ost gone under the
last nineteen hours of hot, unwinking sunshine, and the first geese
winging their way up the valley--sight to stir men's hearts. Stranger
still, the eight months' Arctic silence broken suddenly by a thousand
voices. Under every snow-bank a summer murmur, very faint at first, but
hourly louder--the sound of falling water softly singing over all the
land.

As silence had been the distinguishing feature of the winter, so was
noise the sign of the spring. No ear so dull but now was full of it.
All the brooks on all the hills, tinkling, tumbling, babbling of some
great and universal joy, all the streams of all the gulches joining
with every little rill to find the old way, or to carve a new, back to
the Father of Waters.

And the strange thing had happened on the Yukon. The shore-edges of the
ice seemed sunken, and the water ran yet deeper there. But of a
certainty the middle part had risen! The cheechalkos thought it an
optical illusion. But old Brandt from Forty-Mile had seen the ice go
out for two-and-twenty years, and he said it went out always so--"humps
his back, an' gits up gits, and when he's a gitten', jest look out!"
Those who, in spite of warning, ventured in hip-boots down on the
Never-Know-What, found that, in places, the under side of the ice was
worn nearly through. If you bent your head and listened, you could
plainly hear that greater music of the river running underneath, low as
yet, but deep, and strangely stirring--dominating in the hearer's ears
all the clear, high clamour from gulch and hill.

In some men's hearts the ice "went out" at the sound, and the melting
welled up in their eyes. Summer and liberty were very near.

"Oh, hurry, Yukon Inua; let the ice go out and let the boats come in."

But the next few days hung heavily. The river-ice humped its back still
higher, but showed no disposition to "git." The wonder was it did not
crack under the strain; but Northern ice ahs the air of being strangely
flexile. Several feet in depth, the water ran now along the margin.

More geese and ducks appeared, and flocks of little birds--Canada jays,
robins, joined the swelling chorus of the waters.

Oh, hurry, hurry Inua, and open the great highway! Not at Minook alone:
at every wood camp, mining town and mission, at every white post and
Indian village, all along the Yukon, groups were gathered waiting the
great moment of the year. No one had ever heard of the ice breaking up
before th