“The place where I finally settled down was in a little valley on one of the branches of the Tukuvuk between two ranges of hills running from five hundred to maybe three thousand feet high. Messy-looking place, it was; all littered up, as if the Lord had a few sizable chunks of stuff left over and just threw ’em down there to be out of the way.
“But the gold was there; I could almost smell it. I’d been getting some mighty nice color in my pan; that’s what made me decide to stay there. I got there about the middle of July, and I spent the rest of the summer sinking holes in the edge of the creek and along the benches above. What I found indicated that there was a mighty rich vein of the yellow metal thereabouts, with one end of it laying in a pocket of the stuff. If I could locate that pocket, I thought, I’d have the United States treasury backed off the map. But I wasn’t able to run the pocket down by taking bearings from my holes, because the holes didn’t line up in any particular direction.
“What with my interest in trying to get a line on that pocket, I didn’t notice that the season was getting late. But I’d brought in enough grub to last the winter through, so that didn’t matter. Just the same it was up to me to get some sort of shelter over my head, so I hustled up a one-room shack about twelve by twelve I cut from the timber on the slopes with my hand-ax. Nothing fancy, but tight enough. I put in a fireplace and cut and stacked a lot of wood outside.
“That done, winter was on me; I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to have one more try at finding the pocket that spewed the yellow metal all around there. As I said, I got no information from the holes sunk, and it was pure guesswork. I guessed I’d find my pocket on the side of a certain hill, about two hundred feet above creek level. A glacier flowed down the side of that hill through a little gulley, and my idea was that the ice ground away at the pocket and brought the metal down to the creek, and the creek scattered it. This theory was borne out to some extent by the fact that my best showings of color always came from a point a little below the conjunction of the creek and glacier.
“It was snowing the morning I took my pan and shovel and started up the side of the hill, keeping to the edge of the glacier. It wasn’t much of a glacier for size; say, about fifteen feet wide. I could see it winding up the side of the hill until it went out of sight through a cleft about a thousand feet up. Fed by a lake up there, probably.
“I had climbed the hill maybe a hundred feet, following the edge of the glacier, when I caught sight of a dark blotch in the edge of the ice. It was about two feet under the surface. I brushed away the film of snow to have a look. The ice was as clear as a crystal, of a blue color. And what d’you think, MacNeal? It was a man’s body!”
He paused and gave me a quick glance. He wanted to see how I took that, I presume.
“The body of a man,” he went on. “And the queerest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He was lying on his belly and I didn’t get a look at the front of him just then, but I knew it was a man all right. He was covered all over with long hair like a--well, like a bear, say. Not a stitch of clothes.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Why, I was that surprised I let my pan and shovel drop and stared at the damn thing with the eyes near popping out of my head. What would anybody do, finding a hair-covered thing like that frozen in a glacier? I won’t deny I was a bit scared, MacNeal.
“Well, I stood there staring at the thing for I don’t know how long. It didn’t occur to me, then, to ask myself how the thing got there. Certainly the idea of fossils or prehistoric men didn’t enter my head. I didn’t think much about anything; I just stood there gaping.
“You know me, MacNeal; I guess I’m pretty soft-hearted in some respects. I’d stop to bury a dead dog I found in the road. I knew I wouldn’t rest easy until I’d cut that thing out of the glacier and given it decent burial. Moreover, I didn’t want it where I’d be seeing it when I went to work on that hillside in the spring; and it would surely be there in the spring, because I imagine that glacier didn’t move an inch a year.
“So I went back to the shack and got my ax, and with none too good a heart for the job turned to and made the chips fly. It took me about three hours to get the thing out of the glacier. You see, as I came down to it I went slow; I don’t care to hack even a dead man.
“Say, MacNeal, can you imagine what it meant to me, digging a corpse out of a glacier down there on the side of a hill in that devil-ridden country? No, you can’t, and that’s the truth. You’d have to go through it to know. It was hell. I don’t want any more of it in mine. Nor what followed, either.”
“What was that?” I asked when he deliberated.
“You’ll hear,” he answered, and went on: “I got the thing out at last, little chunks of ice clinging to it, and dragged it ashore, if a glacier has a shore. It froze me to look at the thing with those little chunks of ice sticking to the long hair. Once, at Dawson, I’d seen a man pulled out of the Yukon, ice clinging to him. That was different, though; at Dawson there was a crowd to sort of buck a man up. I turned the thing over on its back to see what it looked like in front.”
“Well?” said I.
“You’ve seen apes, MacNeal?”
“This thing looked like that?” I countered, beginning to connect up his first queer questions with what he was telling me. “You don’t mean it, Chris!”
“I’m telling you,” he nodded solemnly. “An ape man, that’s what it was. More man than ape, if you ask me. For instance, the face was flatter than an ape’s, and the forehead and chin were more pronounced. The nose was flat, but it wasn’t an ape’s nose. And the hands and feet were like those of a man. Oh, it was a man, all right. The thing that convinced me, I think, was the knife gripped in its hand.”
“The knife you have there?” I inquired.
“This very knife,” he answered.
“What then, Chris?” I urged him to go on.
“I had a good look at that thing and started for my shack. Yes, MacNeal, I ran, and I’m not ashamed to say so. It scared me. Ugliest thing I ever saw. Eyes wide open, glaring and glinting, and the thick lips parted to show the nastiest set of fangs I ever saw in the mouth of man or beast. Why, I tell you the damned thing looked _alive_! No wonder I scooted. You would have done the same. Anybody would.
“Back in the shack, I sat down on my bunk to think it over. And it was while I sat there trying to puzzle it out that I remembered that theory about the earth tipping over. That gave me a hint of what I had run up against. Of course, I’d heard about fossils and parts of the skeletons of prehistoric men being found. Had I found, not a fossil or part of a skeleton, but the prehistoric man himself? That knocked the wind out of me. If that were the case my name would go down in history and I would be asked to give lectures before scientific societies and such. Consider it, MacNeal.
“I tell you, I couldn’t quite grasp the thing. It was incredible. There I was in this year of our Lord, with the intact corpse of a man who had lived God only knows how many centuries ago. That body, understand, could well be the key to the mystery of the origin of mankind. It might possibly settle the Darwinian theory forever, one way or the other. It was a pretty serious business for me, don’t you see?
“Well, I decided to preserve the thing until I could get out and make a report of the find. But how to preserve it? Of course if I had left it in the glacier it would have kept indefinitely, like a side of beef in cold storage. I was afraid to put it back in the hole in the glacier and freeze it in again with water I carried from the creek; the creek water might exert some chemical action that would ruin the thing. And if I let it lay where it was the snow would cover it, form a warm blanket, and probably cause it to decompose, then I’d have nothing left but the skeleton. I wanted to save the thing just as I’d found it; maybe the scientists would find a way to embalm it.
“I finally hit on the plan of keeping it in an ice pack. That would turn the trick until the weather took on the job. It hadn’t turned bitter cold yet. I tell you, it was a nasty job keeping that thing iced with chunks I chopped from the glacier, and to make it worse the weather stayed moderate for a couple of weeks. Then, suddenly, the mercury in my little thermometer went down with a rush and it got stinging cold. I carried the thing to the shack and stood it up against the wall outside where it couldn’t be covered with snow, and lashed it there.
“Can you imagine me going to sleep in my bunk in the shack every night after that, with that thing standing against the wall outside not two feet away? Of course you can’t. It frazzled my nerves, and more than once I was tempted to cut a hole in the ice on the creek and chuck the damn thing in where I’d never see it again. But no, I had to save it for the scientists and get my name in history; that idea got to be an obsession with me. I knew well enough that if ever I told people the tale I’m telling you now, without some proof of it, I’d get laughed at.”