May came, and stray
last-year's mosquitoes, full-grown but harmless, crawled out of
rock crevices and rotten logs. Crickets began to chirp, and more
geese and ducks flew overhead. And still the river held. By May
tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with a great rending and snapping,
tore loose from the banks and rose three feet. But it did not go
down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where the Stewart flowed
into it, must first break and move on. Until then the ice of the
Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasing flood
beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Two
thousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the ice
conditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yukon
could rid itself of the millions of tons of ice that cluttered
its breast.
On the twelfth of May, carrying their sleeping-robes, a pail, an
ax, and the precious rifle, the two men started down the river on
the ice. Their plan was to gain to the cached poling-boat they
had seen, so that at the first open water they could launch it
and drift with the stream to Sixty Mile. In their weak
condition, without food, the going was slow and difficult.
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