616 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
doors of nature’s vaults had been closed against 
me. My friends can testify that my credit al¬ 
ways has been limited, and I know it always 
will be so, yet I confess that the realization I 
was weighing my life in the balance with the 
gold that is worshipped by fools made my esti¬ 
mate of that filthy lucre gradually sink below 
par. 
As I slowly and wearily wended my way back, 
by the light of the snow, I reflected that if 
Apollo had been a prospector instead of a sheep 
herder, and his scene of activity had been 
Alaska, he would have sung, no doubt, of the 
beauties of nature, because he usually did, but 
that very often his refrain would have been 
varied by the favorite recitative of the country, 
‘‘Please pass the beans.” 
I always have thought that the love of money 
was base, and a bar against a higher life, yet I 
doggedly resolved to return the next year and 
continue my search. If I had been allowed to 
leave the coast a month or even ten days earlier 
I should have had my choice of locations on 
Miller Gulch and Slate Creek, which have, at 
this writing, produced about two tons of gold. 
It is a consolation to know, however, that the 
locality was staked by more deserving men than 
those others who would have beaten Captain 
West and myself out of it, and who could not 
travel a straight trail unless there was an im¬ 
passable barrier on either side. 
The snow continued to fall, and the next day 
we prepared to leave. The air was calm and 
everything was purely white. That is when the 
ptarmigan come down off the mountain and say 
laughingly, “I’ve come back!” They descend 
singly and in flocks. A flutter and a sail, a flip 
and .a cackle, and there is a ptarmigan down, 
and laughing about it. You cannot see him be¬ 
cause he is as white as the snow. If you had 
found him two or three weeks before, his color 
would have been brown, but the first snow has 
remained on the mountain where he has been 
and now he is white. At this time of the year 
on a few of them may be noticed a dark brown 
spot about the size of a silver dollar, but even 
that will be white in a few days. 
On our return I went out to kill a few of 
them to eat. One came down not twenty steps 
away, and thinking I saw the brown spot, I 
fired, only to knock the snow off a rock. The 
bird was two feet to one side and had no brown 
spot. He fluttered up and came down again. 
They have a red ring around the eyes, and look¬ 
ing for that I approached until it was visible, 
and then I killed the bird. The snow is not 
nearly so white in the spring, and after it has 
lain on the ground all winter those birds are 
seen much more easily. It is difficult to dis¬ 
tinguish a white ptarmigan on an October snow, 
even at the distance of twenty steps. 
They have fine feathers, a kind of hairy down, 
completely covering their feet, and their plum¬ 
age changes color almost constantly. The small 
rock ptarmigan is very gentle and often a hen 
will fight to protect her little chicks. They are 
frequently found in summer hovering over their 
broods in the rain. This presents a pretty pic¬ 
ture. The chicks peep from their mother’s 
feathers, while the hen is so gentle that you 
can almost stroke her back with your hand. My 
little dog Pete was trained to treat the hens and 
little chicks with respect. 
We left that camp on Sept. 28, and the dis¬ 
tance to the coast, over the route we were com¬ 
pelled to travel without a trail, was about 300 
miles. The white Coast Range, with its three 
divides to cross, looked very forbidding and 
hopeless to us who were almost out of food 
and with feet wrapped in sacks. We fed all 
of our flour to the horses to enable them to 
get down to the valley where they could live. 
So long as they had sufficient strength to carry 
our blankets we felt secure, for we were too 
weak to carry them ourselves. We managed 
to kill a spruce hen or a pheasant almost every 
day, but game was very scarce at that time along 
the river. 
If the weather had been delightful when we 
came up, it was very different now, for the cold 
north winds blew down the Copper River Val¬ 
ley and through the naked treetops. With a 
suggestive whistle and apparently irresistible 
force, but with futile effect, they hurled them¬ 
selves against those great natural battlements, 
the Wrangell group. The atmosphere was so 
clear it was reasonable to believe that those 
mountains could be seen at a distance of 150 
miles. Mt. Wrangell sent up a steady spiral 
of smoke and steam that drifted away as clouds 
toward the Pacific. 
When we were sitting by our camp-fire one 
evening with nothing to eat, two Indians ap¬ 
proached us and asked if we had “muck-muck” 
(food)? Upon receiving a negative answer 
they counted the number of nights that they 
should be away from their winter camp, and 
then “pot-latched” us with two dried salmon. 
These salmon are cured without salt and white 
men can eat the half rotten fish only when 
nearly starved; therefore, our condition may be 
inferred from the fact that we ate and enjoyed 
those fish. When we arrived at Copper Center 
we had eaten but one pheasant during the pre¬ 
vious thirty-six hours. We found Dick Wortham 
there, running a trading post for Mr. Holman, 
for the purpose of securing furs from the In¬ 
dians. He had laid in a supply of moose meat 
for the winter, and we sat down to one table 
and ordered the best he had. He placed a 
large pot of boiled meat before us and said: 
“Boys, I put fourteen pounds of moose meat 
in that pot.” 
We ate, and then rested, and began to eat 
again, and he exclaimed: 
“Boys, I put fourteen pounds of moose meat 
in that pot.” 
Before retiring we attacked that pot again and 
succeeded in eating all that there was, so Dick 
settled back once more and exclaimed: 
“Boys, I put fourteen pounds of moose meat 
in that pot.” 
He charged us nine dollars for that meat and 
other sundries, and we had to raise the price 
of our worthless placer locations a few thou¬ 
sands to pay the bill. 
From Copper Center it was a battle with the 
elements. Our food was insufficient and we had 
no trail to follow. We met Mr. Holman and 
his assistants, who were burdened with the first 
mail from Valdez to the Yukon, and he richly 
deserves the credit of delivering it under the 
conditions that then existed. 
Our warm and dry sleeping bags enabled us 
to sleep comfortably beneath two feet of snow 
on the Grayling Creek divide, while the cold 
north wind blew and the poor horses pawed for 
grass on the steep hillsides. One horse refused 
[Oct. 16, 1909. 
to move the next morning. I mercifully sent a 
bullet to his brain and he dropped beside our 
trail. We crossed and descended to the edge 
of timber and camped on frozen ground. 
We camped the next night in a deep valley 
that was brimful of death-like stillness and sur¬ 
rounded by gold and silver crimsoned peaks 
that had climbed heavenward to bask in the 
light of other planets. About 1 o’clock at night 
I was looking on one of the prettiest sights of 
a lifetime. We were in the shade of a deep 
canon, but the full moon shone on the tops of 
the surrounding mountains thousands of feet 
above us and miles away, and those refulgent 
rays lighted up the canons and deep cut gorges 
so plainly that we could see the great precipices 
and glaciers away up where human feet never 
could tread. That color overspread everything 
with a rich golden glow, unimaginable to those 
who never have viewed a northern winter’s 
moonlight. For one hour I had been absorbed 
in speechless wonder when my companion called 
out: 
“Say, you sleepy-head, wake up and look at 
the grandest scene that nature ever painted! I 
have been staring at it for an hour.” 
There! Both of us had been gazing on the 
scene and neither of us had said a word—and 
with empty stomachs, too! True, Alaska’s 
hardships are severe, but she often repays one 
with that which “filthy lucre” cannot buy. 
Ambidextrous Alaska! She affectionately 
strokes your brow with one hand and wrath- 
fully cuffs you with the other. She woos you 
with a smile and drives you away with a frown. 
We trudged wearily into U. S. Station No. 3 
where we were fed. As the wind was blowing 
fiercely across Thompson Pass we deferred the 
crossing until night. We then made the attempt, 
but the horse, “Dynamite Bob,” lost his buck 
and life up there. Although on the summit, he 
refused to move further, and so we left him 
to seek shelter in the lee of a large rock on the 
coast side of the mountain. The next morning 
I returned far enough to see his feet sticking 
out of the drifting show. We slowly descended 
into the timbered lowlands out of the wind and 
tried to realize that we had but twenty miles 
to trudge to the little town at the end of the 
landlocked bay. Ah, how much that destination 
meant to us. It meant bacon and good old 
beans, butter and bread and possibly beefsteak. 
Our ambitious spirits gradually left our ankles 
and began ascending toward our knees as we 
prefigured the luxury of reading letters from 
home while enjoying comfortable shelter from 
the cold, bitter storms. 
When we did weakly walk into Valdez we 
were long-haired, long-whiskered, hatless, shoe¬ 
less and horseless and represented the remnant 
of the outfit that went exploring in the Alaskan 
range in the fall of 1899. A. M. Powell. 
—:- 
Hunters in Newfoundland. 
In a recent letter W. J. Carroll, of St. John’s, 
N. F., says: 
Several hunting parties from America are now 
in the interior deer stalking. The following 
from Grand Rapids, Mich., left the train at 
Grand Lake last Thursday: A. H. Foote, C. B. 
Kelsey, W. A. Tadman and Albert Stickley. 
There are two students from Cornell Univer¬ 
sity deer stalking at the Quarry, viz., Robert E. 
Freman and Sherman Peer. 
