“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 open
the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice
from Dan to Beersheba. I found empty sacks where
they’d dragged them a quarter of a mile away.”
Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was nothing
less than a catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic
winter and in a game-abandoned land, to lose their
grub. They were not panic-stricken, but they
were busy looking the situation squarely in the face
and considering. Joe Hines was the first to speak.
“We can pan the snow for the beans and rice...
though there wa’n’t more’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 gets back?” Hines demanded.
“Only one thing to it,” was Elijah’s
contribution. “You’ll have to take
the other team, Joe, and pull up the Stewart till you
find them Indians. Then you come back with a
load of meat. You’ll get here long before
Henry can make it from Sixty Mile, and while you’re
gone there’ll only be Daylight and me to feed,
and we’ll feed good and small.”
“And in the morning we-all’ll pull for
the cache and pan snow to find what grub we’ve
got.” Daylight lay back, as he spoke, and
rolled in his robe to sleep, then added: “Better
turn in for an early start. Two of you can take
the dogs down. Elijah and me’ll skin out
on both sides and see if we-all can scare up a moose
on the way down.”
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.
