WHAT UNCLE DICK THOUGHT 246

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE FIRST PORTAGE--SLAVE RIVER. "THE SCOWS
WERE HAULED UP THE STEEP BANK BY MEANS
OF BLOCK AND TACKLE" _Frontispiece_

AN ENCAMPMENT OF ESKIMOS ON THE BEACH AT
FORT MCPHERSON _Facing p._ 55

HUSKY FLEET--FORT MCPHERSON " 172

HUSKY DOG--RAMPART HOUSE " 206

YOUNG ALASKANS IN THE FAR NORTH

I

THE START FOR THE MIDNIGHT SUN

"Well, fellows," said Jesse Wilcox, the youngest of the three boys who
stood now at the ragged railway station of Athabasca Landing, where
they had just disembarked, "here we are once more. For my part, I'm
ready to start right now."

He spoke somewhat pompously for a youth no more than fifteen years of
age. John Hardy and Rob McIntyre, his two companions, somewhat older
than himself, laughed at him as he sat now on his pack-bag, which had
just been tossed off the baggage-car of the train that had brought
them hither.

"You might wait for Uncle Dick," said John. "He'd feel pretty bad if
we started off now for the Arctic Circle and didn't allow him to come
along!"

Rob, the older of the three, and the one to whom they were all in the
habit of looking up in their wilderness journeyings, smiled at them
both. He was not apt to talk very much in any case, and he seemed now
content in these new surroundings to sit and observe what lay about
him.

It was a straggling little settlement which they saw, with one long,
broken street running through the center. There was a church spire, to
be sure, and a square little wooden building in which some business
men had started a bank for the sake of the coming settlers now
beginning to pass through for the country along the Peace River. There
were one or two stores, as the average new-comer would have called
them, though each really was the post of one of the fur-trading
companies then occupying that country. Most prominent of these,
naturally, was the building of the ancient Hudson's Bay Company.

A rude hotel with a dirty bar full of carousing half-breeds and rowdy
new-comers lay just beyond the end of the uneven railroad tracks which
had been laid within the month. The surface of the low hills running
back from the Athabasca River was covered with a stunted growth of
aspens, scattered among which here and there stood the cabins o