Indeed he was a BEAR.”
And then he raised his rifle and—Bruin wasn’t there. We jumped up on the ridge, clambered to the top and almost fell into his ursine majesty’s arms. He had ducked down on seeing the rifle but hadn’t budged from his position. It looked as if he had met hunters before. Hopkins blazed away, and I followed. The splendid beast gurgled and fell backward dead.
We had reached the foothills, crossed the uplands, made our caches of meat, stuffed the dogs and turned them loose—Goritz called it “burning our ships behind us”—and were creeping along the edge of the narrow deep chasm or canon which caught the waters from the cliffs, gathering them in an awful, tempestuous, writhing torrent, that became almost maniacal in its agony where hidden rocks stopped its course, or where it dropped into black abysses. We must cross that chasm, climb the cliffs, before we could begin the ascent of the mountains. The chasm was twenty or thirty feet wide, the cliffs rose above it, from our level, about one hundred feet, and below us they descended to the water trough, one hundred feet more. The problem was to reach the bottom of the chasm, bridge the raging brace, and then work up the cliffs. It looked like a fly’s job. And what disclosures the roofs of the cliffs and the mountains beyond had we could only guess. These difficulties had been anticipated, in one way; we had strong wire rope, a flexible cable made of copper wire and skin.
Crawling on hands and knees we were studying the sides of the chasm, and not infrequently Goritz would suspend himself, held by the rest of us, over the frightful gulf, to determine where we might safely enter this inferno, with a prospect of spanning the seething, spouting, vociferous river, and of scaling the black and jagged wall on the other side. Our search was unavailing. We had explored the bank for more than a mile. The delay was maddening. Suddenly the Professor, who had been silent, and had been studying the black and red walls opposite, with occasional long examinations eastward with the glass, exclaimed:
“We are making a mistake. Our course is up and to the back of the glacier. These cliffs are sedimentary; they lie on the eruptive crystallines of the mountains; the river runs west; the glacier has dammed its course eastward, where it should flow, following the dip of the slates and sandstones. It cuts the dip, and the glacier has crossed its path and filled up this singular crevice, which is a fault rift.”
He looked triumphant; Goritz seized the suggestion.
“That’s right,” he shouted, “up the glacier and then—we can use the dogs!”
We were soon back to the abandoned sledge; some of the dogs had followed us, the rest were sleeping off their debauch of raw bear’s meat. We loaded the sledge with meat, from one of our caches, leaving the other intact, and with awakened hope started at a lively pace over the snow covered uplands for the distant ice-river. The going was not good for the snow had drifted somewhat, and was soft and mushy, but the dogs were in excellent condition, and they really seemed to understand that they had escaped desertion.
KROCKER LAND RIM