y added fatigue.

[Sidenote: Heavy Hauling]

For the transportation of our wood and supplies beyond the first glacier
camp, the team of six dogs was cut into two teams of three, each drawing
a little Yukon sled procured in the Kantishna, the large basket sled
having been abandoned. And in the movement forward, when the trail to a
convenient cache had been established, two men, roped together,
accompanied each sled, one ahead of the dogs, the other just behind the
dogs at the gee-pole. This latter had also a hauling-line looped about
his breast, so that men and dogs and sled made a unit. It took the
combined traction power of men and dogs to take the loads up the steep
glacial ascents, and it was very hard work. Once, "Snowball," the
faithful team leader of four years past, who has helped to haul my sled
nearly ten thousand miles, broke through a snow bridge and, the
belly-band parting, slipped out of his collar and fell some twenty feet
below to a ledge in a crevasse. Walter was let down and rescued the poor
brute, trembling but uninjured. Without the dogs we should have been
much delayed and could hardly, one judges, have moved the wood forward
at all. The work on the glacier was the beginning of the ceaseless grind
which the ascent of Denali demands.

[Illustration: Ascension Day, 1913.]

How intolerably hot it was, on some of these days, relaying the stuff up
the glacier! I shall never forget Ascension Day, which occurred this
year on the 1st May. Double feast as it was--for SS. Philip and James
falls on that day--it was a day of toil and penance. With the mercurial
barometer and a heavy pack of instruments and cameras and films on my
back and the rope over my shoulder, bent double hauling at the sled, I
trudged along all day, panting and sweating, through four or five inches
of new-fallen snow, while the glare of the sun was terrific. It seemed
impossible that, surrounded entirely by ice and snow, with millions of
tons of ice underfoot, it _could_ be so hot. But we took the loads right
through to the head of the glacier that day, rising some four thousand
feet in the course of five miles, and cached them there. On other days a
smother of mist lay all over the glacier surface, with never a breath of
wind, and the air seemed warm and humid as in an Atlantic coast city in
July. Yet again, starting early in the morning, sometimes a zero
temperature nipped toes and fingers and a keen wind cut like a knife.
Sometimes