Way Up Yonder

THE QUEST FOR POLAR TREASURES--Jan Welzl--Macmillan ($2).

Readers who gobbled Jan Welzl's Thirty Years in the Golden North (TIME, May 23), with or without salt, should smack their lips over this anecdotal sequel. In the first book Welzl told how, from being a locksmith, sailor, tramp he became a trader, proprietor of a boat, chief judge of New Siberia. In The Quest for Polar Treasures he describes with the same unliterary candor tall tales of further gold and fur hunts.

When news of the Alaska gold rush reached New Siberia, Welzl caught the fever, mushed across the Arctic ice to get his share. But he soon, like Denver's Horace Austin Warner Tabor, made up his mind that the only golddiggers who made fortunes were the middlemen; he went back to hunting and trapping for a living. "Gold-digging," says he, "is a horrid occupation, but a bit better than begging." In Alaska and northern Canada he met many an eccentric adventurer. Dawson Tom was a cardsharp whose favorite dodge for getting free drinks was to produce what looked like a stick of dynamite in a crowded saloon, shout: "Closing time! The pub is going up!" and light the fuse. When the novelty of this trick wore off he substituted a rocket for the nonexplosive "dynamite." Finlander Kid was 103, with hair "over four yards long"; his sledges were pulled by four brown bears to whom he told all his troubles.

Few women, says Welzl, are taken on hunting expeditions, and then "mostly hybrids, because the pure-blooded women of the northern tribes smell too much." In northern Canada Welzl found several small yellow stones, hit one with a hammer and was nearly deafened by the explosion. "It may sound incredible, but in the Far North most of the golddiggers and hunters know of these stones."

Hunters sometimes eat wolf or fox meat, says Welzl, but dogs can always spot such a man. When he comes to a village "whole packs of dogs shuffle after him and water him: a man like that ought to be pitied." He confesses he is fond of bear's meat himself, says he "often ate a huge pot of bear-stew at one sitting. Sometimes I ate three bears in a month."

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