an hour every gorgeous tint of
red and yellow was lavishly flaunted--and then the whole pride and
splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the
encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of
rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the
high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven
could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil. And,
more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection of that
wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of the Alatna-Kobuk
portage. Every land has its glories, and the sky is everywhere a blank
canvas for the display of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic
sky are of an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky can
show.

As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the wind rose again, now
charged with heavy, driving snow, while in the valley the underfoot snow
grew deep, so that it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a
fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent the previous night,
and there we stayed.

The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast it affords. All
the night it had snowed heavily, and it snowed all the morning and into
the afternoon. Some sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since
Bob and his party passed, and again we had no trail at all.
Moreover--strange plaint in January in Alaska!--the weather grew so warm
that the snow continually balled up under the snow-shoes and clung to
the sled and the dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17 deg. above
zero--and it was but four days ago that we recorded 70 deg. below! It will
be readily understood how such wide and sudden ranges of temperature add
to the inconvenience and discomfort of mushing. Parkees, sweaters,
shirts are shed one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the
mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow he is bathed in
sweat who had forgotten what sweating felt like. The poor dogs suffer
the most, for they have nothing they can shed and they can perspire only
through the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream, they
labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look that comes only with
soft weather and a heavy trail. So constantly do they grab mouthfuls of
snow that the operation becomes quite a check on our progress.

By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but reached the bank of
the oth