Adventure Magazine Cover — page 69: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ny ¥ maven oo it] Li) i when ates » | HU “a 4 ie vil reer il | : % 4 a3 Ss si Be) <p Sag ssp! aa ie 1G) ya Fh whee NI eaer zs , i “ene HL }}hiaer 9 el eee ai ea Pee SN) LA ESE Tt F is H ne I | ! | AAA | ' 1p \ IN | BS | | Noe aril j OF, | ¢ ICLIXGS K WANPUUPMORUATROTINLRNIUTHISTIOAIRITOONEOIILUD EUR ITTLTINDO EERO DI Author of “In the Maw of the Ice,” “Jeff the Guesser,” etc. N THE fall, havoc reigns on the tidal rivers and lagoons of the Arctic coast. Winter on the northern tun- dra, facing the sea, is a simple affair. Calm and great cold alternate with scourging, deadly blizzards; but the water that was in sea and rivers, is as fixed as the land. Spring unlocks the ice and moves it grandly forth, out of the ken of men. Summer dapples with light and shade the dun hills and coastal plains. But October rouses this coast to ram- pancy—as Jim Knight and Joe Woods learned to their sorrow when, weeks before their planning, they bucked scum ice all the way across Kotzebue Sound, broke the crust nearly to the head of Buckland lagoon, arid, wet, half frozen and cursing volubly, made shore and camp on a dismal, rocky point, getting their outfit ashore a box or a sack at atime. They had three dogs in their whale boat and hickory strips and sticks for as fine a basket sled as old Alaskans could make. The makings for it were hardly a sub- stitute for the sled itself; yet a sled then and there would have done them no good, for there was no snow. The air was deadly cold and only winds and tides and the cur- rent of the river playing the game of chaos. Chaos, indeed, it seemed to these men from the interior. A south wind blowing the Pacific water into the Arctic and they 67 beheld the miracle of an off-shore wind. piling the sea on the beaches and backing the waters of the lagoon and river until the bordering flats were flooded, the promon- tories half-submerged, and their beached outfit threatened with drowning. So, higher on the rocks they moved it, sweating at the task all night in a dark so dense they bumped each other, coming and going. ~ Then, while the risen waters were still sustained by the south wind that blew over half a continent, new ice formed—half a foot of it in a night and a day. And when the water finally subsided this ice sheet was lowered upon the flats capping the summit of every boulder and rock of the lagoon shores, and making queer ice-mushrooms, which later were built up by the snow into strange, ghostly shapes. Yet fall was not through with its tricks. The pent waters of the river, released at last, found entry between the old and new ice-crusts, and, coursing down the wide la- goon, raised the new ice to a normal level and depressed the old, wearing it through here and there in a way no man but an Eskimo could know. Knight and Woods knew nothing of this, when the weather settled, but that the la- goon seemed open again along the lines of its normal channels, and if they could manage to obtain a flat boat or some sort they could get their outfit—in which they CS Eecom (@) (ele) ‘boo Br thi tim cad de & ‘