CHAPTER XLV 



A NEAR TRAGEDY 



ON the 23rd I started for Cape Alfred with two sledges, sixteen 

 dogs, and the Eskimos Emiu and Alingnak, his wife, Guni- 

 nana, and their daughter, Ikiuna, a girl of ten or eleven. We 

 traveled without adventure, sometimes camping in the snowhouses 

 built by Wilkins' party, but more often failing to find them on ac- 

 count of the nearly complete absence of daylight on cloudy days 

 and the covering up of their trail through intervening blizzards. 



Near Bernard Island we did have an adventure. We passed the 

 east end of the island the last evening of January and camped in 

 one of Wilkins' snowhouses found about two miles beyond. The 

 previous fall Thomsen and Knight had made a trip to Bernard 

 Island and placed on the east end a depot of pemmican and kero- 

 sene. This was before any one knew that the Star was only 

 twenty miles to the north and at a time when I thought such a 

 depot might be convenient for sledge parties traveling in winter. 

 I now wanted to pick these things up and carry them to the Star, 

 so we thought we would wait for daylight to locate the place 

 where they were. 



The next day was beautifully clear and at noon the sun came 

 almost to the horizon, so we had full daylight by which to dis- 

 cover the depot with the glasses and even to discern it with bare 

 eyes when once we knew where it was, Emiu was then told to 

 fetch the things sometime during the day, supposedly about noon 

 or soon after. 



Emiu, as we have said, had spent a large part of his life around 

 Nome and had there absorbed the Alaska idea of fast dog driving. 

 He took great delight in hitching a large number of frisky dogs 

 to a light sled and dashing across country at twelve or fourteen 

 miles per hour. This inclination we found useful and cultivated it, 

 giving him the fastest and liveliest dogs and using him and them 

 whenever it was necessary to send a message a comparatively short 

 distance at high speed. It should not have taken him more than 



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