o be put into the cocoa
before it was cool enough to drink. Of course it is perfectly
simple--all the astonishing things are--but I never open one of those
bottles in the cold weather and pour out its contents without marvelling
at it.

We left the river and struck inland towards the foot-hills of the
Alaskan range, a long, rough journey over a trail that had been made by
the band that came out to the Healy to meet us, and had been travelled
no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been
as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier.
Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the
dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give
smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour
of the dogs calling for the continual supplement of the men, one at the
gee pole and one at the handle-bars. Some twenty miles, perhaps, a long
day's continuous journey, we pushed laboriously into the hills and then
pitched our tent; but in a few miles, next morning, we had struck the
main Indian trail from the village near the Tanana Crossing, by which
the hunting party had come, and what little was left of the journey went
easily enough until we reached the considerable native encampment.

The men were all gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old
paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for
tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping
out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and
splitting it up, making our couch of spruce boughs, starting a fire, and
bringing a plentiful present of moose and caribou meat for ourselves and
our dogs. Nothing could have been kinder than our reception; the full
hospitality of the wilderness was heaped upon us. It was not until dark
that the men returned, and we had all the afternoon to get acquainted
with the women and children. Already the chief difficulty we had to
encounter presented itself. These people did not speak the language of
the lower Tanana and middle Yukon--Arthur's language--at all. Their
speech had much more affinity with the upper Yukon language, and it
dawned upon me that they were not of the migration that had pushed up
the Tanana River from the Yukon, as all the natives as far as the
Salchaket certainly did, were not of that tribe or that movement at all,
but had come across country by the K