The Young Alaskans by Emerson Hough (best novels to read to improve english .TXT) 📖

the surf. Arrived off shore, they waited till a big wave came directly at the stern, then with a shout gave way and rode in on its crest, jumping out into the water and pulling the dory high up on what proved to be a shingle beach backed by a high rock wall a hundred yards or so inland.

All the boys now scrambled out, glad enough to set foot on shore. But they found their surroundings cheerless rather. The soft blanket of the fog shut in, white and fleecy, all about them. Now and again they heard a wandering sea-bird call, but they could see neither the sea nor any part of the shore beyond the rock wall near at hand. They no longer heard the whistle of the Nora lying at anchor at the mouth of the channel.

Both the natives now pulled out pipes and began to smoke silently. One produced from his pocket an object deeply wrapped in a bundle of rags and hide, which finally proved to be an old brass watch, which he consulted anxiously.

“Him sleep,” he remarked, shaking the watch and putting it to his ear. By this Rob knew that he meant that the watch had stopped.

“I knew he could talk,” said John. “Ask him where we can get something to eat. I’m getting awful hungry.”

“You’re always hungry, John,” said Rob. “The most important thing for us is to find where we are. Here, you!” He addressed the natives. “You can talk English. Which way is town? How far? Why don’t we get there at once?”

The wrinkled native smiled amiably again, and remarked “By-’n-by”; but that seemed to be the extent of his English, for after that he only shook his head and smiled.

“This is a fine thing, isn’t it?” said Rob. “I wonder what your uncle Dick will think of us. Anyway, we’ve got our guns and blankets, and there’s a box of crackers and some canned tomatoes under the boat seat.”

At last the two natives began to jabber together excitedly. They turned and said something to the boys which the latter could not understand, and then, without further ado, made off inland and disappeared in the fog. Some moments elapsed before the boys understood what had happened, and indeed they had no means of knowing the truth, which was that the two natives, who were perfectly friendly, had started across to the Mission House of Wood Island, some two miles or more, in search of something to eat, and possibly in the wish of getting further instructions about these young men they found in their charge.

“Why don’t they come back?” asked Jesse, in the course of half an hour or so, during which all were growing more anxious than they cared to admit.

“Who knows how long ‘by-’n-by’ may mean? I’d like to get out of here,” added John.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Rob, after they had waited for perhaps another half-hour. “These men have left us, and now we’ll leave them in turn. The sea is pretty rough, but this is a good boat and we can run her. We can go back that way, and get to the mouth of the channel, because I noticed which way the wind was blowing. Town must be off to the left, and we can keep track of the shore by the echo. I’m for pulling out right away.”

“So am I,” assented John. And Jesse, although he looked rather sober at the sight of the white-topped waves, agreed.

By great good-luck they were able to push the dory out with the receding crest of a big wave, and the first thing they knew they were pitching up and down in the white water. By hard pulling they got the boat offshore, and being there outside the more broken water made fairly good headway, although they found the boat heavy and hard to pull.

“We can’t make it,” said Rob, at last. “She’s too big for us to pull against the wind, and that’s the way we must go if we go toward town. I’m afraid we’ll have to go ashore again.”

“Look, look there!” cried John, suddenly.

They all stopped rowing for a moment and gazed ahead.

A towering ridge of white, foamy waves arose directly in front of them, higher than their heads had they stood upright in the boat. Swirling and breaking, it seemed to advance and march down upon them. The surface of the water was agitated as though some great creature were lashing it into foam. But soon they saw that this was something worse than any creature of the deep.

“It’s the tide-rips!” cried Rob, anxiously. “The tide-bore is going out the channel—I’ve heard them tell of that before. Look out, now! Give way, and put her into it quartering, or it’ll swamp us, sure!”

VI ADRIFT ON THE OCEAN

A thousand angry, choppy waves pitched alongside the dory, as though reaching up and trying to come aboard. Time and again the boys thought all was lost. Instead of passing through the tide-rips, the dory seemed to be carried on with them as they shifted.

The tide, indeed, had now turned, and with its turn the fog began to lift. Getting some idea of what now was happening, Rob undertook to make back toward the shore, where they could hear the surf roaring heavily. Perhaps it was lucky they did not succeed in this attempt, for the boat would no doubt have been crushed like an eggshell on the rocks. Instead, they began to float down parallel with the coast, carried on the crest of the big tide-bore which every day passes down the east coast of Kadiak between the long, parallel islands which make an inland channel many miles in extent. As the boys called now they could hear an echo on each side of them, and indeed could see the loom of the rock-bound shore; but all about them hissed and danced these fighting waves, tossing the dory a dozen ways at once, and all the time there came astern the long roll of the mighty Pacific in its power, the Japan current and the coast tide in unison forcing a boiling current down the rocky channel. Escape was hopeless.

“Boys,” said Rob, his face perhaps a trifle pale, “we can’t get out of this. All we can do is to run.”

The others looked at him silently.

“She’s a splendid boat,” went on Rob, trying to be cheerful. “She rides like a chip. I believe if we keep low down she’ll be safe, for it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse.”

A powerful steamboat, if it were caught under precisely these conditions, could have done little more than drift down the channel. The boys resigned themselves to their fate. Now and again the fog shut down. Wild cries of sea-birds were about them. Now and then the leap of a great dolphin feeding in the tide splashed alongside, to startle them yet more. Each moment, as they knew, carried them farther and farther from their friends, and deeper and deeper into dangers whose nature they could only guess.

“I wish we’d never left Valdez,” said Jesse, at last, his lip beginning to quiver.

“That’s no way to talk,” said Rob, sternly. “The right thing to do when you’re in a scrape is to try to get out of it. This tide can’t run clear round the world, because your uncle Dick said this island wasn’t over one hundred and fifty miles long, and there must be any number of bays and coves. Pull some crackers out of that box and let’s eat a bite.”

“That’s the talk,” said John, more cheerfully. “We’ll get ashore somewhere. It’s no use to worry.”

John was always disposed to be philosophical; but the great peculiarity about him was that he was continually hungry. He found the crackers now rather dry and hard to eat, so worried open a can of tomatoes with his hunting-knife, complaining all the time that they had no water to drink.

Their hasty meal seemed to do them good. Finding that their dory was still afloat, they began to lose their fears. Indeed, little by little, the height of the waves lessened. The tide was beginning to spread in the wider parts of the channel.

“Let’s try the oars again,” said Rob, at last.

To their delight they found that they could give the dory some headway. But in which direction should they row? Small wonder that in these crooked channels, with the wind shifting continually from the shore and the veil of fog alternately lifting and falling again, they took the wrong course.

They had now been afloat for some hours, although at that season of the year there is daylight for almost the entire twenty-four hours, so that they had no means of guessing at the time. They had passed entirely across the mouths of two or three of the great inland bays, which make into the east shore of Kadiak Island. At the time when they flattered themselves they were making their best headway back toward town, they were really going in the opposite direction, caught by the stiff tide which was running between Ugak Island and the east coast of Kadiak. In all, they remained in the dory perhaps ten or twelve hours, and in that time they perhaps skirted more than one hundred miles of shore-line, counting the indentations of the bays, although in direct distance they did not reach a total of more than fifty or sixty miles. At the head of one of these bays, had they but known it, there were salmon rivers where fishing-boats occasionally stopped; but all that they could do was to use the best of their wisdom and their strength, and they kept on, steadily pulling, believing that the tide had turned, whereas in truth they were going down the coast still with the tide and approaching the mouth of the vast crooked bay known as Kaludiak, half-way down the east coast of the great island. Thus they were leaving behind a possible place of rescue. Although their first fright had in time somewhat worn away, they were now tired, hungry, thirsty, and, in fact, almost upon the point of exhaustion.

All at once, at an hour which in the United States would probably have been taken to be just before sundown, but which really was nearly eleven o’clock at night, a change in the contour of the coast caused the wind to whip around once more. The fog, broken into thousands of white, ropy wreaths, was swept away upward. There stretched off to the right the entrance of a vast bay, with many arms, whose blue waters, far less turbulent than these of the open sea, led back deep into the heart of a noble mountain panorama of snow-covered peaks and flattened valleys.

“It’s almost like Resurrection Bay, or Valdez Harbor,” said Rob. “At any rate, I’m for going in here. There will be streams coming down out of the mountains, and we can stop somewhere and make camp.”

VII THE HUT ON THE BEACH

Rob pointed to a valley which made down to the bay some distance ahead.

“There must be a stream somewhere in there,” said he. “Besides, it looks flat, as though there were a beach. We’d better pull over there.”

So, weary as they were, they tugged on the oars until finally they drew opposite this narrow beach. A long roll from the sea came down the bay, but the surf did not break here so angrily, so that they made a landing with nothing more serious than a good wetting. They pulled the dory as far up the beach as they could, and made it fast by the painter