of it! Game from the other side of the Pacific. They
look all right, but--do you know?"--the lines deepened humorously at the
corners of his mouth--"nothing with wings ever seems quite as fine to me
as ptarmigan."

"Ptarmigan!" Feversham suspended his fork in astonishment. "Not
ptarmigan?"

"Yes," persisted Tisdale gently, "ptarmigan; and particularly the ones
that nest in Nunatak Arm."

There was a pause, while for the first time his eyes swept the Circle. He
still held the attention of every one, but with a difference; the
tenseness had given place to a pleased expectancy.

Then Foster said: "That must have been on some trip you made, while you
were doing geological work around St. Elias."

Tisdale shook his head. "No, it was before that; the year I gave up
Government work to have my little fling at prospecting. You were still in
college. Every one was looking for a quick route to the Klondike then, and
I believed if I could push through the Coast Range from Yakutat Bay to the
valley of the Alsek, it would be smooth going straight to the Yukon. An
old Indian I talked with at the mission told me he had made it once on a
hunting trip, and Weatherbee--you all remember David Weatherbee--was eager
to try it with me. The Tlinket helped us with the outfit, canoeing around
the bay and up into the Arm to his starting point across Nunatak glacier.
But it took all three of us seventy-two days to pack the year's supplies
over the ice. We tramped back and forth in stages, twelve hundred miles.
We hadn't been able to get dogs, and in the end, when winter overtook us
in the, mountains, we cached the outfit and came out."

"And never went back." Banks laughed, a shrill, mirthless laugh, and added
in a higher key: "Lost a whole year and--the outfit."

Tisdale nodded slowly. "All we gained was experience. We had plenty of
that to invest the next venture over the mountains from Prince William
Sound. But--do you know?--I always liked that little canoe trip around
from Yakutat. I can't tell you how fine it is in that upper fiord; big
peaks and ice walls growing all around. Yes."--he nodded again, while the
genial wrinkles deepened--"I've seen mountains grow. We had a shock once
that raised the coast-line forty-five feet. And another time, while we
were going back to the village for a load, a small glacier in a hanging
valley high up, perhaps two thousand feet, toppled right out of its cradle
into the sea. It stirred things some an