CHAPTER XXV
THE HERD OF KADIAKS
Jack Darrow and Mark Sampson had never experienced so arduous a trip by dog sled as this. The party was really running a race with starvation. The terrible frosts of each long night on this island in the air had killed every species of vegetation the country wide, save the very hardiest trees and shrubs. The country, which two weeks before had been verdant as only a northern country can be verdant in late summer, was now as black as though a fire had swept over it.
Everywhere, too, lay the volcanic ashes that had fallen ere the new planet had been shot from the earth by the volcanic eruption. It was indeed a devastated country through which the Alaskan dogs drew them.
They dared not drive the dogs more than twelve hours out of the long night; but when the word was given to "mush," and the train started, the party kept up a good speed for those dozen hours.
Andy Sudds and Phineas Roebach took the lead in this journey. They understood better how to handle the dogs and how to choose the trail. But, indeed, the trail was pretty well marked for them by the white traders who had gone before. Their camping sites were marked by a plenitude of discarded and empty food tins.
The party ahead, in whose pursuit the boys and their friends were, undoubtedly traveled just as fast as Jack and Mark. And they had a week's start, according to the Indian who had not been allowed to return to his fellows until the whites were well along the trail to the Anakturuk River.
The valley of the river, when they reached it, was a desert. There was little wonder that most of the game had fled. All herb-eating animals would have died for want of forage.
"I am not sure," the professor said, gravely, during one of their campfire talks, "that physical life of any kind can long exist in this small planet. The vegetation is being rapidly destroyed. Soon the ground will become like rock. The carnivorous beasts will live for a while on the more timid creatures, then they will fight among themselves until the last beast is destroyed.
"There were no great lakes in this Alaskan region when our present planet was a part of the earth. We do not know how full the streams may be of fish. There are few birds to be seen, that is sure. I fear that before many years this will be either a dead and frozen island floating in space, or it will be absorbed by some other body of the universe."
"You said, Professor," Jack observed, "that its ultimate end would either be to fall into the sun, or collide with the earth."
"And that is my belief yet; but I have no means of knowing surely."
"I hope she bumps the world again!" cried Jack. "Maybe we can get off then."
"It will do a lot of damage when it falls," said Andy Sudds, reflectively. "Some folks up there in the earth will get hurt."
"Perhaps not," the professor said, hastily.
"How can it be otherwise?" Mark demanded. "This fragment of the world must be enormously heavy. Cities—counties—whole states will be buried if we should fall into the earth."
"Not if we came down into one of the big oceans," said Professor Henderson. "We would probably sink some vessels, and might overwhelm islands; but if this island in the air is as big as Australia it could easily fall into the Pacific and do no particular harm to any present existing body of land—save through the great tidal waves that would result from such a fall."
"It is an awful thing to think of," cried Mark. "I don't see, no matter how this awful affair ends, but that we are bound to be overwhelmed."
"We do not know that," declared the professor, with his wonted cheerfulness. "Never say die. Our safety is in the hands of Providence. We have not got to worry about that."
"Isn't he a wonder?" whispered Jack to his chum. "We ought to take pattern by him. Our grumbling and anxiety is a shame."
Yet it was very difficult to remain cheerful under the circumstances as they then were. Their provisions, even for the dogs, were at a low ebb. Not a shot at edible bird or beast had they obtained since leaving Aleukan. And the torrid sun by day and the frost by night were most trying.
"However," said Professor Henderson, "I have kept a careful account of the fluctuations of temperature since the catastrophe, and I find that the mercury does not descend into the bulb so far now as it did at first. We are circling the earth, as the earth circles the sun. At present we are turning more toward the sun. It is coming summer. The sun will more and more heat this torn-away world. I do not believe that vegetation will start, and I look for nothing but frost during the hours of the sun's absence. But the cold night is not so intense as it was at first."
"It's quite cold enough, just the same," Phineas Roebach grunted. "It was summer a few days ago—the best summer this part of Alaska ever has. And to jump right into cold weather—midwinter, as ye might say—is enough to kill us all."
The oil man simply ignored the professor's scientific explanations of their situation and the changes in their environment. He absolutely would not believe that they were floating in the air above the earth's surface.
The trail down the valley of the Anakturuk was fairly smooth and well defined; when they struck the Coleville—a much wider stream—the shore was very rugged, and the dogs could scarcely drag the sleds over some stretches of the route.
The traders who had gone before them were certainly having a hard time. Our friends traveled very slowly for two days, walking most of the time. Then they found that the veil of ice that had formed on the wide stream since the region had become a torn-away world, would bear both men and dogs; the sun merely made it spongy for a few hours each day, but did not destroy the ice, which was now three or four inches thick.
Each night when the sun set and the air cooled the water on the surface of this sheet of smooth ice congealed again, making a splendid course for skating—had they only possessed the skates. But the sleds slipped more easily over the ice and the dogs were saved for two or three days longer. The brutes were almost starved, however, and one of them going lame, when they were released at a certain stopping place, the others pitched upon their wounded comrade and like wolves tore the unfortunate dog to pieces before Roebach could beat them into submission.
Andy Sudds chopped through the ice and set lines for fish; but the catch was so small that the party could not spare more than the bones for the dogs. Starvation faced them. Mark was miserably despondent, and Wash was so lugubrious all the time that he seldom exploded in his usual pyrotechnical displays of big words. His grain supply for the Shanghai had completely run out, too, and the colored man divided his own poor rations with his pet.
"And the rooster's that lean he wouldn't be anything but skin and bone if we killed and cooked him," Jack wickedly proposed.
Wash looked upon his young friend in extreme horror.
"Eat Buttsy?" he finally gasped. "Why Massa Jack! I'd jest as lief eat a baby—dat I would!"
But the matter of eating was past the joking stage now. The dogs fell on the ice and could not get up again. It was a mercy to put them out of their misery, and this is what Phineas Roebach and Andy did—shooting each faithful creature through the head and leaving the carcasses for the wolves which had, all this time, followed the little party at a respectful distance.
"If wolf meat was fit to eat we'd certainly live on the fat of the land," quoth the oil man.
"I wouldn't mind meeting a bear—savage as that other fellow was," said Andy Sudds.
And before they were through with this adventure they saw all the bear meat—and that very much alive—that the party ever wished to behold.
First, however, came Mark's invention. They dragged the empty sleds—after the dogs were killed—for several miles and then went into camp beside the stream, while the sun rose and warmed them most uncomfortably.
Roebach suggested abandoning the sleds as they could carry the little stock of movables they now owned. But Andy was opposed to this as he feared the professor might break down, in which event they would have to drag him.
"We must keep one of the sleds, at least," the old hunter insisted.
"I have a scheme," quoth Mark, suddenly. "Why not use the sleds—both of them?"
"True enough—why not?" scoffed Jack. "Let's keep them to slide down hill on. Do you realize that the professor says we are still three hundred miles from Nigatuk and the mouth of the Coleville?"
"That is the reason I suggest traveling by sled instead of dragging them behind us," said Mark, unruffled. "I've got an idea."
Jack stopped then. When Mark said he had an idea his chum knew it was probably worth listening to, for Mark possessed an inventive mind.
"We will have to strap the robes and blankets on our shoulders if we abandon the sleds," Mark Sampson said, quietly. "Let us utilize them to better advantage and save the sleds in addition."
"How?" asked Phineas Roebach.
"Make sails of the robes and propel the sleds, riding on them, too," declared Mark. "Such wind as there is is pretty steadily at our backs. Why not?"
"Why not, indeed?" shouted Jack. "Hurrah for Mark!"
"A splendid thought, my boy," declared the professor.
Poles were cut for masts and Andy rigged a stout one on each sled, with cross-pieces, or spars, to hold the blankets spread as sails. Andy even rigged sweeps for rudders with which to steer these crude ice-boats. They got off under a fair wind as soon as the river was passable again, and ran fifty miles straight away without stopping. This was a great lift toward the end of their journey, and all plucked up courage. The Shanghai seemed to share the feeling of renewed hope, and began to crow again.
They were obliged to rest over the sunlit day, as before, for the ice became covered with a sheet of water an hour after sunrise, and they were afraid the sled runners would cut through and let them all down into the stream.
However, they saw very well that—barring some unforeseen accident—they would be able to reach the mouth of the river before the last of their scanty food supply ran out. All the way now they looked for signs of the traders from Aleukan, who had started for the coast ahead of them. These men, however, seemed to have left the rough path along the bank of the Coleville, and were either traveling on the ice ahead, or had struck off into the wilderness.
When they set sail for a second time the heavens, for the first time since the final cataclysm that had shot them off into space, were beginning to be overcast.
"There is so great an evaporation while the sun is shining that I am surprised that we have not had snow before," the professor observed. "These mists rising from the earth and the bodies of water would become heavy nightly rains in any other climate. Here they will result, now that the atmosphere has become saturated with moisture, in heavy hail storms and much snow. It is nothing more than I have looked forward to."
The remainder of the party were not so much interested in the natural phenomena as he, however; they looked forward mainly to reaching some safe refuge—some place where there were supplies and the fellowship of other human beings.
The wind increased, but its keenness the party did not mind. They were only glad that it remained favorable to their line of travel. They swept down the frozen river at a speed not slower than ten miles an hour.
The wolves had followed them on the ice, or along the edge of the river, up to this time. They saw, indeed, a pack of the ugly creatures on a wooded point ahead of them, at a distance of a couple of miles. But before the sleds reached this point (which served to hide the icy track beyond) the wolves suddenly disappeared.
"Something has scared them fellers," Andy declared.
"The traders?" suggested Jack, who traveled with the old hunter and
Mark on one sled, while Roebach, Wash and Professor Henderson sailed
on the other. "Not hardly. Men wouldn't scare them critters so.
Something bigger and uglier than the wolves themselves, I reckon."
To prove how true Andy's guess was, Mark shouted the next moment:
"A bear—two of them! Three! See that crowd of bears, will you? No wonder the wolves skedaddled."
Several of the huge bears, like the one they had had the fight with on the glacier, appeared out of the woods and waddled on to the ice. They had evidently sighted the sailing party, and they roared savagely and tried to head off the sleds. That they were wild with hunger, there could be no doubt.
"I have heard the Indians say that, in bad seasons, the bears travel in packs like wolves, and will attack villages and tear the huts to pieces to get at the inmates," Roebach said, from the other sledge.
"How fortunate that we are not afoot, then," Professor Henderson remarked.
The next moment the two sleds shot around the wooded point and the river below lay before them. The bears were galloping after the party and shut off all way of escape to the rear.
"Oh, gollyation! Looker dat mess ob b'ars!" shrieked Washington White.
And there was a good reason for the black man's terror. Strung out across the frozen river, as though they had been waiting for the coming of the exploring party, was a great herd of Kodiak bears—monsters of such horrid mien that more than Washington were terror-stricken by their appearance.
There were more than half a hundred of the savage creatures, little and big, and they met the appearance of the two sailing sledges with a salvo of bloodthirsty growls.