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Show ^9 "Push him off!" the man behind me yelled. I pulled her off the stairs and we clung to the mountainside like two scared mountain goats. Tip said she was never going to move again. And I did not know what I was going to do. After a while she realized that hanging there was worse than climbing, and we squeezed back into the line. It took us three hours to climb those fifteen hundred steps to the Summit. Going back down was faster. There was a slide cut shoulder-deep in the snow called the "grease trail." We simply sat down and pushed off. We reached the bottom all right-in less than five minutes. Tip ran ahead to our tent, crawled into her tunnel, and said she was never coming out. I had heard that before. But feeling sorry for her, I told her since her supplies were already over the mountain, she was under no obligation to haul mine over. She agreed, I carried only fifty pounds up the steps each trip, and at this rate I figured it would take me forty days to get over the pass. I could not afford the leaping Chilkoots, nor could I afford the new engine-powered tramway which had been installed by an old sourdough named Archie Burns. He hitched loaded sleds to a cable and lifted them to the Summit. |