was not an Indian; nor was she
an Eskimo; nor even an Innuit. Going backward into mouth tradition,
there appears the figure of one Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, who
journeyed down in his youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits,
and where he foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie. Now the
woman Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man. And
from Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian, one-
quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo. And Halie was the grandmother of
Jees Uck.

Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished no
prejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur trader
called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat. Shpack is herein
classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, a
Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from the
quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was a
woman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who became
the grandfather of Jees Uck.

Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People, who
fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would not have
become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no story at all.
But he _was_ captured by the Sea People, from whom he escaped to
Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the Baltic. Not
long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and the years were not
many till he went drifting east over the same weary road his father had
measured with blood and groans a half-century before. But Shpack was a
free man, in the employ of the great Russian Fur Company. And in that
employ he fared farther and farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea
into Russian America; and at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta
of the Yukon, became the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of
Jees Uck. Out of this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.

Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a few
hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato. With him he took Halie
and the babe Tukesan. This was in 1850, and in 1850 it was that the
river Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the face of the earth.
And that was the end of Shpack and Halie. On that terrible night Tukesan
disappeared. To this day the Toyaats aver they had no hand in the
trouble; but, be that as it may, the fact remains that th