THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 685 



bined parties of Mr. Stefansson and Dr. Burke, who had met at 

 the Rampart House and were thus far on their way to Fort Yukon. 



"It was a very happy reunion for Dr. Burke and myself, and I 

 was greatly pleased to meet Mr. Stefansson and to find him so 

 much improved. The folks at Herschel Island doubted if he 

 would reach Fort Yukon alive, but I was not surprised to find him 

 mended. I think that had he stayed in the little cabin where he 

 lay so long sick, with several zealous amateur practitioners doing 

 their rival best for him, he would very likely have died." 



Three days later we arrived at St. Stephen's Hospital, Fort 

 Yukon, and I was so far recovered that I walked without assistance 

 from the gate to the house. Some enterprising Alaska journalist 

 later wrote a vivid story printed in many newspapers about my 

 hardships and sufferings on a four hundred-mile journey over snow- 

 covered arctic mountains from Herschel Island to Fort Yukon "in 

 a neck-and-neck race with Death." On the said race I never no- 

 ticed the hardships, probably through lack of the journalistic in- 

 stinct. I enjoyed each day the events thereof and rejoiced in the 

 increasing certainty of recovery. If the reader insists that on such 

 a journey under such conditions there must be hardships, I shall 

 not argue the point. Perhaps I don't know what the word means. 

 But I do know that on the twenty-seven-day journey I gained in 

 weight thirty pounds. 



From the windows of my room in St. Stephen's Hospital I could 

 look south across the Yukon River and across the Arctic Circle 

 into the "Temperate Zone." Not only by this sign but by many 

 others was my polar voyage over. From the isolation and virgin 

 peace of the North we had come first to Herschel Island with car- 

 pets and rocking-chairs and news from "the world" thrice a year or 

 oftener; now we were at Fort Yukon with a wireless bulletin coming 

 in every day at noon. The Germans were crushing their way every 

 day nearer Paris and their guns were shelling it (April, 1918). The 

 electric sensory nerves of civilization reach thus far north already, 

 and ours was part of the painful and breathless suspense of the 

 whole world. Both for good and for evil I was home after five 

 years. 



On the whole expedition I had much to be grateful for whenever 

 we touched an outpost of civilization. At Nome, at Barrow, at 

 Herschel I am under debts of kindness that I desire to pay but have 

 not the means. A list of those who were kind and helpful would 

 be nearly a census of these places. So it was at Fort Yukon. In 

 the Hospital, in the Government Wireless Station, in every private 



