[Sidenote: The Glacier Camp]

The camp was in pretty bad shape. The snow that had fallen upon it had
melted and frozen to ice, in the sun's rays and the night frosts, and
weighed the tent down to the ground. But an hour's work made it
habitable again, and we gleefully piled the stove with the last of our
wood and used the last spoonfuls of a can of baking-powder to make a
batch of biscuits, the first bread we had eaten in two weeks.

Next day we abandoned the camp, leaving all standing, and, putting our
packs upon a Yukon sled, rejecting the ice-creepers, and resuming our
rough-locked snow-shoes, we started down the glacier in soft, cloudy
weather to our base camp. Again it had been wiser to have waited till
night, that the snow bridges over the crevasses might be at their
hardest; but we could not wait. Every mind was occupied with Johnny. We
were two weeks overstayed of the time we had told him to expect our
return, and we knew not what might have happened to the boy. The four of
us on one rope, Karstens leading and Walter at the gee-pole, we went
down the first sharp descents of the glaciers without much trouble, the
new, soft snow making a good brake for the sled. But lower down the
crevasses began to give us trouble. The snow bridges were melted at
their edges, and sometimes the sled had to be lowered down to the
portion that still held and hauled up at the other side. Sometimes a
bridge gave way as its edge was cautiously ventured upon with the
snow-shoes, and we had to go far over to the glacier wall to get round
the crevasse. The willows with which we had staked the trail still
stood, sometimes just their tips appearing above the new snow, and they
were a good guide, though we often had to leave the old trail. At last
the crevasses were all passed and we reached the lower portion of the
glacier, which is free of them. Then the snow grew softer and softer,
and our moccasined feet were soon wet through. Large patches of the
black shale with which much of this glacier is covered were quite bare
of snow, and the sled had to be hauled laboriously across them. Then we
began to encounter pools of water, which at first we avoided, but they
soon grew so numerous that we went right through them.

[Sidenote: Flowers]

The going grew steadily wetter and rougher and more disagreeable. The
lower stretch of a glacier is an unhandsome sight in summer: all sorts
of rock debris and ugly black shale, with discolored melting