testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the
Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a
dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve
where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded
seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,
passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart
itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked
the backbone of the continent.
John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the
wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased.
Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course
of the day s travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he
kept on travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he
would come to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight
meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the
load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless
future.
To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite
wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold
on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp,
here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through
frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat
of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted
riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of
hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted
across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in
slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the
uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the
Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards,
shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber
line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming
gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and
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