room with a paean of triumph. His herds had
increased by a thousand head during the fawning months of April and May,
and interbreeding of the Asiatic stock with wild, woodland caribou had
produced a hundred calves of the super-animal whose flesh was bound to
fill the markets of the States within a few years. Never had the moss
been thicker under the winter snow; there had been no destructive fires;
soft-hoof had escaped them; breeding records had been beaten, and
dairying in the edge of the Arctic was no longer an experiment, but an
established fact, for Tautuk now had seven deer giving a pint and a half
of milk each twice a day, nearly as rich as the best of cream from
cattle, and more than twenty that were delivering from a cupful to a
pint at a milking. And to this Amuk Toolik added the amazing record of
their running-deer, Kauk, the three-year-old, had drawn a sledge five
miles over unbeaten snow in thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds;
Kauk and Olo, in team, had drawn the same sledge ten miles in twenty-six
minutes and forty seconds, and one day he had driven the two
ninety-eight miles in a mighty endurance test; and with Eno and Sutka,
the first of their inter-breed with the wild woodland caribou, and
heavier beasts, he had drawn a load of eight hundred pounds for three
consecutive days at the rate of forty miles a day. From Fairbanks,
Tanana, and the ranges of the Seward Peninsula agents of the swiftly
spreading industry had offered as high as a hundred and ten dollars a
head for breeding stock with the blood of the woodland caribou, and of
these native and larger caribou of the tundras and forests seven young
bulls and nine female calves had been captured and added to their own
propagative forces.

For Alan this was triumph. He saw nothing of what it all meant in the
way of ultimate personal fortune. It was the earth under his feet, the
vast expanse of unpeopled waste traduced and scorned in the blindness of
a hundred million people, which he saw fighting itself on the glory and
reward of the conqueror through such achievement as this; a land
betrayed rising at last out of the slime of political greed and
ignorance; a giant irresistible in its awakening, that was destined in
his lifetime to rock the destiny of a continent. It was Alaska rising up
slowly but inexorably out of its eternity of sleep, mountain-sealed
forces of a great land that was once the cradle of the earth coming into
possession of life and