gut, and seal oil is a staple article of their diet. Their clothing
is also marine, their parkees of the hair-seal and their mukluks of the
giant seal. Communications are always kept up with the coast, and the
sea products required are brought across. The time for the movement of
the Kobuks back and forth was not quite yet, though we hoped we should
meet some parties and get the benefit of their trail. Just before we
left the Alatna River we stopped at Roxy's fish cache and got some green
fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had
fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to
dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or
five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that
did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking
of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of
food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is rarely
that a cache is violated except under great stress of hunger, when
violation is recognised as legitimate. Doughty, in his _Arabia Deserta_,
mentions the same custom amongst the Arabs; Sven Hedin amongst the
Tartars. Sparsely peopled waste countries have much the same customs all
over the world. Even the outer garb in the Oriental deserts has much
resemblance to our parkee; both burnoose and parkee are primarily
windbreaks, and it makes little difference whether the wind be charged
with snow or sand.

At midday on the 3d of February we left the Alatna River and took our
way across country for the Kobuk. We had now no trail at all save what
had been made a couple of months before by the only other party that had
crossed the portage this winter, and it was buried under fifteen or
sixteen inches of snow. There was quite a grade to be climbed to reach
the plateau over which our course lay, and the men, with rope over the
shoulder, had to help the dogs hauling at the sled. Indeed, over a good
deal of this portage, from time to time, the men had to do dog work, for
the country is rolling, one ridge succeeding another, and the loose,
deep snow made heavy and slow going. One man must go ahead breaking
trail, and that was generally my task, though when the route grew
doubtful and the indications too faint for white man's eye, Roxy took my
place and I took his gee pole, and slipped his rope around my chest.

Breaking trail would not be so laborious if one