the Gap, and it was well that it
was no farther, for we were weary with our thirty-mile run and
dangerously cold with the exposure of the last hour. It was rather a
large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the
middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to
make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we
went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over
the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but
slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a
log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather
is hard to heat in one evening.

When we started next morning the thermometer stood at 45 deg. below zero,
but we were out of the wind region and did not mind the cold. It is
curious that a few miles on either side of that Gap the air will be
still, while in the Gap itself a gale is blowing. Seven times I have
passed through that Gap and only once without wind. The great Flats were
now behind us, we had passed into the mountains, and for the remainder
of our long journey we should scarce ever be out of sight of mountains
again. Up the river, with its constant trouble of overflow, going around
the open water whenever we could, plunging through it in our mukluks
when it could not be avoided--with the care of the dogs' feet that the
cold weather rendered more than ever necessary when they got wet, and
the added nuisance of throwing the toboggans on their sides and beating
the ice from them with the flat of the axe wherever water had been
passed through--for two days we followed its windings, the thermometer
between -45 deg. and -50 deg., the mountains rising higher and the scenery
growing more picturesque as we advanced. At the end of the second day
from the Gap we were at the mouth of the West Fork of the Chandalar, and
after passing up it for fifteen or sixteen miles we left that
watercourse to cross the mountains to the South Fork of the Koyukuk
River.

Then began hard labour again. A toboggan is not a good vehicle for
crossing summits. Its bottom is perfectly flat and smooth, polished like
glass by the friction of the snow. If the trail be at all "sidling" (and
mountain trails are almost always "sidling"), the toboggan swings off on
the side of the inclination and must be kept on the trail by main force.
The runners of a sled will grip the surface, if there be any