tual death be painless, the long conscious fight against it
must be an agony; for a man of any experience must realise the peril he
is in. The tingling in fingers and toes and then in knees and elbows is
a warning he recognises only too well. He knows that, unless he can
restore warmth by restoring the circulation, he is as good as frozen
already. He increases his pace and beats his arms against his breast.
But if his vitality be too much reduced by hunger and fatigue and cold
to make more than a slight response to the stimulation, if the distance
to warmth and shelter be too great for a spurt to carry him there, he is
soon in worse case than before. Then the appalling prospect of perishing
by the cold must rise nakedly before him. The enemy is in the breach,
swarming over the ramparts, advancing to the heart of the fortress, not
to be again repelled. He becomes aware that his hands and feet are
already frozen, and presently there may be a momentary terrible
recognition that his wits begin to wander. Frantically he stumbles on,
thrashing his body with his arms, forcing his gait to the uttermost, a
prey to the terror that hangs over him, until his growing horror and
despair are mercifully swallowed up in the somnolent torpidity that
overwhelms him. All of us who have travelled in cold weather know how
uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately
cold and he realises that he is not succeeding in getting them warm
again. It is the beginning of death by freezing.

We buried the body on a bench of the bluff across the river from the
native village, the natives all standing around reverently while the
words of committal were said, and set up a cross marked with
lead-pencil: "R. I. P.--Eric Ericson, found frozen, January, 1906." Two
or three years later a friend sent me a small bronze tablet with the
same legend, and that was affixed to the cross. There are many such
lonely graves in Alaska, for scarce a winter passes that does not claim
its victims in every section of the country. That same winter we heard
of two men frozen on the Seward Peninsula, two on the Yukon, one on the
Tanana, and one on the Valdez trail. This day I recorded a temperature
of 10 deg., the first plus temperature in thirty-nine days, and that
previous rise above zero was the first in twenty days.

[Sidenote: NEGLECTED NATIVES]

That night we gathered all the natives, and after long speech with poor
interpretation I ventured t