for only a few days.
Then they again felt their strength failing. Once more they endured the
excruciating torments which precede starvation.

In the very complete account of this trip, which is kindly furnished by
Mary Graves, are many interesting particulars concerning the suffering
of these days. "Our only chance for camp-fire for the night," she says,
"was to hunt a dead tree of some description, and set fire to it. The
hemlock being the best and generally much the largest timber, it was our
custom to select the driest we could find without leaving our course.
When the fire would reach the top of the tree, the falling limbs would
fall all around us and bury themselves in the snow, but we heeded them
not. Sometimes the falling, blazing limbs would brush our clothes, but
they never hit us; that would have been too lucky a hit. We would sit
or lie on the snow, and rest our weary frames. We would sleep, only to
dream of something nice to eat, and awake again to disappointment. Such
was our sad fate! Even the reindeer's wretched lot was not worse! 'His
dinner and his bed were snow, and supper he had not.' Our fare was the
same! We would strike fire by means of the flintlock gun which we had
with us. This had to be carried by turns, as it was considered the only
hope left in case we might find game which we could kill. We traveled
over a ridge of mountains, and then descended a deep canyon, where one
could scarcely see the bottom. Down, down we would go, or rather slide,
for it is very slavish work going down hill, and in many cases we were
compelled to slide on our shoes as sleds. On reaching the bottom we
would plunge into the snow, so that it was difficult getting out, with
the shoes tied to our feet, our packs lashed to our backs, and ourselves
head and ears under the snow. But we managed to get out some way, and
one by one reached the bottom of the canyon. When this was accomplished
we had to ascend a hill as steep as the one we had descended. We would
drive the toes of our shoes into the loose snow, to make a sort of step,
and one by one, as if ascending stair-steps, we climbed up. It took us
an entire day to reach the top of the mountain. Each time we attained
the summit of a mountain, we hoped we should be able to see something
like a valley, but each time came disappointment, for far ahead was
always another and higher mountain. We found some springs, or, as we
called them, wells, from five to twenty feet under gro