Читать книгу Gold Hunting in Alaska онлайн

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As we rested ourselves, sheltered in a niche of the summit crag safe from the chilling wind, a little red-backed mouse ran from a crevice and scampered through the moss straight to a huckleberry patch, his own winter garden. Clouds began to gather on the highest peaks, and we started down, leaving them behind.

The moss was slippery and we found that we could slide down the steep pitches easier than we could walk or jump. I remembered seeing the little Sioux slide down the hills of Dakota in government skillets, and immediately sat down on my shovel, steering with the handle just as I had seen the Indian boys do, and made terrific progress. I was soon able to pick myself up, feigning to examine a ledge of quartz while I rubbed my posterior, and looked back for Clyde.

He tried sitting in the gold-pan and started all right, but soon found that he couldn't steer. He went at a frightful rate, tearing down the steep slide backwards, until he, too, found himself examining the geological strata while giving some attention to his anatomy. And then we had to hunt for the gold-pan which, from the musical sounds which grew fainter and fainter and finally died away altogether, must have got switched off into the bottomless abyss. Will it be found some day generations hence and borne off in triumph as proof of a prehistoric race? It was a race. Such is gold-hunting in far-away Alaska.