rict. To this
the Commissioner agreed, and so notified the Comptroller at Ottawa, as
well as the officer commanding at Dawson, who was told to expect the
patrol from Macpherson about the end of January.

When the patrol started from Fort Macpherson everything seemed
favourable for a mid-winter trip. The men were all in fit condition,
thoroughly acquainted with conditions of winter travel, and so keen to
make a record journey that they did not burden themselves with more food
than necessary for themselves and their dogs, of which they had fifteen
for their three trains. The sequel proved that had they been able to
keep the route they would have made Dawson in good shape. The trouble
came upon them when neither map nor compass or any previous knowledge
availed them in the maze of rivers and mountains that lay in their way.
Taylor and Kinney had never been over the route, Fitzgerald had been
over it once on another trail from the Dawson end. Carter had been over
the new trail once a few years previously, but he, too, had come over it
from Dawson to Macpherson, and a route with its piloting marks of bluffs
and trees or banks by the way-side looks quite different when traversed
the opposite way. Carter was a powerful, experienced and thoroughly
reliable man, who had seen much service in the Force. Though not in the
corps at the time of the patrol, he had been confident of his ability to
guide the party to Dawson, and Fitzgerald had taken him on in that
capacity.

The weather was intensely cold, and the going heavy, with here and there
the rivers bursting up through the broken ice and creating very
difficult trails. But they were all used to that, and did not mind it.
Over a portage at a certain point they secured the services of an
Indian, named Esau, to break trail and guide them to a certain point
from which Carter was sure he knew the way. There the Indian was
discharged and returned to his camp, Fitzgerald probably feeling that
extra expenditure of Government funds for a guide was not justified when
Carter was along.

The scene changes to Dawson. The patrol did not arrive when expected,
and Superintendent A. E. Snyder, an experienced officer, who was in
command there, began to get anxious, and when some Indians arrived from
the Fort Macpherson direction he got in touch with them at once. From
them he learned that Esau, who had been discharged at a certain point,
expected the patrol to be in Dawson many days before the