dirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque
spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a
native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting
salmon on the river bank.

The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for
God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and
white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in
hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even
though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for
canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very
much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to
call him.

Christmas and the Fourth of July are the Indian's great holidays, the
one just after the best moose hunting and the other just before the
salmon run. It may be supposed that there were always great feasts at
the winter and summer solstices, though now he is sufficiently devout at
the one and patriotic at the other. At these seasons, and for weeks
before and after, Fort Yukon gathers a large number of Indians. It is
the native metropolis of the country within a radius of a hundred
miles, and what may be termed its permanent population of one hundred
and fifty is doubled and sometimes trebled by contingents from the
Chandalar, the Porcupine, and the Black Rivers, from that long river
called Birch Creek, and all the intervening country. Many families of
the "uncivilised," self-respecting kind, to which reference has been
made, come in from outlying points, and the contrast between them and
their more sophisticated kinfolk of the town is all in their favour.

[Sidenote: JIMMY]

Such a gathering had already taken place in preparation for the
Christmas holidays when we reached Fort Yukon on the 15th of December.
It would have been pleasant to spend Christmas with them, but we were
due two hundred and fifty miles away, at Bettles, for that feast, if by
any means we could get there. So we lingered but the two days necessary
to equip ourselves. Jimmy had torn our bedding to pieces on the night of
the mishap; it was lashed on the outside of the load, and he had
scratched and clawed it to make a nest for himself until fur from the
robe and feathers from the quilts were all over the trail. The other
dogs, not so warmly coated as he, had been content to sleep in the snow.
Jimmy's character was gradually revealing itself. A well-bred trail do