CHAPTER XXV.
B
BUSTER CREEK, Cape Nome, Sept. 16, 1899.—A week ago Casey went to Anvil City, across country twelve miles, and brought a batch of mail, containing our first letters from home since our arrival here in answer to our own. I received six, which I have committed to memory, sitting alone in the cook tent. If people at home, the wide world over, would write faithfully to absent ones, there would be joy in many a wanderer's heart.
Here we are, working like beavers, thirteen of us, including me, the cook. It's the last struggle of a dying company. But it isn't dead yet. In fact there are many good signs of reviving, possibly to a more prosperous condition. We have done little so far on Buster Creek but hunt for pay dirt. Just now we are making wages. Took out $400 last week, including some very pretty nuggets. The claims are too spotted; that is, the gold runs in narrow streaks, and necessitates moving quantities of barren dirt to get at it. Our largest nugget so far is $4.13, with a good many $1 ones. Over on Anvil Creek they took out a twenty-seven ounce one last week. That is a better size. While we have done little but "prospect" on the claims here, we have gained a good idea of their value, and expect to work them next year. A cold snap struck us three days ago and threatens to put a stop to our mining for this season. The creek is bordered with ice, and icicles adorn the edges of the sluice-boxes. We shall remain as long as we can possibly work. It is snowing quite heavily to-day. I saw the last Siberian yellow wagtail on the 8th, also a gray-cheeked thrush. I saw a gyrfalcon and snowy owl flying along the canon yesterday. Scattering flocks of golden plover have been quite common the past few days on the hillsides feeding on blueberries. I shot one near the tent this morning, although the ground was white with snow. I can hear their clear notes every few minutes while I write. They are flying past along the creek or up the hills. I wish I could save some skins. But wishes do not count with a gold-hunter when gold is in sight. Yesterday immense flocks of little brown cranes passed south overhead.
I am pretty sure this is the same species we see and hear so much of during the migrations in southern California, and not so often the sand-hill crane.
This "cooking job," which has been thrust upon me by circumstances entirely outside my control, is something terrible. I will never, never get into another scrape like it. And yet "I am in the hands of my friends." No President of these United States ever accepted his office "by the will of the people" more surely than I now occupy my office as cook for the L. B. A. M. & T. Co. But for all that, I am elected by a sweeping vote. I repeat my previous oft-made declaration that I will never be caught running for this office again. In fact I never did run for it. It ran for me. An unquestionable illustration of the office seeking the man and not the man the office. I get up at five in the morning; nearly dark now at that early hour. How cold it is! And I never was eager to get up, under any circumstances. For a week nearly every night ice forms in the tent. I have an oil stove, without which I should never be able to prepare breakfast. Green willow brush is hard to burn in the little camp stove. I have breakfast ready at 6:30, dinner at 12, and supper at 6. It keeps me "hustling" to be prompt. The office is no "snap." I am given a man to chop wood when necessary, otherwise I must do everything alone. And the dish-washing three times a day! Let who will envy me. Up to the beginning of the cold snap I made light bread, six loaves per day. But since it has been freezing in the tent at night the sponge will not rise. And there's no way to keep it warm. Fuel too dear and scarce. The camp stove oven is about ten inches square, with bake pans to fit, two loaves to a pan, one pan at a time. Light bread went a good deal further than baking-powder biscuit. It takes nine slabs of the latter a day to satisfy us now. We are reduced to the bare necessities, no butter nor canned milk. For breakfast I give them corn-meal mush, bacon, bread, beans and coffee. For dinner bacon, beans, bread, pea soup, apple sauce and coffee. For supper either bacon gravy, made of flour and water, or stew, if we have ptarmigan or meat, beans, rice, apple sauce, bread, hard-tack and tea. Our reindeer was fine, but lasted only a few days. One unaccustomed to this fare of ours may think we are in luck for miners, and so we are, but one gets tired of the same menu for so long. And then the staleness of it, after being shipped and towed and packed and unpacked, and swapped, and crushed, and dampened, for nearly two years! Little freshness in it.
The boys are having no easy job at shoveling. Their feet are swollen and sore from standing in rubber boots in ice water, and their hands are cracked and chapped. These every-day monotonies are the real hardships of a miner's life. He can tramp across the country for a few weeks and know that the end of his journey is at hand, and besides be getting some satisfaction from the thought of "glory" when he shall relate his perils to gaping friends at home. But this "peg-away" daily toil, in heat and cold and sleet and rain, after what may come to light in the next shovelful, and possibly never show up at all—this is hardship. But through it all the boys who have stuck to their work are in good spirits, and this in face of the fact that the "clean-ups" do not always show up wages even.
I have plenty of time to think nowadays all by myself, for I do not necessarily keep all my thoughts upon the grub. I do a good deal of my work from sheer habit now, or mechanically. The boys are working on Claim No. 1, and these tents are on No. 4, so I am quite alone except at meal time. A regulation claim is one-fourth of a mile long lengthwise of a creek, and one-eighth wide.
The "Penelope" is at Port Clarence, where Fancher and Jett went prospecting. The boat will be at Anvil City about October 1st, according to programme, and we will sail for home as soon after that date as we can get away. Yes, home! I am heartily tired of this kind of living. I shall be willing to take a six months' rest before taking another trip, I am sure. I long to get back to my father's house and up in those cool, high chambers of mine, where I may once more feel "like a Christian and a gentleman."
The season is earlier than usual, and the weather much more disagreeable than at the same date last year on the Kowak. Every moment or two while I write I have to stop and stir the beans or apple sauce, or look at a batch of bread. The beans are boiling with rather a melodious gurgle, while the sizzling rice and the patter of sleet on the canvas overhead furnish a rather pleasing accompaniment. But it makes a person feel kind of lonesome-like. There! the old stove is smoking again! Whenever the wind shifts around the hill the draft is damaged, and the stinging, irritating green willow smoke fills the tent. My eyes smart and are very painful from this cause. I long for the voyage home across the water for the sake of my eyes. And now the snow is coming and it will but increase the mischief. I should hate to lose my good eyesight.