nd the old spacious hunting tent that stands
there in which we were to spend the night. Rather hopelessly we hung our
bedding to dry on ropes strung about some trees, and our wet clothing
around the stove. By taking turns all the night in sitting up, to keep a
fire going, we managed to get our clothes dried by morning, but the
bedding was wet as ever. Fortunately, the night was a warm one.

[Sidenote: Glacial Streams]

The next morning there was the McKinley Fork to cross the first thing,
and it was a difficult and disagreeable task. This stream, which drains
the Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole northeast face of Denali,
occupies a dreary, desolate bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or
more wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps after tremendous
rain following great heat, but wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of
varying depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution of the shale
which the mountain discharges so abundantly tingeing not only its waters
but the whole Kantishna, into which it flows one hundred miles away.
Commonly in the early morning the waters are low, the night frosts
checking the melting of the glacier ice; but this morning the drainage
of yesterday's rain-storm had swollen them. Channel after channel was
waded in safety until the main stream was reached, and that swept by,
thigh-deep, with a rushing black current that had a very evil look.
Karstens was scouting ahead, feeling for the shallower places, stemming
the hurrying waters till they swept up to his waist. The dogs did not
like the look of it and with their packs, still wet from yesterday, were
hampered in swimming. Two that Tatum was leading suddenly turned back
when half-way across, and the chains, entangling his legs, pulled him
over face foremost into the deepest of the water. His pack impeded his
efforts to rise, and the water swept all over him. Karstens hurried back
to his rescue, and he was extricated from his predicament, half drowned
and his clothes filled with mud and sand. There was no real danger of
drowning, but it was a particularly noxious ducking in icy filth. The
sun was warm, however, and after basking upon the rocks awhile he was
able to proceed, still wet, though he had stripped and wrung out his
clothes--for we had no dry change--and very gritty in underwear, but
taking no harm whatever. I think Tatum regretted losing, in the mad rush
of black water, the ice-axe he had carried to the top of the mo