Gulf and Glacier; or, The Percivals in Alaska

It was a fallen hemlock, lying directly across their path. Baranov laid his finger lightly on a small reddish spot, where the bark had been scraped off.

“A b’ar did that,” he whispered. “An not long ago, neither.”

The boys instinctively clutched their empty guns.

“Give me my rifle,” the hunter said, in the same tone. “I must load her an’ hev her ready in case we come on the critter sudd’nly. But I’ll let you do your own shootin’ ef I can. Fred, you must take the ax naow, an’ be awful keerful of it. Carry it blade aout from ye, an’ not over your shoulder. Naow foller me as easy’s you kin.”

They crept along, Indian file, for half an hour or more.

Tom’s foot sank into something that crunched under the moss.

“Snow!” he exclaimed; and indeed they all were standing on the edge of a huge snow bank.

Something about this appeared to please Solomon very much, though the boys could not tell why. But now he was stopping and pointing again. Ah! that was why the old hunter was gratified by finding that the trail crossed a snow bank. Master Bruin could pass through the thick scrub of the forest so deftly that even the keen eye of the best guide in Juneau could hardly distinguish the course of his journey. Not so when he crossed the snow. There was his track, plain enough.

“My! don’t it look like a boy’s barefoot mark?” exclaimed Tom, quivering with excitement. “Is he near here, do you think, Solomon? What sort of a bear is it? Is he a big one?”

Baranov answered at once, as he shouldered his pack and rifle again:

“The trail’s abaout an hour old. He’s a purty good-sized black b’ar, I should say. An’ it’s my opinion we can fetch him afore night.”

On they went, faster than before. Indeed, the boys soon noticed that they were now following a sort of beaten track – no other, Solomon assured them, than one of the famous “bear-paths,” thousands of which thread the deepest and loneliest jungles of Alaska.

They halted for a hasty dinner and then pressed forward. Baranov could not be positive that the same bear was before them on this hard track, but it seemed highly improbable that Ursus Americanus had left his easy highway for the almost impenetrable growth of evergreens on either side.

It was about three in the afternoon when Baranov halted so suddenly that Fred, who was next behind him, fairly tumbled against him, nearly upsetting the hunter. The latter, however, paid no attention to this. He was too much occupied in examining half a dozen hairs, which he had picked from a low spruce bough projecting across the path.

“What is it?” the boys whispered eagerly, their fatigue gone in a moment.

“Look at them ha’rs!”

“Why, they’re almost white! They are white at the tips.”

“The animil that went through here ahead of us, left ’em behind,” said the guide. “An’ it wa’n’t no black b’ar, neither, as you can see for yourselves.”

“What was it – not grizzly?”

The idea was not wholly a pleasant one, and the young hunters looked nervously around.

“No, no; it’s no grizzly. It’s my opinion that a big silver-tip, a glacier b’ar, some calls ’em, is just beyond,” rejoined Baranov.

“A glacier bear? I never heard of one before,” whispered Fred.

“They’re ugly fellers, an’ mighty scarce raound these parts. The trappers north of here call ’em Mount St. Elias b’ars, because there’s more of ’em there. The pelt’s wuth double a black b’ar’s. It’ll be great luck ef we find one.”

This whole conversation was carried on in an undertone, and without further noise or delay, the party pushed on.

At the end of half an hour’s forced march they found themselves on a sort of level tableland, at a great elevation above the sea. Here and there were patches of snow, and small glaciers could be distinctly seen on distant mountain slopes, toward the east and north.

The scene near at hand was utterly desolate and forbidding. The bear path, too, had “ended in a squirrel track and run up a tree,” Tom declared. He was on the point of proposing a halt for a rest, if not for the night, when he caught sight of a grayish patch in a clump of low spruces about a hundred yards distant. He was sure it had moved while he was looking. His heart beat violently as he gave a low whistle to attract Baranov’s attention.

The guide’s eye no sooner rested on the object than he sank as if he had been shot. The boys did the same, and cautiously crawled to his side.

“Slip a cartridge into that rifle quick,” he whispered to Fred. “That’s old Silver Tip, sure, an’ ef we work it jest right, we can drop him. Naow don’t you move for five minutes. Before long, you’ll see him start this way. When he gets up to that rock over thar between them two leetle spruces, Tom, you let drive. Don’t you fire, Fred, till Tom gets another cartridge in. An’ ef you miss him, run fer your lives.”

Before the boys could ask where he was going or what his plans were, the old hunter had disappeared in the undergrowth, taking his ax with him.

The wind was blowing freshly from Bruin toward them. In the course of a few minutes, which seemed hours, they saw the animal push his snout out from the boughs and sniff the air curiously. There was a strange scent, he thought, lingering about this mountain-top. What could it be?

Whatever its nature, it evidently acted like the reverse end of the magnet to the shaggy beast; for after a moment’s uneasy moving about, he started off in a line which would carry him very near the ambushed hunters.

On he came, crashing through the boughs and clambering nimbly over mossy bowlders.

Fred could feel that his companion was trembling from head to foot from excitement.

“Rest over that twig, Tom,” he whispered in his ear. “You can’t get a shot if you don’t.”

The two spruces were reached. Bang! slam! went two rifles; for forgetting Solomon’s injunction, Fred pulled the trigger almost at the same instant with Tom.

“Hooray!” shouted a welcome voice in the direction from which the bear had come. “You’ve done it, boys! Wait till I come before you go near him!”

With arms and legs flying like a windmill, and ax ready, Solomon came floundering along the bear’s track.

“Dropped him, fust shot!” he called out again. “He’s dead, sure enough – look out!” For at that very moment the bear struggled to his feet and made a mad rush toward his assailants.

Fred had thrown down his rifle at Solomon’s last shout, but Tom had the presence of mind to level his reloaded piece and fire. Then he turned to run, but Bruin, making one last plunge, threw out his big paw.

Tom felt a sensation like a shovelful of red-hot coals dropped down his right boot-leg, and with a howl of pain and fright, tumbled headlong.

Had not Solomon reached the scene at that very moment with his ax, this story might have had a sad ending. One mighty sweep of that terrible weapon, and the battle was finished.

“Are ye hurt, boy?” cried the hunter. “Your last shot did the business, but I had to kinder second the motion. Whar are ye?”

Tom sat up straight, shouted: “Here I am! Hurrah!” and with a very queer feeling in his head, rolled over on the moss.

When he came to himself, the first thing he saw was Solomon bending over him, chafing his hands and trying to force some kind of hot liquor down his throat. There was the tinkling of a tiny stream somewhere among the moss close by, and a big Douglas fir stretched its boughs overhead.

“Where – where are we?” he stammered, trying to rise.

“Naow don’t ye go to rushin’ raound,” counseled Baranov. “I’ve lugged ye off a piece to a first-rate leetle campin’ graound, an’ all you’ve got to do is to lay still whar ye be, while Fred an’ I fix things a leetle.”

“Is the bear” – began Tom, trying to remember, and wondering what made his head swim.

“He’s right whar we left him, an’ thar he’ll stay I reckon, till we get ready to borrer his coat. Got some kindling, Fred?”

“Here you are!” called that genteel young man, staggering up with an armful of dry boughs. His hands were covered with pitch and his eyeglasses dangled from the cord.

“Halloo, you scarred old veteran, you!” he cried, dropping on his knees beside Tom. “Feeling better? What a clip he did give you!”

Tom, beginning to feel conscious of a score or two of bees stinging his right leg, looked down at that member, and was surprised to find his boot was removed and its place supplied by bandages.

“You won’t be lame more’n a few days,” said Baranov consolingly. “He only jest raked you with his claws. But the bleeding made ye faint, most likely. You’re all right naow.”

It was very pleasant lying there and watching the other two in their preparations for the night. A roaring fire was kindled, and although the sun was still high, the warmth of the red flames was by no means unwelcome.

Slash, slash! went Solomon’s keen ax, and tree after tree came swishing down before its strokes. Some of them he trimmed with a dozen clips to each, and bade Fred carry the boughs into camp. As if by magic a framework of crotched sticks, props and rafters grew under the sheltering fir, boughs were piled on and across them, and by six o’clock there was a snug brush camp ready for occupancy, with a bed of fragrant fir boughs two feet deep. Then came the firewood – larger trees, felled and cut into six-foot lengths.

When a good pile of these had been provided, and not before, Solomon drove his ax into the trunk of the fir, pulled on his coat, and sitting down on a small log which, running across the front of the camp formed a sort of seat and threshold to it, opened his bag and drew out a black coffee-pot. This being placed on the fire, he started off for the scene of the late battle.

“I ’low we’ll have a good b’ar steak to-night,” he said, as he went. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

While he is preparing supper for the two tired and hungry boys, we will return to the gentler portion of the family, and follow the Queen northward on its voyage.

CHAPTER X.

ON THE MUIR GLACIER

“Away up here!”

It was Bessie who was speaking her thoughts aloud, as she leaned upon the rail of the good steamer Queen, and looked dreamily out over the blue water toward the mountains on the mainland.

“’Way up here, in Alaska! Really in Alaska! I can’t realize it!” she went on, turning to Rossiter Selborne, who was seated by her side. “Just think, that shore over there is a part of the pink patch in the map of North America, in the very upper left-hand corner. And I’ve come all the way from Boston, across the whole continent.”

It was indeed hard to realize that they were in those strange, far-away waters. Near the ship, porpoises leaped merrily through the sunlit spray of the waves. Now and then a queer-looking canoe shot by, paddled by dark-faced natives. On shore they could see only the pathless, boundless forest that stretched away for a thousand miles – an unbroken wilderness – towards the North Pole.

It was late on the afternoon in which they sailed from Juneau. Whatever anxieties had been harbored in Mr. Percival’s own mind, he had been at some pains to conceal them from the rest of the party. “The hunters had simply tramped farther than they had expected,” he said, “and found themselves too tired, after their first night in the woods, to reach the ship at the time agreed upon. For his part, he was glad they were not hurrying.”

Although Mrs. Percival was by no means reassured by these remarks, and her husband’s indifferent manner, she did allow herself to be somewhat comforted; and the younger folk easily fell in with his method of accounting for the prolonged absence of the boys. With real pleasure, therefore, all but one settled themselves to a thorough enjoyment of the new scenes constantly opening around them.

On leaving Juneau the steamer passed around the lower end of Douglas Island, and then headed northward once more, toward what is called the “Lynn Canal.”

The sun came out, warm and bright, so that although there was a strong southerly breeze, it was calm and comfortable even on the hurricane deck.

An old Alaskan traveler had come on board at Juneau, taking passage to a cannery in which he was interested, farther north. There was also a family of Thlinket Indians, bound for the same port.

The stranger pointed out various objects of interest, as they passed, including many glaciers which sent their white tongues of ice down to the sea front, dividing the dark forest that clothed both mainland and islands as far as the eye could reach.

“That is the largest glacier hereabouts – the Davidson,” he said, “and the most interesting. It’s something like three miles wide at the foot.”

“Oh! that doesn’t seem possible,” exclaimed a passenger standing near by. “It doesn’t look over a dozen rods wide. Are you sure you are right about that, sir?”

“Do you see that dark strip lying between this end of the glacier and the open sea?”

“Where – O, yes! What is it – moss, or low bushes?”

“Those bushes are tall trees. There is a great terminal moraine two miles from front to rear, pushed out by the Davidson, and a whole forest grows upon it. Here, take this glass, and you can see for yourself.”

The skeptical passenger was obliged to own himself in the wrong, and the great, silent glacier – so motionless, yet forever moving toward the ocean – seemed more mysterious and terrible even than the enormous ice-stream of the Selkirks.

The Queen now made her way past the Chilkoot Inlet, where, said Randolph, who had followed Tom’s example in “reading up” Alaska, Schwatka started to cross the mountains and explore the head-waters of the Yukon.

Pyramid Harbor, at the head of Chilkat Inlet, was now reached, and at this point, the farthest northing of the route, or, to be exact, at latitude 59° 13´, the steamer stopped her wheels, while the obliging stranger and the Thlinkets went ashore in a small boat, which tossed perilously on the choppy waves of the Inlet.

Slowly the steamer swung round, and, having picked up the boat on its return, began its southward course. The wind now swept the decks with stinging force, driving the tourists below or into sheltered corners.

Against the western sky towered the mighty peaks of Fairweather and Crillon, lifting their white summits nearly sixteen thousand feet above the sea.

Until late in the evening the Percivals talked, laughed and sang, while the never-ending day still glowed brightly, and the waves tossed their foam caps in the golden twilight.

Thump! Bump! The girls woke next morning to find the ship trembling from stem to stern. Had the Queen run ashore? No, they were going smoothly enough now. It must have been a dream, that that —

Thump!

That was no dream, any way, for they were wide-awake now. Out of her berth jumped Kittie, and, drawing aside the curtain from their little stateroom window, looked out.

What a sight it was! The ship was moving cautiously, at half-speed, up a narrow bay – Glacier Bay, they afterwards heard it called – surrounded by bare and desolate mountains, along whose upper slopes lay dreary banks of never-melting snow, and whose splintered summits were hidden in dull gray clouds. Across the bay, at its upper end, miles away, stretched an odd-looking line of white cliffs. They could not yet make out what gave them that strange, marble-like look. The surface of the water was all dotted over with floating ice, of every size and shape imaginable. Just in front of Kittie’s window (which overlooked the bridge), the Captain, in thick coat and fur cap, was pacing to and fro. Even while she looked, the ship’s bow struck against a good sized iceberg. Again the steamer shuddered, and the girls knew now what it was that had waked them.

“Sta-a-arboard a little!” called Captain Carroll sharply, as another great berg loomed up, just ahead.

“Starboard, sir,” repeated the quartermaster and the second officer.

“Stead-a-a-ay!”

“Steady, sir!”

“Port a bit!”

And so it went on, as the Queen dodged now this way, now that, under the direction of the best pilot and captain on the dangerous Alaskan coast.

It did not take long, you may be sure, for the girls to finish their toilet and rush out on deck to see the fun. One by one the passengers joined them, wrapped in all sorts of heavy ulsters and coats. The air was like that of mid-winter, and the wind blew sharply.

The Queen steamed up as near as the captain dared, and there, about an eighth of a mile distant from the head of the bay, she waited.

Now, indeed, was discovered the true nature of that line of marble cliffs. They were of solid ice, rising to the awful height of three hundred feet above the fretted sea, and stretching across the bay in a mighty wall.

As the passengers gathered, shivering, on the forward deck, and gazed at this wonderful ice-river – the great Muir Glacier of Alaska – some one gave a sudden cry, and pointed to an ice pinnacle just abreast the ship. With a majestic movement the huge mass of glittering ice, larger than a church building, loosened itself from the cliff, and with a crash like thunder, plunged into the sea. A few moments later and the staunch ocean steamer rocked like a little boat on the waves made by the falling berg.

Again and again the ice came tumbling down. Sometimes immense pieces which had broken off from the bottom of the glacier, seven hundred feet below the surface, rose slowly and unexpectedly from the depths, throwing the water high in air. These bottom fragments were not white, but as blue as indigo. From their gleaming sides the water poured in roaring cataracts.

“What are those sailors up to?” sung out Randolph suddenly, pointing to a boat’s crew that was leaving the side of the ship.

“Going to fill the refrigerator, sir,” replied a steward, who caught the question as he passed.

Randolph thought he was joking; but sure enough, the men in the boat grappled a huge floating cake of ice, towed it to the gangway, and made it fast to a tackle and fall, which picked it up and swayed it over on the deck – a fine young berg of beautiful clear ice weighing something over two tons. Quickly it was stowed below, and other pieces followed. Although it was floating in salt water, the ice coming from the glacier was perfectly fresh. In this way about forty tons were taken on board and stored.

After breakfast all who wished to do so went ashore in the steamer’s boats, landing on a gravelly beach about a mile from the foot of the glacier. Bessie was obliged to remain on board with her mother, the rest joining the shore-going party.

Leaving the beach they walked up over slippery rocks, gravel and protruding bits of black ice, until, before they knew it, they were on the glacier itself. Its surface was roughened and stained, and every now and then they came to a wide crack or “crevasse” in the ice, with sloping, treacherous sides, its shadowy depths reaching no one knew how far below. To fall into one would have been almost certain death.

“I wonder how thick this glacier is?” asked some one, peering down into one of these terrible crevasses.

“About a thousand feet,” was the answer. “The front of the glacier is over three hundred feet high, above the sea; that gives about seven hundred beneath the surface.”

“Do you know how long it is, from the source to the front?”

“Upwards of forty miles, I believe. And a mile wide at the mouth.”

They could look up into the far-away, misty mountain valleys, and still the ice stretched beyond the utmost bound of sight.

As the party retraced their steps, the gentleman who had volunteered the information regarding height and distance, narrated the interesting story of the discovery of the glacier by Professor John Muir. He told them how the intrepid Scotchman, on reaching Cross Sound, had hired an ancient native guide and two or three Indians to paddle his canoe up Glacier Bay. As the mountain slopes surrounding the glacier were known to be bare of fuel, the voyagers filled their canoe with dry cedar and pine boughs, that they might have camp-fires to keep them alive in that almost Arctic atmosphere, and to cook their food.

When the Percivals reached the head of the moraine, they were so fortunate as to find the professor himself standing there, talking with friends. He was spending the summer, it seemed, in a rude hut not far below, and in company with some hardy young college students, pursuing new investigations in this marvelous land of ice and granite.

Leaving Professor Muir, after an introduction and a pleasant word or two from the famous explorer, Randolph and the rest descended to the beach, not by the long muddy path by which they had come, but by striking downward through a deep gulley, which brought them scrambling, sliding and laughing to the sand below.

On this narrow strip of seashore, where were lying great blocks of ice stranded by the ebb tide, they walked a mile or more beneath frowning ice-cliffs, to the very foot of the glacier, and indeed under it, for there was a sort of cave formed by the huge pinnacles of clear blue ice, and into this dismal opening the young people penetrated for a few yards, when a crackling sound in the gleaming walls made them rush for the open air again in mad haste. They were just in time to escape an ugly fragment of ice, weighing at least threescore pounds, which had become detached from the ceiling.

After this experience they were glad to walk back to the ship, which was now whistling a recall to its absent children. On the way Kittie stopped to trace, with the tip of her parasol, her name on the smooth sand. She began another, but after printing a large F, rubbed it out, and with a little addition of color to her cheeks, joined the rest, who were now tiptoeing across a narrow plank to the boat.

Steam was up, and the Queen began at once to work southward.

For fifteen miles she wriggled her way out of the icebergs as cautiously as she had wriggled in. Then the broad Pacific came in view, and as the bell in the engine room rang, “Ahead, full speed!” and the ship emerged from the narrow channels and gloomy, landlocked inlets of the North, the great billows softly rocked in their arms the Queen and its passengers, while they sang merrily,

“Out on an ocean all boundless we ride,We’re homeward bound, homeward bound!”

“What shall we see next?” was the question on every tongue that night; and “Sitka! Sitka!” was the answer.

It was a comfort to get out into the open ocean again. They had sailed so long through narrow passages and between dark, lofty sweeps of mountains, frowning with cliffs of bare rock, or shadowy with silent ranks of pine and fir, that, like the Delectable Mountains in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the hills seemed about to fall on them and bury the good Queen out of sight under avalanches and icebergs.

All that night the waves of the Pacific rocked them gently, as the ship made its steady way southward. What a volume it would make, if we could have the dreams of this party of a hundred souls on board the Queen for that one night printed – and illustrated!

At six o’clock next morning Randolph went on deck. The steamer was motionless, anchored about half a mile from shore. She was in a bay, which was thickly sprinkled with pretty, wooded islands, as far out as the eye could reach. Fourteen miles away westward, rose the peak of Mount Edgecumbe, its slopes reddened with ancient streams of lava. It was of that exact cone-shape, with its top cut squarely off or “truncated,” that marks a volcanic formation; and indeed, Edgecumbe was smoking away furiously only a generation or two ago.

The shore line was rugged, like all the southern Alaskan coast, with a narrow strip of level land running along the margin of the sea. Following this line the eye presently rested upon a collection of houses – quite a town, it seemed, just ahead. One large, square building was a hundred feet or more above the rest. A sharply-pointed church steeple rose from among the lower roofs of the other buildings. Then Randolph knew it was Sitka, the capital of Alaska.

He had hardly recognized the place when he heard his name called from the water.

Rushing to the side of the vessel, he spied a boat coming swiftly toward the Queen, rowed with a sharp man-of-war stroke by four sailors in neat suits of blue.

In the stern sheets sat – could it be? – yes, Mr. Percival, Tom and Fred, all three waving their caps and shouting wildly.