[CHAPTER XXV]
SERGE DISCOVERS A CURIOUS CAVERN
At the point where our travellers had again struck the Yukon, nearly fifteen hundred miles from its mouth, it was still a mighty stream two miles wide. Above this they found it bounded on both sides by mountains that often approached to its very waters, where, in sheer precipices hundreds of feet high, they form gigantic palisades similar to those of the Hudson, which are known as the “Upper Ramparts.” On the lower river the sledge party had journeyed over a smooth surface, offering but few obstructions. Their course from Anvik had at first been due north, then northeast, then east, and was now due south, the source of the Yukon towards which they were travelling being some ten degrees south of its great arctic bend.
Owing to this they now found themselves confronted by the hardest kind of sledging over rough, hummocky ice that was often piled in chaotic ridges twenty and thirty feet high. As the river freezes first at its most northerly point, and this belt of solid ice is gradually extended south, or back towards its source, the floating cakes of its upper reaches, borne by the swift current, are piled on the ever-advancing barrier in confused masses that stretch across the river like windrows.
In the spring, when the ice breaks up and is hurled irresistibly down stream on the swollen current, the same effect is reproduced on a vastly increased scale. Then the upper river breaks first, and a sudden rise of water from some great tributary starts the ice over the still solid barrier below. The huge cakes slide, jam, push, and crash over the still unbroken ice sheet, until they are piled in a vast gleaming mass seventy or eighty feet in height, from a quarter of a mile to one mile in length, and extending from bank to bank.
This mighty gorge must give way at length, and when it does it goes with a roaring fury that is terrifying and grand beyond description. After grinding and tearing onward for several miles, or perhaps less than one, the furious impulse is again checked by another solid barrier, which must in turn be broken down and swept away, its added weight giving increased energy to the mighty force.
So the ice crashes its resistless way down the whole Yukon Valley to Bering Sea, two thousand miles distant, sweeping everything before it, mowing down vast areas of forest, submerging islands, tearing out banks, and leaving everywhere traces of its terrible progress in the shape of huge ice cakes, weighing many tons, stranded high above ordinary water-level.
Although Phil Ryder and his companions were not to witness this grand exhibition of one of nature’s mightiest forces, they were sadly inconvenienced and delayed by the uncomfortable fashion in which their frozen highway had been constructed some months earlier. If they could have left the river and followed along its banks they would have done so; but this was out of the question, not only on account of their rugged character, but because on their timbered portions the snow lay many feet in depth, while from the river it had been so blown by strong north winds that for long stretches the ice was barely covered. This enabled the sledge men to walk without snow-shoes, which was a great comfort to all three, but especially to Jalap Coombs, who had not yet learned to use the netted frames with “ease and fluency,” as Phil said.
To this light-hearted youth the sight of his sailor friend wrestling with the difficulties of inland navigation as practised in arctic regions afforded a never-failing source of mirth. A single glance at Jalap’s lank figure enveloped in furs, with his weather-beaten face peering from the recesses of a hair-fringed hood, was enough at any time to make Phil laugh. Jalap on snow-shoes that, in spite of all his efforts, would slide in every direction but the one desired, and Jalap gazing at a frosty world through a pair of wooden snow-goggles, were sights that even sober-sided Serge found humorous.
But funniest of all was to see Jalap drive a dog team. This he was now obliged to do, for, while they still had three sledges, they had been unable to procure any Indians at Forty Mile to take the places of Kurilla and Chitsah. So while Phil, who was now an expert in the art of dog-driving, and could handle a six-yard whip like a native, took turns with Serge in breaking the road, Jalap was always allowed to bring up the rear. His dogs had nothing to fear from the whip, except, indeed, when it tripped him up so that he fell on top of them, but they cringed and whined beneath the torrent of incomprehensible sea terms incessantly poured forth by the strange master, who talked to them as though they were so many lubberly sailors.
“Port your hellum! Hard a-port!” he would roar to the accompaniment of flying chunks of ice that he could throw with amazing certainty of aim. Then, “Steady! So! Start a sheet and give her a rap full. Now keep her so! Keep her so! D’ye hear? Let her fall off a fraction of a p’int and I’ll rake ye fore and aft. Now, then, bullies, pull all together. Yo-ho, heave! No sojering! Ah, you will, will ye, ye furry sea-cook! Then take that, and stow it in your bread-locker. Shake your hay-seed and climb—climb, I tell ye! Avast heaving!” And so on, hour after hour, while the dogs would jump and pull and tangle their “running-rigging,” as Jalap named the trace-thongs, and the two boys would shout with laughter.