224 A WINTER'S DAY IN THE YUKON TERRITORY. 
in very cold weather. Myriads of fish, particularly a delic- 
ious salmon-trout, and a small cyprinoid fish, frequent such 
localities. One would hardly look for insects in this winter 
weather, yet by watching the snow on the river while 
the sun shines brightly, a small, shining, pointed creature, 
like a Podura, may be seen gliding between the particles of 
snow, and immediately disappearing should a cloud pass 
over the sun. In September I have found wooly caterpillars, 
the larve of arctians, crawling on the snow, while the at- 
mosphere was even below zero; and I once found (October 
20th) the caterpillar of Vanessa Antiopa in the same manner, 
alive; and on yet another occasion I shot a whiskey jack, or 
Canada jay (Perisoreus Canadensis), with one just killed, in 
his mouth. A little way farther on, a bluff of dark colored 
sandstone fronts the river. Here our hammers may well be 
employed, and with care fine specimens of fossil leaves may 
be obtained. These are usually Sycamores (Platanus), but . 
others can be found by searching for them, and in Cook's 
Inlet some fifty species have been collected, some of which 
are common to Greenland, Spitzbergen, Northern Europe 
and Siberia, showing that there was a time when this part of 
the world was covered with a rich and verdant forest, and 
the temperature was about that of Virginia. ‘This was be- 
fore the advent of the hairy elephant, who lived in colder 
times. It grew at last too cold for him, however, and his 
bones and teeth may be found scattered over the country, on 
the surface, and usually much decayed. “His remains have 
been found imbedded in the masses of ice (not glaciers) 
which fringe the Siberian coasts, and in a perfect state of 
preservation, as if he had wandered into an enormous re- 
' frigerator and been frozen into it. ; 
' You will look in vain here for the familiar drift boulders, 
so common in the stone fences of New England. What was 
going on during the glacial period in the Yukon Territory 
isa mystery. There were no glaciers there, for their traces 
are entirely wanting. 
