inequalities at all, but a toboggan swings now this way and now that,
like a great pendulum, dragging the near dogs with it. Again and again
we had to hitch both teams to one toboggan to get up a sidling pitch
while all hands kept the vehicle on the trail, and our progress was
painful and slow. In soft snow on a level surface like the river bed or
through the Flat country, generally, the toboggan is much the more
convenient vehicle, for it rides over the snow instead of ploughing
through it, but on hard snow anywhere or on grades the toboggan is a
nuisance. Thus wallowing through the deep snow at the side of the
toboggans to hold them in place we sweated and slaved our way mile after
mile up the gradual ascent until we reached the spot, just under a
shoulder of the summit, where there was dry spruce and green spruce for
camping, the dry for fire and the green for couch, and there we halted
for the night.

[Sidenote: JOHN MUIR]

Next morning we crossed the low pass and dropped down easily into the
wide valley of the Koyukuk South Fork, with a fine prospect of mountains
everywhere as far as the eye could see. I had stood and gazed upon those
same mountains on my journey of the previous winter, my first winter in
Alaska, and had seen a most remarkable sight. As we began the descent
and a turn of the trail gave a new panorama of peaks I did not at first
realise the nature of the peculiar phenomenon I was gazing at. Each peak
had a fine, filmy, fan-shaped cloud stretching straight out from it into
the sky, waving and shimmering as it stretched. The sun was not above
the horizon, but his rays caught these sheer, lawn-like streamers and
played upon them with a most delicate opalescent radiance. Then all at
once came to my mind the recollection of a description in John Muir's
_Mountains of California_ (surely the finest mountain book ever written)
of the snow banners of the Sierra Nevada, and I knew that I was looking
at a similar spectacle. It meant that a storm was raging on high,
although so far we were sheltered from it. It meant that the dry,
sand-like snow of the mountain flanks was driven up those flanks so
fiercely before the wind that it was carried clean over them and beyond
them out into the sky, and still had such pressure behind it that it
continued its course and spread out horizontally, thinning and spreading
for maybe a mile before it lost all coherence and visibility. As far as
I could see mountain peaks I cou