Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled | Page 7

freezes between the toes, and if not
removed will soon cause a sore and lameness. Then a dog moccasin
must be put on and the foot continually nursed and doctored. When
several dogs of a team are thus affected, it may be with several feet
each, the labour and trouble of travel are greatly increased.
So, whenever his dogs have been through water, the careful musher
will stop and go all down the line, cleaning out the ice and snow from
their feet with his fingers. Four interdigital spaces per foot make
sixteen per dog, and with a team of six dogs that means ninety-six
several operations with the bare hand (if it be done effectually) every
time the team gets into an overflow. The dogs will do it for themselves
if they are given time, tearing out the lumps of ice with their teeth; but,
inasmuch as they usually feel conscientiously obliged to eat each lump
as they pull it out, it takes much longer, and in a short daylight there is
little time to spare if the day's march is to be made.
[Sidenote: "OVERFLOW" ICE]
We found overflow almost as soon as we reached the Chatanika River,
and in one form or another we encountered it during all the two days
and a half that we were pursuing the river's windings. At times it was
covered with a sheet of new ice that would support the dogs but would
not support the sled, so that the dogs were travelling on one level and
the sled on another, and a man had to walk along in the water between
the dogs and the sled for several hundred yards at a time, breaking
down the overflow ice with his feet.
At other times the thin sheets of overflow ice would sway and bend as
the sled passed quickly over them in a way that gives to ice in such
condition its Alaskan name of "rubber-ice," while for the fifteen or

twenty miles of McManus Creek, the headwaters of the Chatanika, we
had continuous stretches of fine glare ice with enough frost crystals
upon it from condensing moisture to give a "tooth" to the dogs' feet,
just as varnish on a photographic negative gives tooth to the retouching
pencil. Perfectly smooth ice is a very difficult surface for dogs to pass
over; glare ice slightly roughened by frost deposit makes splendid, fast
going.
Eighty-five miles or so from Fairbanks, and just about half-way to
Circle, the watercourse is left and the first summit is the
"Twelve-Mile," as it is called. We tried hard to take our load up at one
trip, but found it impossible to do so, and had to unlash the sled and
take half the load at a time, caching it on the top while we returned for
the other half.
It took us half a day to get our load to the top of the Twelve-Mile
summit, a rise of about one thousand three hundred feet from the creek
bed as the aneroid gave it. In the steeper pitches we had to take the axe
and cut steps, so hard and smooth does the incessant wind at these
heights beat the snow, and on our second trip to the top we were just in
time to rescue a roll of bedding that had been blown from the cache and
was about to descend a gully from which we could hardly have
recovered it.
This summit descended, we were in Birch Creek water, and had we
followed the watercourse would have reached the Yukon; but we would
have travelled hundreds of miles and would have come out below Fort
Yukon, while we were bound for Circle City. So there was another and
a yet more difficult summit to cross before we could descend the
Yukon slope. We were able to hire a man and two dogs to help us over
the Eagle summit, so that the necessity of relaying was avoided. One
man ahead continually calling to the dogs, eight dogs steadily pulling,
and two men behind steadily pushing, foot by foot, with many
stoppages as one bench after another was surmounted, we got the load
to the top at last, a rise of one thousand four hundred feet in less than
three miles. A driving snow-storm cut off all view and would have left
us at a loss which way to proceed but for the stakes that indicated it.

The descent was as anxious and hazardous as the ascent had been
laborious. The dogs were loosed and sent racing down the slope. With a
rope rough-lock around the sled runners, one man took the gee pole and
another the handle-bars and each spread-eagled himself through the
loose deep snow to check the momentum of the sled, until sled