th a little pile of wood. Such was the law.

He placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations.
It was the same everywhere, with all things. The mosquitoes vanished
with the first frost. The little tree-squirrel crawled away to die.
When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow and heavy, and could
no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big bald-face grew clumsy and
blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of
yelping huskies. He remembered how he had abandoned his own father
on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, the winter before the
missionary came with his talk-books and his box of medicines. Many a
time had Koskoosh smacked his lips over the recollection of that box,
though now his mouth refused to moisten. The "painkiller" had been
especially good. But the missionary was a bother after all, for he
brought no meat into the camp, and he ate heartily, and the hunters
grumbled. But he chilled his lungs on the divide by the Mayo, and the
dogs afterwards nosed the stones away and fought over his bones.

Koskoosh placed another stick on the fire and harked back deeper into
the past. There was the time of the Great Famine, when the old men
crouched empty-bellied to the fire, and let fall from their lips dim
traditions of the ancient day when the Yukon ran wide open for three
winters, and then lay frozen for three summers. He had lost his mother
in that famine. In the summer the salmon run had failed, and the tribe
looked forward to the winter and the coming of the caribou. Then the
winter came, but with it there were no caribou. Never had the like
been known, not even in the lives of the old men. But the caribou
did not come, and it was the seventh year, and the rabbits had not
replenished, and the dogs were naught but bundles of bones. And
through the long darkness the children wailed and died, and the women,
and the old men; and not one in ten of the tribe lived to meet the sun
when it came back in the spring. That _was_ a famine!

But he had seen times of plenty, too, when the meat spoiled on their
hands, and the dogs were fat and worthless with overeating--times when
they let the game go unkilled, and the women were fertile, and the
lodges were cluttered with sprawling men-children and women-children.
Then it was the men became high-stomached, and revived ancient
quarrels, and crossed the divides to the south to kill the Pellys, and
to the west that they might si