214 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



Looking back to it, this journey is one of the most 

 interesting I ever made. At the time it was one of the 

 most disagreeable. I noticed the first evening that 

 William did a good deal of coughing. He spoke no Eng- 

 lish, but Joseph explained to me that some weeks before 

 William had had a hemorrhage from the lungs and that 

 people expected him to die the next year from tuber- 

 culosis. I could tell that W T illiam knew what Joseph was 

 explaining to me. As he seemed in no way depressed, 

 I wondered whether that was a sign he did not worry 

 about dying or whether it indicated that the story was 

 a fabrication. But the more I saw of William the more 

 I believed that he was seriously sick and that the story 

 was true. 



William's illness showed itself not only in coughing 

 but also in weakness and in shortness of breath. The 

 next morning Joseph took twenty pounds of William's 

 pack, so' that now he had a hundred and William only 

 about fifty pounds. We had not been many miles on 

 the road when it became evident that a hundred pounds 

 was^too much for Joseph to carry and I took some of it. 

 We agreed that William's share of the load should be 

 the heaviest food, such as the corned beef, and we ate 

 four times a day hugely. This lightened his load so 

 rapidly that by the third day he had scarcely anything 

 in his pack although Joseph and I were still carrying 

 moderate loads. 



Wiun we left Macpherson the mosquitoes had been 

 bad in the lowland but as we got higher into the moun- 

 tains they ceased to bother us much. Had the journey 

 been made a month earlier the reverse would have been 

 true, for in no place are mosquitoes less tolerable than 

 above the treeline in arctic mountains. The season had 



