losely
all the time, and the eyes were sore from trying to peer ahead through
the fur edging of the hood. One grows to hate that wind with something
like a personal animosity, so brutal, so malicious does it seem. An
incautious turn of the head and the scarf that protected mouth and nose
was snatched from me and borne far away in an instant, beyond thought of
recovery. It seems to lie in wait, and one fancies a fresh shrill of
glee in its note at every new discomfiture it can inflict. There is
nothing far-fetched in the native superstition that puts a malignant
spirit in the wind; it is the most natural feeling in the world. I said
so that night in camp, and one of my companions mentioned something
about "rude Boreas," and I laughed. The gentle myths of Greece do not
fit this country. The Indian name means "the wind beast," and is
appropriate.

A savage, forbidding country, this whole interior of the Seward
Peninsula, uninhabited and unfit for habitation; a country of naked rock
and bare hillside and desolate, barren valley, without amenities of any
kind and cursed with a perpetual icy blast.

[Sidenote: DEATH VALLEY]

The valley crossed and its ridge surmounted, a still more heart-breaking
experience was in store. We descended the frozen bed of a creek from
which the wind had swept every trace of snow so that the ice was
polished as smooth as glass. The dogs could get no footing and were
continually down on their bellies, moving their legs instinctively but
helplessly, like the flippers of a turtle, while the wind carried dogs
and sled where it pleased. The grade was considerable and in bends the
creek spread out wide. Nothing but the creepers enabled a man to stand
at all, and creepers and brake together could not hold the sled from
careering sideways across the ice, dragging the dogs with it, until the
runners struck some pebble or twig frozen in the ice and the sled would
be violently overturned. Twice with freezing fingers I unlashed that
sled lying on its side, and took out nearly all the load before I could
succeed in getting it upright again, losing some of the lighter articles
each time. The third time was the worst of all. The brake had been
little more than a pivot on which sled and dogs were swung to leeward,
but now the teeth had become so blunt that, though I stood upon it with
all my weight, it would not hold at all nor check the sideways motion
under the impulse of the wind. Right across the creek we