The Shameless Diary of an Explorer by Robert Dunn

Author:Robert Dunn [Dunn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BIG BYTE BOOKS
Published: 2016-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XII

UNDER THE SMILING SNOW

August 10.—We’re traveling fast—near twenty miles a day—speeding down the last lap to McKinley.

To-day, broken ridges and brush corrupted the desert, and at noon we crossed the streams of a big brown glacier from invisible Mount Russell. We popped futilely at a dozen caribou in their huge bed of yellowed grass and pea-vines, as they flitted toward the notched morainal hills—grotesque and unstable there, under low clouds, hiding a queer gap in the great range.. . .

S-t-u-u-u-n-g! “Zzz-whoo-op!” buzzed a wasp from my feet, as I batted Whiteface across a creek; and executing a parabola, got in his stinger between my eyes. The pain almost sickened me. Miller burst out laughing. “Your face looks like the fat boy’s in Pickwick,” said he. I could see my swollen cheeks. They felt like a couple of boxing gloves hung from my forehead. Oh, it’s a great joke. The crowd thought it very funny, to halt the train, and photograph me. Soon, I couldn’t see light out of my left eye....

Again we sleep on gravel. I’ve been digging out a sleeping hole to fit my hips, with the geological hammer; not many beds, I bet, are made that way. We boiled raisins for supper, Simon sitting rooted by the fire, drying a sock, unable to keep his eyes off the pot. It’s clearing, if a right eye can see the truth all by itself. Clean, inky foot-hills of slate, veined with quartz, sweep down to our shadowy desert.

August 11.—Left eye was shut tight as a rat trap at breakfast, and the right was so bad that the Professor had to hand me my food and spoon. “How many sacks of flour are there now, Professor?” burbled Simon. I tipped off Miller and Fred not to speak up. “I have not looked up the matter lately,” he sighed wearily, “but I presume about half are unused.” “Half” would be five. We have two.

I stumbled about hunting horses, spite of the blindness, while Fred showed his first peevishness on the trip. “I don’t see how we ken be sure of gitting more caribou, and we need the meat,” he grumbled. “I b’lieve they’re all high up, hitting the streams toward the mountains, an’ don’t see how we’ll shoot more without we stop and hunt.”

And he growled on about “packin’ up jest so each morning,” and over the shortness of flour.

So to-day’s adventure of the moose made Fred hot. One old mastodon peered at us at noon as we chewed our rubbery biscuit stained red from the leather in the box strapped on the Roan, and he vanished before any one could swallow and exclaim. Later, another thrilled the scrub willows as the Professor squatted to eat blueberries in a swamp. King stalked from behind alders; Simon, who couldn’t see an elephant at fifty yards, snooped behind in his footsteps, with the .22, which made Fred sore. Shots and shots; nice horns shaking the willows, as the beast runs and faces jerkily about; bobs into a big clump for good.

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