At the far end of the portage he bought an old set of pack-straps for a dollar, and in them he swung the grip.  Also, he chartered a launch to run him the six miles to the upper end of Lake Linderman, where he arrived at four in the afternoon.  The Athenian was to sail from Dyea next morning at seven.  Dyea was twenty-eight miles away, and between towered Chilcoot.  He sat down to adjust his foot-gear for the long climb, and woke up.  He had dozed the instant he sat down, though he had not slept thirty seconds.  He was afraid his next doze might be longer, so he finished fixing his foot-gear standing up.  Even then he was overpowered for a fleeting moment.  He experienced the flash of unconsciousness; becoming aware of it, in mid-air, as his relaxed body was sinking to the ground and as he caught himself together, he stiffened his muscles with a spasmodic wrench, and escaped the fall.  The sudden jerk back to consciousness left him sick and trembling.  He beat his head with the heel of his hand, knocking wakefulness into the numbed brain.

Jack Burns’s pack-train was starting back light for Crater Lake, and Churchill was invited to a mule.  Burns wanted to put the gripsack on another animal, but Churchill held on to it, carrying it on his saddle-pommel.  But he dozed, and the grip persisted in dropping off the pommel, one side or the other, each time wakening him with a sickening start.  Then, in the early darkness, Churchill’s mule brushed him against a projecting branch that laid his cheek open.  To cap it, the mule blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon the rocks.  After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled rather, over the apology for a trail, leading the mule.  Stray and awful odours, drifting from each side of the trail, told of the horses that had died in the rush for gold.  But he did not mind.  He was too sleepy.  By the time Long Lake was reached, however, he had recovered from his sleepiness; and at Deep Lake he resigned the gripsack to Burns.  But thereafter, by the light of the dim stars, he kept his eyes on Burns.  There were not going to be any accidents with that bag.

At Crater Lake, the pack-train went into camp, and Churchill, slinging the grip on his back, started the steep climb for the summit.  For the first time, on that precipitous wall, he realized how tired he was.  He crept and crawled like a crab, burdened by the weight of his limbs.  A distinct and painful effort of will was required each time he lifted a foot.  An hallucination came to him that he was shod with lead, like a deep-sea diver, and it was all he could do to resist the desire to reach down and feel the lead.  As for Bondell’s gripsack, it was inconceivable that forty pounds could weigh so much.  It pressed him down like a mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back.  If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell’s grip weighed five hundred.