e hummocks of the
Yukon, one hundred and twenty miles above the mouth of the Pelly. Of
this distance they had saved about one-third by their adventurous
cut-off. The end of another week found them one hundred and fifty miles
further up the Yukon and at the mouth of the Tahkeena. It had been a
week of the roughest kind of travel, and its hard work was telling
severely on the dogs.

As they made their last camp on the mighty river they were to leave for
good on the morrow they were both glad and sorry. Glad to leave its
rough ice and escape the savage difficulties that it offered in the
shape of canyons and roaring rapids only a few miles above, and sorry to
desert its well-mapped course for the little-known Tahkeena.

Still their dogs could not hold out for another week on the Yukon, while
over the smooth going of the tributary stream they might survive the
hardships of the journey to its very end; and without these faithful
servants our travellers would indeed be in a sorry plight. So while they
reminisced before their roaring camp-fire of the many adventures they
had encountered since entering Yukon mouth, two thousand miles away,
they looked hopefully forward to their journey's end, now less than as
many hundred miles from that point. To the dangers of the lofty
mountain-range they had yet to cross they gave but little thought, for
the mountains were still one hundred miles away.

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE FUR-SEAL'S TOOTH CREATES A SENSATION.

One evening late in March the smoke of a lonely camp-fire curled above a
fringe of stunted spruces forming the timber line high up on the
northern slope of the Alaskan coast range. Kotusk, the natives call
these mountains. Far below lay the spotless sheet of Tahk Lake, from
which the Tahkeena winds for one hundred miles down its rugged valley to
swell the Yukon flood. From the foot of the mountains the unbroken
solitude of the vast northern wilderness swept away in ice-bound silence
to the polar sea. Far to the westward St. Elias and Wrangel, the great
northern sentinels of the Rocky Mountain system, reared their massive
heads twenty thousand feet above the Pacific. From them the mighty range
of snow-clad peaks follows the coast line eastward, gathering, with icy
fingers, the mist clouds ever rising from the warm ocean waters,
converting them with frigid breath into the grandest glaciers of the
continent, and sending them slowly grinding their resistless way back to
the sea.