cousins;
they had a snow-shoe tramp and insisted on my coming along. But I was
stiff for a week."

"Well," said the editor, "when you try to break trail and have to keep
ahead of a dog-team coming along at a fair clip, it's just about the
hardest kind of work there is."

"They all seem to have had their own troubles," said Hamilton, who had
been glancing down the pages of the report: "here's the next chap, who
got caught in a blizzard while accompanying the mail carrier, and if it
hadn't been for the fact that the people of the nearest settlement knew
that the mail carrier was expected on that day and sent out a rescue
party to search for him, neither of the two men would ever have been
found, and the census would have lost a man."

"That was up in the Tanana region, wasn't it?" queried Barnes, but
without looking up from his work.

"Yes," answered the boy, "and from all accounts that must be a wild part
of the country. Speaking of that same enumerator, the supervisor says:
'That this agent survived the work during the stormy period and came
back alive was the wonder of the older inhabitants of the country. No
less than four times this man was found by other travelers in an
exhausted condition, not far from complete collapse, and assisted to a
stopping place. He lost three dogs, and suffered terribly himself from
frost-bite. In the same district, during the same time, eight persons
were frozen to death, six men and two women.' There's quite a story
here, too, telling how he himself rescued a couple of trappers in the
last stages of hunger, exposure, and exhaustion."

"It's fearful to think of," the other commented; "just imagine those
agonizing journeys in the teeth of an Arctic wind, traveling over
hundreds of miles of trackless wilderness to get less than one-tenth as
many people as a city enumerator would find in one block!"

"But why do it in winter?" asked Hamilton. "It's hot up there in summer,
I've heard, and driving in the warm weather is pleasant enough; there's
no hardship in that!"

"You can't drive where there are no roads, and you can't ride where
there are no horses. Then the time available is short."

"Why is it so short?"

"You haven't a railroad going to every point in Alaska," Barnes pointed
out, "there's usually a trip of several hundred miles before you get to
the place from which to start. And when are you going to make that
journey?"

"In the spring," Hamilton said, "as soon as it gets