"I should not like to be without glasses to-day," said the boy to Gersup, as they stood by the door of the tent.
"There would be fewer skeletons on the Alaskan hillsides," replied the other, "had it not been for the madness caused by the intense pain of snow-glare on the eyes."
"Is it so acute?"
"It is torture unendurable, because any light, no matter how faint, aggravates it, and it is not possible to live without light. Don't make any mistake, snow-blindness is an awful thing."
This gave Roger pause, for he saw at once how many fatal errors he had been saved by being connected with a party wherein all the details of travel had been so carefully arranged, and all sorts of contingencies, which would have been unforeseen to him, provided against. He had been inly contemptuous of the smoked glasses, when a pair had been given him at the beginning of the trip, but now he realized their immense importance, for by this time the May sun had begun to make itself felt with intense heat and the days grew long.
It seemed as though the snowstorm had been the last effort of winter, a sample to show what it could do if necessary, a comparison against the heat of the summer days to come. The rays of the sun soon honeycombed the snow and Roger realized how rotten it had become and saw that Rivers's thankfulness that they did not have to travel over it was well founded. Keenly alive to the interests of the expedition, and not having learned the patience of later life, he chafed a good deal under the delay and was continually asking the chief when they should start.
"Doughty," said the chief to him on one of these occasions, when the boy's restlessness was intense, "you can't expend energy until you have accumulated it. Now in worrying and fretting over not being able to start you are expending energy at a time when, as far as possible, you should be gathering your strength for the time when you will need it. And, what's more, every one reckons on losing a couple of weeks during the break-up; that is a part of the consumption of time on the trip."
But the rapid advance of spring added a new source of surprise to the lad. From the stillness and silence of the days when they first made camp at the head of the pass, the air became filled with the myriad voices of life, and the primal solitude became vibrant with tiny songsters. The golden sparrow was there with his piercing plaint, made musical by distance, and the trilling warble of Townsend's fox sparrow, and the varied strain of the hermit thrush, seemed quite homelike. Before the snow was gone the rosy finch was to be seen, his quick flight giving a gay spot of color to the landscape, and that the more utilitarian side might not be omitted, the snowy ptarmigan formed a welcome addition to the larder of the camp.
Quite a torrent was beginning to flow over the ice in the Jack River, and on the morning of May 16th, when Roger had gone out with Gersup the topographer, to map out with greater detail a little piece of country which had been passed by on a previous expedition, he saw that the center of the ice in the river was bulging up like a hog-backed bridge.
"What makes it bulge that way?" asked the boy.