To shear the Golden Fleece."

As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little
Salmon, they found these streams throwing mush-ice into the main Yukon.
This gathered about the boat and attached itself, and at night they
found themselves compelled to chop the boat out of the current. In the
morning they chopped the boat back into the current.

The last night ashore was spent between the mouths of the White River
and the Stewart. At daylight they found the Yukon, half a mile wide,
running white from ice-rimmed bank to ice-rimmed bank. Shorty cursed the
universe with less geniality than usual, and looked at Kit.

"We'll be the last boat this year to make Dawson," Kit said.

"But they ain't no water, Smoke."

"Then we'll ride the ice down. Come on."

Futilely protesting, Sprague and Stine were bundled on board. For half
an hour, with axes, Kit and Shorty struggled to cut a way into the swift
but solid stream. When they did succeed in clearing the shore-ice, the
floating ice forced the boat along the edge for a hundred yards, tearing
away half of one gunwale and making a partial wreck of it. Then, at the
lower end of the bend, they caught the current that flung off-shore.
They proceeded to work farther toward the middle. The stream was no
longer composed of mush-ice but of hard cakes. In between the cakes only
was mush-ice, that froze solidly as they looked at it. Shoving with the
oars against the cakes, sometimes climbing out on the cakes in order to
force the boat along, after an hour they gained the middle. Five minutes
after they ceased their exertions, the boat was frozen in. The whole
river was coagulating as it ran. Cake froze to cake, until at last the
boat was the center of a cake seventy-five feet in diameter. Sometimes
they floated sideways, sometimes stern-first, while gravity tore
asunder the forming fetters in the moving mass, only to be manacled by
faster-forming ones. While the hours passed, Shorty stoked the stove,
cooked meals, and chanted his war-song.

Night came, and after many efforts, they gave up the attempt to force
the boat to shore, and through the darkness they swept helplessly
onward.

"What if we pass Dawson?" Shorty queried.

"We'll walk back," Kit answered, "if we're not crushed in a jam."

The sky was clear, and in the light of the cold, leaping stars they
caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand.
At eleven o'clock, from below, came a