most
painful decision I ever made in my life; with all my heart I wanted to
go on. It was only one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy
miles away. The journey had been made in three or four days; but we
were now come to a country where travel is impossible in bad weather and
where bad weather prevails; and that journey might quite as likely take
two weeks. I worked over the calendar in my diary, figuring how many
days of travel still remained, allowing reasonable margins, and I could
not see that I had much more than time to get back to Fairbanks before
the break-up, which for sufficient reason I regarded as my first duty.
The day of rest at Kikitaruk was Washington's birthday, the 22d of
February. Eight weeks would bring us to the 19th April, by which time
the trails would be already breaking up. Counting out Sundays, that left
forty-eight days of travelling with something like twelve hundred miles
yet to make without going to Point Hope--an average of about twenty-five
miles a day. I knew that we had made no such average in the distance
already covered, and though I knew also that travelling improved
generally as the season advanced, I did not know how very much better
going there is on the wind-hardened snows of the coast when travelling
is possible at all. Again and again I have regretted that I did not take
the chance and push on, but at the time I decided as I thought I ought
to decide, and one has no real compunctions when that is the case.

[Sidenote: THE RESOLUTION TO TURN SOUTH]

So a first-hand knowledge of our own most interesting work among the
Esquimaux was not for me on that occasion--and there has arisen no
opportunity since. Mr. Knapp, who had planned to spend the rest of the
winter at Point Hope, would get a guide and a team here and turn north
after some days' rest, while I would turn south. Roxy was impatient to
return to Bettles. "Me no likee this country," was all that could be got
out of him. So I paid him his money and made him a present of the .22
repeating rifle with which he had killed so many ptarmigan on the
journey, outfitted him with clothes, grub, and ammunition, and let him
go; saying good-bye with regret, for he was a good boy to us all the
way.

It was late on the night of our single day of rest when I got to bed,
for there had been squaring up of accounts and much writing, and when I
went to bed I did not sleep. Again and again I reviewed the decision I
had come to and fo