July 3 [1903]. — Not a wink, sleeping by the burning stump. Its heat drew the ‘skeets, and the old punk blazed up like a blast-furnace, nearly finishing my horse-blankets.
Packed at last, and with the sun shining, we jumped right into rotten luck. At a big stream, the brown horse branded B refused to take the trail we’d cut through the alder jungle, and jumped in up to his neck — three times. Once, four beasts together followed him, wetting their packs, too, carried downstream and mixed up in snags and swift water, till the game seemed up. Twice I plunged in to my eyes and soaked my camera. Jack and I sweated like crazy men, and only King came back to help. No sooner were the four on the trail, than we hit a sheer alder slope, and chopped upward. It was too steep for the poor Whiteface, who staggered over backwards and rolled to the bottom, caught on his back in the vicious stems. When roped out, repacked, and hauled up the bank, both hind legs limped. His back can’t stand much more.
At last we crossed the 12½ cent crick. The ‘skeets were so thick, Jack lost his temper, hurled away the gold-pan, and vented his wrath on Simon, simply because the boy stood near, with the .22 gun in his hand, watching. When King called something from a distance, Jack yelled back, “I don’t want no bee nor haw from you, neither!” We left him to track us to camp; struck better going, crossing another divide by two small ponds under toothed, snowy mountains cut by vast amphitheatres.
Then came King’s turn. We sighted an old she-grizzly, humping up a slope with two cubs swinging after. Out Fred whips his rifle and snaps the magazine. The cartridges won’t fit the barrel. He jams them and swears; studies them. They’re .303 Savage all right, which the gun should be. Mrs. Bear lifts her fat rear over the hill, laughing a good bear laugh, I guess. Fred looks at the barrel. It’s a .30-30 Winchester! If the Seattle gun-store clerk that palmed off that rifle on us had been within fifty miles, he’d have thought quick about his life insurance. Of course it was our fault. We bought a Savage, handed it to the clerk to put on peep sights, which he put on another gun, handing it back to us next day; and we neglected to examine before freighting it. Yet, right now that clerk’s life, were he here in Alaska, wouldn’t be worth that old she-bear’s laugh. — Robert Dunn, in his book The Shameless Diary of an Explorer: A Story of Failure on Mt. McKinley (read for free)
