I tried to dry them by blowing
on them; my frozen fingers could scarcely hold them. After a time
I struck one. It was soft and useless; another and another at
intervals, till thirteen; then, despairing, I laid the last two on
a stone in the weak sunlight, and tried to warm myself by gathering
firewood and moving quickly, but it seemed useless a very death
chill was on me. I have often lighted a fire with rubbing-sticks,
but I needed an axe, as well as a buckskin thong for this, and I had
neither. I looked through the baggage that was saved, no matches
and all things dripping wet. I might go three miles down that
frightful canyon to our last camp and maybe get some living coals.
But no! mindful of the forestry laws, we had as usual most carefully
extinguished the fire with buckets of water, and the clothes were
freezing on my back. 1 was tired out, teeth chattering. Then came
the thought, Why despair while two matches remain? I struck the
first now, the fourteenth, and, in spite of dead fingers and the
sizzly, doubtful match, it cracked, blazed, and then, oh blessed,
blessed birch bark! - with any other tinder my numbed hands had
surely failed - it blazed like a torch, and warmth at last was mine,
and outward comfort for a house of gloom.
"The boys, I knew, would work like heroes and do their part as
well as man could do it, my work was right here. I gathered all the
things along the beach, made great racks for drying and a mighty
blaze. I had no pots or pans, but an aluminum bottle which would
serve as kettle; and thus I prepared a meal of such things as
were saved - a scrap of pork, some tea and a soggy mass that once
was pilot bread. Then sat down by the fire to spend five hours of
growing horror, 175 miles from a settlement, canoe smashed, guns
gone, pots and pans gone, specimens all gone, half our bedding
gone, our food gone; but all these things were nothing, compared
with the loss of my three precious journals; 600 pages of observation
and discovery, geographical, botanical, and zoological, 500 drawings,
valuable records made under all sorts of trying circumstances,
discovery and compass survey of the beautiful Nyarling River,
compass survey of the two great northern lakes, discovery of two
great northern rivers, many lakes, a thousand things of interest
to others and priceless to me - my summer's work - gone; yes, I could
bear that, but the three chapters of life and thought irrevocably
gone; the magnitude of this calamity was crushing. Oh, God, this
is the most awful blow that could have fallen at the end of the
six months' trip.
"The hours went by, and the gloom grew deeper, for there was no
sign of the boys. Never till now did the thought of danger enter
my mind.
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