CHAPTER IV 



" I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods ; 

 Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods. 

 Long I have waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst, 

 Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the 

 first." 



August 12. Making an early start from our 

 camp on Boutelier, we traveled rapidly down the 

 slope and at 9 A.M. came to the sunlit shores of 

 beautiful Lake Kluane, an emerald-tinted body of 

 water, forty-five miles long, with a setting of ma- 

 jestic snow peaks. This is the end of the wagon 

 trail, and from this point we follow a dwindling 

 horse trail which reaches a vanishing point, after 

 which we make our own trail to the inner fastnesses 

 of the mountains. 



At Lake Kluane our forces were augmented by 

 Jim Baker, one of our guides, a quiet genial man of 

 about forty-five years, whose sole vocation in life 

 has been to hunt and trap. Coming from Tennes- 

 see at an early age, his younger manhood was spent 

 in the West hunting game to supply meat to the lum- 

 ber and mining camps. During the gold stampede 

 to the Yukon he came north with the mining hordes, 

 consistently resisted the mining fever, and continued 



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