"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 pass, 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 Pass, 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 grass and moss, known as "niggerheads," 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.
Photograph by U.S.G.S.
Thus far with the Boats, and no farther!