ounded into fragments that could be chewed and
swallowed. Daylight prospected through the snow, and found occasional
patches of mossberries. At the best, mossberries were composed
practically of seeds and water, with a tough rind of skin about them;
but the berries he found were of the preceding year, dry and
shrivelled, and the nourishment they contained verged on the minus
quality. Scarcely better was the bark of young saplings, stewed for an
hour and swallowed after prodigious chewing.

April drew toward its close, and spring smote the land. The days
stretched out their length. Under the heat of the sun, the snow began
to melt, while from down under the snow arose the trickling of tiny
streams. For twenty-four hours the Chinook wind blew, and in that
twenty-four hours the snow was diminished fully a foot in depth. In
the late afternoons the melting snow froze again, so that its surface
became ice capable of supporting a man's weight. Tiny white snow-birds
appeared from the south, lingered a day, and resumed their journey into
the north. Once, high in the air, looking for open water and ahead of
the season, a wedged squadron of wild geese honked northwards. And
down by the river bank a clump of dwarf willows burst into bud. These
young buds, stewed, seemed to posess an encouraging nutrition. Elijah
took heart of hope, though he was cast down again when Daylight failed
to find another clump of willows.

The sap was rising in the trees, and daily the trickle of unseen
streamlets became louder as the frozen land came back to life. But the
river held in its bonds of frost. Winter had been long months in
riveting them, and not in a day were they to be broken, not even by the
thunderbolt of spring. May came, and stray last-year's mosquitoes,
full-grown but harmless, crawled out of rock crevices and rotten logs.
Crickets began to chirp, and more geese and ducks flew overhead. And
still the river held. By May tenth, the ice of the Stewart, with a
great rending and snapping, tore loose from the banks and rose three
feet. But it did not go down-stream. The lower Yukon, up to where the
Stewart flowed into it, must first break and move on. Until then the
ice of the Stewart could only rise higher and higher on the increasing
flood beneath. When the Yukon would break was problematical. Two
thousand miles away it flowed into Bering Sea, and it was the ice
conditions of Bering Sea that would determine when the Yu