of here, that
can grow anything but bananas and cocoanuts. I'm told they grow bigger
potatoes and cabbages, and carrots and other plain, ordinary cooking
vegetables up there within a couple of hundred miles of the Arctic Circle
than they do down in Oregon, where every man's truck patch looks like the
floral hall at the county fair when I was a boy."

"How can anything ripen in the short summers up here?" asked Don.

"All vegetation has got to have light, and the more it has the harder it
will grow. Sun up here is on the job all the time. Reminds me of the year
that I started out to be star performer with old John Robinson's circus
back in Injianny. Got up at three a. m. to help feed the animals and
hosses, and assist the chef in the cook tent; waited on table for the
canvas men and other nobility from six to nine a. m., 'doubled in brass'
as the sayin' goes, with the band, by carryin' the front end of the bass
drum in the gra-a-nd street parade, wore a toga as a Roman senator in the
great entree, handled jugglin' and other apparatus durin' two
performances, and at midnight helped to take down the big top. The other
three hours I had to myself. I don't mean to say that the sun up here in
the summer time performs all those gymnastics, but he works the same
number of hours and everything up here that wants to live must keep right
up with him. Ground is frozen twenty feet deep, and thaws out about
eighteen inches in the summer time. That furnishes moisture. Consequently,
grass and vegetable are on the jump all the time, working twenty hours a
day, and they manage to mature. Oats and other grains that have to grow
long stalks, I understand, however, never top out."

The work of poling the boats up stream was varied at times by what
Swiftwater described as "canal work." At stretch where the banks of the
stream were reasonably high and precipitous, and the water of considerable
depth close to the shore, the three Indians in each boat fastened
themselves tandem to a long cable stretched from the bow of the boat to
the shore, and towed the craft for miles at a time, while one of the boys
with the long steering oar kept the bow away from the shore and headed up
stream. This method was considerable relief from the steady poling which
told perceptibly upon the back and shoulders of the novice, and it formed
a method of rest for the Indians. The progress was about three miles per
hour, and the boys alternately spent considerable ti