292 THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES 



and all things dripping wet. I might go three miles 

 down that frightful canyon to our last camp and mayl >e 

 get some living coals. But no! mindful of the forestry 

 laws, we had as usual most carefully extinguished the 

 fire with buckets of water, and the clothes were freezing 

 on my back. I was tired out, teeth chattering. Then 

 came the thought, Why despair while two matches 

 remain? I struck the first now, the fourteenth, and, in 

 spite of dead fingers and the sizzly, doubtful match, 

 it cracked, blazed, and then, oh blessed, blessed birch 

 bark! — with any other tinder my numbed hands had 

 surely failed — it blazed like a torch, and warmth at last 

 was mine, and outward comfort for a house of gloom. 

 "The boys, I knew, would work like heroes and do 

 their part as well as man could do it, my work was 

 right here. I gathered all the things along the beach, 

 made great racks for drying and a mighty blaze. I 

 had no pots or pans, but an aluminum bottle which 

 would serve as kettle; and thus I prepared a meal of 

 such things as were saved — a scrap of pork, some tea 

 and a soggy mass that once was pilot bread. Then sat 

 down by the fire to spend five hours of growing horror, 

 175 miles from a settlement, canoe smashed, guns gone, 

 pots and pans gone, specimens all gone, half our 

 bedding gone, our food gone; but all these things were 

 nothing, compared with the loss of my three precious 

 journals; 600 pages of observation and discovery, 

 geographical, botanical, and zoological, 500 drawings, 

 valuable records made under all sorts of trying circum- 

 stances, discovery and compass survey of the beauti- 

 ful Nyarling River, compass survey of the two great 



