Theodore Seixas Solomons

“ By the time he was within a hundred yards of what had been the nearest object of man's creation—a dirty tent it was, with an irregular pile of wood for burning down outside it—the tent whisked into thin air and the wood became bushes of slightly different contour from their nearest neighbors. Howard thought he could pick out some special natural object for each tent, cabin and dump of the mirage that had been. Each of these was either a shimmer of water, a rock, a bush, a specially light or specially dark bit of ground. ”

“ Up to that time only his eyes had been subject to hallucination. He had never imagined that he heard a sound. He knew that an auditory hallucination is just as common or even more common than a visual hallucination; and he had, therefore, no more confidence in the one than in the other. But just because he had not actually been deceived in a sound during his three days of hallucination, some obstinate thing in him suggested that this scene might conceivably be different from the others. ”

“ The Yukon basin is peculiar. Except for the big delta at the lower end and the Yukon Flats below Porcupine River there is no area of valley land in all its tremendous expanse from British Columbia to the Bering Sea. It is hills, hills—illimitable hills separated by a vast network of long gulches twisting and turning with the streams that drain them. Unless you know well a given locality you have nothing to guide you except the general direction of the main river itself and its nearest large confluent. ”

“ Howard had been mining all winter in the Fortymile country and having his usual luck! In the spring he went to work sluicing for one of the big outfits on a near-by creek. They had a lot of low-grade dirt to shovel in; it was a long job and they did not finish until the hills were bare of snow and you could go overland anywhere on foot. That suited Howard first rate because he wanted to get to Circle City as soon as he could to meet some men with whom he had arranged to cross the Yukon-Tanana divide to the newly discovered placers of Fairbanks. ”

“ He was on a treeless divide where he could not make a fire, though he purposed doing that—walking down to the spruce timber and making a smudge—if the mosquitoes bothered him.
The mosquitoes did bother him. They seemed to rise up from nowhere in spite of the fact that he was on a ridge. Wet moss, he found, fostered mosquitoes; and wet moss in Alaska is everywhere. He cursed himself for not having any netting, but of course he had not expected to sleep out. He fought mosquitoes for an hour or so—drowsily—and then decided that he would walk again and dip down into the nearest spruce timber. ”

“ And yet he frowned, wondering and disgusted to think that he had actually passed along the hillside above that part of the valley, which was now about a mile and a half back of him, without noticing the camp. He walked back obliquely along the hillside and down toward the creek bottom, occasionally glancing at the sluicing gang. Water, he judged, was getting scarce at the source from which these men were taking it, or they would not have put on a night shift. He counted eight boxes, with two or three men to each of the seven boxes above the tail box. ”

“ He feared only the disfiguring of the mosquitoes.
From the mirage cabin, which was now almost opposite him across the creek and some hundred yards up the slope, a mirage man appeared, carrying something. In default of other occupation Howard lazily watched him—or it, rather. It came down to the stream, set a bucket on the ground, took from it a pan and a knife, took from the pail, next, some potatoes and began paring and throwing them into the pan.
Howard would not have stirred; he would have gone on watching the man—or the image of the man—until it vanished, except for one circumstance. ”

“ This healthy man, who had used no liquor in his life, little tea or coffee, whose habits had been good and regular habits, whose life had been largely an outdoor life—this Hercules of endurance went on for forty-eight hours longer over the ridges, dipping into side gulches when he had to cross them, keeping northwest in his general course, doggedly winning onward toward the Yukon. ”

“ A man with a better knowledge of Yukon topography would have known that the region toward which he was bending his footsteps was a very sparsely mined one and that his chance was mighty small. He had eaten his two sandwiches at noon and of course he was ravenously hungry. It was the middle of May, light all night, and he had no difficulty whatever in seeing the caribou trails on which he walked along the divides between the gulches. ”

“ The reason I tell the story in the third person is because the thing that to my mind is the most difficult to believe—though it is not the most interesting circumstance by any means—needs the explanation of some one who knows the man himself, the kind of a man he was physically, to be specific. ”

“ And thus he had become possessed of a muscular system of a quality that enabled him in emergencies—he probably was not aware of the fact himself—to sustain a given exertion for twice or thrice as long as the average healthy out door man of his age, which was thirty-five. ”