ma.s.s of snow and earth detach itself from the top of the cliff four hundred feet above them and thunder down directly for the boat.

Simultaneously the boy felt Harry reach forward for a long stroke and, turning, saw Rivers dive from the boat. Bulson, who was also paddling, put his superb muscle into his stroke, and though Roger felt like following his chief's policy and taking to the water, he stuck to his post and made his paddle bite hard on the water. The canoe sprang ahead like a cannon ball, but a second later, with a dull roar the landslide struck, just the edge of it catching the boat. Roger was conscious of a grinding crash, and then a blank.

When he came to his senses a few minutes later he found himself stretched upon the bank and Rivers bending over him. He lay still for a moment and then became deathly sick, noting the looks of concern on the faces of the party. In a few moments he felt better and tried to sit up, but Bulson placed his large hand on the boy's shoulder and bade him be still.

"Where's Harry?" was Roger's first question, his last impression before he went under with the ruins of the canoe having been that of seeing a piece of rock falling straight for his comrade's head.

"All right," answered the Indian composedly; "jump heap quick, though."

"You certainly did, Harry," said another of the members of the party. "I could have sworn that the rock hit you."

"No hit at all," was the quiet reply.

"And Bulson?"

"Bulson liked it," broke in Magee; "sure the whole Rocky Mountains could fall on him, an' he'd like it for a regular exercise before breakfast."

"I guess I'm all right, too," said Roger, and seeing his anxiety to sit up, they let him rise. He patted himself all over and then laughed. "I suppose I'd feel it if anything was broken," he said, "so it must be O. K." He got on his feet.

"Did you get out of it all right, Mr. Rivers?" went on the boy, turning to his chief. "I'm not sure, but I think I saw you dive."

"Yes," answered the geologist, "and it's lucky I did, for one of the rocks struck the very spot where I was sitting. I thought it was coming, and that's why I jumped. You're sure you feel all right?"

"Sure," said the boy. "I lost my wind, that's about all."