BEGINS CATALOGUE OF CANADIAN BIRDS 283 



behind a mountain and, apparently, end the day and, in the course 

 of a couple of hours or so, appear again at the other side. Ap- 

 parently, night passed so easily into morning that many of the 

 inhabitants did not seem to recognise the difference. 



I remember my first trip to Honka Creek. It was commenced 

 after eleven o'clock at night and we reached there while it was 

 still light and I went to bed with sufficient daylight to cause me 

 to believe that it was evening instead of morning. 



Gold washing, while I was in Honka, was still in progress and 

 nothing pleased me better than to stand at the sluice boxes of an 

 evening, when the weekly cleanup was taking place, and look at 

 the faces of the various spectators as nuggets were washed out 

 and the amount of gold became large, and the speculations that 

 were made on the amount of the cleanup. Every man was in a 

 state of excitement bordering on what I might call an "Irish fight'. 

 The claim I visited was worked in this way — a shaft was sunk in 

 the frozen earth to a depth of about thirty feet and, every evening, 

 steam was turned in through steel pipes to thaw the earth 

 and, in the daytime, this was brought up and thrown in the sluice 

 boxes and washed. This was the constant practice on all the 

 creeks as far as I was able to see. Later in the season, I went 

 fifty miles to the west of Gold Run Creek and found that they 

 worked there in exactly the same way but the gold was found to a 

 greater depth. 



I found that Dawson had been built in a peat bog that was 

 frozen hard and now, when the moss was taken of, the bog was 

 settling, as the icy clay thawed, and all the houses were settling 

 and, by this time, Dawson is likely three feet lower than the 

 surface was in my day. I found, wherever I went, that the moss 

 of the soil prevented thawing just as it did in Ontario and other 

 places where I had been and was the real cause of the frozen con- 

 dition of the soil at Dawson. All the creek beds were frozen 

 solid, some to the depth of almost one hundred feet, but all from 

 the same cause, hard frosts in winter and a covering of moss in 

 summer preventing thawing to any considerable depth. 



In climbing a mountain, I found that, in the valley, the spruce 

 trees were only a few inches in size, while on the slope of the 



