Ballads of a Cheechako | Page 5

hill and plain; We burnt our boat to save the nails, and built our boat again; We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn; We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn. O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly; By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky; By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge content; By rocky lairs where the pig-eyed bears peered at our tiny tent. Through the black canyon's angry foam we hurled to dreamy bars, And round in a ring the dog-nosed peaks bayed to the mocking stars. Spring and summer and autumn went; the sky had a tallow gleam, Yet North and ever North we pressed to the land of our Golden Dream.
So we came at last to a tundra vast and dark and grim and lone; And there was the little lone moose trail, and we knew it for our own. By muskeg hollow and nigger-head it wandered endlessly;?Sorry of heart and sore of foot, weary men were we.?The short-lived sun had a leaden glare and the darkness came too soon, And stationed there with a solemn stare was the pinched, anaemic moon. Silence and silvern solitude till it made you dumbly shrink, And you thought to hear with an outward ear?the things you thought to think.
Oh, it was wild and weird and wan, and ever in camp o' nights We would watch and watch the silver dance of the mystic Northern Lights. And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in primrose haze; And swift they pranced with their silver feet,?and pierced with a blinding blaze.?They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod; It was not good for the eyes of man--'twas a sight for the eyes of God. It made us mad and strange and sad, and the gold whereof we dreamed Was all forgot, and our only thought was of the lights that gleamed.
Oh, the tundra sponge it was golden brown, and some was a bright blood-red; And the reindeer moss gleamed here and there?like the tombstones of the dead.?And in and out and around about the little trail ran clear, And we hated it with a deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear. And the skies of night were alive with light,?with a throbbing, thrilling flame;?Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came.?It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge; Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge. Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled; Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled. There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battlefield of the skies.
But all things come to an end at last, and the muskeg melted away, And frowning down to bar our path a muddle of mountains lay. And a gorge sheered up in granite walls, and the moose trail crept betwixt; 'Twas as if the earth had gaped too far and her stony jaws were fixt. Then the winter fell with a sudden swoop, and the heavy clouds sagged low, And earth and sky were blotted out in a whirl of driving snow.
We were climbing up a glacier in the neck of a mountain pass, When the Dago Kid slipped down and fell into a deep crevasse. When we got him out one leg hung limp, and his brow was wreathed with pain, And he says: "'Tis badly broken, boys, and I'll never walk again. It's death for all if ye linger here, and that's no cursed lie; Go on, go on while the trail is good, and leave me down to die." He raved and swore, but we tended him with our uncouth, clumsy care. The camp-fire gleamed and he gazed and dreamed?with a fixed and curious stare.?Then all at once he grabbed my gun and he put it to his head, And he says: "I'll fix it for you, boys"--them are the words he said.
So we sewed him up in a canvas sack and we slung him to a tree; And the stars like needles stabbed our eyes, and woeful men were we. And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream, And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights?came forth with a mystic gleam.?They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow; And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow. They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan; They spread with a blaze of rose-pink