Burning Daylight

by Jack London

  CHAPTER VII

  This time the trail was easier. It was better packed, and they werenot carrying mail against time. The day's run was shorter, andlikewise the hours on trail. On his mail run Daylight had played outthree Indians; but his present partners knew that they must not beplayed out when they arrived at the Stewart bars, so they set theslower pace. And under this milder toil, where his companionsnevertheless grew weary, Daylight recuperated and rested up. At FortyMile they laid over two days for the sake of the dogs, and at SixtyMile Daylight's team was left with the trader. Unlike Daylight, afterthe terrible run from Selkirk to Circle City, they had been unable torecuperate on the back trail. So the four men pulled on from SixtyMile with a fresh team of dogs on Daylight's sled.

  The following night they camped in the cluster of islands at the mouthof the Stewart. Daylight talked town sites, and, though the otherslaughed at him, he staked the whole maze of high, wooded islands.

  "Just supposing the big strike does come on the Stewart," he argued."Mebbe you-all'll be in on it, and then again mebbe you-all won't. ButI sure will. You-all'd better reconsider and go in with me on it."

  But they were stubborn.

  "You're as bad as Harper and Joe Ladue," said Joe Hines. "They'realways at that game. You know that big flat jest below the Klondikeand under Moosehide Mountain? Well, the recorder at Forty Mile wastellin' me they staked that not a month ago--The Harper & Ladue TownSite. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

  Elijah and Finn joined him in his laughter; but Daylight was gravely inearnest.

  "There she is!" he cried. "The hunch is working! It's in the air, Itell you-all! What'd they-all stake the big flat for if they-alldidn't get the hunch? Wish I'd staked it."

  The regret in his voice was provocative of a second burst of laughter.

  "Laugh, you-all, laugh! That's what's the trouble with you-all.You-all think gold-hunting is the only way to make a stake. But let metell you-all that when the big strike sure does come, you-all'll do alittle surface-scratchin' and muck-raking, but danged little you-all'llhave to show for it. You-all laugh at quicksilver in the riffles andthink flour gold was manufactured by God Almighty for the expresspurpose of fooling suckers and chechaquos. Nothing but coarse gold foryou-all, that's your way, not getting half of it out of the ground andlosing into the tailings half of what you-all do get.

  "But the men that land big will be them that stake the town sites,organize the tradin' companies, start the banks--"

  Here the explosion of mirth drowned him out. Banks in Alaska! The ideaof it was excruciating.

  "Yep, and start the stock exchanges--"

  Again they were convulsed. Joe Hines rolled over on his sleeping-robe,holding his sides.

  "And after them will come the big mining sharks that buy whole creekswhere you-all have been scratching like a lot of picayune hens, andthey-all will go to hydraulicking in summer and steam-thawing inwinter--"

  Steam-thawing! That was the limit. Daylight was certainly exceedinghimself in his consummate fun-making. Steam-thawing--when evenwood-burning was an untried experiment, a dream in the air!

  "Laugh, dang you, laugh! Why your eyes ain't open yet. You-all are abunch of little mewing kittens. I tell you-all if that strike comes onKlondike, Harper and Ladue will be millionaires. And if it comes onStewart, you-all watch the Elam Harnish town site boom. In them days,when you-all come around makin' poor mouths..." He heaved a sigh ofresignation. "Well, I suppose I'll have to give you-all a grub-stakeor soup, or something or other."

  Daylight had vision. His scope had been rigidly limited, yet whateverhe saw, he saw big. His mind was orderly, his imagination practical,and he never dreamed idly. When he superimposed a feverish metropolison a waste of timbered, snow-covered flat, he predicated first thegold-strike that made the city possible, and next he had an eye forsteamboat landings, sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needsof a far-northern mining city. But this, in turn, was the mere settingfor something bigger, namely, the play of temperament. Opportunitiesswarmed in the streets and buildings and human and economic relationsof the city of his dream. It was a larger table for gambling. Thelimit was the sky, with the Southland on one side and the auroraborealis on the other. The play would be big, bigger than any Yukonerhad ever imagined, and he, Burning Daylight, would see that he got inon that play.

  In the meantime there was naught to show for it but the hunch. But itwas coming. As he would stake his last ounce on a good poker hand, sohe staked his life and effort on the hunch that the future held instore a big strike on the Upper River. So he and his three companions,with dogs, and sleds, and snowshoes, toiled up the frozen breast of theStewart, toiled on and on through the white wilderness where theunending stillness was never broken by the voices of men, the stroke ofan ax, or the distant crack of a rifle. They alone moved through thevast and frozen quiet, little mites of earth-men, crawling their scoreof miles a day, melting the ice that they might have water to drink,camping in the snow at night, their wolf-dogs curled in frost-rimed,hairy bunches, their eight snowshoes stuck on end in the snow besidethe sleds.

  No signs of other men did they see, though once they passed a rudepoling-boat, cached on a platform by the river bank. Whoever had cachedit had never come back for it; and they wondered and mushed on.Another time they chanced upon the site of an Indian village, but theIndians had disappeared; undoubtedly they were on the higher reaches ofthe Stewart in pursuit of the moose-herds. Two hundred miles up fromthe Yukon, they came upon what Elijah decided were the bars mentionedby Al Mayo. A permanent camp was made, their outfit of food cached ona high platform to keep it from the dogs, and they started work on thebars, cutting their way down to gravel through the rim of ice.

  It was a hard and simple life. Breakfast over, and they were at workby the first gray light; and when night descended, they did theircooking and camp-chores, smoked and yarned for a while, then rolled upin their sleeping-robes, and slept while the aurora borealis flamedoverhead and the stars leaped and danced in the great cold. Their farewas monotonous: sour-dough bread, bacon, beans, and an occasional dishof rice cooked along with a handful of prunes. Fresh meat they failedto obtain. There was an unwonted absence of animal life. At rareintervals they chanced upon the trail of a snowshoe rabbit or anermine; but in the main it seemed that all life had fled the land. Itwas a condition not unknown to them, for in all their experience, atone time or another, they had travelled one year through a regionteeming with game, where, a year or two or three years later, no gameat all would be found.

  Gold they found on the bars, but not in paying quantities. Elijah,while on a hunt for moose fifty miles away, had panned the surfacegravel of a large creek and found good colors. They harnessed theirdogs, and with light outfits sledded to the place. Here, and possiblyfor the first time in the history of the Yukon, wood-burning, insinking a shaft, was tried. It was Daylight's initiative. Afterclearing away the moss and grass, a fire of dry spruce was built. Sixhours of burning thawed eight inches of muck. Their picks drove fulldepth into it, and, when they had shoveled out, another fire wasstarted. They worked early and late, excited over the success of theexperiment. Six feet of frozen muck brought them to gravel, likewisefrozen. Here progress was slower. But they learned to handle theirfires better, and were soon able to thaw five and six inches at aburning. Flour gold was in this gravel, and after two feet it gaveaway again to muck. At seventeen feet they struck a thin streak ofgravel, and in it coarse gold, testpans running as high as six andeight dollars. Unfortunately, this streak of gravel was not more thanan inch thick. Beneath it was more muck, tangled with the trunks ofancient trees and containing fossil bones of forgotten monsters. Butgold they had found--coarse gold; and what more likely than that thebig deposit would be found on bed-rock? Down to bed-rock they wouldgo, if it were forty feet away. They divided into two shifts, workingday and night, on two shafts, and the smoke of their burning rosecontinually.

  It was at this time that the
y ran short of beans and that Elijah wasdespatched to the main camp to bring up more grub. Elijah was one ofthe hard-bitten old-time travelers himself. The round trip was ahundred miles, but he promised to be back on the third day, one daygoing light, two days returning heavy. Instead, he arrived on thenight of the second day. They had just gone to bed when they heard himcoming.

  "What in hell's the matter now?" Henry Finn demanded, as the empty sledcame into the circle of firelight and as he noted that Elijah's long,serious face was longer and even more serious.

  Joe Hines threw wood on the fire, and the three men, wrapped in theirrobes, huddled up close to the warmth. Elijah's whiskered face wasmatted with ice, as were his eyebrows, so that, what of his fur garb,he looked like a New England caricature of Father Christmas.

  "You recollect that big spruce that held up the corner of the cachenext to the river?" Elijah began.

  The disaster was quickly told. The big tree, with all the seeming ofhardihood, promising to stand for centuries to come, had suffered froma hidden decay. In some way its rooted grip on the earth had weakened.The added burden of the cache and the winter snow had been too much forit; the balance it had so long maintained with the forces of itsenvironment had been overthrown; it had toppled and crashed to theground, wrecking the cache and, in turn, overthrowing the balance withenvironment that the four men and eleven dogs had been maintaining.Their supply of grub was gone. The wolverines had got into the wreckedcache, and what they had not eaten they had destroyed.

  "They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food,"Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw openthe sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan toBeersheba. I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a quarter ofa mile away."

  Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was nothing less than acatastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandonedland, to lose their grub. They were not panic-stricken, but they werebusy looking the situation squarely in the face and considering. JoeHines was the first to speak.

  "We can pan the snow for the beans and rice... though there wa'n'tmore'n eight or ten pounds of rice left."

  "And somebody will have to take a team and pull for Sixty Mile,"Daylight said next.

  "I'll go," said Finn.

  They considered a while longer.

  "But how are we going to feed the other team and three men till he getsback?" Hines demanded.

  "Only one thing to it," was Elijah's contribution. "You'll have totake the other team, Joe, and pull up the Stewart till you find themIndians. Then you come back with a load of meat. You'll get here longbefore Henry can make it from Sixty Mile, and while you're gonethere'll only be Daylight and me to feed, and we'll feed good andsmall."

  "And in the morning we-all'll pull for the cache and pan snow to findwhat grub we've got." Daylight lay back, as he spoke, and rolled inhis robe to sleep, then added: "Better turn in for an early start. Twoof you can take the dogs down. Elijah and me'll skin out on both sidesand see if we-all can scare up a moose on the way down."