Jack Heaton, gold seeker

by A. Frederick Collins

The dogs were harnessed and they knew that now they were in for some real work but they were none the less anxious for the start. Then there emerged from McQuesten’s store two strange figures dressed in furs from head to foot. They were neither Eskimos nor Indians but a look at them full in the face revealed that they were no other than a couple of youthful gold seekers who had come out of the far east and answered to the names of Jack and Bill. Truly they looked of the North, Northern.

Finally just as the first dull streaks of daylight sifted through the thick air the cracks of their rawhide whips broke the monotony of weeks of waiting and the orders to “mush on, you huskies” from both Jack and Bill who were at the handle bars of their sleds started the teams down the main street of Circle at a brisk pace.

They crossed the Yukon River and took the No Name River that flows into it a little to the north of Circle and whose headwaters lay some forty miles to the east of it. By noon they calculated they had covered about fifteen miles and here they made their first stop, had a drink of hot tea from their thermos bottles and did justice to some other edibles that Sing Nook had knocked together for them, and they were not Alaska strawberries either.

After they and the dogs had rested half-an-hour, they broke out their sleds, which means loosening the runners, which freeze and stick fast, by moving the sled sidewise with the gee pole, and started up the river again. They didn’t make such good time now for the work was new and was telling on them even more than it was on the dogs. So by sundown they had made only ten miles more, but Bill said he thought that was doing mighty well under the circumstances and Jack thought so too. They had hoped, though, to make the head of the stream that night.

“Four days o’ this kind o’ goin’ will put us in the land o’ the Yeehats,” said Bill.

They pitched their tent on the bank of the river and built a rousing fire just outside of it. Then they fed the dogs a generous piece of fish each, which is the principal diet of the dogs in Alaska; this done they got their own suppers and, just to see how it would go, they warmed up some pemmican, got out the hardtack and made a big pot of coffee.

Here it was that Bill was introduced to that celebrated food which was the chief factor in the discovery of the North Pole, though of course Peary and his malamutes and the Eskimos had something to do with it too.

“Pemmican,” allowed Bill, making a face that would put shame to an ancestor on a totem-pole, “seems to be a concoction on the order o’ a brownstone house built up o’ schnitzel and artificial rubber. I suppose it is all right though when everything else is all wrong but when we get there,” and he pointed somewhere in a direction that might lead to the North Star, the one hundred and thirty-fourth parallel and New York, but meaning their winter quarters to be, “it will be venison steak for ours.”

The dogs, tired after their first day’s work, since they had been idle all summer, had disappeared, having dug out holes in the snow and gone to bed. The boys, though they were dead tired too, were in no mood for sleep, but in their fur clothes they were as warm as though ensconced in their own steam-heated homes, while the mellow glow of the candle light inside their tent gave it as cheery an aspect as a cluster of electric lights in a parlor.

So they sat around for an hour or so after supper discussing their successful start, their outfit, the dogs and—not to be forgotten for a single moment—the gold they were after. It was good to know that here, far from the civilized haunts of men, there were fourteen huskies, strong of leg and tough of feet, sleeping out there under the snow who could carry them to the farthermost ends of the frozen North if needs be. It gave them a great feeling of security.