ough that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill,
and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some
ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the
rest of the run.

The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the
Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the
mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he
reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been
most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun
to learn a little at our travelling night-school.

[Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL]

[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES]

A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12 deg. below, and the
mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in
the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by
the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards
apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not
impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch
of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest
bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we
rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and
when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was
nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow
was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the
dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern
sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green
that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly
the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the
Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky shore of the north coast of
Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise,
which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony
did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest
of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it.

The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon
the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this
golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the
depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of
the mountains of Tennessee, when for half