The Popular Magazine/Volume 67/Number 6/The Last Phantom

By Theodore Seixas Solomons

ARK HOWARD told me this story himself and I am convinced that it is true, for several reasons.

In the first place, I myself had an experience once that strongly savored of the thing that happened to him. In the next place, I have known the man all my life. We went into Alaska together and lived and worked there together for six months before we separated. He is one of the most truthful and colorlessly matter-of-fact persons I have ever known—which probably makes the phenomenon itself the more remarkable. In the third place, I have learned that his experience accords perfectly with the findings of abnormal psychology.

The reason I tell the story in the third person is because the thing that to my mind is the most difficult to believe—though it is not the most interesting circumstance by any means—needs the explanation of some one who knows the man himself, the kind of a man he was physically, to be specific. I'll come to that later.

Howard had been mining all winter in the Fortymile country and having his usual luck! In the spring he went to work sluicing for one of the big outfits on a near-by creek. They had a lot of low-grade dirt to shovel in; it was a long job and they did not finish until the hills were bare of snow and you could go overland anywhere on foot. That suited Howard first rate because he wanted to get to Circle City as soon as he could to meet some men with whom he had arranged to cross the Yukon-Tanana divide to the newly discovered placers of Fairbanks.

He figured—correctly enough—that from where he was, away up on a branch of the Fortymile, it would be easier and quicker to hike it across the western tributaries and on to the network of creeks running into the Yukon south of Circle than it would be to go on down the Fortymile to the Yukon and then virtually double back down that river to his destination. He knew he was a good walker—though he did not know how exceptionally good!—and he certainly did not know how poor was his sense of location—though I did; but unfortunately I was not there to warn him.

He started in the morning carrying absolutely nothing but a couple of sandwiches. He intended making a certain road house whose location had been described to him on Charlie Creek. It was a stiff walk but he expected to make it by six or seven o'clock in the afternoon. The route led along certain ridges between small creeks of the Fortymile watershed.

The Yukon basin is peculiar. Except for the big delta at the lower end and the Yukon Flats below Porcupine River there is no area of valley land in all its tremendous expanse from British Columbia to the Bering Sea. It is hills, hills—illimitable hills separated by a vast network of long gulches twisting and turning with the streams that drain them. Unless you know well a given locality you have nothing to guide you except the general direction of the main river itself and its nearest large confluent.

Thus, when Howard discovered—after he had walked all night—that he had missed the tributary of Charlie Creek and was on unfamiliar ground—being now out of the Fortymile watershed—he realized that all he knew of the lay of the land was that the Yukon was northward and the Tanana, its largest left-hand branch, was southward. But he felt sure that farther on—northwest ward—he would come upon trails and that these would lead to road houses. There was where he made his mistake. A man with a better knowledge of Yukon topography would have known that the region toward which he was bending his footsteps was a very sparsely mined one and that his chance was mighty small. He had eaten his two sandwiches at noon and of course he was ravenously hungry. It was the middle of May, light all night, and he had no difficulty whatever in seeing the caribou trails on which he walked along the divides between the gulches.

Notwithstanding the unsettled condition of this part of the Yukon he undoubtedly would have come upon trails leading to some camp had it not been for the fact that the spring freshets, converting every considerable tributary into a small, raging river, obliged him to keep pretty well along the southerly divide of Charlie Creek and its western neighbor. Pushed thus practically to the headwaters of the Tanana he was in unprospected country, in a maze of gulches that had rarely if ever been traversed.

By noon next day he had walked for thirty hours; and being tired and a little faint from hunger—that was what his ravenous appetite had changed to—he thought he'd rest and sleep. But the mosquitoes would not let him. So he drank water, tightened his trousers belt and “mushed” on. He felt first rate when he got going again—light and clean and not overhungry.

Somewhat to his surprise he found himself walking on and on through the evening into the twilight of midnight, and still on as it became lighter, the sun higher, the air warmer; and by nine o'clock, about, he thought it was warm enough to be able to sleep. He was on a treeless divide where he could not make a fire, though he purposed doing that—walking down to the spruce timber and making a smudge—if the mosquitoes bothered him.

The mosquitoes did bother him. They seemed to rise up from nowhere in spite of the fact that he was on a ridge. Wet moss, he found, fostered mosquitoes; and wet moss in Alaska is everywhere. He cursed himself for not having any netting, but of course he had not expected to sleep out. He fought mosquitoes for an hour or so—drowsily—and then decided that he would walk again and dip down into the nearest spruce timber. He was no longer hungry. He felt queer, but well, and fairly strong.

He carried out his intention, veering at an angle down a hill to a near-by clump of woods. That was about noon or a little after. Then when he tried to start a fire he found that his matches were wet from dampness that had pierced his overalls when, earlier in the day, he had lain down to sleep in the moss. Disgusted, he threw them away, set his teeth—and walked! He turned at an upward angle and gaining the divide again, struck into a moose trail that bore him west, southwest, northwest—according to the curves and twists of the ridge.

That was the afternoon of the third day. He had had nothing to eat for over fifty hours and had rested but two or three hours, sleeping not at all. But he walked on sturdily enough and this was the reason:

Mark Howard was, physically, a very unusual man. He was under medium height, compactly built, with a well-knit, muscular frame. He was naturally strong, probably. But however that may be, at least it is certain that from his earliest youth he had cultivated an unusual strength. He had never been an athlete nor taken part in any sports or exercises. But his lot had been that of a man who is more or less continually engaged in work that is preponderantly physical; and in all that he did he never used his brain—which was a very good one for other purposes—to save his muscles. It was instinctive to him to put forth all of his energy all of the time! And thus he had become possessed of a muscular system of a quality that enabled him in emergencies—he probably was not aware of the fact himself—to sustain a given exertion for twice or thrice as long as the average healthy out door man of his age, which was thirty-five. He was used to walking over the very trying surface of interior Alaska. He was fresh from the splendid setting up of a protracted period of sluicing. He was fit to the nth degree!

But the strains he underwent in this forced march without rest or sleep were more than muscular strains. His nervous system was not equal to the tasks to which his tremendous physical endurance subjected it. He himself discovered that fact next day—the fourth day.

The third night he hoped for sleep, failed to get it—though the mosquitoes had not been numerous, it being rather too cool for them—and wondered if he had better per severe in the effort to sleep, even to letting the mosquitoes bite him at will. Suddenly it occurred to him that since he was running a race with starvation he had better keep going as long as he could. It was common sense that in sleeping he would be continuing to use up his body fuel, even though the rate would be slower. He might be compelled to rest in order to keep going but he reasoned that if he were to rest before he absolutely had to that meant he would stagger and fall some miles before he had to—some miles, it might be, before running into a camp.

The reasoning might have been wrong. But it was a sane enough process of thought and acting on it Howard arose and resumed his march.

He soon came to the end of that ridge, descended into the gulch, and seeing it to be long and swampy, walked along the left margin, gradually rising again from the downward-sloping valley by keeping a level course along the hillside. That hillside grew mountainous and rocky after a few miles and he was subjected to a peculiarly trying experience in continuing along it. This was the only incident of what might be called a topographic nature that happened to him throughout the whole adventure, though it would not, because of that, be worth recounting in a story of the nature of his. But to it Howard is inclined to ascribe what happened after. I do not agree with him; nevertheless the incident ought to be told. He came upon a region of mountainside which was steep, where there was no earth, only rocks of all sizes from sharp particles of gravel to boulders of the bulk of buildings. Rocks, here and there, all along the mountainside, and at all elevations, as far as he could see in the lessened light of the late afternoon, were detaching themselves from their tenuous bedding and rolling down the mountain. It was a spring phenomenon, the snows and frosts of winter having produced new instabilities in this immense, forbidding “slide.”

Howard treaded his cautious way along but became unnerved by the startling effects of these detaching boulders. He frequently toiled far uphill to keep on the upper side of a threatening rock. He himself started many avalanches. He was more conscious of his empty stomach and of its effects upon him through this ordeal than he had been before or was afterward. The passage of that three or four miles of dangerous rock slope “took more out of him” than all the days of his starvation hike. He was sweat wet and shaking when he found solid hillside once more and the first thing he did was find a place to rest.

He thought he would have given his life for sleep, but he only imagined he was sleepy—it was only his ardent longing for some respite from the ague of mind and nerves in which he had emerged from the rock-avalanche zone. When he lay down he began to see the rock slide when he closed his eyes; and when his thoughts wandered from that they brought back the scene of sluicing on Fortymile River—and other recent scenes and places and things.

He had developed a case of insomnia and he knew it. He might have conquered it but for the mosquitoes, those deadly pests of the early Northern summer. So what does he do but arise again and resume his wearisome journey, drinking occasionally at little streams coursing down the hillside—for water was everywhere—but rarely thinking of food. He had constantly a peculiar feeling in his body which he had never known before. It was not distressing, not a gnawing feeling. Physically he could not associate it with hunger though of course his intelligence told him it was caused by lack of food.

It was about four o'clock in the morning when happening to glance backward and down into the valley bottom he saw a camp and men sluicing!

He was delighted—naturally. And yet he frowned, wondering and disgusted to think that he had actually passed along the hillside above that part of the valley, which was now about a mile and a half back of him, without noticing the camp. He walked back obliquely along the hillside and down toward the creek bottom, occasionally glancing at the sluicing gang. Water, he judged, was getting scarce at the source from which these men were taking it, or they would not have put on a night shift. He counted eight boxes, with two or three men to each of the seven boxes above the tail box. He noted these details when he had lessened his original distance by about half.

He trudged on, gradually nearing the bottom of the valley; and the next time he glanced at the scene he was surprised to notice that the sluice line seemed shorter. There were but six boxes. He supposed, of course, that he had erred before. But once again, after rounding a little knoll that had hid the miners from his view, he stopped and was mystified to observe that there were now but five boxes and a correspondingly smaller number of men.

He had to account for this in some way, so he decided that the head boxes had been withdrawn, and this by coincidence just when the outfit had been hidden from his view. But as, increasing his pace—all fatigue forgotten—he glanced again, another sluice box had miraculously disappeared, with two or more men. He laughed at the weird performance—and marveled. He was without theory now. When there were only three sluice boxes he tried to fix the scene with his eye, defying it to change while thus he held it steadily. But he could not avoid glancing away once, and when his eye returned to the scene, two seconds later, presto! There were only two box lengths. He had to glance down while he jumped a side stream. One box, one man were left! It was the tail box.

His way was now clear and tolerably smooth and he vowed he would never once take his eyes away from that man and that box. Nor did he. But in a few moments he saw the man stoop, shoulder the sluice box and walk off with it into the brush. He kept his eye glued to that moving object—a T-shaped thing—until it disappeared. It could have been a natural disappearance and he clung to that idea, holding the brush with his eye, stumbling sometimes, but never looking away—until he came to it.

It was—just brush. There was no tailings pile, no pay dirt, no camp—nothing!

Mark Howard sat down on a boulder and stroked his chin. “Hallucination!” he whispered to himself. Then he said it aloud—and imputed this utterly new experience to the wear and tear of the avalanche mountain upon his nervous system. He laughed good-naturedly and retraced his way down the valley and up the hill—and on, drinking and walking. It was bright day now.

As he toiled on he insisted on persuading himself that if it had been broad daylight, such a light as reveals details—little things that the reason could work upon—he could not have been deceived in his senses. He knew he was perfectly sane and therefore he felt that with sufficient evidence no mere aberration of the single sense of sight could “get” him.

That conviction remained until, early in the afternoon, at the very height of the sun's power, he saw another camp, below and beyond, this time, not back of him. There were both tents and cabins, five camps in all, and several men in sight. Between the camps were two dumps with the usual wind lass in the center of each. Here was the real thing. He was conscious of saliva!

Then began the disheartening wiping out again—first one thing, then another. By the time he was within a hundred yards of what had been the nearest object of man's creation—a dirty tent it was, with an irregular pile of wood for burning down outside it—the tent whisked into thin air and the wood became bushes of slightly different contour from their nearest neighbors. Howard thought he could pick out some special natural object for each tent, cabin and dump of the mirage that had been. Each of these was either a shimmer of water, a rock, a bush, a specially light or specially dark bit of ground. He was through with these hallucinations!

There were two more days to his adventure—six in all. This healthy man, who had used no liquor in his life, little tea or coffee, whose habits had been good and regular habits, whose life had been largely an outdoor life—this Hercules of endurance went on for forty-eight hours longer over the ridges, dipping into side gulches when he had to cross them, keeping northwest in his general course, doggedly winning onward toward the Yukon.

He was always amused but never in the least excited by what he saw in those wild, empty, narrow, winding stream valleys—the camps, the tents, the cabins, the strings of sluice boxes—in a word, the objects with which he had of late years associated his fellow beings, to whom now his subconscious as well as his conscious mind looked for succor!

That was it, of course. That was the theory he evolved to account for the hallucinations. What he needed—and mighty urgently now, for ht felt his strength to be almost gone—was a camp. It was too early for berries. He had no weapon to shoot game, nor hook and line for fish. Therefore he must come upon a camp—men. How natural, therefore, that this powerful wish should be father to the thought—the visual thought! In other words, the hallucination.

At the end of the sixth lay, about five in the afternoon, he saw the last string of sluice boxes—saw it, that is, until he passed it. For latterly he had not taken the trouble to alter his course by so much as an extra rod of walking to investigate any of these cruel delusions. Some of the visions had persisted as far as he could see them. The fading out had come, during that last day or two, only when he had walked right into the “camp.”

He had seen that last one—a string of sluice boxes—perhaps half an hour before. Since that time he had had to descend to the creek, for a large confluent stream compelled it. This was his Waterloo! The stream was swollen, deep, swift, ice cold. He doubted if he ever could have crossed it. In his present condition—his weakness was such that his pace could not have been more than a mile an hour—he was perfectly sure that it meant death to wade out into that water.

There was a chance—a chance in a hundred with Yukon streams in that great alluvial basin—that there might be rocks a little below and a constricting of the water—a chance to jump from rock to rock. As he went staggering along the bank he saw his final mirage, The Last Phantom. A horse browsing on the hillside was the first of it. A little farther down—yes, there was the inevitable cabin. Soon he would see that infernal, damnable, imaginary string of sluice boxes, and men shoveling in.

He was wrong about those last items—sluice boxes did not happen to set themselves into this particular picture.

He came upon a knoll, painfully climbed it and looked up and downstream. He could see at least two miles of the straight-running creek and it was everywhere-wide and rapid. He was very, very tired and with the hopelessness of that view the last of his courage, of his will to live, left him and he lay down in the willow brush and gazed somberly at the hill, the sky, and the brawling, boulder-choked young river that in two or three weeks would be easily fordable. He wondered how long it was to be before he died. He feared only the disfiguring of the mosquitoes.

From the mirage cabin, which was now almost opposite him across the creek and some hundred yards up the slope, a mirage man appeared, carrying something. In default of other occupation Howard lazily watched him—or it, rather. It came down to the stream, set a bucket on the ground, took from it a pan and a knife, took from the pail, next, some potatoes and began paring and throwing them into the pan.

Howard would not have stirred; he would have gone on watching the man—or the image of the man—until it vanished, except for one circumstance. To that circumstance he owes his life!

He heard a bell.

He glanced over to where he had seen the horse and now saw several.

Attached to the neck of one was the bell he heard—or thought he heard. It was a clear enough sound—to his imagined sense of hearing.

Up to that time only his eyes had been subject to hallucination. He had never imagined that he heard a sound. He knew that an auditory hallucination is just as common or even more common than a visual hallucination; and he had, therefore, no more confidence in the one than in the other. But just because he had not actually been deceived in a sound during his three days of hallucination, some obstinate thing in him suggested that this scene might conceivably be different from the others.

With that thought came another, bolstering it. He seemed to remember that the men in all the previous cinemas of his fancy continued to move just as they did when he first saw them. Sluicers shoveled and walkers walked—and did nothing else. A man carrying whipsawn boards went back and forth regularly. But here was a man who walked down from a cabin and went through a number of movements, all quite different.

Even now the semblance dipped water from the stream and washed its peeled and bisected spuds. This was particularly new. The horses, too, had variety, range of movement, and the bell tinkled irritably when flies—or imaginary flies—tantalized the imaginary horse.

Laughing at himself for his credulity Howard rose and with as much force as he could summon shouted “Hullo!”

The figure seemed to be getting ready to return to the cabin. It made no answer, the damned spook! Just as Howard expected. The famished, dying man sank down again.

But Howard was an obstinate person—obstinate with his own idea notwithstanding he himself believed it to be a ridiculous idea. It suddenly occurred to him that men so near that brawling stream could not hear each other. The spook might have seen Howard if he had peered hard at the willow brush across the stream. But the spook had not peered. So Howard retreated from the bank to higher ground from which the sound vibrations of his voice would not be lost in the chaos of air vibrations from the tossing water. There he waited until the phantom on the other side, bucket in hand, had reached a similar position. Then he shouted.

The phantom turned and looked at him.

Mark Howard was conscious of a pleasant titillation of the fancy. Why, hang it, the cuss was real! Undulating from the knees to the shoulders he gently slumped to the ground and knew no more.

“Come on, pardner,” said the ex-spook about half an hour later. “Get your leg over.”

Howard felt himself being assisted into a small poling boat.

“What's that? Oh, yes, sure,” he said, thinking he was answering the man; but in reality four or five minutes had elapsed and his rescuer was getting him out of the boat on the other side.

He walked groggily up the sloping bank into the cabin, assisted by the erstwhile potato peeler. There was another man in the cabin and a third came in after a few minutes. Howard, from a bunk, talked to them a little at a time. He imagined he was talking continuously.

At supper they fed him a very small amount of well-cooked oatmeal and canned milk, told him to go to sleep and they'd give him something more like a feed at breakfast time. He was not in the least hungry and the tablespoonful of mush felt like a bale of hay in his stomach. He slept and in the morning—as he thought it—asked the fellow who seemed cook whether he had overslept.

“Some,” said the latter, “seein' you've missed four meals!”

The creek was Joe-Bill Creek. A trail had run along there toward the Tanana but it was abandoned the winter before in favor of a nearer route. The cabin was a road house. The men were there to transfer their supplies, stove and other equipment to the new route. They had come with the pack horses the day Howard arrived—at the other bank. The next day they would have gone. Only on that one day of the year could Mark Howard have been saved.

As it was they had to wait over an extra day—until Howard woke up!