<SPAN name="chap0108"></SPAN>
<h3> CHAPTER VIII </h3>
<p>No time was lost. Hines and Finn, with the dogs, already on short
rations, were two days in pulling down. At noon of the third day
Elijah arrived, reporting no moose sign. That night Daylight came in
with a similar report. As fast as they arrived, the men had started
careful panning of the snow all around the cache. It was a large task,
for they found stray beans fully a hundred yards from the cache. One
more day all the men toiled. The result was pitiful, and the four
showed their caliber in the division of the few pounds of food that had
been recovered. Little as it was, the lion's share was left with
Daylight and Elijah. The men who pulled on with the dogs, one up the
Stewart and one down, would come more quickly to grub. The two who
remained would have to last out till the others returned. Furthermore,
while the dogs, on several ounces each of beans a day, would travel
slowly, nevertheless, the men who travelled with them, on a pinch,
would have the dogs themselves to eat. But the men who remained, when
the pinch came, would have no dogs. It was for this reason that
Daylight and Elijah took the more desperate chance. They could not do
less, nor did they care to do less. The days passed, and the winter
began merging imperceptibly into the Northland spring that comes like a
thunderbolt of suddenness. It was the spring of 1896 that was
preparing. Each day the sun rose farther east of south, remained
longer in the sky, and set farther to the west. March ended and April
began, and Daylight and Elijah, lean and hungry, wondered what had
become of their two comrades. Granting every delay, and throwing in
generous margins for good measure, the time was long since passed when
they should have returned. Without doubt they had met with disaster.
The party had considered the possibility of disaster for one man, and
that had been the principal reason for despatching the two in different
directions. But that disaster should have come to both of them was the
final blow.</p>
<p>In the meantime, hoping against hope, Daylight and Elija eked out a
meagre existence. The thaw had not yet begun, so they were able to
gather the snow about the ruined cache and melt it in pots and pails
and gold pans. Allowed to stand for a while, when poured off, a thin
deposit of slime was found on the bottoms of the vessels. This was the
flour, the infinitesimal trace of it scattered through thousands of
cubic yards of snow. Also, in this slime occurred at intervals a
water-soaked tea-leaf or coffee-ground, and there were in it fragments
of earth and litter. But the farther they worked away from the site of
the cache, the thinner became the trace of flour, the smaller the
deposit of slime.</p>
<p>Elijah was the older man, and he weakened first, so that he came to lie
up most of the time in his furs. An occasional tree-squirrel kept them
alive. The hunting fell upon Daylight, and it was hard work. With but
thirty rounds of ammunition, he dared not risk a miss; and, since his
rifle was a 45-90, he was compelled to shoot the small creatures
through the head. There were very few of them, and days went by
without seeing one. When he did see one, he took infinite precautions.
He would stalk it for hours. A score of times, with arms that shook
from weakness, he would draw a sight on the animal and refrain from
pulling the trigger. His inhibition was a thing of iron. He was the
master. Not til absolute certitude was his did he shoot. No matter how
sharp the pangs of hunger and desire for that palpitating morsel of
chattering life, he refused to take the slightest risk of a miss. He,
born gambler, was gambling in the bigger way. His life was the stake,
his cards were the cartridges, and he played as only a big gambler
could play, with infinite precaution, with infinite consideration.
Each shot meant a squirrel, and though days elapsed between shots, it
never changed his method of play.</p>
<p>Of the squirrels, nothing was lost. Even the skins were boiled to make
broth, the bones pounded into fragments that could be chewed and
swallowed. Daylight prospected through the snow, and found occasional
patches of mossberries. At the best, mossberries were composed
practically of seeds and water, with a tough rind of skin about them;
but the berries he found were of the preceding year, dry and
shrivelled, and the nourishment they contained verged on the minus
quality. Scarcely better was the bark of young saplings, stewed for an
hour and swallowed after prodigious chewing.</p>
<p>April drew toward its close, and spring smote the land. The days
stretched out their length. Under the heat of the sun, the snow began
to melt, while from down under the snow arose the trickling of tiny
streams. For twenty-four hours the Chinook wind blew, and in that
twenty-four hours the snow was diminished fully a foot in depth. In
the late afternoons the melting snow froze again, so that its surface
became ice capable of supporting a man's weight. Tiny white snow-birds
appeared from the south, lingered a day, and resumed their journey into
the north. Once, high in the air, looking for open water and ahead of
the season, a wedged squadron of wild geese honked northwards. And
down by the river bank a clump of dwarf willows burst into bud. These
young buds, stewed, seemed to posess an encouraging nutrition. Elijah
took heart of hope, though he was cast down again when Daylight failed
to find another clump of willows.</p>
<p>The sap was rising in the trees, and daily the trickle of unseen
streamlets became louder as the frozen land came back to life. But the
river held in its bonds of frost. Winter had been long months in
riveting them, and not in a day were they to be broken, not even by the
thunderbolt of spring. May came, and stray last-year's mosquitoes,
full-grown but harmless, crawled out of rock crevices and rotten logs.
Crickets began to chirp, and more geese and ducks flew overhead. And
still the river held. By May tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with a
great rending and snapping, tore loose from the banks and rose three
feet. But it did not go down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where the
Stewart flowed into it, must first break and move on. Until then the
ice of the Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasing
flood beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Two
thousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the ice
conditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yukon could rid
itself of the millions of tons of ice that cluttered its breast.</p>
<p>On the twelfth of May, carrying their sleeping-robes, a pail, an ax,
and the precious rifle, the two men started down the river on the ice.
Their plan was to gain to the cached poling-boat they had seen, so that
at the first open water they could launch it and drift with the stream
to Sixty Mile. In their weak condition, without food, the going was
slow and difficult. Elijah developed a habit of falling down and being
unable to rise. Daylight gave of his own strength to lift him to his
feet, whereupon the older man would stagger automatically on until he
stumbled and fell again.</p>
<p>On the day they should have reached the boat, Elijah collapsed utterly.
When Daylight raised him, he fell again. Daylight essayed to walk with
him, supporting him, but such was Daylight's own weakness that they
fell together.</p>
<p>Dragging Elijah to the bank, a rude camp was made, and Daylight started
out in search of squirrels. It was at this time that he likewise
developed the falling habit. In the evening he found his first
squirrel, but darkness came on without his getting a certain shot.
With primitive patience he waited till next day, and then, within the
hour, the squirrel was his.</p>
<p>The major portion he fed to Elijah, reserving for himself the tougher
parts and the bones. But such is the chemistry of life, that this
small creature, this trifle of meat that moved, by being eaten,
transmuted to the meat of the men the same power to move. No longer
did the squirrel run up spruce trees, leap from branch to branch, or
cling chattering to giddy perches. Instead, the same energy that had
done these things flowed into the wasted muscles and reeling wills of
the men, making them move—nay, moving them—till they tottered the
several intervening miles to the cached boat, underneath which they
fell together and lay motionless a long time.</p>
<p>Light as the task would have been for a strong man to lower the small
boat to the ground, it took Daylight hours. And many hours more, day
by day, he dragged himself around it, lying on his side to calk the
gaping seams with moss. Yet, when this was done, the river still held.
Its ice had risen many feet, but would not start down-stream. And one
more task waited, the launching of the boat when the river ran water to
receive it. Vainly Daylight staggered and stumbled and fell and crept
through the snow that was wet with thaw, or across it when the night's
frost still crusted it beyond the weight of a man, searching for one
more squirrel, striving to achieve one more transmutation of furry leap
and scolding chatter into the lifts and tugs of a man's body that would
hoist the boat over the rim of shore-ice and slide it down into the
stream.</p>
<p>Not till the twentieth of May did the river break. The down-stream
movement began at five in the morning, and already were the days so
long that Daylight sat up and watched the ice-run. Elijah was too far
gone to be interested in the spectacle. Though vaguely conscious, he
lay without movement while the ice tore by, great cakes of it caroming
against the bank, uprooting trees, and gouging out earth by hundreds of
tons.</p>
<p>All about them the land shook and reeled from the shock of these
tremendous collisions. At the end of an hour the run stopped.
Somewhere below it was blocked by a jam. Then the river began to rise,
lifting the ice on its breast till it was higher than the bank. From
behind ever more water bore down, and ever more millions of tons of ice
added their weight to the congestion. The pressures and stresses became
terrific. Huge cakes of ice were squeezed out till they popped into
the air like melon seeds squeezed from between the thumb and forefinger
of a child, while all along the banks a wall of ice was forced up.
When the jam broke, the noise of grinding and smashing redoubled. For
another hour the run continued. The river fell rapidly. But the wall
of ice on top the bank, and extending down into the falling water,
remained.</p>
<p>The tail of the ice-run passed, and for the first time in six months
Daylight saw open water. He knew that the ice had not yet passed out
from the upper reaches of the Stewart, that it lay in packs and jams in
those upper reaches, and that it might break loose and come down in a
second run any time; but the need was too desperate for him to linger.
Elijah was so far gone that he might pass at any moment. As for
himself, he was not sure that enough strength remained in his wasted
muscles to launch the boat. It was all a gamble. If he waited for the
second ice-run, Elijah would surely die, and most probably himself. If
he succeeded in launching the boat, if he kept ahead of the second
ice-run, if he did not get caught by some of the runs from the upper
Yukon; if luck favored in all these essential particulars, as well as
in a score of minor ones, they would reach Sixty Mile and be saved,
if—and again the if—he had strength enough to land the boat at Sixty
Mile and not go by.</p>
<p>He set to work. The wall of ice was five feet above the ground on
which the boat rested. First prospecting for the best launching-place,
he found where a huge cake of ice shelved upward from the river that
ran fifteen feet below to the top of the wall. This was a score of
feet away, and at the end of an hour he had managed to get the boat
that far. He was sick with nausea from his exertions, and at times it
seemed that blindness smote him, for he could not see, his eyes vexed
with spots and points of light that were as excruciating as
diamond-dust, his heart pounding up in his throat and suffocating him.
Elijah betrayed no interest, did not move nor open his eyes; and
Daylight fought out his battle alone. At last, falling on his knees
from the shock of exertion, he got the boat poised on a secure balance
on top the wall. Crawling on hands and knees, he placed in the boat
his rabbit-skin robe, the rifle, and the pail. He did not bother with
the ax. It meant an additional crawl of twenty feet and back, and if
the need for it should arise he well knew he would be past all need.</p>
<p>Elijah proved a bigger task than he had anticipated. A few inches at a
time, resting in between, he dragged him over the ground and up a
broken rubble of ice to the side of the boat. But into the boat he
could not get him. Elijah's limp body was far more difficult to lift
and handle than an equal weight of like dimensions but rigid. Daylight
failed to hoist him, for the body collapsed at the middle like a
part-empty sack of corn. Getting into the boat, Daylight tried vainly
to drag his comrade in after him. The best he could do was to get
Elijah's head and shoulders on top the gunwale. When he released his
hold, to heave from farther down the body, Elijah promptly gave at the
middle and came down on the ice.</p>
<p>In despair, Daylight changed his tactics. He struck the other in the
face.</p>
<p>"God Almighty, ain't you-all a man?" he cried. "There! damn you-all!
there!"</p>
<p>At each curse he struck him on the cheeks, the nose, the mouth,
striving, by the shock of the hurt, to bring back the sinking soul and
far-wandering will of the man. The eyes fluttered open.</p>
<p>"Now listen!" he shouted hoarsely. "When I get your head to the
gunwale, hang on! Hear me? Hang on! Bite into it with your teeth,
but HANG ON!"</p>
<p>The eyes fluttered down, but Daylight knew the message had been
received. Again he got the helpless man's head and shoulders on the
gunwale.</p>
<p>"Hang on, damn you! Bite in!" he shouted, as he shifted his grip lower
down.</p>
<p>One weak hand slipped off the gunwale, the fingers of the other hand
relaxed, but Elijah obeyed, and his teeth held on. When the lift came,
his face ground forward, and the splintery wood tore and crushed the
skin from nose, lips, and chin; and, face downward, he slipped on and
down to the bottom of the boat till his limp middle collapsed across
the gunwale and his legs hung down outside. But they were only his
legs, and Daylight shoved them in; after him. Breathing heavily, he
turned Elijah over on his back, and covered him with his robes.</p>
<p>The final task remained—the launching of the boat. This, of
necessity, was the severest of all, for he had been compelled to load
his comrade in aft of the balance. It meant a supreme effort at
lifting. Daylight steeled himself and began. Something must have
snapped, for, though he was unaware of it, the next he knew he was
lying doubled on his stomach across the sharp stern of the boat.
Evidently, and for the first time in his life, he had fainted.
Furthermore, it seemed to him that he was finished, that he had not one
more movement left in him, and that, strangest of all, he did not care.
Visions came to him, clear-cut and real, and concepts sharp as steel
cutting-edges. He, who all his days had looked on naked Life, had never
seen so much of Life's nakedness before. For the first time he
experienced a doubt of his own glorious personality. For the moment
Life faltered and forgot to lie. After all, he was a little
earth-maggot, just like all the other earth-maggots, like the squirrel
he had eaten, like the other men he had seen fail and die, like Joe
Hines and Henry Finn, who had already failed and were surely dead, like
Elijah lying there uncaring, with his skinned face, in the bottom of
the boat. Daylight's position was such that from where he lay he could
look up river to the bend, around which, sooner or later, the next
ice-run would come. And as he looked he seemed to see back through the
past to a time when neither white man nor Indian was in the land, and
ever he saw the same Stewart River, winter upon winter, breasted with
ice, and spring upon spring bursting that ice asunder and running free.
And he saw also into an illimitable future, when the last generations
of men were gone from off the face of Alaska, when he, too, would be
gone, and he saw, ever remaining, that river, freezing and fresheting,
and running on and on.</p>
<p>Life was a liar and a cheat. It fooled all creatures. It had fooled
him, Burning Daylight, one of its chiefest and most joyous exponents.
He was nothing—a mere bunch of flesh and nerves and sensitiveness that
crawled in the muck for gold, that dreamed and aspired and gambled, and
that passed and was gone. Only the dead things remained, the things
that were not flesh and nerves and sensitiveness, the sand and muck and
gravel, the stretching flats, the mountains, the river itself, freezing
and breaking, year by year, down all the years. When all was said and
done, it was a scurvy game. The dice were loaded. Those that died did
not win, and all died. Who won? Not even Life, the stool-pigeon, the
arch-capper for the game—Life, the ever flourishing graveyard, the
everlasting funeral procession.</p>
<p>He drifted back to the immediate present for a moment and noted that
the river still ran wide open, and that a moose-bird, perched on the
bow of the boat, was surveying him impudently. Then he drifted dreamily
back to his meditations.</p>
<p>There was no escaping the end of the game. He was doomed surely to be
out of it all. And what of it? He pondered that question again and
again.</p>
<p>Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort of
religion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and he
had not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death ended
all. He had always believed that, and been unafraid. And at this
moment, the boat fifteen feet above the water and immovable, himself
fainting with weakness and without a particle of strength left in him,
he still believed that death ended all, and he was still unafraid. His
views were too simply and solidly based to be overthrown by the first
squirm, or the last, of death-fearing life.</p>
<p>He had seen men and animals die, and into the field of his vision, by
scores, came such deaths. He saw them over again, just as he had seen
them at the time, and they did not shake him.</p>
<p>What of it? They were dead, and dead long since. They weren't
bothering about it. They weren't lying on their bellies across a boat
and waiting to die. Death was easy—easier than he had ever imagined;
and, now that it was near, the thought of it made him glad.</p>
<p>A new vision came to him. He saw the feverish city of his dream—the
gold metropolis of the North, perched above the Yukon on a high
earth-bank and far-spreading across the flat. He saw the river
steamers tied to the bank and lined against it three deep; he saw the
sawmills working and the long dog-teams, with double sleds behind,
freighting supplies to the diggings. And he saw, further, the
gambling-houses, banks, stock-exchanges, and all the gear and chips and
markers, the chances and opportunities, of a vastly bigger gambling
game than any he had ever seen. It was sure hell, he thought, with the
hunch a-working and that big strike coming, to be out of it all. Life
thrilled and stirred at the thought and once more began uttering his
ancient lies.</p>
<p>Daylight rolled over and off the boat, leaning against it as he sat on
the ice. He wanted to be in on that strike. And why shouldn't he?
Somewhere in all those wasted muscles of his was enough strength, if he
could gather it all at once, to up-end the boat and launch it. Quite
irrelevantly the idea suggested itself of buying a share in the
Klondike town site from Harper and Joe Ladue. They would surely sell a
third interest cheap. Then, if the strike came on the Stewart, he
would be well in on it with the Elam Harnish town site; if on the
Klondike, he would not be quite out of it.</p>
<p>In the meantime, he would gather strength. He stretched out on the ice
full length, face downward, and for half an hour he lay and rested.
Then he arose, shook the flashing blindness from his eyes, and took
hold of the boat. He knew his condition accurately. If the first
effort failed, the following efforts were doomed to fail. He must pull
all his rallied strength into the one effort, and so thoroughly must he
put all of it in that there would be none left for other attempts.</p>
<p>He lifted, and he lifted with the soul of him as well as with the body,
consuming himself, body and spirit, in the effort. The boat rose. He
thought he was going to faint, but he continued to lift. He felt the
boat give, as it started on its downward slide. With the last shred of
his strength he precipitated himself into it, landing in a sick heap on
Elijah's legs. He was beyond attempting to rise, and as he lay he
heard and felt the boat take the water. By watching the tree-tops he
knew it was whirling. A smashing shock and flying fragments of ice
told him that it had struck the bank. A dozen times it whirled and
struck, and then it floated easily and free.</p>
<p>Daylight came to, and decided he had been asleep. The sun denoted that
several hours had passed. It was early afternoon. He dragged himself
into the stern and sat up. The boat was in the middle of the stream.
The wooded banks, with their base-lines of flashing ice, were slipping
by. Near him floated a huge, uprooted pine. A freak of the current
brought the boat against it. Crawling forward, he fastened the painter
to a root.</p>
<p>The tree, deeper in the water, was travelling faster, and the painter
tautened as the boat took the tow. Then, with a last giddy look
around, wherein he saw the banks tilting and swaying and the sun
swinging in pendulum-sweep across the sky, Daylight wrapped himself in
his rabbit-skin robe, lay down in the bottom, and fell asleep.</p>
<p>When he awoke, it was dark night. He was lying on his back, and he
could see the stars shining. A subdued murmur of swollen waters could
be heard. A sharp jerk informed him that the boat, swerving slack into
the painter, had been straightened out by the swifter-moving pine tree.
A piece of stray drift-ice thumped against the boat and grated along
its side. Well, the following jam hadn't caught him yet, was his
thought, as he closed his eyes and slept again.</p>
<p>It was bright day when next he opened his eyes. The sun showed it to
be midday. A glance around at the far-away banks, and he knew that he
was on the mighty Yukon. Sixty Mile could not be far away. He was
abominably weak. His movements were slow, fumbling, and inaccurate,
accompanied by panting and head-swimming, as he dragged himself into a
sitting-up position in the stern, his rifle beside him. He looked a
long time at Elijah, but could not see whether he breathed or not, and
he was too immeasurably far away to make an investigation.</p>
<p>He fell to dreaming and meditating again, dreams and thoughts being
often broken by sketches of blankness, wherein he neither slept, nor
was unconscious, nor was aware of anything. It seemed to him more like
cogs slipping in his brain. And in this intermittent way he reviewed
the situation. He was still alive, and most likely would be saved, but
how came it that he was not lying dead across the boat on top the
ice-rim? Then he recollected the great final effort he had made. But
why had he made it? he asked himself. It had not been fear of death.
He had not been afraid, that was sure. Then he remembered the hunch
and the big strike he believed was coming, and he knew that the spur
had been his desire to sit in for a hand at that big game. And again
why? What if he made his million? He would die, just the same as
those that never won more than grub-stakes. Then again why? But the
blank stretches in his thinking process began to come more frequently,
and he surrendered to the delightful lassitude that was creeping over
him.</p>
<p>He roused with a start. Something had whispered in him that he must
awake. Abruptly he saw Sixty Mile, not a hundred feet away.</p>
<p>The current had brought him to the very door. But the same current was
now sweeping him past and on into the down-river wilderness. No one
was in sight. The place might have been deserted, save for the smoke
he saw rising from the kitchen chimney. He tried to call, but found he
had no voice left. An unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled and
wheezed in his throat. He fumbled for the rifle, got it to his
shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the discharge tore
through his frame, racking it with a thousand agonies. The rifle had
fallen across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulder
failed. He knew he must be quick, and felt that he was fainting, so he
pulled the trigger of the gun where it lay. This time it kicked off
and overboard. But just before darkness rushed over him, he saw the
kitchen door open, and a woman look out of the big log house that was
dancing a monstrous jig among the trees.</p>
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