We generally worked till late, and began cooking our supper in the dusk—which was now beginning to come—over a camp-fire whose glare dazzled us so that when we tossed our flapjack into the air, preparatory to browning its raw upper side, we often lost sight of it in the gloom, and it sprawled upon the fire, or fell ignominiously over the edge of the frying-pan. Those were awful moments; no one dared to laugh at the cook then. We took turns at cooking, and patience was the watchword. The cook needed it and much more so, those on whom he practiced. One of our number produced a series of slapjacks once which rivalled my famous Chilkoot biscuit. They were leaden, flabby, wretched. We ate one apiece, and ate nothing else for a week, for, as the woodsmen say, it "stuck to our ribs" wonderfully.
"How much baking powder did you put in with the flour?" we asked the cook.
"How should I know?" he answered, indignantly. "What was right, of course."
"Did you measure it?" We persisted, for the slapjack was irritating us inside.
"Anybody," replied the cook, with crushing dignity, "who knows anything, knows how much baking powder to put in with flour without measuring it. I just used common sense." So we concluded that he had put in too much common sense and not enough baking powder.
Just above where the river divides into two nearly equal forks, the water grew so shallow that we could not drag our boat further, so we hauled it up and filled it with green boughs to prevent it from drying and cracking in the sun; then we built a "cache."
It may be best to explain the word "cache," so freely used in Alaska. The term came from the French Canadian voyageurs or trappers; it is pronounced "cash" and comes from the French cacher, to hide. So a cache is something hidden, and was applied by these woodsmen to hidden supplies and other articles of value, which could not be carried about, being secreted until the owners should come that way again. In Alaska, when anything was thus left, a high platform of poles was built, supported by the trunks of slender trees, and the goods were left on this platform, covered in some way against the ravages of wild animals. To this structure the name "cache" came to be applied; and later was extended to the storehouses wherein the natives kept their winter supplies of fish and smoked meat, for these houses have a somewhat similar structure, being built on top of upright poles like the old Swiss lake-dwellings.
A "Cache."