LIFE ON A YUKON TRAIL 381 



and complexions deepen into the hue and finish of red earthen- 

 ware crockery. The writer's sleeping companion, John, the cook, 

 introduced the device of daily blackening his face with soot from 

 a charred fagot. It helped, he said, to soften the intolerable 

 glare. Traces of these applications were visible upon a more or 

 less wrinkled and pachydermatous face many weeks later. 



About the middle of March we crossed the Alaskan boundary, 

 40 miles up the river, and two miles, beyond passed the dead 

 body of a man wrapped in canvas and strapped to a tree near 

 the river's brink. Hard-by stood a hand sled and its empty 

 harness. The gaunt stark figure and the motionless sled in the 

 silent white desert told the brief story of the hope that had 

 braved the wilderness and of the quest that had failed. We 

 bivouacked nightly under the stars on the ice of the river. There 

 was no unpacking of tents or removal of clothing. The tired 

 men stretched themselves in couples upon a layer of blankets, 

 over which were drawn more blankets and a tarpaulin, and were 

 soon sunk in stertorous slumber. There were those in the party 

 who could not sleep more than half the night while " lying out " 

 on account of the cold. To crawl forth in the dead of the night 

 from a heap of blankets in a semi-torpid condition for the pur- 

 pose of thawing out by a painfully kindled fire was austerely 

 somber work. 



About 50 miles up the river the base of a great glacier was 

 skirted, whose jagged billows of bluish ice silhouetted against a 

 cloudless sky-line had been a sort of pillar of cloud by da}^ for 

 many weary miles of travel. The bunching of the boulders on 

 the beaches and the plainly defined scratchings on the grim 

 faces of the deeply serrated ridges testify to the sliding of a great 

 ice-sheet in the remote ages of the past. The present-day glaciers, 

 the lineal scions of this ice-mantle, lie anchored in splendid iso- 

 lation upon the flanks of the lofty mountains that hem in the 

 river. The course of the river through 200 miles of cross-ranges, 

 tHat might not be inaptly termed the Cordilleras of North Amer- 

 ica, is contentious and turbulent, circumventing barriers by 

 abrupt bends. About 95 miles upstream the pent-up current 

 boils through a gloomy canon not 100 feet in width, but ordi- 

 narily the stream flows composedly to the sea between banks 

 that are anywhere from 300 to 3,000 feet apart. 



The heaviest snow encountered on the river was in the Forty- 

 mile stretch between Fifty-five mile camp and the canon. The 

 snow lay in great wind-driven dunes from bank to bank, often 



