In three weeks we had excavated into the bank ten feet and more, following the streak on bed rock, and found it always rich. We made a dump, or heap of wash dirt, at the entrance. Our piles were in it, we had good reason to feel sure; besides, we had, as we considered, equally rich ground ahead of us.
One thing we knew, that if we should be discovered we could each claim five hundred feet along the creek; indeed, we thought twice that, as discoverers, so that our claim on the Klondyke might be two thousand feet in length. Therefore we need not have been so much afraid of being found. I used to say so to Meade, who invariably replied that we were better as we were, and were bound to keep our secret as long as possible.
It was now the middle of August—we had attempted to continue a sort of diary, but we had quite lost count by this time of dates and days. For weeks there had been no darkness, there was only what the Shetlanders call "the dim," and which we could then perceive was becoming more pronounced. We ate and slept when we felt we must; the rest of the time we worked without ceasing—we took no relaxation whatever.
Our creek was now alive with salmon; we could, with a long-handled shovel, scoop one out whenever we liked. They were so closely packed that they crowded each other out. In places many had been forced on to the land, where they lay rotting by the hundred: crows and ravens, jays, magpies, and hawks were numerous, feeding on dead fish, and several times we noticed bears dragging the salmon out and gorging themselves with them—not one bear only, often we saw several at once catching and eating them, or lying, surfeited with food, on sunny banks asleep.
We could easily have killed all we wished of them, but we did not dream of doing so; we had stores in plenty, as much salmon as we chose—why should we bother about bear meat?
About this time Meade first complained of being out of sorts. He was a powerful man, and had, till lately, looked the picture of health, but now clearly a change had come over him. He was pale, always tired, and did not eat properly. Was it to be wondered at? Such work, such living, such worry with mosquitos would tell on any one.
I, too, felt that I was not the man I should be. Yet in spite of all, we told each other we must stick to it for another six weeks, then we could rest, which was foolishness. One night we both felt so bad that we could neither work nor eat; it had become serious. Then we settled to devote the next few days to making a sluice with the boards we had brought, hoping that change of work, which, it is said, is as good as play, would prove so in our case: it did.
We constructed three-sided boxes, the depth and width of our boards, and about six feet long, an inch or two wider at one end than the other; across the inside, along the bottom, we put bars or riffles a foot apart. We made six of these boxes, then went up stream, where a little obstruction, a sort of dam, raised the water; there we cut a groove, or ditch, and led a powerful stream into the boxes, which we had set up by our dump, one behind the other on a slant, the narrow ends fitting into the wider, so as to form a trough some thirty feet long. This was our sluice.
Into the upper boxes we threw the wash dirt, allowing the water to rush over it. One of us was continually throwing in the dirt, the other stirred it about and flung out the large stones and coarse gravel with a long-handled shovel.