o the hills and kill
four or five caribou that will stock his larder equally well. The fresh,
clean meat of the wilds has to most palates far finer flavour than any
cold-storage meat that can be brought into the country; and, save at one
or two centres of population and distribution, cold-storage meat is not
available at all. Without its big game Alaska would be virtually
uninhabitable. Therefore most white men are content that the necessary
measures be taken to prevent the wasteful slaughter of the game; for the
rights of the prospector and trapper and traveller, and the rights of
the natives to kill at any time what is necessary for food, are
explicitly reserved.

[Sidenote: THE KETCHUMSTOCK]

We reached the village and telegraph post of Ketchumstock for the night
only to find all the natives gone hunting; but since they had gone in
the direction of Chicken Creek, towards which we were travelling, we
were able to catch up with them the next morning without going far out
of our way. While we were pitching our tent near their encampment came
two or three natives with dog teams, and as the dogs hesitated to pass
our dogs, loose on the trail, a voluble string of curses in English fell
from the Indian lips. Such is usually the first indication of contact
with white men, and in this case it spoke of the proximity of the mining
on Chicken Creek. To discover the women chewing tobacco was to add but
another evidence of the sophistication of this tribe; a different people
from Chief Isaac's tribe, different through many years' familiarity with
the whites at these diggings. If the mission to be built at the Crossing
tends to keep these Indians on the Tanana River and thus away from the
demoralisation of the diggings, it will do them solid service.

In some way foul and profane language falls even more offensively from
Indians than from whites; for the same reason, perhaps, that it sounds
more offensive and shocking from children than from adults. Sometimes
the Indian does not in the least understand the meaning of the words he
uses; they are the first English words he ever heard and he hears them
over and over again.

So here another day and a half was spent in instruction. There are some
forty souls in this tribe and they have had teaching from time to time,
though not in the last few years, at the mouths of missionaries from
Yukon posts. Most of the adults had been baptized; I baptized sixteen
children. One curious feature