We did not allow the 8th to tempt us on the lake so readily, and the day was employed in taking astronomical observations, arranging our photographic apparatus and similar work, until early afternoon. At 1.30 P.M. a favorable breeze from the south sprang up, and by 2 o'clock was raging in a gale, blowing over the tent where we were eating our midday meal, filling the coffee and eatables with sand and gravel, and causing a general scampering and chasing after the lighter articles of our equipment, which took flight in the furious wind. Most exasperating of all, it quickly determined us to break camp, and in less than half an hour we had all of our effects stored on the vessel, and were pulling off the beach, when just as our sail was spread the wind died down to a zephyr hardly sufficient to keep away the mosquitoes. At 7 o'clock the lake was as quiet as can be imagined, and after remaining almost motionless for another hour we pulled into the steep bank, made our beds on the slanting declivity at a place where it was impossible to pitch a tent, and went to sleep only to be awakened at night by showers of rain falling upon our upturned faces. We congratulated ourselves that we were in a place where the drainage was good.
In the shallow water near the shores of Lake Kluk-tas-si, especially where a little bar of pretty white sand put out into the banks of glacier mud, one could always find innumerable shoals of small graylings not over an inch in length, and our Indians immediately improvised a mosquito bar into a fish net, catching hundreds of the little fellows, which were used so successfully as bait with the larger fish of the lake that we finally thought the end justified the means.
Terminal Butte of the Hancock Hills (on the right).]
Instead of dying down as we spread sail early in the morning of the 9th, the wind actually freshened, upsetting all our prognostications, and sending us along at a rate that allowed us to enter the river early in the forenoon, and I doubt if the besiegers of a fortress ever saw its flag go down with more satisfaction than we saw the rude wall-tent sail come down forever, and left behind us the most tedious and uncertain method of navigation an explorer was ever called upon to attempt--a clumsy raft on a motionless lake, at the sport of variable winds. Our joy was somewhat dampened at sticking several times on the bars, one of which delayed us over half an hour.