Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the Yukon—­noise not loud, but deep—­an undercurrent of heavy sound.  As they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to move.  A compact mass of ice, three-quarters of a mile wide and four miles long, with a great grinding and crushing went down the valley.  Some distance below the town it jammed, building with incredible quickness a barrier twenty feet high.

The people waited breathless.  Again the ice-mass trembled.  But the watchers lifted their eyes to the heights above.  Was that thunder in the hills?  No, the ice again; again crushing, grinding, to the low accompaniment of thunder that seemed to come from far away.

Sections a mile long and half a mile wide were forced up, carried over the first ice-pack, and summarily stopped below the barrier.  Huge pieces, broken off from the sides, came crunching their way angrily up the bank, as if acting on some independent impulse.  There they sat, great fragments, glistening in the sunlight, as big as cabins.  It was something to see them come walking up the shelving bank!  The cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving their goods behind.  Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice would push its way so far.

In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre.  Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water rushes out with a roar.  Once more the mass is nearly still, and now all’s silent.  Not till the water, dammed and thrown back by the ice, not until it rises many feet and comes down with a volume and momentum irresistible, will the final conflict come.

Hour after hour the people stand there on the bank, waiting to see the barrier go down.  Unwillingly, as the time goes on, this one, that one, hurries away for a few minutes to prepare and devour a meal, back again, breathless, upon rumour of that preparatory trembling, that strange thrilling of the ice.  The grinding and the crushing had begun again.

The long tension, the mysterious sounds, the sense of some great unbridled power at work, wrought on the steadiest nerves.  People did the oddest things.  Down at the lower end of the town a couple of miners, sick of the scurvy, had painfully clambered on their roof—­whether to see the sights or be out of harm’s way, no one knew.  The stingiest man in Minook, who had refused to help them in their cabin, carried them food on the roof.  A woman made and took them the Yukon remedy for their disease.  They sat in state in sight of all men, and drank spruce tea.

By one o’clock in the afternoon the river had risen eight feet, but the ice barrier still held.  The people, worn out, went away to sleep.  All that night the barrier held, though more ice came down and still the water rose.  Twelve feet now.  The ranks of shattered ice along the shore are claimed again as the flood widens and licks them in.  The cheechalkos’ cabins are flooded to the caves.  Stout fellows in hip-boots take a boat and rescue the scurvy-stricken from the roof.  And still the barrier held.