squimau community, noted for its native
schooner building and its successful seal hunters and fishermen. We were
rejoiced to see signs of native prosperity and advance, and we left
Unalaklik with high hope for its future.

Here also was real rest and refreshment at a road-house. Road-houses in
Alaska are as various in quality as inns are "outside." Our previous
night's halt was at one of the worst; this was one of the best. The
proprietor was a good cook and he did his best for us, with omelet and
pastry, and young, tender reindeer. It has been said that road-house
keeping in Alaska is like soliciting life insurance "outside," the last
resort of incompetence. Certain it is that a thoroughly lazy and
incompetent man may yet make a living keeping a road-house, for there is
no rivalry save at the more important points, and travellers are
commonly so glad to reach any shelter that they are not disposed to be
censorious. None the less, when they find a man who takes a pride in his
business and an interest in the comfort of his guests, they are highly
appreciative.

[Sidenote: THE KALTAG PORTAGE]

We should have only an occasional road-house from now on, but expected
to reach some inhabited cabin each night. Our good travelling was over
though we did not know it. We knew that the hard snows of the Seward
Peninsula and the bare ice of Norton Sound were behind us, but we kept
telling ourselves that the travel of all the winter would surely have
left a fine trail on the Yukon. We were now about sixty-five miles from
Saint Michael, by the coast. But taking the ninety-mile portage from
Unalaklik to Kaltag we should reach the Yukon River more than five
hundred miles above Saint Michael, so much does that portage cut off.
This is the route the military telegraph-line takes, and we should
travel along close beside it much of the way until the Yukon was
reached.

The soft weather persisted, and we had even doubt about starting out in
such a rapid thaw. A visit to the telegraph station informed us that the
warm wave was spread all over interior Alaska and that there was general
expectation of an early break-up. But if the snow on the portage were
indeed rapidly going, that was all the more reason for getting across
before it had altogether gone; so we pulled out in the warm, muggy
weather, and even as we pulled out it began to rain!

Up the little Unalaklik River, water over the ice everywhere, we went
for a few miles and then to