Tuesday, the 31st.—In the morning the camp was enveloped in thin clouds. As the sun was quite invisible, we had no ideas of time; but just after breakfast, while we were still sitting round the fire, the rain having left off and the clouds dispersed a good deal, the men suddenly said ‘(K)hoots’ (the guttural being the same as in the Arabic Khamsin—something like the German ich), and looking up at once, I saw two bears leisurely crossing the stones on the Coal Glacier, about three hundred yards off, going diagonally across towards the point below us. Hurriedly telling the Indians to keep quiet, I sneaked down to the tent, got H.’s big telescope (how I longed for a rifle!) and had a splendid view of them.
The first was the much-talked-of ‘blue’ bear at last. The body was slate-colour, much lighter on the back, with a very well-marked white crescent on the shoulders, while the head was nearly, if not quite, black. He was decidedly smaller than the other, which was an undersized cinnamon. The blue one was also much neater-looking and smarter in his gait, the pair resembling a park-hack followed by a cart-horse. The brown one had, I think, seen the tent, for he kept stopping and staring in our direction, but the blue kept quietly on, and when he reached the point at about two hundred yards from the camp, he lay down in the long grass. The other came on after him, but, instead of lying down, wandered about in a restless manner. After about five minutes, the blue one got up, and, followed by the brown, came leisurely towards us along the slope. I heard the men whispering nervously together behind my back, and when the bears were about a hundred yards off they couldn’t stand it any longer, but gave vent to a most fiendish yell, which made me nearly drop the telescope, while the bears, puffing and snorting, rushed wildly up the hill and disappeared over the ridge. I went down to inspect their tracks at a place where they had crossed a small patch of snow at the edge of the glacier, and found them to be totally different. The blue had gone with his heel down the whole time, like the black bear, while the brown’s tracks only showed the print of the fore-part of the foot. From this and from the general appearance of the animal, I have but little doubt that these blue ones are a variety of the black bear. No doubt, as in the case of the black bear in other parts of America, they will breed with the brown ones, and hence puzzling variations are met with, such as a skin I afterwards saw at Yakutat, which had been obtained near Dry Bay, and was of a uniform yellowish grey.
Halleck is the only author on Alaska in whose works I have found any mention of this bear. He says (‘Our New Alaska,’ p. 166): ‘Up on the ridges back of Mount St. Elias, which constitute a favourite (sic) hunting-ground for goats, is found a bear similar to the roach-back or silver-tip of the Rockies, but of a beautiful bluish undercolour, with the tips of the long hairs silvery white. The traders call it the St. Elias silver bear.’ In another place (p. 160) he says: ‘Besides there is a small albino bear found on the coast, which is known as the coast bear. Being white and a good deal about the ice in winter, some have supposed it to be a variety of polar bear, but the zoologists dispute it.’ My own impression is that these bears are the same, the white variety not being an albino, but the blue bear with his winter coat on. I could only hear of two of these white bears having been killed—one at Chilcaht, the other on the Taku Glacier, near Juneau, and this latter was described as having been almost white. The blue skins are also very rare, as much as seventy-five dollars being given for a good one. They seem to rather prefer the company of their brown brethren, as Shorty a few days later saw three bears on the glacier, of which one was brown and two blue; and Anthony, the Sitka watchmaker, whom we first met at Yakutat, whither he had come prospecting up the coast, met four near Dry Bay, some brown and some blue, but I forget the exact proportion.
After lunch I set to work to prepare a sumptuous supper, as I expected the others back that evening. I made a pudding by boiling rice and dried peaches together, and even added some sugar, which had become a rare and precious commodity, so that I did not use it while the others were away. I then left the pot in the snow to cool, put a goose to stew on a slow fire, and wandered up a little way beyond camp to make a sketch of the glacier. About five o’clock the weather improved, the clouds gradually disappearing and the sun being pleasantly warm. The others did not return, and the pudding was so good that about half of it was eaten at supper, but I put the rest by for next day. After supper I went out on to the Tyndall Glacier and had a grand view of the mountain, though there were still some clouds about. I could see no sign of the others, but took a lot of bearings.
Wednesday, August the 1st.—It was so cold in the night that I woke up several times and got up pretty early. (Having the tent all to myself and without the ground-sheet no doubt contributed to this.) Making bread for breakfast exhausted the flour, so I started the men off to get some more from Camp H, and went down with them as far as the Daisy Glacier. On the way I had to pitch into Master Jimmy pretty severely; the crevasses at the junction of the Coal and Tyndall Glaciers gave us some little trouble from having kept too near to the latter, and one of these was spanned by an exceedingly frail snow-bridge. Merely glancing at it, I went some thirty yards lower down, and, looking back as I crossed, saw, to my horror, that, though Billy was following me all right, Jimmy, who had been a little behind, was crossing the rotten bridge, which he traversed in safety, but two or three strokes from my ice-axe sent it tinkling into the depths, and why it did not give way with him is a great mystery. Jimmy looked rather awestruck, and I pointed out to him with some vigour the necessity of following absolutely in my tracks.
The weather was again perfect, and on arriving at the Daisy Glacier I let them go on, while I turned on to the glacier, up which I went for nearly three miles, when my eyes began to ache a good deal, and, as some schrunds appeared which threatened to prove awkward for a solitary climber, I returned. In the lower part of the Daisy there are hardly any crevasses, and in consequence there are some very fine moulins, while the surface was there in many parts very swampy, if such an expression can be used, a thin crust of snow overlying the wet glacier. As I had expected, it had a small outflow on its south side, about half a mile from its junction with the Tyndall; and the stream from this, augmented by another from the latter glacier, runs into the little lake by Camp H, and so gets back to the glacier.
I made a slight sketch of Mount St. Elias from the terminal moraine, and got back to camp about one o’clock (estimated), visiting on the way the big blocks on the Coal Glacier, the biggest of which probably contained about six thousand cubic feet. I found that the others had been over for stores and the kerosene stove, and H. had left a note saying that I could go down and wait for them at G, and that they would be back in four days. Among other things they had carried off the small kettle with the remains of the rice-pudding, and so got their share after all. They left the skins of four young marmots to be stretched and dried. These afterwards vanished when we were camped at Yakutat, presumably the prey of some Indian dog. The men came back about two o’clock, and after lunch we also went hunting marmots, which they called tsahkh; but though we got pretty near one or two, and dug up a great deal of the hill-side, the only results were the expenditure of a few revolver-cartridges and the not uncommon one of smashing the stock of an ice-axe.