ion of about three thousand. Take a town of three thousand and
reduce it to thirty or forty, and it is hard to resist the melancholy
impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings.
There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the
Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged
here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground
were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with
never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow
drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier
prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather
than merely a dead city.

The weather had grown steadily colder since we reached the Yukon slope,
and for two days before reaching Circle the thermometer had stood
between 40 deg. and 50 deg. below zero. It was all right for us to push on, the
trail was good and nearly all down-hill, and there were road-houses
every ten or twelve miles. Freighters, weather-bound, came to the doors
as we passed by with our jangle of bells and would raise a somewhat
chechaco pride in our breasts by remarking: "You don't seem to care what
weather you travel in!" The evil of it was that the perfectly safe
travelling between Eagle Creek and Circle emboldened us to push on from
Circle under totally different conditions, when travelling at such low
temperatures became highly dangerous and brought us into grave
misadventure that might easily have been fatal catastrophe.

Our original start was a week later than had been planned and we had
made no time, but rather lost it, on this first division of the journey.
If we were to reach Bettles on the Koyukuk River for Christmas, there
was no more time to lose, and I was anxious to spend the next Sunday at
Fort Yukon, three days' journey away. So we started for Fort Yukon on
Thursday, the 7th of December, the day after we reached Circle.

[Sidenote: THE YUKON FLATS]

A certain arctic traveller has said that "adventures" always imply
either incompetence or ignorance of local conditions, and there is some
truth in the saying. Our misadventure was the result of a series of
mistakes, no one of which would have been other than discreditable to
men of more experience. Our course lay for seventy-five miles through
the Yukon Flats, which begin at Circle and extend for two hundred and
fifty miles of the river's course bel