. This meant longer
hours of travel, and Daylight, for good measure and for a margin
against accidents, hit the trail for twelve hours a day. Since three
hours were consumed by making camp at night and cooking beans, by
getting breakfast in the morning and breaking camp, and by thawing
beans at the midday halt, nine hours were left for sleep and
recuperation, and neither men nor dogs wasted many minutes of those
nine hours.

At Selkirk, the trading post near Pelly River, Daylight suggested that
Kama lay over, rejoining him on the back trip from Dyea. A strayed
Indian from Lake Le Barge was willing to take his place; but Kama was
obdurate. He grunted with a slight intonation of resentment, and that
was all. The dogs, however, Daylight changed, leaving his own
exhausted team to rest up against his return, while he went on with six
fresh dogs.

They travelled till ten o'clock the night they reached Selkirk, and at
six next morning they plunged ahead into the next stretch of wilderness
of nearly five hundred miles that lay between Selkirk and Dyea. A
second cold snap came on, but cold or warm it was all the same, an
unbroken trail. When the thermometer went down to fifty below, it was
even harder to travel, for at that low temperature the hard
frost-crystals were more like sand-grains in the resistance they
offered to the sled runners. The dogs had to pull harder than over the
same snow at twenty or thirty below zero. Daylight increased the day's
travel to thirteen hours. He jealously guarded the margin he had
gained, for he knew there were difficult stretches to come.

It was not yet quite midwinter, and the turbulent Fifty Mile River
vindicated his judgment. In many places it ran wide open, with
precarious rim-ice fringing it on either side. In numerous places,
where the water dashed against the steep-sided bluffs, rim-ice was
unable to form. They turned and twisted, now crossing the river, now
coming back again, sometimes making half a dozen attempts before they
found a way over a particularly bad stretch. It was slow work. The
ice-bridges had to be tested, and either Daylight or Kama went in
advance, snowshoes on their feet, and long poles carried crosswise in
their hands. Thus, if they broke through, they could cling to the pole
that bridged the hole made by their bodies. Several such accidents
were the share of each. At fifty below zero, a man wet to the waist
cannot travel without freezing; so ea