CHAPTER XIII
THE TERROR OF THE NORTH
There is no stillness like the stillness of the Arctic. In the frozen wastes of the North the human voice is a blessed and desirable thing. Imagine an ice-locked land, stretching on either hand for thousands of miles, with never a bird’s song to break the silence, where nothing lives but a few starved wolves, and consumptive Indians existing for the most part in fœtid igloos, venturing out but rarely in search of edible roots or an occasional indigenous animal. Ninety per cent. of the human life of Alaska was settled along the Yukon valley, in close proximity to the vast artery that connected with the outer world.
North of that the boundless wilderness stretches away over plain and mountain to the very pole. Traveling is slow and tortuous, for 187 beaten trails are few, and the wanderer must “pack” his own trail where the snow is deep—walking in front of the sled and treading a negotiable sled-track by means of snow-shoes.
The body craves for warmth, and warmth can only be obtained by excessive consumption of food. The normal ration of a healthy being is trebled to counteract the enormous evaporation of bodily heat. Fat is the staff of life. The Esquimo, settled along the coast by the Bering Sea, takes his meal of ten pounds of blubber and feels a better man. By imitative methods the white man survives the awful cold and the pitiless conditions.
To Angela it seemed that every single discomfort to which human life was subject was epitomized in these appalling wastes. The ice was yet new and river trails were unsafe. Day after day they plowed through the deep snow, ever Northward, with the wind in their teeth, and the sun but a mere spectre mounting the horizon, with an effort, to sink again but a few hours later. The dogs frightened her. They were fierce, untamed brutes who snarled at each other and fought on occasion, until the stinging lash 188 descended on their thick coats to remind them of the terrible master behind the sled. She came to see how necessary was the whip. They responded to that and that alone. Some of them were half wolf—creatures that were the result of inter-breeding on the part of Athabaskan Indians. Like their wolf parent their energy was immense. They ate but twice daily—enormous meals of pulped fish and nondescript material which filled two of the sacks on the sled.
They camped on bleak mountains and along frozen creeks. In the latter case Jim made double use of the camp-fire. Before retiring into the snow-banked tent for the night the fire was heaped high with branches. In the morning the thawed ground beneath it was excavated and washed with snow-water, lest it harbor the much desired red mineral.
Muck! Always muck! It seemed to her amazing that he should continue this heartbreaking quest. Much as she had prized the things that money could buy, she began to hate it now. As they penetrated farther North, so the conditions grew more appalling. No longer the sun mounted the horizon. Night and day 189 were much the same thing—a mysterious luminiferousness, merging into the fantastic lights of the great Aurora Borealis, that occasionally leapt across the Northern sky in spectrumatic beauty, to flicker and die, and rise again.
Day after day the journey went on. The ice being now strong, they skimmed across rivers and creeks, raising the snow in clouds and “switchbacking” over hummocks in a fashion that under other conditions might have been exhilarating. Then came the monotonous digging and washing, with its inevitable unsuccessful issue.