to its mouth,
double the end of the peninsula, and then travel south along the coast
to the mission at Kikitaruk, the peninsula being too rugged to cross.
Three considerable rivers drain into Hotham Inlet, roughly parallel in
their east and west courses, the Noatak, the Kobuk, and the Selawik, so
that its waters must be commonly more fresh than salt, for its bounds
are narrow and the extensive delta of its eastern shore would argue its
depth slight. Ahead of us, as we travelled north making a bee-line for
the end of the peninsula, all the afternoon, loomed the rocky promontory
of Krusenstern, one of Kotzebue's capes, and far beyond, stretching up
the dim coast-line, lay the way to Point Hope. It was with a sinking of
the heart that I gazed upon it, for I knew already, though I had not
announced a decision, that the road to Point Hope could not be my road
that year. All day long the thermometer stood between -40 deg. and -30 deg., and
the constant light sea-breeze kept scarfs wrapped closely about mouths
and noses, which always means disagreeable travel. When the company
stopped at noon to eat a little frozen lunch, I was too chilly to cease
my movement and pressed on. The day of that blessed comfort of the
trail, the thermos flask, was not yet. By two-thirty we had reached Pipe
Spit, which still further contracts the narrow entrance of the inlet,
and turning west for a mile or two rounded the point and then turned
south for ten miles along the coast. Just about dark we reached the
mission and stood gazing out over the rough ice of Kotzebue Sound to the
Arctic Ocean, having made the forty miles in ten and a half hours. We
had come about one thousand miles from Fairbanks, all of it on foot and
most of it on snow-shoes.

[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC OCEAN]

So here was my first sight of the Arctic Ocean. All day long I had
anticipated it, and it stirred me,--a dim, grey expanse stretching vast
and vague in the dusk of the evening. The old navigators whose stories I
had read as a boy passed before me in their wonderful, bold sailing
vessels, going in and out uncharted waters that steamships will not
venture to-day--Kotzebue, Beechey, Collinson, McClure--pushing
resolutely northward.

Less happy had been my first sight of the Pacific Ocean, five years
before. I had the ill luck to come upon it by way of that Western Coney
Island, Santa Monica, and from the merry-go-rounds and cheap eating
places Balboa and Magellan and Franky Dr