At this camp I saw the Chilkat boy packers wrestling in a very singular manner, different from any thing in that branch of athletics with which I am acquainted. The two wrestlers lie flat on their backs upon the ground or sand and against each other, but head to foot, or in opposite directions. Their inner legs, i.e., those touching their opponents, are raised high in the air, carried past each other, and then locked together at the knee. They then rise to a sitting posture, or as nearly as possible, and with their nearest arms locked into a firm hold at the elbows, the contest commences. It evidently requires no mean amount of strength to get on top of an equal adversary, and the game seems to demand considerable agility, although the efforts of the contestants, as they rolled around like two angle worms tied together, appeared more awkward than graceful.
POSITION OF THE FEET IN WALKING A LOG, AS PRACTICED BY THE CHILKAT INDIANS.
Northward from this camp (No. 4), lying between the Nourse and Dayay Rivers, was the southern terminal spur of a large glacier, whose upper end was lost in the cold drifting fog that clung to it, and which can be seen on page [77]. I called it the Saussure Glacier, after Professor Henri de Saussure, of Geneva, Switzerland. The travels in the Dayay Inlet and up the valley of the river had been reasonably pleasant, but on the 10th of June our course lay over the rough mountain spurs of the east side for ten or twelve miles, upon a trail fully equal to forty or fifty miles over a good road for a day's walking. Short as the march was in actual measurement, it consumed from 7:30 in the morning until 7:15 in the evening; nearly half the time, however, being occupied in resting from the extreme fatigue of the journey. In fact, in many places it was a terrible scramble up and down hill, over huge trunks and bristling limbs of fallen timber too far apart to leap from one to the other, while between was a boggy swamp that did not increase the pleasure of carrying a hundred pounds on one's back. Sometimes we would sink in almost to our knees, while every now and then this agony was supplemented by the recurrences of long high ridges of rough bowlders of trachyte with a splintery fracture. The latter felt like hot iron under the wet moccasins after walking on them and jumping from one to the other for awhile. Some of these great ridges of bowlders on the steep hillsides must have been of quite recent origin, and from the size of the big rocks, often ten or twelve feet in diameter, I infer that the force employed must have been enormous, and I could only account for it on the theory that ice had been an important agent in the result. So recent were some of the ridges that trees thirty and forty feet high were embedded in the débris, and where they were not cut off and crushed by the action of the rocks they were growing as if nothing had happened, although half the length of their trunks in some cases was below the tops of the ridges. I hardly thought that any of the trees could be over forty or fifty years old. Where these ridges of great bowlders were very wide one would be obliged to follow close behind some Indian packer acquainted with the trail, which might easily be lost before re-entering the brush.
That day I noticed that all my Indians, in crossing logs over a stream, always turned the toes of both feet in the same direction (to the right), although they kept the body square to the front, or nearly so, and each foot passed the other at every step, as in ordinary walking. The advantage to be gained was not obvious to the author; as the novice, in attempting it, feels much more unsafe than in walking over the log as usual. Nearing Camp 5, we passed over two or three hundred yards of snow from three to fifteen feet deep. This day's march of the 10th of June brought us to the head of the Dayay river at a place the Indians call the "stone-houses." These stone-houses, however, are only a loose mass of huge bowlders piled over each other, projecting high above the deep snow, and into the cave-like crevices the natives crawl for protection whenever the snow has buried all other tracts, or the cold wind from the glaciers is too severe to permit of sleep in the open. All around us was snow or the clear blue ice of the glacier fronts, while directly northward, and seemingly impassable, there loomed up for nearly four thousand feet the precipitous pass through the mountains, a blank mass of steep white, which we were to essay on the morrow.
CHASING A MOUNTAIN GOAT IN THE PERRIER PASS.