The saber-tusk walrus

Contents

Chapter Page

I A Mad Thrust . 9

II The Long Trail. .... 25

Chapter I A Mad Thrust

To say that Byron Snowder was surprised at the thing he saw would have expressed it mildly. To say that he was perfectly astounded at what he himself did would he to express his feelings not at all.

For some time he had been wending his way in and out among the jagged ice piles that line the shore of Behring Strait on the Alaskan side. It had been ghostly enough, this wan¬ dering, lighted only by the mellow glow of the moon and the white twinkle of the stars, the frozen surface of the sea taking on the ap¬ pearance of a vast graveyard; each upended cake seeming a marble tombstone.

“ Enough tombstones for every poor sailor who lost his life at sea since life began,” he had told himself. Just at that moment he had heard, or thought he had heard, a shuffling sound behind him. He had turned quickly but had seen no living thing.

“ I must have imagined it,” he told himself. “ Spooky out here; have to get down to busi¬ ness. Ought to be a pool about here some¬ where. 9 9

He was hunting, yet he carried no rifle. In one hand he balanced a single shaft some six feet in length. This wooden shaft, the size of a shovel handle, was tipped at the upper end with some sixteen inches of ivory, and at the other with eight inches of heavy bone, into which was set a slender shaft of ivory six inches long. This ivory-shaft was tipped by a bit of bone into which was set a point of steel with edge as keen as a razor.

This was an Eskimo harpoon. Eskimo hunt¬ ers use it for catching seal and walrus. The point of bone and steel is loose from the shaft, but is fastened to some forty feet of stout rawhide rope.

When one has driven this point into the

The Saher-Tusk Walrus hide of his prey, the shaft drops off. The rawhide rope is held by the sportsman. As long as he does not lose hold of the rope, the seal or walrns is at his mercy.

Byron, who had but recently learned to wield this strange hunting implement, had come out in search of a little brown seal. A steak or two from it would not be unwelcome in camp. The heart and liver would be excellent. The remainder would be fed to the dogs.

“ Strange how a fellow gets into such a place as this,” he told himself. “ Strange that I should be way up here on the top of the world, seventy-five miles from the Arctic Circle.”

Just as he said that, his eye caught sight of a dark patch of water straight ahead. “ Just the place,” he breathed. “ There ought to be a whole colony of seals living there.”

Then, just as he turned to walk toward it, he caught again that shuffle. Quickly following the shuffle came a mysterious sound, a loud hiss like the hiss of a goose.

Wheeling suddenly about, he all but fell back¬ ward; his eyes bulged; his knees trembled. A ghostlike apparition had appeared just behind him.

Not five yards from him, slowly rising upon his haunches, was the largest animal he had ever seen outside of a circus.

“ A hear! ” his lips framed the word, “ a mammoth polar bear.”

As the creature rose, he appeared to climb out upon the very sky, so tall he was. His mouth was open in a broad grin. Two half cir¬ cles of ivory teeth gleamed in the moonlight. His forepaws swaying in air seemed the broken boughs of some giant tree.

This was the thing that had surprised him. But his own action surprised him fully as much, for without one single second of consideration of consequences, but quite as if by instinct, he poised the harpoon in mid-air, then hurled it right at the very center of the bear’s ample breast.

The instant the shaft had sped, he realized the fatal blunder, realized it as fully as he might had he had a month to meditate upon it. The harpoon could do nothing more than inflict a painful and irritating wound. Left to

himself, the hear might have dropped upon

all fours and ambled awav. But now —

The expression of hurt surprise that flashed over the bear’s face as he suddenly doubled into a heap, was all but human.

He fell upon the shaft. It snapped like a pipestem. This action must have embedded the point more firmly between the bear’s ribs for, with a roar of fury, he rose and went scram¬ bling away.

Open-mouthed, the boy stood and watched him go. He was glad the bear w T as gone; the line attached to the point would be lost, but he was getting off easy at that. He was —

Suddenly, to his great consternation, he felt himself lurch forward. He had been jerked, not struck. He was thrown flat upon his stomach. With the breath knocked from him, with senses reeling, he was dragged forward over the rough ice at a terrific rate. His confused senses told him what had happened. When he had started hunting, he had tied the loose end of the walrus-hide rope of his harpoon about his waist. Jerry

Maxwell, his pal, had remonstrated, had told him it was not safe, hut he had said that since he was not to hunt walrus but only the harm¬ less, seventy-five pound seal, it was safe enough and he was sure not to lose the seal.

“ And now the bear has me,” he moaned. “ He’ll drag me to some dark pool of water, plunge beneath its surface and drag me after him. That will be the end of me.” Byron felt helpless and forlorn.

At that instant, he remembered the pool of water he had been approaching when the bear found him. He wondered if the bear was go¬ ing in that direction. In his confusion he could not tell.

Mad]y his mind struggled with the problem before him. How was he to escape? The rawhide rope was strong, strong enough to hold a two-ton walrus. To hope that it might break was useless. Vain, too, was the hope that he might loosen the rope. As he shot forward he heard the rope sing like a bass viol string. The knot was behind him; he could feel it press into the muscles of his back. The rope had slipped forward. He was being dragged by the shoul¬ ders.

Two things were favorable: He was dressed in tough native-tanned skin garments and there had been a recent storm which had heaped snow against every jagged bit of ice. The skin gar¬ ment protected him from cuts; the snow smoothed his path.

The whole thing would have been amusing had it not promised to end so tragically. 4 4 Like being towed by an elephant,’’ he thought. “ Bet that bear weighs a ton. Pity he hasn’t a real load to haul.”

This thought suggested the possibility of somehow hitching that rope to some two-ton ice cake. The thought was instantly abandoned. How was one to get an opportunity to hitch it to anything? He was not being given time enough so much as to scramble to his feet.

There came a second’s pause in his wild ride after the great white bear. Byron’s heart stopped beating, then plunged on as hope loomed. He saw what had happened. The bear, having crossed over a great pile of ice frag-

16 The Boys’ Big Gcvnie Series

merits, had descended on the other side. The rope had caught in a crevice and had stuck.

Byron, half upon his feet, was feeling back¬ ward for the knot in the rope when, with a jerk that threw him flat and knocked the wind quite out of him, the bear tore the rope free.

The next instant the bov felt himself drawn

*

up over the ice pile with the speed of a dry willow leaf blown upward by an Arctic gale.

Sudden as was his rise, his descent was even more sudden. So much faster was his drop than the speed of the bear that more than three feet of slack was gained.

“ If only he’d go over a high enough hill,” he told himself, “I’d get enough slack to set me free.”

Then a terrible thought came to him. As he reached the crest of the ice pile, he saw dark spots in the distance; three of them; dark pools of water. Far away they might be, but not so far but that the bear might cover the distance in a short time. Once a, pool was reached, instant death by drowning seemed inevitable.

And he must not drown. Suddenlv he recalled the fact that, locked in his own mind, was a secret, a great discovery he had made that morning. Major Clinton, head of their hunting party, must he told. Until that secret was shared by someone who could be trusted, he could not, must not, die.

One little gleam of hope came to him. Be¬ side one of those pools he had seen a dark speck. The pools were far away and he had not, in that flash of time, been able to make out the nature of that speck. Was it a brown seal asleep on the ice, or was it a hunter? A hunter might bring him hope. Jerry, his pal, was somewhere hunting on this very stretch of ice. But his heart sank; Jerry carried only a harpoon, such a one as he had so foolishly sent crashing into the bear’s breast. A poor weapon in such an emergency, yet Jerry would do his best.

His hope was short and ended in awesome fashion, for the bear, having arrived at the edge of a dark pool, plunged, without a pause, into its stinging depths.

The rope was thirty feet long. In a few seconds Byron would be in the water. In less than a minute he supposed he would be dead. With a little gasp he seized the rope with both hands, in a mad effort to arrest the movement of the bear. The result was somewhat sur¬ prising. The bear was now swimming, not running. He paused, wheeled half about and looked back as much as to say: “ Now why did you do that? ”

Not knowing the power of a creature swim¬ ming in the water, the boy for the space of a few seconds was led to hope that he might be able to hold the bear in one position while he drew up the rope, gained some slack, slid the knot round to the front of him, untied it and fled.

This hope was short-lived. After one good look at the boy, the bear resumed his journey. His speed was not as great as upon the ice, but there was power enough there to move an object ten times the size of the boy.

For six seconds Bvron’s mind was filled with wonderings regarding death by drowning. In those six seconds he died six separate deaths.

He froze, he strangled, was suffocated, and who knows what other deaths he died. And still he lived.

That he should die, he doubted not in the least. True, the bear had not disappeared be¬ neath the surface of the pool. He was swim¬ ming straight for the center of it. But sooner or later he would dive. That might be at the center or at the far edge.

All of a sudden Byron felt himself slide off the edge of the ice. The next instant he plunged into the stinging water. Even here he gathered a little hope. He was a strong swimmer. Might he not outswim the bear and gain enough slack to effect his escape?

Again hope died. It appeared that as an athlete the bear had him beat ten ways. With his Australian crawl at its best, Byron could not gain an inch.

Without a second backward look the bear swam straight on. Struggling only to keep his head above water, the boy expected every moment to be his last. Passing the center of the pool, the bear swam for the far side.

Straight on he paddled. Now he had covered half the remaining distance, now two-thirds, now all but a few yards. The critical moment had arrived. Hoping against hope, Byron told himself that the bear would climb upon the ice beyond, that he would be dragged back to a safe position on the ice, and that he might yet escape.

The next instant hope utterly forsook him, for the bear, with a grace that was maddening, tossed his head high to execute a semicircle with his body and disappeared beneath the surface.

Game to the last, the boy struggled madly to free himself, until it became evident that unless he followed the example of the bear and dived, his brains would be dashed out against the solid wall of ice that lay before him. Then he took one long, deep breath and shot down¬ ward.

That there was now a gleam of hope he did not dream, yet practice and instinct compelled him to hold his breath as long as it was humanly possible.

He felt the water rushing by him. There was a swift current beneath the ice. They were going with it. That the ice above him was of uneven thickness he knew from the lights and shadows that flitted past him.

His lungs began to pain him. There was a cramp in his chest. Like a copper kettle be¬ ing hammered, his head rang. In another second his mouth would come open or he would fall into unconsciousness. Then all would be over. Tor¬ tured as he was, he now longed that the end might come quickly.

But what was this? Even as he was taking a last leave of the bright world of sunshine and flowers, of happy thrills and wild adventures, a dark spot appeared above and before him. A dark spot meant open water. There was yet hope. With a determination that set him writh¬ ing in the water, he held on until with three master strokes he brought himself to the surface of this second pool. With a loud “ Oof,” he released the air that was bursting his head, then, dropping flat on the Surface of the water, he allowed himself to be dragged forward like a log. The truth was, he was too near dead to offer further resistance.

What had happened came to him vaguely now. The bear, preferring swimming to climbing, had swum beneath the ice from one pool to the other. What would he do next?

The answer was not far to seek. This second pool was narrow. On reaching its farther shore Bruin climbed dripping from the sea. After shaking himself three times, he proceeded to climb over a great pile of broken ice.

Byron had been dragged all but against the ice that lined the pool; the bear had completely disappeared when the draw upon the rope sud¬ denly ended. Summoning every available ounce of his remaining strength, the boy dragged him¬ self from the water to the ice. There, too weak to do more, he lay still, while his water-soaked garments froze into boards.

As strength came oozing back, he dragged himself to a sitting position. A feeble struggle brought the rope round to a position where the knot was on his chest. Had this happened fifteen minutes before he would have felt himself saved, but now with his fingers wet and benumbed, with the knot frozen to the hardness of stone, he was powerless to effect his own rescue. In his last extremity he thought of the dark object on the edge of the pool, the one he had seen when he was far away. Hope revived a little; help might come. And in the meantime, why had the bear paused? He was too thankful for this pause to wonder much. To be dragged forward as he was now would be torture indeed.

But the bear did not move; or if he did, he moved toward Byron and not away from him. At once the thought came to him that he might yet be attacked and eaten by the bear.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet to thrash his arms and jump madly about in an effort to soften his frozen garments.

“ I’ll give him a race for it,” he told him¬ self through chattering teeth.

All of a sudden, he stood still. A rifle shot crashed out. There came another, and yet an¬ other.

“ A hunter! ” he cried, yet.”

44 There’s a chance

But at that instant he felt a sudden tug at the rope. His heart sank as he went crashing upon the ice. That one terrific tug, however, was all he felt for some seconds. When there came another it was of a different sort. There was not the force to it. It was more as if someone was trying the rope out to see if it was fas¬ tened.

“ Someone may have wounded the bear,” he told himself hopefully. “ Perhaps he is trying to drag himself away.”

At that instant he saw a small brown head poked up above the ice pile over which the bear had clambered. The head was followed by a pair of narrow shoulders that belonged to a very small brown man who carried a prodigious rifle.

The small man’s eyes followed the rawhide rope until it ended around Byron’s chest.

“ Oh! ” he said disappointedly, “ was that your bear? ”

Chapter II The Long Trail

Long as the time had seemed to Byron as he had been dragged by a giant of a polar hear at the end of the rawhide rope, and rough as the ice trail had been, it was a much longer trail that had brought him to the White North. The trail had begun in this wise:

They had been seated by a fire in Bear Canyon Inn, of the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington, he and his pal, Jerry Maxwell — Jerry had been asleep in his chair — when a stranger had entered. This stranger carried a leather hag from which protruded some mysterious looking shafts. At first Byron thought them a bow and arrow.

“ Can you bend a how as heavy as that? ” he had asked impulsively.

The stranger did not answer at once, hut stood alternately blinking at the light and staring at Byron, as if to draw the answer to the question from his own eyes.

This had given Byron an opportunity to study the man. He was tall, broad-shouldered, middleaged. His hair was jet black; so, too, were his eyes. These eyes were the striking part of him. They gleamed from beneath his bushy eyebrows like jewels of black jade. “ If a person’s got a really keen mind,” one of Byron’s teachers had once said to him, “ he can’t hide the fact. You’ll see it in his eyes.”

Byron had gone this far in his study of the stranger when the man spoke.

“ Why, no,” he smiled, “ I can’t bend it; but why should I want to? ”

Byron opened his eyes wide. Evidently he had made some mistake. The thing he had thought was a bow and arrow was perhaps some¬ thing else.

“ Why, I—” he stammered, scarcely know¬ ing what to say.

“ Perhaps you thought it was a bow and arrow,” smiled the stranger as the light of a new idea flashed across his mind. “ Of course i you might. Hadn’t thought of that before. That’s not what it is, however.”

Stooping down, he unlaced a thong that held the bag tight about the shafts and, the next instant, held before the astonished boy two instruments which were beyond doubt some form of native hunting equipment, but from what land Byron could not tell.

“ Harpoons,” said the man simply, “ Eskimo harpoons. This small one is more or less out of date. It was used in taking seals as they slept on the ice. The Eskimos shoot them now. But the large one, the one with a shaft that no man could bend, is of the type that is used quite as much now as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. The natives hunt walrus with them in the open sea, in skin-boats, ten or twelve miles from land. Exciting sport, I can tell vou.

“ You see,” he said as he slid easily into a chair by the boy’s side, “ if you shoot a walrus in the water, you’re almost sure to lose him. He’s hard to kill; takes several shots some¬ times to do him in. Then after he is killed, like as not lie sinks and you never see him again. Not only that, but he seldom travels alone. Perhaps there are a thousand of his tribe within a half mile of you. You have a four-ton boat and can carry home the de¬ sirable parts of three or four of the big beasts. But the moment you shoot, the whole herd dis¬ appears and the one you get is the only one you carry away, providing you get him.

“ If you harpoon them, however, you can run your skin-boat right in amongst them. They’ll come up under your boat, go leaping about in the water near your boat and have a barking, bellowing, regular walrus picnic with¬ out being at all disturbed by your presence. You can even harpoon three or four of them and lash them to your boat and still they pay no attention to you. When you’ve harpooned as many as you can carry home, you begin to shoot, but not till then.

“ This harpoon was made by an Eskimo. Some clever work on it. Want to look at it? ”

“ Be mighty pleased to,” Byron had said as he took the shaft in his hand.

It was a remarkable piece of handicraft, that walrus harpoon, Byron was not slow to see. Always a handicraft fan, he had himself done some notable work in leather and bronze, as well as in wood and iron. To niake a shaft such as the one he held in his hand required an expert knowledge of the working of ivory, rawhide leather, bone and steel. The evidence that the simplest kind of tools had been used in fashion¬ ing it was not far to seek, yet the rawhide thongs that bound the perfectly curved upper tip of walrus ivory was of even width and thickness. The hard whalebone which formed the socket for the setting of the steel-set point of bone was cut into a perfect cylinder. The wood shaft was round and smooth and was even decorated here and there with protruding buttons of ivory carved into the shape of seals’ heads.

“ Did an Eskimo do it? ” he asked at last.

“ Every bit,” the man nodded. “ That’s not all; they were doing it quite as well long years before the white man discovered Alaska. You see,” he smiled, “ we white folks think we are very wonderful folks; and we are, in our way;

but other people are wonderful in their way, too, and that is the part we too often forget. ”

Jerry Maxwell had awakened from his nap and had straightened up to listen. “ "What do you get with that? ” he asked, not having heard the first of the conversation.”

“ Walrus.”

“ And did you say you had hunted them in a skin-boat ten miles from land,” Byron asked with growing admiration.

“ More than once.”

“ How big is a walrus! ” asked Jerry.

“ Sometimes two tons; big as two or three fair-sized horses; tusks about two and a half feet long; not very dangerous though, not as much as vou’d think.”

44 Never dangerous! ”

“ Almost never.”

u Ever see ’em dangerous! ”

“ Only once; natives called him Old Saber- Tusk.”

“ But you got him! ” persisted Jerry, eager for a story.

“ We did not, and as far as I know, no one else ever has. I happen to know that his herd went south into Behring Strait last autumn without a single member of it being taken by the natives, or by anyone else. In fact, the natives are afraid of Saber-Tusk; they think he’s a haunt, a spirit of some dead walrus who has not slept quietly in his grave and has come back to get revenge for some lance-thrust in his side or a bullet in his heart. Superstitious lot, those Eskimos; got considerable Christianity on the outside, but at heart they are still the same old worshipers of dead spirits of whales, wal¬ ruses and polar bears.”

Both Byron and Jerry had leaned eagerly forward in the pleasant expectation of hearing a real hunting story from one who had acted a part in it.

‘ c And you didn’t get him? ” sighed Jerry. “ How — how’d he get away? ”

“ That,” the stranger had smiled, “ is rather a long story. I must turn in now. You see, I’ve been up at the Sunset Club giving a talk on ‘ Life in an Eskimo Village,’ and since it was rather a long one, I am naturally tired.

i

“ I expect to be here three days. To-morrow night I ’ll meet you right here in this very spot. ’ ’

“ Oh, Glory, that will be darby! ” Jerry had exclaimed.

“ It might interest you to know,” smiled the stranger, as he rose to go, “ that next month I am starting back over the old Yukon Trail and that I will then be headed for Behring Strait, which is the home of Old Saber-Tusk. Since I shall be there in the spring when he is sure to pass north into the Arctic Ocean, just as all walrus do, I hope to get another crack at him and to be more lucky than last time all right. See you to-morrow night.”

That “ to-morrow night ” proved a wonderful one for the two boys. Major Clinton might be at his best when on the lecture platform, but he never had a better audience than when, before the open fire of the hotel lobby, he told his tale of the far North to the two seventeen-vear-old lads. The love of adventure shone in the eyes of Byron Snowder and Jerry Maxwell as they leaned forward to catch every word of the story.

But it wasn’t one story; the major had been everywhere and had had many adventures. None, however, held the boys so enthralled as when the scene w r as laid in the shifting drifts of Arctic snows or out on the drifting ice of Behring Strait.

“ If I dared to I’d tell you the story of Old Saber-Tusk,” chuckled the major as he got up to stretch his legs — and give the boys a hint that he was growing tired.

“ Dared to? ” queried Byron perplexedly.

“ If I told you about him you’d never be satisfied till you went along with me on my next try for him.”

Of course that meant another story, and such a tale as it was, a regular thriller, part Eskimo legend and part the major’s own experience. It all centered about a gigantic walrus, Old Saber- Tusk, “ Azeezrukca (the terrible one),” as the natives called him.

Old Saber-Tusk was reputed by some to be as large as a whale, as ferocious as a barrenground grizzly bear and as tough as a driftwood tree. As for his tusks, they were like the im¬ mense ones found now and then and known to have belonged to that extinct monster, the mastodon. There were some, indeed, who went so far as to say that this was no walrus at all, but one of those long-list monsters who were known to have existed in the days when Eskimo folk-stories had their beginning.

Of course, few white men believed these wild tales; but then again, white men seldom hunt walrus and only one of them had seen Old Saber-Tusk, and that was Major Clinton.

The boys would willingly have listened till daylight, for they kept hoping that the major would tell of his own adventure with Old Saber- Tusk, but the story-teller finally yawned so em¬ phatically that the boys made haste to bid him good-night, not, however, without his promise to “ see them again.’’

The two pals were a long time in getting to sleep that night, for the stirring exploits of Old Saber-Tusk had made a profound impres¬ sion on their adventure-loving souls. The last thing Byron said as his heavy eyes refused to stay open another instant, was:

“Pm going along with the major when he goes back up there to get old Azeez — whatever his name was. If dad won’t let me go I’ll never forgive him — and I won’t let up till he gives in.”

Jerry’s only reply was a long grunt, but next morning he insisted he had distinctly said, “ Me too, old scout,”

The consent of their parents was not so easily obtained. It would be a long and danger¬ ous journey, and costly as well. But each boy had a small hoard of money he had earned in one way and another, and this he was willing to spend on the trip. Since their fathers had been adventurers when they were younger, and real¬ ized to the full the value of travel as a means of education, the affair was at last agreed upon, providing school matters might be arranged and the major’s consent obtained.