could wear the large
snow-shoes that are used for hunting. But the hunting shoe, though it
carries the man without fatigue, does not help the dogs. The small shoe
known as the trail shoe, packs the snow beneath it, and by the time the
trail breaker has gone forward, then back again, and then forward once
more, the snow is usually packed hard enough to give the dogs some
footing. Footing the dog must have or he cannot pull; a dog wallowing in
snow to his belly cannot exert much traction on the vehicle behind him.
The notion of snow-shoeing as a sport always seems strange to us on the
trail, for to us it is a laborious necessity and no sport at all. The
trail breaker thus goes over most of the ground thrice, and when he is
anxious at the same time to get a fairly accurate estimate by the
pedometer of the distance travelled, he must constantly remember to
upend the instrument in his pocket when he retraces his steps, and
restore it to its recording position when he attacks unbroken snow
again. Also he must take himself unawares, so to speak, from time to
time, and check the length of his stride with the tape measure and alter
the step index as the varying surfaces passed over require.
Conscientiously used, with due regard to its limitations, the pedometer
will give a fair approximation of the length of a journey, but a man can
no more tell how far he has gone by merely hanging a pedometer in his
pocket than he can tell the height above sea-level of an inland mountain
by merely carrying an aneroid barometer to the top.

[Sidenote: THE SUNRISE AND THE MOUNTAINS]

It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent
sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with
threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow
between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent
preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in
my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the
greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it
was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous
bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were
deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained
an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until
the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and
then I had to turn my bac