Daylight decided to go Indian River a flutter, as he expressed it; but
Elijah could not be persuaded into accompanying him. Elijah's soul had
been seared by famine, and he was obsessed by fear of repeating the
experience.

"I jest can't bear to separate from grub," he explained. "I know it's
downright foolishness, but I jest can't help it. It's all I can do to
tear myself away from the table when I know I'm full to bustin' and
ain't got storage for another bite. I'm going back to Circle to camp
by a cache until I get cured."

Daylight lingered a few days longer, gathering strength and arranging
his meagre outfit. He planned to go in light, carrying a pack of
seventy-five pounds and making his five dogs pack as well, Indian
fashion, loading them with thirty pounds each. Depending on the report
of Ladue, he intended to follow Bob Henderson's example and live
practically on straight meat. When Jack Kearns' scow, laden with the
sawmill from Lake Linderman, tied up at Sixty Mile, Daylight bundled
his outfit and dogs on board, turned his town-site application over to
Elijah to be filed, and the same day was landed at the mouth of Indian
River.

Forty miles up the river, at what had been described to him as Quartz
Creek, he came upon signs of Bob Henderson's work, and also at
Australia Creek, thirty miles farther on. The weeks came and went, but
Daylight never encountered the other man. However, he found moose
plentiful, and he and his dogs prospered on the meat diet. He found
"pay" that was no more than "wages" on a dozen surface bars, and from
the generous spread of flour gold in the muck and gravel of a score of
creeks, he was more confident than ever that coarse gold in quantity
was waiting to be unearthed. Often he turned his eyes to the northward
ridge of hills, and pondered if the gold came from them. In the end,
he ascended Dominion Creek to its head, crossed the divide, and came
down on the tributary to the Klondike that was later to be called
Hunker Creek. While on the divide, had he kept the big dome on his
right, he would have come down on the Gold Bottom, so named by Bob
Henderson, whom he would have found at work on it, taking out the first
pay-gold ever panned on the Klondike. Instead, Daylight continued down
Hunker to the Klondike, and on to the summer fishing camp of the
Indians on the Yukon.

Here for a day he camped with Carmack, a squaw-man, and his Indian
brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, bough