CHAPTER VII.
THE MYNOOK CREEK DIGGINGS.
The next day, the 21st of August, we loaded up the Skookum again, and dropped away from Circle City with the current. The customs officers were short of rice, but they sent a pair of old slippers flying after us as we moved away; and several of the ladies who had been at the dance stood on the bank and waved us adieu. Soon the river broadened out, with many channels flowing amid a maze of low wooded islands. This was the beginning of the great Yukon Flats, which stretch in dreary monotony for so many miles below Circle City.
The wind blew strong, with gusts of rain, in the morning, and increased to a gale which lasted nearly all day. The proper channel was difficult to determine, and we were often sucked into some little channel or slough (pronounced "sloo"), only to find our way back again, after a long circuit, to the larger body of water, at a place near where we had left it. No hills were visible in any direction—nothing but the waste of waters, the sandspits, and the level wooded islands and banks. At night we reached Fort Yukon, a trading post, which is situated at the junction of the Porcupine with the Yukon; we had made the distance from Circle City, estimated at about eighty miles, in sixteen hours. So bewildering are the various channels here that one would hardly suspect that any stream entered the Yukon, and the current is so varied and sluggish that one might easily attempt to ascend the Porcupine, having the impression that he was still descending the Yukon—a delusion that would be dispelled after the first few miles.
Like other so-called "Forts" in the Alaskan country, Fort Yukon was simply a rough log building inhabited by one white man, who had a scanty stock of very poor provisions, such as flour and tea, to exchange for skins with the natives. Around the building the Indians had made their camp, as usual, a trading-post being always the nucleus of a dirty and foul-smelling congregation of natives. From one Indian we bought a whitefish, and on his presenting it to us whole, we motioned him to clean it; he did so, laying the entrails carefully on a board. He wished tea in exchange for it, and not being experienced in native trading, we gave him what we afterwards learned was ten or twelve times the usual price. We had the best English breakfast tea, and he was at first doubtful at this, having seen only the cheap black tea always sold to the natives; but he was vastly pleased at the quantity, and, laughing delightedly, proceeded to "treat" his friends on the occasion of his good fortune, by handing around the raw entrails of the fish, which they divided and ate without further ceremony.
Not liking to sleep within reach of the Indian dogs, who are very dangerous enemies to one's bacon, we dropped down the river half a mile below the post and made camp in a spruce grove—a beautiful spot, cool, and free from mosquitoes.
The next day we were still in the flats. There was a high wind blowing and the sky was spotted with curious clouds. Some were like cauliflowers in form; others were funnel-shaped; and still others were dark, with long black tentacles of rain. Whenever these tentacles passed over the river in a direction against the current, an ugly chop sea was the result, and our boat, stout dory though she was, shipped water in some of these places.
Floating down through the network of channels we suddenly ran hard upon a sand-bar, and it took a couple of hours' work to get us off, for as soon as we were lodged the sand which the Yukon waters carry began settling round the boat and banking it in, making it the hardest work imaginable to move it. While we were tugging and groaning in our efforts, a steamer—the Arctic—came down the river behind us, and being steered by experienced Indian pilots, struck the right channel only a short distance from us and floated past triumphantly. The deck was swarming with miners who were bound for St. Michael's, and they made many jocose remarks at our expense, offering to take word to our friends, and do other favors for us. We said nothing, though we fumed inwardly. Finally we succeeded in getting free, and floated off. Some time afterwards we saw behind us what appeared to be the smoke of another steamer; but when we stopped for lunch the craft caught up with us, and proved to be an ordinary open boat like our own, but with a Yukon stove made of sheet iron set up in it, whereon the solitary passenger cooked his dinner while he floated.
In the afternoon we caught sight of a bona fide steamer ahead of us, and as we came steadily closer, it seemed as if she must be stopping; soon we recognized the Arctic, and saw that the crew and all the passengers were laboring excitedly in many ways, trying to get the boat off the sand-bar on which she was stuck. We ran close by her, for there was water enough for our little boat, although the rapid deposit from the river had built up a bank to the surface of the water on one side of the steamer. We were sorry for these men, who were in a hurry to get to St. Michael's, and so on home; at the same time we could not resist the temptation to return to them their greetings of the morning, and offer to take letters to their friends. They did not seem to be so much amused at the joke as they had been in the morning—probably because they had heard it before.
We were several days floating through this monotonous part of the river. There were always the same banks of silt, from which portions, undercut by the current, were continually crashing into the stream; these were immediately taken up and hurried along by the current to form part of the vast deposit of mud which the Yukon has built up at its mouth, and which has filled up the Behring sea until it is shallow and dangerous. On the higher banks, which were forty feet or so above the river (it was then low water), spruce and other trees were growing, and as the soil which bore them was undercut, they too dropped into the river and started on their long journey to the sea. Along the vast tundra at the Yukon mouth, and the treeless shores of the Behring sea, the natives depend entirely upon these wandered trees for their fuel. The quantity brought down every year is enormous, for the stream is continually working its way sidewise, and cutting out fresh ground.
Everywhere we noticed the effects of the ice which comes grinding down the river in the spring. The trees had been girdled by the ice and were dying, the underbrush cut down, the earth plowed up, and occasionally there were piles of pebbles where a grounded cake had melted and deposited its burden.